Word: vapor
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Like a raffish, somewhat questionable stranger at a bar, this raffish, somewhat questionable book glibly rattles off all sorts of odd and fascinating facts about the manufacture and use of liquor. The word "spirits" was originally applied to the alcohol vapor created during the distillation process. The "proof" of any whisky is equal to double the amount of alcohol it contains; 100 proof means 50% alcohol by volume, the other half being distilled water, coloring and the like. "Proof" originally was a place where gunpowder was tested. Early distillers adopted the term, because they used powder to gauge the strength...
Perner was not the first to use osmic-acid vapor. Others had tried it without success. Undismayed when exposing pea cells to the vapor for two months failed to produce results, Perner doggedly lengthened the experiment to nine months and finally got his pictures. "My greatest achievement," he says, "was that I was patient...
Ostlund's findings, which he reported last week to a Miami conference on tropical oceanography, were derived from samples of water vapor he collected in September during harrowing "hurricane hunter" plane flights through Betsy, the storm that ravaged the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Though the amount of tritium in atmospheric water vapor over the central Atlantic and the Caribbean is usually from eight to ten times the quantity in sea water, the concentration in the samples Ostlund collected decreased as the plane approached the storm center. In the vapor in the cloud wall surrounding the storm...
Only one conclusion seemed plausible to Ostlund: the decrease in tritium in his samples resulted from the dilution of atmospheric vapor with relatively tritium-free vapor drawn up from the sea. For every ounce of atmospheric vapor in Hurricane Betsy, he calculated, there were almost two ounces of sea water vapor-a finding that strongly suggested Betsy had derived about 60% of her energy from...
...Ostlund's preliminary findings are confirmed by further tests, hurricane fighters may have to take a new approach to their job. Instead of seeding clouds to deprive the big storms of energy from atmospheric water vapor, as planned for next year's Project Storm Fury, they may have to find ways to isolate the hurricanes from their principal source of energy, the sea. One suggestion advanced at the Miami meeting: to cover large areas of the sea in the vicinity of a hurricane with a thin chemical layer-perhaps of fatty alcohols-that would prevent evaporation and keep...