Word: vaporous
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...forms (mercury bichloride), a therapeutic salve in others (mercury ammonium chloride), fickle mercury also goes in hefty quantities into such disparate products as dental fillings and dry-cell batteries, antibarnacle paint and electrical control apparatus. Hatmakers, however, have ceased using the stuff to soften felt. Reason: poisoned by mercury vapor, almost one U.S. hatter in ten developed shakes and mental disturbances. The resulting cliche, mad as a hatter, survives...
...long by 2 ft. high, braced between uprights. A cool piece of pure structure, the object has all the contemplative imagery of an I beam, but it has an inner electronic life. The narrow six-inch gap between the aluminum beams is brightly lit by hidden sodium-vapor lamps that shine on electric eyes staring up through pencil-sized holes in the bottom beam...
...astronauts still had unfinished business. Before splashing down in the western Atlantic on Tuesday, they planned a tethered flight with Agena and a space walk by Aldrin designed to evaluate man's ability to work in space. In another experiment, they will photograph a sodium vapor cloud released into the upper atmosphere by a high-flying French rocket to coincide with the passage of Gemini...
...discovery of methanelike compounds on Mars, Kaplan believes, leaves only one important obstacle to life on the red planet: the apparent lack of water in liquid form. What little Martian water there is exists as polar-cap frost or vapor in the atmosphere; there are no oceans or even lakes similar to those in which the first terrestrial life evolved. "It would be a strenuous climate for life," says Kaplan, "but then not all life-even on earth-requires liquid water...
Rainbow of Colors. To measure this tiny quantity-less than a millionth of the energy needed to split the nucleus of an atom-the scientists devised an ingenious technique. Light from a 200-watt mercury vapor lamp was focused on a diffraction grating, which, like a prism, broke up the beam into its constituent rainbow of colors, its separate wave lengths of light. By rotating the grating to a carefully calculated angle, the scientists were able to reflect light of a single, specific wave length at a target. Knowing the wave length, they were able to determine precisely the energy...