Word: ultraviolet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...slot machines of Las Vegas, Nev., Dr. Edward Teller described a scheme to explode a nuclear charge 100 million miles away from the earth. The purpose would be to test a key assumption of Einstein's theory of relativity: that every kind of electromagnetic radiation (light, infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, X rays and gamma rays) travels at the same speed-186,000 miles a second...
...disk. But astronomers have long known that its face is mottled with hot clouds of hydrogen gas, which seem to be the source of some of the radiation that periodically disrupts radio communication, and may have an important effect on the earth's weather. The clouds give off ultraviolet rays on the so-called Lyman-alpha line of the spectrum, midway between visible light and X rays. Since these rays are absorbed by the earth's atmosphere long before they can reach the ground, no earthbound camera has ever been able to make a photographic record...
...stream of gas followed the ash and spread into the vacuum above the moon's surface. The gas contained carbon molecules of various sorts, and ultraviolet light from the sun made them glow brilliantly, accounting for the bright streak on the spectrogram...
...said Dr. Calvin, that life first appeared something like 2 billion years ago when the earth's atmosphere was dominated by hydrogen compounds such as methane, ammonia and water vapor. Such simple organic compounds as acetic acid and glycine (an amino acid) are formed in the laboratory when ultraviolet light or electric sparks pass through such mixtures. Presumably, solar ultraviolet and natural lightning would do the same in nature...
This was enough to send Dr. Heil back to Manhattan for another close-up inspection. With mounting excitement he dated the marble, through ultraviolet examination, as from the 16th century. The workmanship, he found, was Renaissance in character. A few details-unsmoothed caliper marks on the cheeks, one wing of the Medusa head on Cosimo's armor -seemed unfinished. Otherwise the statue was in near-perfect condition...