Word: vapor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...results were varied and poetic as they were abstract: he painted the sea to look like a flight of cold, curling steps, and made forests echo the architecture of cathedrals. During World War II he based one exultant canvas on the vapor trails of bombers and fighters overhead, and another, gloomy one, on a moonlit junkyard swimming with wrecked planes. When he was dying, at 57, he painted sunflowers, which turn their yellow disks to the slow geometric...
...greenish areas. Their spectra indicated that they could not be vegetation like trees or grass. But they might be lowly lichens like those that grow on the dry rocks near McDonald Observatory. Lichens need no water in liquid form. Martian lichenlike plants might get enough water out of vapor from the icecaps, which evaporate without melting...
Cockroach Teaser. To check the theory Beck & Miles started with cockroaches, which wear their smellers conveniently on their antennae outside their bodies. They put oil of cloves vapor (attractive to cockroaches) behind a gas-tight window of material transparent to infrared. The cockroaches responded to it just about as strongly as if the barrier were not there. When a thin sheet of glass (opaque to infrared) was added to the barrier, the cockroaches showed no more interest in the window than when there was no oil of cloves behind...
Next, the two Yale researchers tried bees, which have much more complex reactions. The bees acted like the cockroaches, crawling frustrated outside a heat-transparent window with sweet-smelling honey vapor behind it. Apparently both cockroaches and bees could smell vapors at a distance from their antennae. This may explain how certain creatures, such as male moths seeking their females, seem able to detect odors far downwind...
...Vapor Blends. Human beings are harder to test. Their smelling apparatus is deeply buried in the upper nasal passages, where it cannot be blocked off from the vapors by heat-transparent barriers. Beck & Miles hope to lick this problem somehow when they get an infra-red spectrometer for studying the wavelength of fragrances...