Word: quartz
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...astronauts will also leave behind a laser reflector pointed toward the earth. The reflector actually consists of an array of 100 quartz corner reflectors, so called because they are shaped like the corner of a cube or a room. Each reflector has a valuable characteristic: it will reflect a beam of light directly back to the source. Thus light aimed at the lunar reflector from a laser located in Los Angeles, for instance, will bounce directly back to Los Angeles...
Kaleidoscope Console. John Seery, 28, disdainfully tilted a 17-in. color set on its back and imprisoned it in a quartz-like block of plastic. "When the TV stops functioning," explains Seery, "the work is complete." Earl Reiback, 33, an M.I.T.-trained nuclear physicist, stripped the phosphor coating from the glass screens on three sets, allowing the viewer to see electrons gleaming eerily inside the colorfully painted picture tube...
...Still, they made gigantic strides in sculpture. Their earliest attempts (around 1800 B.C.) had simply a head separated from the body by a crude neck; their final works depict arms, hands, and what look like facial traits. Most remarkable of all, they were apparently laboriously carved with round, white quartz tools. Nor is their final reckoning complete; Grosjean discovered altogether 72 carved menhirs, of which 30 were finely sculpted. Says he: "I have only scratched the surface. There is enough digging here to keep ten full-time archaeologists busy for the next 200 years...
These organic compounds made of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen resemble ordinary liquids. Yet their orderly molecular structure is similar to that of solid crystals such as diamonds, mica and quartz. The crystals themselves are not new, but it was only recently that scientists discovered that an electrical charge makes them light-reflecting; the higher the voltage, the greater the reflecting power. At first, this "electro-optical effect" could be shown only in the laboratory, since the crystals reacted to electricity only at certain temperatures. Now, after trying more than 100 compounds, RCA scientists have produced a crystal that responds...
Died. Harry Steenbock, 81, longtime (1908-56) University of Wisconsin research chemist and pioneer in vitamin D-enriched foods; of a heart attack; in Madison, Wis. In 1924, Steenbock discovered that vitamin D could be "activated" with ultraviolet rays from a quartz-vapor lamp, quickly treated milk and other foods to provide the first new source of the rickets-preventing "sun vitamin" since cod-liver oil. His patents could have made him wealthy, but instead he helped set up a foundation to handle royalties, which netted $10,000,000 for the university before a federal court in 1945 ruled...