Word: silica
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...diameter, paced with 800,000 Ibs. of ammonium perchlorate and powdered aluminum held together with synthetic rubber. This potent stuff is cured in a single carefully shaped "grain" with a star-shaped cavity and burns from the inside out. The nozzle is made of plastic, spun silica and fibrous graphite...
...near Gunflint Lake in western Ontario, which somehow escaped this rough treatment. In the magazine Science, Paleontologist Elso S. Barg-hoorn-of Harvard and the late Geologist Stanley A. Tyler of the University of Wisconsin describe the remains of microscopic organisms that lived in that "Gunflint chert" - an impure silica -about 2 billion years ago, 1,800 million years before the earliest dinosaurs...
...living parts were on the tips: microscopic threads of algae tangled together, busily depositing silica that stiffened the columns. The hummocks eventually became the Gunflint chert, which radioactive dating proves to be 2 billion years...
...water above the hummocks must have teemed with tiny boating things that sank between the silica columns when they died. Those things may have been plants or animals or something in between. Whatever they were, they resembled small stars, or spheres with smaller spheres sticking to their outside walls. The most elaborate form had a bulbous base, a stalk and a ribbed cap. Its discoverers do not know whether it was sedentary like a mushroom or swam like a miniature jellyfish...
From the Phoenicians. Filaments spun from hot silica sand were used to make ornaments 3,000 years ago by the Phoenicians, but the modern fiber glass industry is only 25 years old. In that scant time, it has grown into a $340 million business. Almost 80% of its sales are made by Owens-Corning, a company controlled jointly by Owens-Illinois and Corning Glass. Owens-Corning did much of the original research on commercial glass fibers, owns the well-known Fiberglas trademark. Under a 1949 consent decree, the company agreed to release some patents and license others. Fiber glass...