Word: squirts
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...Houston last week, helicopters swooped low over bayous to lay thick mists of insecticide, and fire engines raced from block to block to spray chemicals in vacant lots. Citizens lined up to receive free handouts of bug-killing Malathion, and even kids at play carried spray guns to squirt at anything that flew...
Copper Blue Blood. While Professor Ernst Bayer of Tubingen University was still a graduate student, he began to study the ability of marine animals to concentrate some of the rare metals found in sea water. The sea squirt, Phallusia mamillata, for example, has 1,000,000 times more vanadium in its blood than the water it lives in; the deep blue blood of the octopus has 100,000 times as much copper. If sea squirts and octopuses can do the trick, asked Bayer, why shouldn't human chemists...
Scientists are not sure what makes tin whiskers grow. They are slender crystals that seem to squirt out of the metal like toothpaste out of a tube. They grow fastest at 125° F., which is close to the temperature inside a home hi-fi set, but they grow well enough at average room temperature (70°), which is common in enclosed parts of spacecraft. Now a spacecraft with a faltering voice or an electronic brain that has become psychotic need not be given up for lost. Allowed a few days to grow, the little tin whiskers will make...
Into this mixture the multivator will squirt a shot of test chemicals-fluorescein spiked with phosphate. The fluorescein cannot give off its telltale glow until the phosphate has been removed, and nothing can remove phosphate better than the enzyme phosphatase, which is common to all life on earth...
Ever since Lord Lister rigged up an apparatus to squirt a curtain spray of phenol around his operating table, surgeons have worried about bacteria flying through the air and into a patient's wound. Trouble is, there has been next to no information about how many germs, of what kinds, are in the operating room's air, or-more importantly-about where the bugs come from...