Word: vapor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Threatening Thimble. So far, the total quantity made in Russia, the U.S. and Britain would fill little more than a thimble. But researchers are busily making more, and the process is surprisingly simple. A vacuum is created in a bowl that contains tiny glass capillary tubes; water vapor is introduced into the vacuum, and in two or three days polywater collects in the capillaries. Scientists conjecture that polywater's strange properties might eventually make it useful as a superlubricant, a substitute for antifreeze, or fuel for an extraordinarily efficient steam engine...
...good whiff hinted another way in which the reading was going to depart from Robert Lowell's format. There were about three parts of grass vapor to one part of oxygen in the room, and after a few deep breaths we had caught up to everyone else...
...slow,.sad task of cleaning up after Camille began, a new hurricane, Debbie, began moving northward from the Caribbean. In an effort to reduce its intensity, a 13-plane armada attacked its core with silver-iodide crystals, designed to bring down Debbie's temperature by turning her water vapor into rain or sleet. Debbie shrugged off the effort and continued moving on her course...
...dust -which seemed to explain what Astronaut Buzz Aldrin meant when he described the lunar surface as slippery. Geologists tentatively ascribed the abundance of the glassy material to meteors. Because of the immense heat generated on impact, speculated Harvard's Clifford Frondel, the invading material would have been vaporized, along with chunks of the lunar surface. After cooling, the vapor may have rained back in the form of glass spheroids. But that explanation raised a baffling question: Since lunar gravity is not even strong enough to retain an atmosphere, why did the vaporized material-not drift off into space...
...satellites sent into orbit by Martians. But they would have to be unlike any terrestrial creatures. More than ever, Mars seems hostile to most earthly forms of life. Its surface appears exceptionally dry; its atmosphere seems to be composed largely of carbon dioxide with only a trace of water vapor...