Word: sunlight
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Germany, Von Braun fired a V-2 on a clear day 15 minutes after the sun had set. The stars were already coming out, and as the great rocket climbed upward, the flame of its exhaust diminished to a shining pinpoint and disappeared. Then the rocket broke into the sunlight above the shadow of the earth and gleamed, brilliantly visible, against the darkening sky. He watched it through its full course, like a bright, climbing star, and followed it down again into the shadow...
...last one of them learns to extract energy from the sunlight, releasing oxygen into the air and absorbing carbon compounds. When these living forms-the first plants-have multiplied for a few million years, they create the oxygen-rich atmosphere that the earth now knows. Then oxygen-breathing plant-eaters evolve to devour the plants, and the full stream ot evolution is under...
...other proof is being sought by studying Titan (one of the satellites of Saturn), which is somewhat bigger than the moon. Titan is too cold for life as the earth knows it, but it has an atmosphere containing much methane. Chemist Urey hopes to find that sunlight is slowly making organic compounds out of this simple gas. If Titan were warmer and bigger the process might already have clothed it with oxygen-and life...
...ancient, half-ruined village of Mont Louis in the French Pyrenees, a great, flat mirror, nearly 40 ft. on a side, stares all day at the sun, turning automatically. Facing it is a parabolic mirror almost as big, into which the flat mirror throws reflected sunlight. The combination acts as a gigantic burning glass which can melt 130 Ibs. of iron in an hour. The fierce spot of concentrated sunlight can bore holes through aluminum oxide (the material used to line electric furnaces...
...echoed for centuries through Japanese literature. Some years ago on a summer morning, the skeptical scientist dragged recording equipment to the shore of a lotus pond. There he assured himself that the modern flower blooms in silent beauty. Last week he "listened" to a prehistoric plant open to morning sunlight. Smiling till his tiny eyes all but disappeared in his face, he had bad news for sentimentalists: in spite of all that the poets have said, even a 2,000-year-old lotus blossoms without a whisper...