Word: sunlight
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Conventional crop plants, says the report, have many shortcomings. The food they produce by the action of sunlight is formed in their leaves, which are usually inedible and must be supported and supplied by many other inedible parts. Generally only the seeds and tubers can be eaten by man. Another trouble with conventional food plants: when they are young, they cover only a little ground. A field of thriving, knee-high corn may delight a farmer, but to a chemist's eye it is shockingly inefficient. It utilizes only a small fraction of the sunlight falling on the field...
...depends for food, are lamentably ineffective as food-producing machines. They work only part of the day and only part of the year. They take up a vast amount of "floor space" and occupy the better part of the world's labor. Their average efficiency in turning sunlight into food energy is only about...
...already partly synthetic. It will be simple for chemists to manufacture food fats out of synthetic glycerin and paraffins from petroleum. Starch will be more difficult because plants produce it cheaply, but Rosin is confident that synthetic starch can be made out of carbon monoxide acted upon by sunlight...
Depression followed, and an ambitious male secretary at a major studio who asked for a raise was awarded a key to the executive washroom instead. The day was saved again by Technicolor, and in the sunlight of wartime prosperity, Hollywood made hay. But after the war the foreign market collapsed, and the domestic box office took a dive. The U.S. Supreme Court divorced the movie producers from their theater chains, and the studios no longer had a guaranteed outlet for their pictures...
...clouds from losing heat as rapidly as before. The smaller temperature difference between cloud base and top cuts down the air currents which must circulate through the cloud before rain or snow can form. Lowered rainfall will make a drier climate. Less cloud cover will be formed, more sunlight will reach the earth, and the average temperature will rise still higher...