Word: vapor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exporters could become victims of their development plans by helping produce a drought. Through evaporation, the forest recycles 7 trillion tons of water annually from the ground back into the atmosphere?as much as 50% of all the moisture it receives from rainfall. A good portion of that water vapor is carried by air currents that bounce off the Andes and head southward to drop rain on farming regions in the southern states of Mato Grosso and Goi?s, both part of Brazil?s breadbasket. In other words, no Amazon forest in Brazil?s north, no rain in the south...
Their sport yields no meat, no trophies, just pride in one's marksmanship and that freeze-frame moment of annihilation. "Varmint vapor" it's called by hunters. "Montana mist." "Dakota droplets." Apparently unconcerned about p.r. or the tender feelings of nonhunters, varminters have a taste for sick humor and grisly imagery. The 54,000-member V.H.A. sells T shirts that feature cartoons of exploding rodents. Its headquarters in Pierre is lined with snapshots of happy hunters and their diminutive kills. There are images of coyotes, badgers, gophers, and one large close-up of a prairie-dog carcass tumbling through...
That's why experiments now going on in laboratories around the world are so important. At a research center outside Stuttgart, Germany, engineers at DaimlerChrysler have created a high-performance car whose tail pipe emits nothing but water vapor. In a giant wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, engineers are set to analyze air turbulence in order to make superefficient wind-power turbines. In Japan scientists are perfecting paper-thin solar cells that will be cheap to produce and could turn every house into its own electricity supplier. These ventures, along with many others, are beginning...
...steel mills, oil refineries and power plants are suppressing rainfall downwind of major industrial centers. In Australia, Canada and Turkey, according to one study, these pollution patterns perfectly coincide with corridors within which precipitation is virtually nil. Reason: the aerosols interfere with the mechanism by which the water vapor in clouds condenses and grows into raindrops big enough to reach the ground...