A Field Guide to the Invisible
by
Wayne Biddle


ALSO BY WAYNE BIDDLE

Coming to Terms

Barons of the Sky

A Field Guide to Germs

Field

Guide to the

Invisible  Field Guide to the Invisible

Wayne Biddle

Henry Holt and Company New York Consider, therefore, this further
evidence of bodies whose existence you must acknowledge though they
cannot be seen.

--Titus Lucretius Carus

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Publishers since 1866 115 West 18th Street New York, New York 10011

Henry Holts is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

Copyright ) 1998 by Wayne Biddle All rights reserved.

Published in Canada by Fitzhenry 8c Whiteside Ltd., 195 Allstate
Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biddle, Wayne.

A field guide to the invisible / Wayne Biddle.--Ist ed.

p. em.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8050-5069-8 (alk.  paper) 1. Science--Miscellanea.  I. Title.

Q173.B597 1998

500--dc21

97-39178

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums.

For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 1998

Designed by Betty Zw

Printed in the United States of America All first editions are printed
on acid-free paper.  co

A..  _.

 Con tents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

Allergens Alpha Rays Ammonia Background Radiation Bacteria Bad Breath
Beta Rays

B.O.

Burps Carbon Dioxide Carbon Monoxide Comet Tails Cooties

S - =

xi xiii xv

Contents ix viii Contents

Cosmic Rays Dioxin Dust

EMF

Fallout Flatus Formaldehyde Freon Fungi Gamma Rays God

Gravity Hydrogen Sulfide Infrared

Krypton Laughing Gas Methane Methyl Chloride Microwaves

Mites

Musk Neutrinos

Noise No-see-urns

Ozone Particulates Perfume Pheromones

Photons Pollen Protozoa Quarks Radio Waves Radon Smells Soot Spores
Sulfur Dioxide Thoughts Ultraviolet

Virus 152

Water Vapor 157

Wind 160

X Rays 165

Zeitgeist 169

Bibliography Index

 List of Illustrations

1. Memory, imagination, cognition, and the senses (woodcut, 1520).
Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

2. Les Cinq Sells (The Five Senses).  Courtesy of National Library of
Medicine.

3. Allergens on the trachea's surface.  E. Gray/ Science Source.

4. Henri Becquerel.  Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

5. Madame Curie,1921.  Courtesy of Library of Congress.

6. Fritz Haber.  Science Source.

7. Sweat pore.J. Burgess/ Science Source.

8. Comet dust particle.  Science Source.

9. Attention au Pou.  Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

10.  A late-nineteenth-century cartoon about household dust and
disease.  Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

11.  Candida albi cans fungus.  K. Lounatmaa/Science Source.

12.  Falling cat.J. I?  Varin/Science Source.

13.  An 1830 cartoon about the use of laughing gas.  Courtesy of
National Library of Medicine.

14.  Dust mite.  A. Syred/Science Source.

15.  Scabies eggs in skin.  K. Kjeldsen/Science Source.

16.  Stop Needless Noise.  Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

17.  A mid-nineteenth-century cartoon about deaXness.  Courtesy of
National Library of Medicine.

18.  Donora, Pennsylvania,1948.  Courtesy of National Library of
Medicine.

19.  Ragweed pollen.  Science Source.

20.  Marie Curie receives a gram of radium from President Harding,1921.
Courtesy of Library of Congress.

21.  The Sniffmobile.  Courtesy of Southwest Research Institute.

22.  Odor test participants.  Courtesy of Southwest Research
Institute.

23.  Cartoon from Harper's Weekly, 1881, about pollution and politics.
Courtesy of National Library of Medicine.

24.  PET and MRI scans of schizophrenia.  D. Silbersweig/Science
Source.

25.  Ban the Burn.  Courtesy of American Academy of Dermatology/
National Library of Medicine.

26.  AIDS virus.  Courtesy of Centersfor Disease Control.

27.  The first X ray: Frau Rontgen's hand.  Courtesy of National
Library of Medicine.

Acknowledgments.

All field guides, even the ones with no tongue in cheek, are
necessarily severe distillations.  Almost every entry in this book
represents lifetimes of study for devoted specialists.  My pleasant job
has been to marvel at what's been done, then to exit the dabbler's
paradise and invoke a personal sense of importance.

The bibliography is thus more than a formality.  It is a bow to those
who would spend years to produce a single volume entitled, for example,
Mites.

I am indebted to Mimi Harrison for casting her professional eye on the
choice of illustrations, in addition to showing considerable
forbearance as the author's wife.  Elizabeth Douglas of the Southwest
Research Institute in San Antonio gave generously of her time to a
supplicant on the telephone.  I also warmly recognize the continuing,
though sometimes financially tenuous, hospitality of research staff at
the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the Milton
S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University, and the Gelman
Library at George Washington University.  To paraphrase Pierre
Bosquet's observation about the Light Brigade's charge at Balaklava,
the Internet is magnificent, but it is not scholarship.

Introduction.

Much of everyday experience takes place beyond the range of our senses,
which are ample but comparatively dull.  It is our big brain that makes
us superior to other creatures, for better or worse, and that also
enables us to explore realms that are no less important because they
are invisible.

Invisible means everything going around and through us that we not only
can't see, but can't do much about anyway, at least as individuals.  It
suggests a mode for cataloging the inescapable stew we're in, for
identifying life's ingredients that are literally out of sight and
therefore too often out of mind.  There is nothing here that you could
easily ascertain on a hike through the woods, yet each item is as
impossible to avoid as the trees.

In our contemporary predicament, where so much seems beyond personal
control, helplessness requires sorting out.

For example, an average adult breathes about 13.5 kilograms of air per
day (but consumes only I.2 kg of food and 2 kg of water).  Since no one
can go on an air diet, this figure represents a fixed universal.  Also
fixed, therefore, is exposure to more than two dozen gases--from the
good, such as oxygen, to the bad, such as methane, to the ugly, such as
formaldehyde.  There is no clean air left anywhere on Earth, so we can
no more avoid breathing the formaldehyde than the oxygen.  What is
invisible generates an index of what we are (in the Feuerbachian sense
of "Der Mensch ist, was er isst"--man is what he eats), which is to
varying degrees toxic whether you're a Democrat or a Republican,
paranoid or not.

In medieval times, as William Manchester has noted, every-one knew
perfectly well that the air was rife with menacing spirits--the souls
of unbaptized babies, undead ghouls wandering forever between Heaven
and Hell, sociopathic nymphs, melsh-dicks who made hazelnuts disappear,
assorted incubi and succubi who did their dirty work while the victim's
eyes were closed by sleep.  If, moreover, any visible object might
express invisible forces, then the senses were most useful for
identifying telltale signs of the netherworld.  Hence, perhaps, the
priest-hood as the highest intellectual calling.

Scientists supplanted priests long ago, of course, relegating holy or
unholy ghosts to literature.  Still, much of what is invisible to us
sophisticated moderns is as scary as the enmity of old fiends.  That
our ancestors evolved to coexist with these realities is small comfort.
So-called background radiation fits this category.  If the intensity
of ultraviolet rays reaching the Earth's surface had been harmful to
life during the eons of human evolution, maybe we would have developed
an ability to see them coming.  But the planet's atmosphere, which
largely filtered them out, mercifully made that unnecessary. Now that
we have altered the atmosphere's chemical composition to the point
where W is a health threat, we must somehow grapple with an invisible
foe.  Or should only frogs be worried?  Let's sort out such practical
quandaries, which today are legion.

Julius Caesar is said to have banned nighttime chariot driving on
Rome's cobbled streets because the noise spoiled his slumber.  At the
beginning of the fourteenth century, England's Edward I forbade the
burning of coal because he hated its smell, and executed at least one
wretched violator.  None of our leaders will ever possess the absolute
power over the invisible enjoyed by these potentates.  In a democracy,
invisible threats are notoriously difficult to recognize and control
because most of our lingua franca derives from visual evidence.  The
introductory phrase let's see is routinely applied to all the other
senses, Let's see if I can hear you whisper.  Let's see f I can feel
the tingle.  Let's see f you have afever.  Let's see f we can taste the
spice.

Seeing is believing for most voters, a positive trait unless it
perpetuates states of denial.

"This is hilarious," a frustrated citizen told the local paper about
restrictions during a summer ozone alert around Washington, D.C.

"It's just .. . it's just oppressive."

At least he wasn't beheaded for mowing his lawn, though we may someday
come to that.

In this century, physicists have developed a special language, called
quantum electrodynamics, for describing the unseeable interior of
atoms.  That it corresponds not one bit with everyday experience is
irrelevant to them, given the power the concepts bestow.  This is the
age-old seductive pull of the invisible, which draws scientists down
the rabbit hole just as ineluctably as it once drew priests.  The
professional language for comprehending invisible things like quarks,
radiation, or ozone is often even more arcane than run-of-the-mill
scientific jargon, widening the gap between those who see ("I see") and
those who don't.

Everything is invisible for the blind, no matter what their education.
So if blind people can still learn to step around holes, then the rest
of us are evidently blessed with deep redundancies of data.  The worst
threats merely foil several layers, giving "odorless and tasteless"
gases like carbon monoxide an especially demonic reputation.

In a more benign epoch, a field guide to the invisible might be
construed as a spiritual exercise, and a demeaning one at that.

"Why has not man a microscopic eye?"  Alexander Pope mused in 1732.
"For this plain reason, man is not a fly."  But in an age of chronic,
low-dose exposure to sundry radiations and pollutants, of
drug-resistant infections from exotic microbes, of habitats where the
sources of stress are amorphous, of a bio-sphere so radically changed
by the hand of man that the natural protections it once provided are no
longer assured, it is still the invisible that worries us most.  Like
superstitious sinners or bad scouts, we feel unprepared.

Then again, there are many good things among the invisible--friendly
things whose invisibility enhances their marvelousness  As Emily
Dickinson wrote, "So soft upon the Scene / The Act of evening fell / We
felt how neighborly a Thing / Was the Invisible."  In this niche we
shall skip such unseeables as hummingbird wings or the rebounded sphere
of a falling raindrop that are invisible because they pass too quickly.
(Our nervous system can only distinguish between two moments if they
are separated by more than about one-twentieth of a second.) A sane
person does not see lightbulbs flashing on and off 360 times every
minute.  Being able to see all of creation would be a terrible curse
even for the most crazed naturalist.  Included here, nonetheless, are a
few items that we might personally want to preserve as unseeable,
though not unknowable.  These deserve our surrender, actually, given
how capable they are of giving pleasure.  For the 40 percent of
American scientists who call themselves believers, God herself may
belong in this category.

What follows are points on the map of a parallel world, ignored at our
peril, that we inhabit simultaneously with the one before our very
eyes.  There is a lot of difference between say-so and take-a-look, but
we'll get over it.

to the Hay fever.

(this colloquialism dates to the early nineteenth century, when POLLEN
was first recognized as a culprit), or allergic rhinitis, is the single
most common disease suffered by humans.

The fact that we're not alone--apes get it, too--is no comfort.

There are many irritating (and sometimes far worse) medical problems
eking rashes, itchy eyes, asthma--caused by hypersensitivity to
otherwise harmless biological or chemical matter known in this context
as allergens, but only hay fever has elicited enough literary bathos to
inspire a play by Noel Coward.

Allergen was coined in 1912 after an Austrian pediatrician named
Clemens von Pirquet formed the term allergy (or Allergie, in German)
from Greek words meaning "abnormal response," no doubt referring to the
over-the-top reaction of an allergic individual's immune system to
certain invaders.  Sicknesses recognizable today as allergic reactions
have been reported for thousands of years.  King Menes of Memphis is
known to have expired in 3100 B.C. either from a hornet sting or from
getting squashed by a hippopotamus (ancient Egyptian vocabulary being
ambiguous on this subject).  Intolerance of certain foods was discussed
from the sixteenth century onward, as was the tendency on the trachea's
surface.

Of pet dander, feathers, and other common substances to trigger asthma.
In 1835, researchers began to challenge" subjects with pollen
samples.

All natural allergens are proteins or protein-carbohydrate compounds
(gly-co proteins in the jargon of organic chemistry).  In the usual
scenario, when any of myriad allergenic substances--animal dander,
POLLEN, mold, FUNGI, BACTERIA, dust MITES, latex, cockroach mung,
etcetera ad infinitum--land on us or in us, we all produce little
soldiers that capture the foreigner and take him to jail.  Speaking a
bit more technically, proteins called immunoglobulin antibodies bind to
the encountered antigens and then attach to receptors on mast cells,
which are thereby stimulated to release inflammatory agents such as
histamine (of snotty-nose fame, also contained in the hairs of stinging
nettles) from their cytoplasm.  Cat antigen, for example, is mostly
from dried saliva.  Unfortunately, lots of people are inclined by
heredity to unleash way too much defensive stuff, sending nearby tissue
into miserable symptoms of infamous category.

Why?  No one knows.  If there were some Darwinian advantage conferred
upon itchy, rashy, sneezy, grumpy cavemen, the point is now lost on
their descendants.  There must have been a good reason because the
genetic imperative is very strong, if one parent has allergies,
children face at least a one-in-three chance of having them, too, if
both parents do, the odds rise to seven-in-ten.  More than 50 million
Americans thus endure allergic diseases sometime during their lives.

Whoever classified ragweed as Ambrosia was obviously not hounded by
allergens.

alpha rays s On a cloudy February day in Paris,1896, Henri Becquerel
put away an experiment he had been hoping to run that needed lots of
sunshine.  Forty-four years old and already sporting a long white
beard, the Ecole Polytechnique professor liked to tinker with uranium
salts, which glowed wondrously in the dark after being out in the sun.
His scientific coterie was captive by Herr Rontgen's recent discovery
of x RAYS at | Wurzburg's Physikalisches Institut in Bavaria, so
Becquerel thought he might see if this stuff worked in the latest
laboratory trick--placing a metal cutout between the uranium and a
photographic plate to make a silhouette image.  But it wouldn't work
without sunlight to stimulate phosphorescence first, he believed.
Every-thing went into a drawer to await clear skies.

--, Henri Besquerel, the impatient discoverer of les rayons
uraniques.

Three overcast days later, Becquerel grew impatient and developed the
plate anyway, maybe to prove to himself that the sun really was
necessary.  Merde.  There as plain as his whiskers was a blotchy patch
rather like a lipstick kiss.  Something potent was coming out of the
uranium salts even without the sun's prodding.  After feverish study he
christened the phenomenon les rayons uranique--uranium rays--and showed
that they were different from X rays in two crucial respects, they
could not pass easily through materials, and they streamed continuously
out of the uranium.  For the eternal glory of France, he had discovered
radioactivity (which he still thought was a form of phosphorescence). 
For this feat he shared the Nobel Prize in 1903 with two other
pioneers, Marie and Pierre Curie.

It was the inimitable Madame Curie who coined the term radioactivity
and proposed that the rays were due to changes Marzya SklodouJska, the
illustrious Madame Curie, in 1921.

within atoms, not to chemical reactions.  At first ignored by Nobel
nominators from the French Academy of Sciences her work was championed
by Pierre, who had put aside his own study of magnetism to collaborate
with her.

After he was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906, she assumed his
position on the Sorbonne faculty, raised two daughters (one of whom,
Irene Joliot-Curie, shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry with her
husband, Frederic), and won another Nobel solo in 1911.  Besides her
scientific genius, she is remembered for a letter written to the
Swedish Academy of Sciences, which was nervous about the very public
scandal of her affair with a married physicist.

"The prize has been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium,"
she reminded them.

"I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and
the facts of private life."

News of Becquerel's work had traveled quickly across the Channel to the
Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where a New Zealander named Ernest
Rutherford was looking for a way to make his mark for the empire.  In
1897 he began what would stretch into nearly ten years of radioactivity
research.  His first important find was that uranium rays had two
components.

One, which he called alpha radiation, was positively charged and
completely absorbed by a sheet of paper or aluminum foil as thin as
two-thousandths of a centimeter, the second, named beta radiation, was
negative and 100 times more penetrating.  We now know that all the
natural elements heavier than lead, excepting bismuth, are radioactive
and give off alpha or BETA RAYS.

The truly fabulous thing about alpha rays was that when one element
emitted them, it turned spontaneously into a different element.
Uranium, for example, transmuted into thorium.

Shades of Merlin!

"Don't call it transmutation," Rutherford warned a colleague, "they'll
have our heads off as alchemists."

Rutherford concentrated on alpha rays, concluding in 1908, the same
year he won the Nobel Prize, that they were beams of particles like
charged helium atoms.  It took another two years to identify them as
helium ions (clusters of two protons and two neutrons--not known at the
time), actually nuclei, a new concept in atomic structure.

Along the way, Rutherford noticed that when alpha particles passed
through an extremely thin sheet of mica onto a photo-..  L.= graphic
plate, they did not make a sharp image, evidently they were somehow
being scattered by the mica.  But since they were moving at
one-twentieth the speed of light (that is, with great energy), what was
powerful enough to deflect them?  More experiments with gold leaf just
a few hundred atoms thick showed that sometimes an alpha particle even
ricocheted back-ward off the target.

"It was as though you had fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of
tissue paper and it had bounced back and hit you," he marveled  The
only way this could happen was if each gold atom had a positively
charged center that contained almost all of the atom's mass.  If true,
then atoms were more like miniature solar systems than the "plum
pudding" model then in vogue.  He calculated that the center, or
nucleus, occupied less than 10-t4 of the atom's volume.  (If Earth were
an atom, its nucleus would be the size of Yankee Stadium.) Matter was
thus mostly emptiness.  The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, after working
in Rutherford's lab, developed the theoretical aspects of this
planetary model, which came to be named after Bohr.

Rutherford--now Sir Ernest--announced his last great discovery in 1919
at the age of forty-eight, after the Great War had dispersed many of
his international colleagues.  He found that the positive charge in the
nucleus was due to particles he called protons, from the Greek word for
"first."  Not a bad career for a boy from Nelson.  He was named
director of the Cavendish, despite his colonial status.  His
bread-and-butter technique of firing alpha rays at various targets and
analyzing the reflections paved the way for "atom smashers," which are
still the most powerful experimental tools of physics.

Alpha rays in nature are generally harmless to people because the first
layer of dead cells in our outer skin is too thick for them to
penetrate.  Nor can they make it to the lens of the eye.  Natural and
man-made em utters include radium, plutonium, thorium, neptunium,
americium, and curium.

Very few alpha particles can travel more than one to three inches in
air before being stopped.  Polonium-212 and 214 give off alpha rays
that are energetic enough to reach inner cells, but 212 is very rare
and 214 is of concern only in uranium mines, where it is a suspected
cause of skin cancer among miners.  Therapeutic beams of alpha
particles have been used instead of X rays to treat eye cancers and
certain brain disorders because the cell destruction they cause is more
confined.

If the elements that emit alpha rays somehow get inside us, however,
they can be very damaging and potent carcinogens as the particles
travel through soft tissue and destroy chemical bonds in cellular
molecules (see RADON).  A dose of alpha radiation delivered to living
tissue is twenty times more destructive than the same dose of X rays.
Radium-226 (the isotope studied by Marie Curie) was one of the first
sub-stances tied conclusively to cancer, in classic epidemiologic
studies of watch-dial painters.  In 1931, researchers reported that
young women employed to paint luminous numbers on watches and clocks
developed bone cancers far more often than the general population
because they often "tipped" their brushes with their lips.  Due to its
chemical similarity to calcium, the swallowed radium accumulated in
their bones, where emitted alpha rays produced tumors.  (Today,
tritium--which gives off only low-energy beta rays--has replaced radium
in timepieces.) During and after World War II, military doctors treated
inflamed inner-ear tissues of submariners and airmen with direct
exposure to radium.  The technique, called nasopharyn-geal radium
therapy, involved pushing a rod filled with fifty milligrams of radium
through the nostrils until it reached the eustachian tubes, which help
balance pressure.  Some 20,000 troops and dependents endured the
procedure for inner-ear problems from the 1940s to the mid-1960s.  A
1982 study by Johns Hopkins researchers found that they might be at
higher risk for head and neck cancers, but the Pentagon did not
publicly report the matter until 1997.

In 1934, Madame Curie herself died at age sixty-six of leukemia induced
by decades of radiation exposure.

A colorless, poisonous gas that fortunately has a pungent odor
irritating enough to make us get away from it fast.  Think of smelling
salts--a dilute mixture of ammonia and PERFUME still powerful enough to
bring a KO'd heavyweight back to his senses.  The large-scale synthesis
of ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer is the keystone of modern
agriculture and thus of global coastal water pollution.

The standard manufacturing method of combining atmospheric hydrogen and
nitrogen under high pressure to make NH3 is still called the
Haber-Bosch process, after the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl
Bosch, who pioneered it just before World War I. The illustrious Haber,
founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical
Chemistry in 1911, received the Nobel chemistry prize in 1919 for this
synthesis, despite the fact that his work had allowed Germany to keep
mass-producing explosives after the Allies blocked shipments of nitrate
from Chile.  The Swedish Academy, focusing on man-made ammonia as a
boon to world agriculture, also chose to ignore his pivotal role in
developing deadly battlefield gases for the Wehrmacht, for which the
Allies considered him a war criminal.  (Just before the first such use
of gas at Ypres in 1915, his wife committed suicide.) Bosch went on to
receive a Nobel in 1931 for further research on high-pressure
chemistry.  Haber, who had always been a fervent patriot, left Germany
when the Nazis came to power in 1933, be-cause he was Jewish.  He died
the following year in Switzerland

Vast quantities of ammonia are used today for making fertilizers,
nitric acid, plastics, explosives, dyes, glues, pharmaceuticals,
petroleum products, I synthe ic fibers, and myriad other chemicals.
Total abundance in the biosphere is esti-Fritz Haber, Nobel chemist and
war criminal.

mated to be 10 billion tons.  At concentrations over 20 to 25 parts per
million in air, surveys of workers have found symptoms starting with
nasal dryness (32 ppm) and eye, nose, throat, or chest irritation (72
ppm).  Industrial accidents with anhydrous (water-free) ammonia at
inhalation exposures of 2,500 to 6,500 ppm have caused blindness and
fatal lung damage.  The federal limit is 25 ppm.

About 45 percent of the NH3 in the atmosphere comes from decomposition
of animal waste, including human excreta.  In Europe and Great Britain,
cow piss is the number-one source via urea, CO(NH2)2.  Urban and
industrial wastewater treatment often generates ammonia pollution. The
action of BACTERIA on organic matter in soil accounts for another 20
percent of atmospheric ammonia, some of which is reabsorbed by plants
as they try to keep the concentration of NH3 around them constant. 
Release from fertilizers produces about 8 per-cent, and burning of coal
less than 1 percent.  Biomass burning can be significant in the
tropics, but most of the rest comes from the oceans. On a worldwide
basis, about 54 percent of atmospheric ammonia comes from human
activities, over continents the fraction reaches almost
three-quarters.

The world's reliance on nitrogen fertilizers, underpinned by factory
production of ammonia, appears to be absolute.  At least 2 billion of
the planet's 6 billion people are able to exist only because of plant
and animal proteins derived from nitrogen supplied through Haber-Bosch
synthesis.  Application of these fertilizers in the United States has
stabilized since the 1980s, but ecologists estimate that half of all
industrial nitrogen ever used worldwide has been spread on the ground
since 1984.  Since 1993, a "dead zone" of hypoxic (oxygen content below
2 ppm) water has appeared every summer across some 7,000 square miles
of the Gulf of Mexico along Louisiana's coast, as algae bloom on
hundreds of millions of pounds of nitrates in debouched Mississippi
River sediment.  A similar "eutrophocation" (nutrient enrichment of
oxygen-depleted water) disaster plagues Chesapeake Bay, where
Phiesteria pisci-cida microbes that thrive in nitrate-rich stagnant
waters caused massive fish kills and human illness along the Pocomoke
River in 1997, Scandinavian fjords, and coastal waters on every
continent except Antarctica.  Since 1972, the number of major shoreline
outbreaks of algal diatoms and plankton harmful to fish and higher
forms of life--including humans--has more than doubled in the United
States, from sixteen to thirty-six.

The Environmental Protection Agency has set no federal pollution
standards for nutrients such as nitrogen beyond the drinking water
limit of 10 ppm, which is far above what will foster hypoxia.

Ammonia is used by cigarette manufacturers to boost the biological
effects of nicotine.  In natural tobacco, nicotine resides in molecules
of nonvolatile salts.  Ammonia releases pure nicotine from these
compounds, which evaporates more easily and dissolves better in fats.
When smokers inhale, the addictive drug is then more readily absorbed
by lung tissue.  Cigarette tobacco typically contains about 3 percent
ammonia, which helps evaporate about a quarter of the nicotine in
inhaled smoke about 100 times more than without ammonia.

According to a 1991 tobacco company "leaf-blender's manual obtained by
the Food and Drug Administration, this is "associated with increases in
impact and satisfaction' reported by smokers."  The process is similar
to free basing cocaine, where the snow (also a salt, cocaine
hydrochloride) is liberated by ammonia or, to make crack, by sodium
bicarbonate.

background radiation * Nature is radioactive, including us.  Edward
Teller, father of the H-bomb, loved to emphasize that we are all
intimately irradiated by the potassium-40 in our bed mate's body, that
by snuggling with two lovers we would get more radiation than from
lounging against a nuclear reactor.

Just because we sleep with background radiation doesn't mean it's
harmless, Dr.  Strangelove.  Even today, some text-books repeat the
shibboleth that the highest doses to people living near the Three Mile
Island accident in 1979 were less than the annual background exposure
and thus nothing to worry about.  Like germs (which it somewhat helps
keep at bay), background radiation causes health problems--just not
often enough to be highly noticeable in a crowd.

People living with sharply above-average natural radiation in parts of
Brazil, China, and India, due to thorium-rich monazite soil (beaches in
southwestern India are streaked with sand containing as much as
one-third thorium), have more chromo-some aberrations and, in the last
case, greater incidence of Down's syndrome than control groups. Higher
frequency of cancer has not been documented, but the epidemiologic
studies suffer statistically from low numbers of subjects.

Villagers near Rio de Janeiro received radiation detectors in the shape
of religious medals to bolster their participation.

Where does natural background radiation come from?

There are two general sources, cosmic and terrestrial.

COSMIC

RAYS account for about 9 percent of the total annual exposure.

A passenger on a cross-country airline flight receives about 2.5 milli
rems from this source.  RADON is by far the largest earth-bound
contributor, at about 66 percent.  So-called primordial
nuclides--potassium-40, rubidium-87, and members of the decay chains of
thorium-232 and uranium-238 (plus, to be obsessive, the extremely rare
uranium-235)--left in the Earth's crust when it cooled from radioactive
gases supply another 9 percent.  The rest comes from deposits inside
everyone's body, mainly potassium-40 and rubidium-87.  The dose of
GAMMA RAYS from your spouse's potassium-40, which is the only type of
internal radiation capable of leaking out, is negligible compared with
the emission of BETA RAYS from your own nuclides.

So keep on spooning.

And maybe don't pig out on Brazil nuts, which are grown in high-gamma
ray soil and may be 14,000 times more radioactive than most fruits.
Other "hot" foods include cereal, organ meats, peanuts, and flour.
Oysters have been known to accumulate zen on-65 to levels hazardous for
gourmands.

Eating tuna and wild salmon may increase the body burden of iron-55.
High levels of strontium-90 have been found in the shells, bones, and
edible parts of mollusks.  As with contamination from pesticides and
other food contaminants, government standards are only as good as
enforcement, which--we're shocked--is sometimes spotty.

After the discovery of x RAYS in 1895, man-made radiation was added to
Mother Nature's.  Today this accounts for about 18 percent of the total
yearly exposure from both natural and artificial sources, breaking down
to 11 percent from diagnostic X rays, 4 percent from nuclear medicine,
and 3 percent from consumer products.  The last category is dominated
again by radon (in domestic water lines) but also includes phosphate
fertilizers, building materials such as cinder blocks, color video
monitors, and, most notably, cigarettes, which will deliver a nasty
little dose of ALPHA RAYS to your bronchial epithelium from
polonium-210.  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your personal
thrill quotient, the fabulous shoe-fitting X-ray fluoroscopes of the
1950s are no longer the neatest thing about getting new shoes.  Baby
boomers who survived those sales gimmicks may recall the 1959 scare
involving contamination of calcium in milk by strontium-90 from A-bomb
blasts.

Today, the contribution of such FALLOUT is relatively insignificant,
assuming no more atmospheric tests.

All told, the average annual personal dose to the U.S.

population from GOD and Mammon is about 360 mrem (or 3.6 mSv in the
newer "Sievert" units, where 1 Sv = 100 rem).  By being prudent about
medical X rays and diligent about household radon, plus not smoking,
you can reduce this figure somewhat as an individual.  The rest, for
better or worse, is just part of being an Earthling.

At the level of charlatanism, yet relentlessly pushed by the nuclear
industry, is the subject of hormesis--the supposed healthy effect of
low-level, whole-body radiation.  Alpine "radon spas" have been selling
this pseudoscience to true believers for 600 years.  Some early animal
experiments claimed that such exposure brought longer life
expectancies, but the data were flawed.  Human mortality from cancer
and heart disease is lower in parts of the United States having high
natural background radiation, but cause-and-effect is confounded--as in
many "ecological correlations"--by other factors, such as the fact that
these regions are mostly at high altitudes.

Let us end with more pearls of wisdom from Dr.  Teller, who had the
chutzpah to write a book in 1962 titled The Legacy of Hiroshima, "A
person living in a brick house .. . is exposing himself to .. . perhaps
as much as ten times the amount of the current dose from radioactive
fallout.  If fallout really is dangerous we should tear down all of our
brick houses.  I would hate to do this, because I live in a brick house
myself."

bacteria -Earth's dominant form of life.  We have evolved to
accommodate them.

Back up 3.5 billion years, and the fossil record begins with bacteria.
Their cumulative mass since then would be greater than the whole
planet's, which is a mere 6.588 x 1021 (6 sextillion, 588 quintillion)
tons.  Their population in a single human gut far exceeds the total
number of people who have ever lived.  Louis Pasteur was so unnerved by
their ubiquity that when dining out he used a magnifying glass to
scrutinize his meal.

Scientists have identified more than 4,000 species of bacteria, with
untold millions more to go.  Most are harmless to us, many are helpful.
About 10 percent of our body weight consists of them, some of which we
absolutely depend on.  The pseudomonads that swim on any recently moist
surface would be quite sufficient to decompose every errant flake of
organic matter in the house.  Despite pasteurization, millions live in
a pint of fresh milk.  The invigorating smell of rich garden soil comes
from gases released by streptomycetes, whose chemical defenses against
other microbes we use in the antibiotics strep-tomycin and
tetracycline.  If we disappeared as a species tomorrow, it would make
less than a blip in bacterial ecology.  If just trivial clan of their
kind departed, like Escherichia coli, we'd be goners, too.

Bacteria are single cells, usually about one to two microns
(thousandths of a millimeter) across.  (The flecks of DUST visible in a
sunbeam measure down to about twenty microns.) But some are as small as
200 nanometers (billionths of a meter) .  They come in three main
shapes, called cocci (balls), bacilli (rods), and vibrios (commas),
though you can find corkscrews, Ss, and squares.  They reproduce
asexually by just dividing in two.

Those of us who grew up believing that the 281,000 animals,284,000
plants, and 750,000 insects described by taxonomists constitute the
peak of bio diversity were demonstrating what happens when "the error
of our eye directs our mind," as Shakespeare put it.  The genetic
richness of microbes was invisible to science until gene-typing
techniques allowed microbiologists to see that groups of bacteria are
as distinct from each other as dogs are from rosebushes.  Multicellular
animals did not appear until about 580 million years ago on the tree of
life, which thus owes most of its limbs to bacteria.

They inhabit every conceivable nook and cranny suitable for liSc
generally wherever there is water from about 20 to 250 F, but not
necessarily.  Aerobes need air, anaerobes don't.  Thermophiles want
heat, psychrophiles like cold.  Acidophiles need acidic milieus,
alkalophiles desire alkaline.  Heterotrophs eat organic matter,
autotrophs crave CARBON DIOXIDE.  They love glaciers, hot springs, and
volcanic fissures, besides the usual scummy places we're used to
finding them in.  Bacterial SPORES have been collected around deep-sea
sulfide "smokers" at 650 F, while others can remain viable for years
despite desiccation.

They have been extracted from a Swedish bore hole almost four miles
deep.  Lithoautotrophic bacteria thrive in rocks thousands of feet
below the Earth's surface, using energy from inside the planet instead
of the solar power of ecosystems we've always deemed conventional.  In
fact, microbes may have been the primary architects of the Earth's
crust as they metabolized metals, minerals, and hundreds of other
compounds.  If the estimated 100 trillion tons of bacteria living
underground right now were mined out and slathered across the Earth's
entire surface, we'd be up to our necks in them.

Plants may be responsible for maintaining oxygen in the atmosphere, but
this life-giving gas was supplied primordially by bacterial
photosynthesis.  Plants themselves could not survive without
nitrogen-fixing bacteria living free in the soil (cyanobacteria) or
symbiotically within root nodules (of the genus Rhizobium).  These
bacteria split apart tightly bonded nitrogen molecules and create
AMMONIA, a compound whose nitrogen is easier for plants to incorporate.
Methanogenic bacteria in the guts of cattle produce almost one-third of
the atmosphere's METHANE, a crucial greenhouse gas that controls global
temperatures.  In fact, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus,
and every other element pivotal to life are churned throughout the
biosphere by bacterial action.

Now for the downside.  Of the millions of different bugs out there,
perhaps a hundred are known to threaten our health when their parasitic
colonies grow too populous (E.  coli in the intestines, for example),
or when they release powerful toxins (Clostridium tetani in a wound) .
The range of human reaction to these microbes is as broad as the number
of people exposed to them, hence the physician's art.  The thrust of
evolution is toward peaceful relationships.  Germs have no
self-interest in wiping us out, they just want a well-adapted place to
live.  Some 600 kinds inhabit our mouths, for example, in what would be
a mutually happy home if not for dietary excesses that jump-start
Streptococcus mutans colonies, which love to turn sugar into acid.
Bordetella pertussis, the whooping cough bug, can be found in perfectly
healthy throats, as can Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  Or they can kill
us.

Our natural immune system polices all bacterial encounters, a.k.a.
infections, but when it is overtaxed we get sick.  To help fend off the
very few kinds of bacteria with which we still have a rather savage
repartee, medical technology has refined antibiotic drugs from their
natural enemies, such as the Penicillium mold that Alexander Fleming
accidentally discovered could kill staphylococcus.  Evolution is a
powerful express train, how-ever, when trillions of cells are
reproducing in generations that last only minutes or hours.  The germs
have thus become resistant to many front line medicines prescribed
profligately for the past fifty years.

In an affluent yet germophobic society such as ours, the most important
thing to understand about bacteria is that they cannot be escaped,
household disinfectants notwithstanding.  A normal immune system will
handle most of the pathogenic bugs, albeit with some chance of side
effects otherwise known as symptoms of disease (which are treatable
more often than not).  Getting sick should be devoid of social meaning,
since nothing is more natural than meeting a microbe.  It's their
scene.  We must try to get along.

bad breath" Not Homer's Chimaera breathe such foul breath, not the
fire-breathing herd of bulls of which they tell, not all Lemnos [whose
women were cursed with a stench by Venus, goddess of fragrance] nor the
excrements of the Harpies, nor Philoctetes' putrefying foot."  Thus did
the epigrammatist Lucilius describe the breath of Telesilla.  Madison
Avenue would not foist the term halitosis on society for another 2,000
years, but bad breath was already a grave offense.

The high rank of bad breath among twentieth-century social ills traces
directly to a businessman named Gerard Lam-bert, whose father developed
Listerine in the 1870s as a general-purpose antiseptic.  A rich boy who
was whisked from class to class at Princeton in a chauffeured
limousine, Lambert deter-mined after graduation in the early 1920s that
the family enter-prise had grown stale profit-wise.  A minion saw the
word halitosis in a British journal, and Lambert seized upon it as the
magic word that would cut a new market niche for Listerine.

Saturation magazine advertising blamed unpleasant mouth odor for
failure in romance ("The secret her mirror held back concerned a thing
she least suspected--a thing people simply will not tell you to your
face") and in business ("Fired--and for a reason he never suspected").
As a result of the ad campaign annual profits rose from $115,000 in
1921 to $8 million in 1928, whereupon lucky Lambert sold his stock for
$25 mil-lion just before the Crash.  In his wake he left a legendary
American success story, a touchstone for future hucksters, and a term
that still stands for fearful obsession with our natural

SMELLS.

Scientifically speaking, the oral cavity is a well-established source
of both endogenous (from the lungs) and exogenous (from oral BACTERIA)
odors.  Concentrations of rotten-egg-smelling HYDROGEN SULFIDE may
reach 700 parts per billion and of skunky methyl mercaptan nearly 200
ppb.  Tooth cavities, periodontal disease, and tonsillitis generate a
fetid smell and bad taste.  Colds and sinus infections also bring on
malodor.

Liver failure causes "fetor hepatic us a mousy breath from methanethiol
and other alkylthiols.  Kidney disease makes breath smell like piss,
and a lung abscess turns it putrid.  Gastrointestinal disorders do not
cause bad breath, so breath odor offers no hint of what's happening way
down in the stomach or bowels.

In the Middle Ages, those few members of the gentry in a position both
to care about their breath and actually do some-thing about it chewed
herbs or gargled with spiced water.  Can-dies called "kissing comfits"
might palliate one of the noxious olfactory hazards of intimacy, though
in an era when bathing was considered a health threat, gross breath
would have been a relatively minor consideration.

beta rays @ In 1897, Ernest Rutherford detected and named two
constituents--alpha and beta--of the mysterious "uranium rays"
discovered a year earlier by Henri Becquerel (see ALPHA RAYS).

Rutherford then turned his prodigious attention to alpha rays, while
other physicists concentrated on the betas.  Among them were Marie and
Pierre Curie, who in 1900 found the electrical charge of beta rays to
be negative, Becquerel himself, who determined that beta rays were
similar to so-called cathode rays (which nowadays produce the image in
television picture tubes), already known to be composed of electrons,
and Walter KauErnann of the University of Gottingen, who in 1902 proved
that beta particles were electrons.

Physicists had known since 1897 that atoms contain electrons so they
were not exactly shocked by this news.  (Not yet, that is.  It would
take quite a few more years to understand how beta electrons spew from
a radioactive atom's nucleus, which doesn't contain electrons any more
than a cow contains a moo.) In 1907 at the University of Berlin, Lise
Meitner and Otto Hahn--who were fated to introduce nuclear fission just
before World War II--decided to try measuring the energy of the emitted
electrons, figuring that they would all be the same from any given
radioactive element, as was true for alpha particles.

After some initial experiments, they published an article to this
effect in 1908, but soon feared that their conclusions were wrong.  By
1911, a new experimental technique suggested to them that beta
electrons came out with a range of energies instead of just one.  Other
researchers--notably Rutherford's ace student, James Chadwick--took up
the question, leading to a genuine crisis.  It turned out that if one
radioactive atom transmuted ("decayed" in the vernacular) into another
while giving off a beta electron, the total energy before the change
was not equal to the total energy afterward.  In other words, the
sacred principle of energy conservation appeared to be violated.
Physicists were so confounded by this problem that even the great Niels
Bohr was tempted just to accept it as a bizarre fact of life within
atomic confines.  Thus the stage was set by the late 1920s for the
postulation of a bizarre new particle to account for the missing
energy, the NEUTRINO.

Because beta particles have only 1/7,500 the mass of alpha particles
and travel close to the speed of light, they are more penetrating than
alpha rays.  A sheet of newspaper will stymie an alpha particle, but a
beta electron can pass through three feet of concrete.  Compared with
alpha radiation, beta rays are some-what less damaging to biological
tissues, since they tend more often to miss cellular molecules
entirely.  One of the most important beta emitters for human exposure
is the naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium,
technically noted 40K, which is ubiquitous in plants and animals.  For
a given dose of radiation absorbed in living tissue, beta particles
cause about the same injury as x RAYS or GAMMA RAYS.

Unlike alpha rays, beta particles from many radioactive sub-stances can
penetrate the epidermis.  If concentrated beta emitters--such as the
fission products in atomic bomb FALL-OUT--come into contact with skin,
they can cause a disfiguring form of radiation injury called "beta
burn."  Marshall Islanders exposed to fallout from the American H-bomb
test at Bikini atoll in 1954 suffered from extensive beta burns,
especially because they wore little clothing that might have attenuated
the radiation.  The crew of "Japanese fishing boat named The Lcky
Dragon was also seriously burned.  In this ghastly case, fallout took
the form of white lime powder from the decomposition of coral by blast
heat.  Some victims later developed thyroid cancer  Welcome to the
atomic age, Bloody Mary.

B.O. a "Why has the armpit a more unpleasant odor than any other part
of the body?"  asks Aristotle in his Problemata.  We still don't really
know.

On the other hand, consider Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Sweat",
"Wo'd ye oyle of Blossoms get?  / Take it from my Julia's Sweat, / Oyl
of Lillies, and of Spike, / From her moysture take the like, / Let her
breathe, or let her blow, / All rich spices thence will flow."  Henri
III of France sniffed the linens of Mary of Cleves after she changed
them in a closet, thereby falling forever in love.  Goethe went so far
as to steal the bodice of Madame von Stein so that he could smell it
when-ever he had a few idle, Stein-less moments.

Obviously we're on subjective ground here.  The human body excretes or
secretes thousands of volatile chemicals, many with strong odors.  We
leave behind a cloud of bitter AMMONIA, rotty HYDROGEN SULFIDE,
vinegary acetic acid, pungent ethyl alcohol, and skunky mercaptans.  We
are short work for blood-hounds.  The stuff exudes from the most
salacious natural gunk, including sweat, urine, feces, saliva, come,
and skin oils.  A potent man's aura seminal is was once proof of his
virility.  The mix reflects daily environmental influences such as
drinking water, diet, drugs, and hygiene products, as well as personal
factors such as gender, age, race, reproductive state, health, and
emotional condition.

"B.O."  can be ghastly or sublime, even both at once.

If we limit our fascination here to skin secretions, we have to
consider three possible culprits.  First, there are the eccrine glands,
which are distributed over almost the entire body and produce a sweaty
solution of inorganic salts (potassium, sodium, zinc), glucose, vitamin
C, riboflavino and amino acids primarily to help regulate the body's
temperature through evaporation.  About two liters of liquid an hour
can be produced by some 2 million of these sweat glands.  They're
generally considered nonodorous, but some foods--notably garlic--can
change that in a hurry, as can certain metabolic disorders such as
diabetes.

Second, the sebaceous glands secrete most of the lipids that keep the
skin supple and waterproof.  Their greatest density is on the forehead,
face, and scalp (hence all that pancake makeup on talking heads), with
none at all on the palms or soles of the feet.  Specialized sebaceous
glands are stationed at all points of entry into the body, including
the eyelids, ear canals, nostrils, lips, nipples, and anogenital
orifices.  This is quite handy, since they also produce substances that
retard the growth of pathogenic microbes.  Though they're associated
with acne, their secretions are thought to have a weak and not
unpleasant odor.

Finally, the apocrine glands let loose a stew of compounds, especially
during times of excitement or stress.  They are thus the major source
of B.O. in humans, found primarily in the armpits, but also in the
sternal region of the chest, the anogenital area, the breast areola,
the scalp, cheeks, eyelids, and ear canals.  In the pits, bacteria
thrive on the secretions to produce acrid-smelling isovaleric acid. The
apocrines operate only between puberty and menopause and are much
larger in males than in females (though women may have more of them),
leading scientists to wonder if they have pheromonal functions.

They also differ in size and number between various races (blacks have
more than whites, who have more than Asians), leading to all sorts of
ugly stereotypes.

Two of the most interesting apocrinal secretions are steroids
(androstenone and androstenol) that also happen to be found in pigs,
where they help produce the "tainted breath" of boars that stimulates
sows to go into mating position.  Since the 1970s, numerous behavioral
studies have tried to establish whether underarm odors communicate
sexual identity and are therefore preferred by males or females.
Valiant test subjects have compared dirty T-shirts, sniffed gauze pads
taped inside armpits, rated photographs while wearing surgical-type
masks soaked or not soaked with androstenol, and, in one truly inspired
experiment, they chose among chairs in a dentist's waiting room that
had been sprayed with various concentrations of androstenone (women
went for the smelliest seats, oh yes).  Methodological shortcomings
have usually undermined this search for a holy pheromonal grail.

In our deodorized civilization, the answer to B.O. is chemical
counterattack.  Sweat beads are negatively charged under the positive
skin pores, so that by smearing negatively charged Mmm .. . sweat
pore

bits of aluminum across an armpit, we neutralize the magnetic force
that draws perspiration to the surface.  Add a little PER-FUME and some
pesticide to the concoction, and you've got a product worth billions.

Swallowed air, referred to in uptight circles as aerophagia or erac-tat
ion  Everyone gulps a bit of atmosphere as they eat or drink, then
belches it back up either privately or with gusto, depending on the
social milieu.  Anxiety sometimes creates additional, unconscious
intakes.  So may chewing gum or smoking.  As Mother always suspected,
table manners help decide which way the air ultimately goes, perhaps
more than what's being consumed (soda pop and beer being well-known gas
bombs).

A Teutonic posture keeps it above the stomach contents, where it rises
without much trouble besides the auditory insult.

Hunching over like a dog tends to trap it below, where it may get
forced into the duodenum and contribute to FLATUS.  Sit up straight!
Listen to your elders!

carbon dioxide o CO2 is a harmless trace gas in the Earth's natural
atmosphere, the fifth most abundant substance in unpolluted air after
nitrogen, oxygen, water, and argon.  It's the fizz in fizzy water and
in solid form makes "dry ice."  In the presence of moisture it forms
carbonic acid, which has pitted the visage of marble statues from
Athens to Anaheim.  It is vital to the process known as
photosynthesis--and thus to all life in which green plants, algae, and
some BACTERIA use the energy of sunlight to make nutrients.  It also
helps regulate the planet's temperature, which is why it may soon cause
big-time problems.

Aristotle took the first conceptual leap toward understanding
photosynthesis.  (He was thinking about how plants grew and did not use
this term, of course, which was coined in 1898.) But not until the late
eighteenth century did science begin to provide real insights.  In
1771, the English theologian and pioneer chemist Joseph Priestley
(1733-1804) found that air inside a jar changed somehow if a rat was in
there breathing it for a while.  He called the different gas
"phlogistic matter," which we now know to be exhaled carbon dioxide. He
must have discovered simultaneously how to make rats faint, but he is
not famous for that.

More to the point, the jar's contents could be "dephlogisti-ca ted by
replacing the rat with a plant.  Priestley's direct link to the
ancients is revealed by his jargon--phlogiston was the supposed
substance of fire.  A candle flame, he observed, was immediately
overwhelmed by the mysterious "phlogistic matter  Science it was,
albeit only a step or two out of the alchemist's den.  Perhaps this is
why, besides his challenge to established religious order as founder of
English Unitarianism, Priestley's church was ransacked by a mob and his
books burned in Dort, the Netherlands, by the town hangman.

Photosynthesis, summed up by the notation CO2 + H2O < 2 + [organiC
compounds], is one of the great global engines that make life as we
know it possible.  On a worldwide scale, the production of 2 is almost
perfectly balanced with its consumption via respiration. (Fortunately,
2 has such a long residence time in the atmosphere that even if Lex
Luthor managed to halt all photosynthesis, it would take more than
8,000 years to use up all the existing oxygen.) Priestley's personal
faith was no doubt deepened by glimpses of a cycle so seemingly
infinite and self-sustaining.  What could have set it in motion besides
the hand of GoD?  Our unfortunate lot today is to appreciate that
nature can be undone by the hand of man, hence the second important
thing to comprehend about carbon dioxide.

During the International Geophysical Year of 1957--the same
Wissenschaftfest that brought us Sputnik--researchers built a CO2
measurement station on the 9,000-foot peak of Hawaii's conveniently
dormant Mauna Loa volcano.  Sixty-one years had passed since a Swedish
scientist named Svante Arrhenius first calculated how changing the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would affect the
temperature of the Earth's surface.  When solar energy reaches the
planet, some is reflected by clouds and about 7 percent is absorbed as
ULTRA-VIOLET radiation by OZONE in the stratosphere, but most reaches
the surface as visible light and then radiates back out into space as
INFRARED energy.  About 30 percent of this heat is trapped by carbon
dioxide and WATER VAPOR in the troposphere, which keeps the surface far
warmer (by about 54 F) than otherwise.  Hence the veddy English name
"greenhouse effect," which dates to research carried out in the United
Kingdom during the 1930s.

In 1939, an article titled "The Artificial Production of Car-bon
Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature" was published in Quarterly
Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society by George Callendar, who
realized that burning massive quantities of carbon-based fuels like
coal was changing the natural balance of gases in the atmosphere. 
Twenty years later, the Mauna Loastation provided data showing that CO2
was steadily rising by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year--from about 315
parts per million in 1958 to more than 350 ppm in the 1990s.  Other
monitoring points around the world have confirmed this trend.

From analysis of air bubbles trapped inside deep ice core samples, we
now know that the preindustrial (before 1750) concentration was around
275 to 285 ppm, with the steepest rise happening in this century.
Somewhere between 90 and 145 billion tons of carbon have been added to
the atmosphere since 1850.  "Within a few centuries, we are returning
to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in
sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years," two leading
researchers warned even before getting the bad news from Mauna Loa.

The biggest culprit is the internal combustion engine, followed by
power stations, cement kilns, and aircraft.  Tropical deforestation has
exacerbated the problem.  Auto manufacturers continue to campaign hard
against mandatory CO2 emissions controls, which require improving fuel
economy or simply cutting the number of cars on the road.

"Almost 97 per-cent of CO2, after all, comes from natural sources such
as plants and oceans," argues Chrysler chairman R.J. Eaton, waving one
of the debate's great red herrings.  The Big Three propose a joint
development project with national laboratories to create a "Supercar"
that would get eighty miles per gallon with less than half the CO2
exhaust of current vehicles.  At a time when gas-guzzling "sport
utility vehicles" are hot sellers and alternative motors that run on
natural gas, alcohol, or electricity remain expensive novelties, the
political outlook for air-quality regulations is as scrambled as
Eaton's logic.

Expressed in terms of a tax on fossil fuels, the Clinton administration
estimates the cost of keeping emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2010
would be like raising the tax on gasoline by about twenty-six cents a
gallon, on electricity by two cents per kilowatt hour, on coal by $52
per ton, and on natural gas by $1.49 per thousand cubic feet.  Of
course, other economic methods to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions--subsidies for energy efficiency, for example, or a trading
system in credits for cutting pollution--would be more palatable than
taxes.

Of obvious concern to American industrialists is the fact that a United
Nations global-warming treaty to maintain 1990 fossil fuel usage would
exempt 130 developing nations, including China and India.  Jobs would
follow cheaper (that is, dirtier) energy.  So far this decade, carbon
dioxide emissions have increased 7.8 percent in OECD countries.  In the
United States, industrial CO2 pollution now exceeds pre-1980s levels.

With just 4 percent of the world's population, the United States
belches out more than a quarter of all greenhouse gases.

The fifty largest electric companies in the eastern half of the United
States account for 20 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions,
led in 1995 by Kentucky Utilities.

In the decades between 2020 and 2080, depending on various postulations
about ocean-atmosphere dynamics and how much the world continues to
rely on carbon-based fuels, the CO2 concentration could double from
current values.  This would produce global warming of I.8 to 6.3 F by
2100, amplified by a factor of three or four in polar regions.  The
effects of burgeoning carbon dioxide are not yet plainly notice-able,
given how much the weather fluctuates normally from year to year. 
Researchers agree that the average ground-level temperature increased
by about 1 F over the past century, with a more pronounced rise of 1 to
3 F in the northeastern United States.  But most global climate models,
based on reasonable assumptions, predict that average surface
temperatures will increase far more over the next 100 years. (The
models cannot account for the fact that middle portions of the
troposphere have actually been coolin, a glitch that makes green-house
skeptics smile.) Under such conditions, leaving shoreline property to
your grandchildren might be very bad estate planning.  Cape Cod would
lose some 200 acres a year as the sea level rises twelve to twenty
inches.  The top of the Pilgrim Monument in Province-town could house
the last bar in town.  New England would suffer more droughts, possibly
leading to a prairie environment like that of eastern Kansas.  Earlier
springs and hotter summers would alter which tree species
prosper--stifling the beloved sugar maple, for example and cause
mosquito population booms.  Best long-term investment?  Canadian
wheatlands, which will replace parched American farms as the world's
breadbasket.

The demand for ice-cold carbonated beverages would sky-rocket, too, of
course, perhaps suggesting a use for all that excess gas if it could be
siphoned from the atmosphere.  CO2 stimulates the trigeminal nerves of
the tongue, causing a prickly sensation that borders on pain at high
enough concentrations.  In the 1770s'Joseph Priestley studied the
phlogistic bubbles generated when malt fermented into beer, then
decided to try transferring them to water under pressure.  Perhaps in
quest of a nonalcoholic brew for his sodden parishioners he qua fed
this seminal soda pop and started a fad that roared on through the age
of quack tonics to Casey Jones's favorite mouthwash (alas, no more
cocaine in Coke after 1903) to the Pepsi Generation.  The
quintessential greenhouse drink, Joe Cola, in honor of the estimable
Priestley.

carbon monoxide a The gas that made the phrase "colorless, odorless,
tasteless" something of a spine tingler.  It is also flammable, but
this characteristic does not figure in classic sealed-garage
scenarios.

If we inhale enough carbon monoxide, it will kill us because it bonds
strongly to hemoglobin molecules in our blood, displacing oxygen vital
to the brain and heart.  (Hemoglobin's affinity for CO is about 240
times greater than for 2-) Evidently, you don't have to try hard,
between 1979 and 1988, carbon monoxide poisoning caused 11,547
unintentional deaths in the United States,57 percent of which were due
to motor-vehicle exhaust.  No other single substance causes more
fatalities.

Carbon monoxide is produced at myriad sites of combustion (i.e."
burning of organic fuels), including gasoline engines, natural and
man-made fires, stoves, ovens, space heaters, water heaters, furnaces,
charcoal grills, and tobacco smoking.  Paint strippers containing
methylene chloride give off fumes that our body metabolizes into CO,
hence the warning on the can for generous ventilation.  Cigarette smoke
contains about 1 percent CO by volume (or 10,000 parts per
million)--another reason to regard fags as portable suicide systems.

Federal air-quality standards dictate that CO concentrations not exceed
9 ppm for an eight-hour average or 35 ppm for one hour, though these
thresholds are frequently broken in many American cities.  The best way
to relate dosage to biological effect is to measure the concentration
of hemoglobin glommed by carbon monoxide (COHb in chemical notation) as
a percentage of total available hemoglobin.  Thus, nonsmokers normally
have COHb concentrations in their blood of around 0.5 percent.  Smokers
zoom much higher, from a median of 5 per-cent to a maximum of over 15
percent.  Such figures do not always correlate with either the clinical
condition of or prognosis for a severe poisoning victim, however.

Overexposure, starting between 15 and 25 percent, can cause headaches,
dizziness, confusion, weakness, nausea, vomiting, and loss of muscle
control.  The best first aid is lots of fresh air, breathing normal air
will clear away half of blood carbon monoxide in about five hours.
Prolonged exposure leads to unconsciousness, brain damage, and death.
Even long-term, low-level intake may bring persistent memory loss and
muscle pain.  On Manhattan's Upper East Side in February 1997, a
clogged chimney trapped CO from anat-ural gas furnace inside an
apartment house, leading to one death and nine hospitalizations.
Paramedics and doctors at first mistook headaches and shortness of
breath among residents for influenza.

At blood concentrations above 40 percent, victims need immediate
treatment with pressurized pure oxygen, known as hyberbaric oxygen
therapy.  Levels over 60 percent are usually fatal.  Experiments have
shown that healthy adults start losing aerobic exercise capacity,
visual perception, vigilance, and manual dexterity at around 5 percent,
confirming the Via recta's warning of 1620, "Tobacco drieth the brain,
dimmeth the sight, and cause th the blood to be adjusted."

People with chronic heart or lung diseases are obviously more
sensitive.  And, yes, those bridge and tunnel workers who collect your
toll are at much higher risk for heart attacks than the general
population.  Video freaks, too, beware, a 1984 study

=.L

found significant decrements in game performance at just 2 percent
COHb.

As if CO were not bad enough by itself, military scientists long ago
figured out how to make it worse.  Phosgene, which is produced by
combining carbon monoxide with chlorine, became one of the first
weapons of modern chemical warfare.

(It was developed by Fritz Haber--who won a Nobel Prize for discovering
how to synthesize AMMONIA--and introduced by the German Fifth Army at
Verdun, France, in 1916.) Phosgene is considered lethal when mingled
with 9,999 parts of normal air (100 ppm), making it twice as deadly as
chlorine alone.

In Greek, they were called aster kometes, or long-haired stars.

Aristotle believed that comets dwelled high in the Earth's atmosphere,
just like the Milky Way.  The Sun drew from the planet a warm
"exhalation" that sometimes caught fire.  A hundred years later, the
mathematician Apollonius made a better guess, opining that comets were
celestial objects that became visible when they reached the lowest part
of their course, which in a geocentric universe was here.  Neither of
these two geniuses possessed any evidence other than what even the hoi
polloi could see with their own eyes from time to time.

As for why comet tails always pointed away from the sun, no one dared
say, the religious implications being unspeakable.  Science did not
generate a worthy theory until 1900, when the Swedish chemist Svante
Arrhenius proposed that material in the tail was deflected by solar
radiation.  Comets are now known to possess two tails, one made of
plasmatic gas molecules (usually ionized CARBON MONOXIDE and nitrogen)
and the other of DUST particles  The first type is pushed askew by
"solar wind" protons and electrons streaming out of the Sun at 892,800
miles per hour, the second by PHOTONS of sunlight.  The fact that they
both point side-ways to the comet's path Comet dust particle collected
from the atmosphere.

when it gets close to the Sun raises the possibility that the Earth
might pass through them without actually hitting the comet's ice ball
nucleus.

Indeed, the Earth probably careened through the tail of Halley comet on
May 19, 1910.  Newsstands sold a lot of papers that day by trumpeting
the poisonous constituents of cometary gas, such as HYDROGEN SULFIDE
(H2S), cyanogen (CN), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), and methyl cyanide
(CH3CN), without explaining that their density was so low that they
would burn out in the upper atmosphere.  But micrometer-sized comet
dust grains containing nearly a score of basic elements (in decreasing
abundance, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, iron,
nitrogen, sodium, aluminum, calcium, nickel, chromium, manganese,
titanium, cobalt, potassium), as well as organic compounds that might
have played a role in the origins of life, are slowed by atmospheric
drag and thus accumulate.

They have even been collected by U-2 aircraft.  Though the density of a
comet's dust tail is much less than cigarette smoke, it extends for
millions of miles.  Comets may therefore have transported much, if not
all, of the biogenic organic material (such as METHANE) from the outer
solar system, where it is common, to the inner planets, which lacked it
primordially but basked in a water-based chemistry conducive to life.

cooties j A cutesy schoolboy epithe that traces back to the decidedly
un cute conditions of trench warfare that many schoolboys found
themselves in during World War I. It probably derives from kutu in the
Malay language of colonial regiments.  By now, most taunting kids never
realize it refers to body lice, Pediculus hum anus  which will infest
anybody without access to clean clothes, soap and water, or other
rudiments of personal hygiene.

Besides being an itchy nuisance, body lice are potentially dangerous
because they may carry germs that cause typhus, trench fever, and other
diseases.  In typhus epidemics, the lice feed on an infected
individual's blood, jump to another host, and defecate Rickettsia
prowazekii microbes, which get scratched into the skin.  A week or two
later, the victim develops a prolonged fever of 104 F and a rash over
the entire body.  If the condition is allowed to progress, derangement
and organ failure commence, with fatality rates of around 60 percent in
older, untreated victims.  Antibiotics can defeat typhus if used early
on, but the lice must be eliminated to break the chain of infection,
usually by dusting with insecticides.

A milder form of typhus, known as murine typhus but sometimes called
"Urban Typhus of Malaya" (hence the linguistic readiness of those
colonial troops), is transmitted to humans by a different critter, the
rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopsis).

To sick and dying soldiers in the Western Front's squalid trenches, of
course, cooties were anything that itched.  Besides, even medical
scientists of that era did not fully understand the link between such
pests and disease, two pioneering re-searchers, Howard T. Ricketts and
Stanislas von Prowazek, both died of typhus.

Several breeds of P hum anus are also responsible for relatively benign
infestations.  P hum anus capitis prefers the head and loves to attend
school regardless of tuition level.  I?  hum anus corporis resides in
dirty underwear, from where it ventures out onto the bottom and tummy
(no wonder the kids have been giggling for so many generations).
Phthirus pubis, a close cousin affectionately known as the crab louse,
is usually transmitted by intimate sexual contact.  All these cooties
are susceptible to medicinal shampoos and diligent laundering.  Nyah,
nyah, pants on fire

Whenever the Apollo astronauts closed their eyes to stack some zs while
cruising to and from the Moon, they were startled by pinpoint flashes
of light.  Nature's alarm clock?  Don tfall asleep at the wheel out
here, bub!  No, just atomic nuclei from the far reaches of the cosmos,
striking their retinas to remind them they weren't in Kansas anymore.

In 1925, the American physicist Robert Millikan (1868-1953) named this
type of radiation cosmic rays, thereby proving himself a match for any
Hollywood sci-fi writer.  Unfortunately he also tried to take credit
for discovering the phenomenon, which had already been done by someone
else in 1912.

Victor Hess (1883-1964), an Austrian physicist, secured the 1936 Nobel
Prize not just by beating out Millikan, but by having demonstrated more
pluck than a French Jesuit.  In 1910, Father Theodor Wulf had climbed
the Eiffel Tower with radiation detectors, recording higher numbers at
the top and speculating that the source might therefore be heavenward. 
He thought about taking his meters up in a balloon, but apparently
couldn't stomach heights loftier than Monsieur Eiffel's observation
deck.  The hardier Hess soon took the trip, finding that the radiation
intensity several miles high was three to five times greater than on
the ground.  Measurements taken during day-time were the same as those
at night, so the Sun was obviously not the source. Cosmic rays, indeed,
though nobody knew what they were composed of.

Even in the atmosphere's upper reaches, cosmic rays are so thinly
spread that Hess's primitive instruments could only record their
existence, not identify their content.  It took the advent of the
Geiger counter in the late 1920s for detecting charged particles
refinement of the cloud chamber (which had been invented in the late
1890s) for showing their tracks, and development of special
photographic emulsions after World War II to provide the level of
sophistication needed to determine just what the mysterious rays were,
interstellar detritus, namely 86 percent protons, 12 percent helium
nuclei, and the rest carbon, oxygen, and rarer nuclei, plus a few
electrons and positrons.  Further research cataloged the subatomic
avalanche, or "air showers," created by collisions with atmospheric
elements on the way down, where the dissipated energy is sometimes
visible as aurora borealis.

Cosmic rays come from two sources, stars throughout the universe, many
so far away that particles reaching us today started before Earth
existed, and the Sun, which sends out bursts of radiation during
sunspot activity and solar flares.  In 1949, Enrico Fermi theorized
that cosmic rays get their energy from shock waves generated by
exploding stars, or supernovas.

The Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth along its magnetic
field trap vast numbers of the particles arriving from outer space.
Others are blocked by the atmosphere.  Without these barriers, cosmic
radiation would be intense enough to make life impossible.

For every rise of 10,000 feet from the Earth's surface, the penetration
of cosmic rays is three times greater.  Thus, the annual flight time of
airline crews who routinely work at 30,000 feet and above is limited by
government regulation to avoid dangerous levels of radiation.  A single
transatlantic flight may result in whole-body exposures a bit greater
than those received in a whole-mouth dental X-ray series.  Exposure on
the surface varies with location, with intensities greater near the
poles.  Tropical areas therefore receive minimal radiation, with
Scandinavia, Canada, and other high-latitude regions get-ting up to
three times more, depending on altitude.  In the United States,
Colorado and Wyoming register the highest exposures, Georgia and
Louisiana the lowest.

Before man-made accelerators, or "atom smashers," appeared in the
1950s, cosmic ray research produced the first evidence of a veritable
zoo of "fundamental" particles beyond the simple
proton-neutron-electron model of the atom.  With the demise of the
multibillion-dollar Superconducting Super Collider project in 1993, the
golden age of particle accelerators may finally have ended.  It was
designed to impart energies of about 40 trillion electron volts (TeV,
or 1012 eV), where one electron volt equals the energy an electron
gathers by traveling across the terminals of a one-volt battery.  For
comparison, lighting a match releases about 10 billion TeV, but the
energy is widely distributed compared with that of a concentrated beam
of particles in an accelerator.

The most powerful existing accelerator, Fermilab's Tevatron, operates
at 2 TeV.  Cosmic ray energies can reach upward of 102l eV, far
outclassing any feasible man-made device.  But these biggies are rare.
A detector array known as "Fly's Eye" in the Dugway desert of
northwestern Utah has counted only several hundred particles above
101(' giga, or billion, electron volts (GeV) in a decade of operation.
Below about 109 GeV, galactic cosmic ray particles are deflected by
magnetic fields in the Milky Way, which means they arrive at the Earth
from random directions rather than on a beeline from their source.
Above about 10ll GeV, the major constituents of cosmic waves, protons,
slow down because of an interaction with the universe's BACKGROUND
RADIATION, lowering the likelihood that any will reach us.  The few
ultra-high-energy rays detected by Fly's Eye probably come from beyond
the Milky Way, since they are too strong to be contained by our
galaxy's magnetic fields.

Two well-known radionuclides that we are exposed to constantly--tritium
and carbon-14 have been generated for mil-lions of years by cosmic
rays.  Most of the tritium is in ocean water and results in extremely
low doses.  As for carbon-14, every compound in the human body contains
it, so find some-thing else to worry about.

dioxin g The shorthand name for seventy-five different compounds made
of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and chlorine atoms.  Only seven are highly
toxic, but one of them is a doozy.

Dioxins are totally useless and have never been manufactured on
purpose.  They are notorious pollutants, an unwanted by-product of
virtually any industrial chemical process involving chlorine.

Until the advent of large-scale chlorine chemistry between the world
wars, dioxins existed only at insignificant levels.  Today they are as
ubiquitous as the 90 billion pounds of chlorine produced every year
worldwide for commodities such as plastics, paper, pesticides, and
solvents.  Because they bio accumulate everyone in the industrialized
world carries some in their body, rather like the plutonium from atomic
bomb FALLOUT.

All dioxins are formed chemically by the linkage of two benzene
molecules, each of which contains six carbon atoms and six hydrogen
atoms in a distinctive hexagonal ring.  The geometry and oxygen content
of the hookup, as well as the number and location of chlorine atoms
substituted for hydrogens, determine which of the various dioxins is
obtained.

Dioxinlike compounds called furans and biphenyls (which comprise the
equally notorious PCBs) also cook this way.  The size and shape of the
final molecule, which are fixed by the total number and positions of
the chlorine atoms, decide its toxicity.  The most heinous member of
the dioxin clan is thus designated in the jargon of organic chemistry
as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (mercifully abbreviated TCDD),
where the numbers tell the location of four (tetra) chlorines (chloro)
on two benzene rings (dibenzo) linked by two oxygens (dioxins).  At
room temperature, it is a colorless crystalline solid.

When the word dioxin appears in the popular media, it usually means
this supremely poisonous compound, even though TCDD is rarely found in
the environment by itself.

Just how bad is it?  In the 1970s, experiments with rats found greatly
increased cancer incidence at feed exposures as low as 5 parts per
trillion and, in an important study sponsored by Dow Chemical Company,
at 210 ppt.  These figures meant that dioxin was the most potent animal
carcinogen ever tested.  Since then, numerous trials have proved that
TCDD causes tumors in multiple species of both sexes at many different
body sites.

Indeed, no "safe" low dose has ever been established.  Animal studies
have also demonstrated that dioxin kills fetuses, causes birth defects,
and suppresses the immune system at infinitesimally small doses. Rhesus
mon-keys, for example, have suffered increased prenatal mortality at
daily doses of 0.64 nanograms per kilogram of body weight. (A nanogram
is one-billionth of a gram.) "Acceptable" daily human doses, a concept
influenced perhaps as much by politics as by science, range from the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 0.006 picograms (one-trillionth
of a gram) per kilogram of body weight per day to the World Health
Organization's 10 pg/kg/day.  Hence the mantra that dioxin is "the most
toxic chemical known to man."

Dioxin that leaks into nature tends to stay there because it does not
dissolve well in water or evaporate much into the air, sticks to
organic matter, and rarely breaks down into other sub-stances.  To
boot, it is very soluble in oils and fat, which means that if we eat
some, we don't soon excrete it but store it in fatty tissue.  The EPA
estimates that people consume on average 119 pg/day (eggs,4 pg, fish, 8
pg, pork,12 pg, chicken,13 pg, milk, 17 pg, dairy,24 pg, beef,37 pg,
fruits and vegetables, negligible), which amounts to more than 280
times the "acceptable" dose.

The daily intake from breast milk is 10 times higherHifficult news for
the La Leche League, but not a good enough reason to switch to formula.
Dioxin accumulates until a middle-aged per-son carries an average 9
ng/kg "body burden," which is just short of the lowest level known to
harm human health (decreased testes size, altered glucose tolerance).
In other words, if there is a safe threshold, we're all near or beyond
it.

For scientific and ethical reasons, "acceptable" human dose figures
rely primarily on animal research.  Only one study, a dubious exercise
directed by Dow in a Pennsylvania prison in 1965, has ever exposed
people deliberately to TCDD.  (Subjects were evaluated for a severe
skin disease called chloracne, which is the classic symptom of acute
exposure.) Epidemio-logic evidence for dioxin as a human carcinogen
comes from studies of chemical plant accidents, broadside contamination
such as that from Agent Orange herbicide during the Vietnam War, and
long-term occupational exposures.  Conclusions are mixed, with much
ongoing debate about levels of exposure, the influence of other
chemicals, and even the honesty of the research.  The EPA and the
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) rate TCDD as a
probable human carcinogen, associated with tumors in soft or connective
tissue, the lungs, liver, stomach, and with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.  A
devilish list of male and female reproductive problems, fetal
disorders, nervous system damage, immune system glitches, and metabolic
hormonal changes round out the portrait of a public health menace.

Because dioxin pollution is entwined with powerful indus-tries basic to
modern life, it is rivaled perhaps only by nicotine in the
politicization of science.  Monsanto, BASF, Dow, and Hoffmann-La Roche
are among the corporations whose products have been implicated in
famous dioxin disasters, from the 1949 explosion of a Monsanto
herbicide plant in West Virginia to a 1953 release at BASF's
trichlorophenol (astarting material for 2,4,5-T--the herbicidal partner
of 2,4-D in Agent Orange and the antibacterial agent hexachlorophene)
fac-tory in Germany, to Dow's military production of Agent Orange in
the 1960s, to a runaway reaction at Hoffmann-La Roche's chemical works
in Italy in 1976 that released six pounds of TCDD over 275 urban acres.
Meanwhile, the catastrophic negligence of Hooker Chemical Company at
Love Canal, New York, and waste oil handlers around Times Beach,
Missouri, attracted press coverage that turned dioxin into a household
word.  Because TCDD is dangerous to human health in such minute
quantities, which can be extraordinarily expensive to clean up from
contaminated soil or water, government regulatory policy continues to
be a vicious battle-ground.  Serious laypeople are therefore advised to
spend plenty of time in the library with primary sources.

Anyone living near a past or present waste incinerator, paper mill,
metal smelter, wood treatment site, petroleum refinery, cement kiln, or
plant that makes plastics, solvents, or pesticides involving chlorine,
or heavily trafficked roads is at risk of elevated dioxin exposure.
Airborne ash from incinerators spreads dioxin thousands of miles from
point sources, the primary reason for its ubiquity.  Oh yes, it's in
cigarette smoke, too.

Awareness of house dust, on the linguistic if not maidservant level, is
as old as civilization.  A prehistoric Indo-European base, theu-,
evolved into the Sanskrit thuma, meaning "smoke," which Proto-Germanic
speakers adopted as dunstu-, for a cloud of fine particles, which was
the basis for Old English dust appearing around A.D. 725.  Northern
European abodes ofi X , , Dust, disease, and social statxs.

every social stratum doubtlessly harbored great balls of it, as did the
unwashed, heavily garbed inhabitants.  Dust has long been abhorred by
polite society, but although it can be easily vacuumed or mopped or
wiped out of sight, it is still everywhere.

Go away for a few days and your home looks like Morticia Adams's.

House dust, as opposed to the technical category of PARTICULATES,
consists of the detritus of human domestic life, food crumbs, fibers,
skin flakes, grit, plant matter such as POLLEN and SPORES, microbes,
MITES, FUNGI, and debris from insects and domestic animals.  Many of
these ingredients contain ALLERGENS, but enough dust will make anyone
sneeze.  Though dust can sometimes be directly toxic, its association
with diseases such as asthma, dermatitis, and rhinitis applies only to
hyper-sensitive individuals.

Doctors used to blame dust allergies on pet dander (hair with skin
scrapings, like dandruff), insects, and fungi.  But research since the
late 1960s has shown that dust mites of the family Pyroglyphidae,
especially the genus Dermatophagiodes--which thrive on skin scales in
carpets, stuffed furniture, and mattresses at just the temperature
range humans prefer, 65 to 80 F--are the primary culprits in most parts
of the world.

They especially enjoy relative humidifies above 45 percent.

Diligent scientists found that homes of symptomatic people have more
than 500 mites per gram of dust.  Exceptions occur in high-altitude or
dry climates, which the mites don't relish, as well as city
neighborhoods, where rodent urine and roach debris take charge.

Most of the mites in dust are dead.  Their little ca-ca balls, pardon'
the old expression, contain the allergens.  About the diameter of
pollen (10-35 microns), each carries around 0.2 nanograms (billionths
of a gram) of allergenic material, multi-plied by the astronomical
factors of even the most Swiss house-I hold.  If you could arrange a
mite holocaust, as happens naturally during periods of low humidity, it
would still take months for indoor allergen levels to decrease.

Besides mites, common biological sources of allergens in house dust
include spiders, crickets, flies, locusts, beetles, fleas, moths,
midges, and cockroaches, cats, dogs, ferrets, skunks, horses, rabbits,
pigs, mice, rats, gerbils, and guinea pigs, kapok, and Penicillium,
Aspergillus, Rhizopus, and Cladosporium fungi.

Roach allergens have been closely studied, due to their urban ubiquity,
and are believed to come from the pests' feces and saliva.

A special word about cats, which are powerful asthma triggers  There is
no such thing as a nonallergenic cat (or dog, for that matter). Licking
and grooming spread the primary allergens, which are then found in
settled dust and constantly air-borne in the homes of pet owners.  Even
many houses that are cat-deprived harbor high levels of contaminated
dust brought inside on the clothes of cat lovers.  Dust particles
carrying allergen are often small enough (less than 2.5 microns in
diameter) to be inhaled deeply into the lungs.  Beds and furniture
where the little darlings sleep are vast storage sites of allergens. 
If an offending cat is banished from the house, it takes at least five
months for the itchy dust level to reach that of a no-cat home.

Attention unemployed PhDs, Pharmaceutical companies manufacture dust
extracts for allergy skin tests from the contents of home vacuum
cleaner bags.  No pets, please.  Call now!

EMF -In 1979, researchers Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper published an
article in the American Journal of Epidemiology titled "Electrical
Wiring Configurations and Childhood Cancer."

They presented evidence, inconclusive but un trivial that otherwise
extremely rare cases of leukemia were turning up among Denver children
living near power transmission lines and transformers.  It was the sort
of report that rattles an advanced capitalistic society to its bones.

In 1996, a blue-ribbon National Research Council commit-tee mandated by
Congress to get to the bottom of the issue announced that there is "no
conclusive and consistent evidence" that ordinary exposure to
electromagnetic fields (EMF) in the home can "produce cancer, adverse
neuro behavioral effects, or reproductive and developmental defects."

That is the long and short of it.  In between, and still running are
more than 500 studies of whether EMF causes myriad health problems,
such as brain and breast cancer in electrical workers, miscarriages
among computer users, and leukemia and behavioral problems in children.
In the leukemia cases, an apparent increase was found around homes
within fifty yards of high-capacity (115,000-500,000 volts)
transmission lines--the kind with six thick wires typically strung
between steel towers.

Yet when EMF measurements are taken in the homes of sick children, no
correlation is obtained between field strength and cancer incidence.

Because childhood leukemia is so rare appearing in only about 4 out of
every 100,000 American kids between the ages of two and ten--even the
best studies have just a few dozen cases to work with every year, which
severely hampers drawing wider conclusions from the data.  In one of
the few large-scale studies available,400,000 adults in Finland were
scrutinized for residential EMF exposure over a twenty-year period.  No
related cancer risk emerged.  In 1997, the National Cancer Institute
published a seven-year study of I,000 children in the New England
Journal of Medicine, accompanied by an editorial that bluntly said "it
is time to stop wasting our research resources" on looking for a
connection between EMF and leukemia.

Science can never prove that anything is safe, of course.

It can only say that hazards have not been found.  In this case, the
picture is clouded by the fact that empirical evidence remains
unsupported by theory.  Household-level EMF has never been linked to
adverse health effects in the laboratory.  There is no accepted
biophysical mechanism for EMF carcinogenesis.  If there is a causal
effect at work, the NRC suggested, it may have nothing to do with EMF,
but rather reflect such known risks as living near automobile pollution
or in lower socioeconomic conditions.

Nonetheless, millions of dollars have already been spent to reduce EMF
levels in residential areas.  Giant financial interests in the cellular
phone and electrical power industries, which fund many EMF research
projects, joust perennially with academic epidemiologists over how to
interpret the cloudy data.

If a process by which low levels of non ionizing radiation can damage
living tissue were ever discovered, stronger population studies could
be designed.  Meanwhile, the threat--real or imagined--has become part
of the endless battle among developers, utility companies, real estate
agents, property owners, and environmentalists.

To understand what EMF is, however, requires a short physics lesson.
The electromagnetic force is one of three fundamental forces that
govern the behavior of atoms.  (The others are the "weak force," which
causes radioactivity, and the "strong force," which binds the nucleus
together.  A fourth force, GRAVITY, holds the universe together but has
no measurable action within individual atoms.) Electromagnetism keeps
the negatively charged electrons in their "orbits" around the
positively charged nucleus, making atoms and bulk matter seem solid.
The theory of electromagnetism was published by the Scottish physicist
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) in 1865 and has evolved into the modern
theory of quantum electrodynamics, which is mercifully beyond the scope
of this modest discussion.

When electrons flow through a wire in an electrical current, they
create a magnetic force around the wire that can start cur-rents
flowing in other conductors, including living tissue.  The strength of
this magnetic "field" decreases by the square of the distance from the
wire.  At 50 feet from a 230,000-volt power line, the field is about 20
milli-gauss (mG, or thousandths of a gauss, a unit of field strength).
At 200 feet away, it's I.8 mG.

Homes and offices expose people to fields of about 0.1 to 3 mG.  By
comparison, the Earth's magnetic field is 500 mG.

Electrical currents induced in living tissue by household EMF are a
thousand times weaker than the nerve signals produced naturally in the
brain.

Even at levels a hundred times higher than in an average home, there is
no evidence of adverse health effects.  In fields 1,000 to 100,000
times higher, cultured cells show changes, but none has been connected
to illness.  One such alteration is even known to be beneficial,
pulsing fields of just 5 mG help animal bones heal, a phenomenon that
has found practical use in veterinary care.

Residential electrical currents are called "alternating"

(AC)

because they change direction sixty times every second.  At much higher
frequencies, especially in the MICROWAVE range of 0.3 to 300 billion
cycles per second, EMF can heat up exposed biological tissue (hence,
microwave cooking).  Skin, eyes, and testicles have long been known to
be sensitive to such thermal effects.  For thirty years, governments
have tried to set occupational exposure guidelines, at first mostly
with the communi-cations industry and military in mind, but
increasingly for the workaday environment of anyone who spends time
around electronic devices that radiate EMF (computers, TVs, cellular
phones, microwave ovens, diathermic medical instruments, etc.). Because
bio electromagnetic research has always lagged behind the marketing of
commercial products, these standards tend to be both arbitrary and
contradictory, especially from one country to the next.

Should you buy a house near those power lines?  If it's all you can
afford, it beats sleeping outside in the rain.

f'Bout * "Gee, that's important, isn't it?"  President Eisenhower said
after his first briefing on radioactive fallout.

"Is everybody ready for lunch?"

The entire government was out to lunch for most of the 1950s when it
came to fallout.  The long-range consequences of nuclear weapons, as
opposed to the ground-zero horrors of Hiroshima, were essentially
unknown to the public until March I, 1954, when an H-bomb code-named
Bravo exploded seven feet above Namu Island in the once paradisial
Bikini atoll.  Calculated beforehand to be equivalent to 8 mil-lion
tons of TNT, Bravo popped off at fifteen megatons instead.  Namu
disappeared in a titanic mushroom cloud of vaporized coral, wafting
back down a few hours later as white radioactive powder over an area of
7,000 square miles.

Not only did the physicists predict the wrong yield, but meteorologists
misjudged the wind.  The ash therefore fell on Marshall Islanders and
American bomb testers instead of empty ocean.  The islands of Rongelap,
Rongerik, Alingnae, and Utirik (which was 300 miles from Bikini) were
evacuated, but not before the mostly barefoot, tropically attired
(i.e., nearly naked) Marshallese suffered disfiguring radiation burns
and body doses that would undermine their health for the rest of their
lives.  Two-thirds of Rongelapers developed nausea within fifteen
hours, half lost their hair after two weeks, indicating hellish
exposure.

At first, American authorities covered up the disaster.

Roger Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, declared that
the islanders were "well and happy."  But they did not realize that
"Japanese fishing boat named Fukuryu Maru, the Lucky Dragon, got caked
in fallout while motoring eighty-five miles east of Bikini, well
outside the test zone.  Two weeks after Bravo, her crew returned home
with all the classic symptoms of radiation sickness rather well known
in Japan, nausea, fever, internal bleeding, skin burns.  To boot, her
catch was found to be hot, setting off a fish scare in a country where
seafood is astaple of life.  On September 24, the Lucky Dragon's
radioman succumbed in Tokyo, thus becoming the first atomic fatality
since Nagasaki.

Washington apologized and sent his widow $2,800.

The cat was out of the bag, however, about fallout, which helped stoke
the era's mass paranoia.  Such darksome nightmares as the "cobalt
bomb," an H-bomb specially coated to maximize release of cobalt-60
around the globe, entered political rhetoric and schoolboy vernacular.
Adlai Stevenson called for an inter-national test ban during the 1956
presidential campaign, warning that "poisoning of the atmosphere" was
threatening "the actual survival of the human race."  But Republicans
were able to portray him as naive and dangerous to national security--a
charge that would continue to work like a charm against all critics of
the military for decades.

Meanwhile, American, Soviet, and British weapons designers detonated
scores of nukes in the open.  Having worn out their welcome in the
South Pacific, U.S. forces moved to the Nevada desert eighty miles from
Las Vegas.  The AEC, for its part, never waive red in assuring the
public that fallout from these tests--even the Russian ones--was no
hazard whatsoever.

Gradually, technical facts to the contrary salted the debate thanks to
individuals like Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and organizations like
SANE, but mainstream press organs such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News
and World Report routinely smeared them.

"Much of the clamor about the danger of fall-out is inspired by
Communists," declared U.S. News in a typical article.

Not that officials were scientifically ignorant, of course.

After Trinity, the premier A-bomb test in 1945, fallout over the
Midwest had contaminated Kodak packaging material, which in turn fogged
lots of unsold film (harking back to Henri Becquerel's discovery of
radioactivity in 1896, see ALPHA RAYS).

When it happened again in 1951, Kodak threatened to sue the government,
but the AEC promised to start giving the company warning of Nevada
tests.  Informing the public, however, always fell by the wayside when
faced with "the more immediate and infinitely greater dangers of
defeat" by the Soviet Union, as Roger Strauss intoned.  Instead,
American citizens received helpful tips such as the army quartermaster
general's 1958 suggestion that eating "cabbage and broccoli may be the
means of doubling the capacity of man to withstand" fallout.

Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and perennial advocate of anything
nuclear, spearheaded the effort to soothe public fears about fallout.

"Our custom of dressing men in trousers causes at least a hundred times
as many mutations as present fallout levels," he said.

"But alarmists who say that continued nuclear testing will affect
unborn generations have not allowed their concern to urge men into
kilts."

In 1957, Teller and others even managed to convince Eisenhower of the
imminent development of a "clean bomb" that would cause 96 percent less
fallout than old-fashioned dirty ones, if only atmospheric testing
could continue unabated.  But oh, that 4 percent!  This was the same
concept that would later be retooled as the "neutron bomb," a
relatively low-yield H-bomb detonated at high altitudes.  Ike swallowed
it until Nikita Khrushchev told him he was talking "stupidities."  Even
a pure fusion weapon exploded in air, with no fission trigger, would
still create fallout of carbon-14, tritium, and other nuclides, as Dr.
Teller knew perfectly well.

Somehow, against great odds, the public grasped the truth, as shown by
a 1957 Gallup poll that found 63 percent of Americans favoring a test
ban treaty.  The blockbuster novel On the Beach, about a world
terminally poisoned by fallout, perhaps outdid all the federal
propaganda.  In 1958, the Big Three nations (the United States, USSR,
and Great Britain) agreed on a moratorium.  In 1959, strontium-90
contamination of milk struck at the fearful hearts of families
regardless of political affiliation.  In 1961, President Kennedy
matched the Soviet resumption of weapons tests but acknowledged the
rising pres-sure of public opinion by stipulating they would take place
only "underground, with no fallout."  Finally, in 1963, the Big Three
ratified a ban on all atmospheric tests, as well as those undersea and
in space.  It was a rare diplomatic success in the long Cold War.

What relevance does fallout have today?  Besides the fact that other
nuclear nations--China, France, India, Pakistan, South Africa,
Israel--never signed the treaty and have tested bombs openly or
secretly since 1963, contamination from those eighteen hectic years
after August 1945 is still with us.  By the late 1960s, more than half
of the external radiation dose from these tests had been delivered to
the world's population, plus two-thirds of that from internally
deposited cesium-137.  But even by the year 2000, only one-tenth of the
internal dose from carbon-14 will have been delivered.  Though it
accounts for a small portion (less than 0.3 percent) of our total
annual expo-sure from all sources (see BACKGROUND RADIATION), fallout
is the reason almost every person on Earth carries a bit of plutonium
in their bodies that nature obviously did not intend.

Cesium-137, with a half-life of thirty years, remains a source of
external GAMMA RAYS.

People who lived directly downwind from American tests, especially in
southwest Utah, have been financially compensated by the government.
But a recent National Cancer Institute study of fallout patterns from
1951 to 1958 in all forty-eight contiguous states found that some of
the highest exposures occurred in Albany, New York, and parts of
Massachusetts  All 160 million U.S. residents of that era received some
fallout, with the average national thyroid dose around 2 rads. People
in twenty-four counties with the greatest levels may have received an
average of 16 rads.  Children aged three months to five years living in
those hot spots might have absorbed as much as 160 rads from milk
contaminated with iodine-131.  The NCI estimated that 10,000 to 75,000
Americans may develop thyroid cancer because of bomb fallout--an
increase of about 20 percent over normal incidence.

The medical consequences are subtle on a macro level, but all too real.
Fallout from the era of atmospheric testing peaked in 1957 and 1962.
Death rates for acute and myeloid leukemia in American children five to
nine years old also peaked in 1962, and again in 1968.  Leukemia
mortality for all ages and cell types peaked in that same decade and
was highest in states with high levels of strontium-90 in diet, milk,
and bones and lowest in states with low 90Sr.  Among residents of Utah
and neighboring states downwind of the Nevada test site, as well as
among military personnel who participated directly in the tests,
studies have found excess cancer, primarily leukemia.  The same is true
for British participants in weapons tests in Australia and the Pacific
Ocean.

And then there is the ongoing development of new nuclear weapons, such
as the B-61-11 "bunker buster" designed to destroy underground
structures.  Actually an old H-bomb housed in a new shell made of
depleted uranium (which is radioactive itself), it would be dropped
without a parachute and burrow into soil before detonating.  The
B-61-11 replaces a Bravo-magnitude bomb, which would have accomplished
the same mission by creating a 500-foot-deep crater, while also
spawning a fireball two miles in diameter and colossal amounts of
fallout.  The new device sports a handy selectable yield from 300 tons
to about 340 kilotons, which would cause less "col-lateral damage," as
the Pentagon techies call death of civilians.

(For comparison, the Hiroshima atomic bomb was 22 kilotons, and the
conventional Oklahoma City terrorist bomb was somewhat under 2 tons.)
Of course, any nuclear weapon that kicks up dirt makes lots of fallout.
If the B-61-11 were ever used to take out an underground Libyan or
Iraqi munitions factory, for example, vast sections of the Middle East
would be hot in more than the Mad-Dogs-and-Englishmen sense.

The most contemporary use of the term fallout has nothing to do with
radiation, however.  Toxic chemical fallout containing DIOXIN emitted
from more than a thousand trash-burning incinerators in the United
States and Canada spreads contaminated DUST across the entire
continent.  Half of the dioxin in the Great Lakes thus comes from as
far away as Texas and Florida, according to a 1995 study by the Center
for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College-CUNY, based on
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration computer models
and actual air samples.  The Environmental Protection Agency has found
that ingestion of dioxin that gets into the food chain is the primary
source of human exposure.

i _ ... ow flatus -Farts.

More than 400 species of BACTERIA inhabit the human gut in a continuous
chemical stew.  We should be glad, because they help digest food and
synthesize substances, such as vitamin B, that we very much need. There
are nefarious methanogens among them, however, that produce METHANE as
they go about their business, as well as gassers like Clostridia, E.
coli, Bacteroides, plus various yeasts and protozoans. According to a
courageous bit of research published in 1976 by Messieurs Levitt,
Lasser, Schwartz, and Bond with the epic title "Studies of a Flatulent
Patient," the resultant wind that blows from our bottoms is composed
mostly of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, methane, and CARBON DIOXIDE in
varying percentages depending on what we've been eating.  Indigestible
carbohydrates are prodigious sources of H2, thus the antisocial
reputations of beans, corn, and potatoes.  Sometimes sulphate-reducing
microbes get in there, too, and squeeze off HYDROGEN SULFIDE of
rotten-egg infamy, which fosters the beneficial effect of lowered
methane volume, but the social disaster of cheesy odeur.  Hence those
hot little poohs that can clear astation wagon.

Quantity and frequency are the stuff of family legend.  A single meal
could theoretically pump as much as four liters of car-bon dioxide into
Uncle Irv's duodenum, but with luck much of it will be absorbed into
the blood.  One study of men between 25 and 35 counted an average of 13
+ 4 farts a day, but there are individual cases on record at the 140
level.  And then there was the Moulin Rouge musician known as "Le
Petomane" (perhaps sharing a root with petoire, popgun), whose
instrument was his backside.

Few words in English possess more ancient cousinage throughout the
Indo-European languages than "fart," which traces back to prehistoric
perd-, probably an onomatopoeic creation.  German far zen Swedish
farta, Danish ferte, Russian perdet, Polish pierdziec, Greek pordizo,
and Welsh rltechain all share this powerful ancestor.  Old Norse fsa,
however, took a more musical turn, emanating from the Indo-European
base peis-, the sound of blowing or breathing out, which also generated
Slavonic piskati, whistle, and Serbo-Croatian pistati, hiss.

formaldehyde @ A colorless gas at room temperature that is known to
biology students and horror movie fans for the pungent-smelling
solution in water used to preserve animal specimens.  It occurs
naturally in the environment and the human body in minute quantities,
but its status as one of the top ten industrial organic chemicals, as
well as its presence in automobile exhaust, tobacco smoke, and building
materials, has made it one of the twentieth century's ubiquitous health
hazards.

Formaldehyde was first prepared in 1859 by a Russian chemist, Alexander
Mikhailovich Butlerov, who made synthe ic sugars from it.  (Butlerov
pioneered the use of formulas to rep-resent the position of atoms in
compounds and coined the term chemical structure.) In 1889, France and
Germany granted the first patents for commercial production.  Initially
used in the manufacture of dyes, it soon became valuable as a
disinfectant and embalming agent, which were its chief applications in
the United States at the turn of the century.  The development of
synthe ic resins caused output to rise steeply, fueled by war slemands.
Durina World War II, the U.S. government built two !, formaldehyde
plants, at Danville, Pennsylvania, and Morgan-town, West Virginia, to
support production of cyclonite, or RDX, a military explosive.  After
the war, the booming plastics industry took up the supply.  Today, over
5 billion pounds are used annually in the United States alone in
chemical synthesis and products such as polyester clothing,
permanent-press fabrics, photographic film, cosmetics, furniture, foam
insulation, plywood, fertilizers, germicides, paints, particle board
Formica, carpets, and wall paneling.  It is impossible to escape
man-made formaldehyde in the developed world.

In older chemistry books, formaldehyde was nota ted as CH2O, but the
suggestion of an inherent water molecule was misleading.  HCHO is more
accurate, showing that formaldehyde is the simplest member of a group
of highly reactive compounds, called aldehydes, all of which contain
the CHO structure.  Many of the other, less famous
aldehydes--acetalde-hyde, acrolein, crotonaldehyde, chloroacetaldehyde,
furfural--are also of environmental concern because of their vast
industrial usage.  Cigarette smoke, moreover, contains at least ten of
them, which will send a roomful of smokers off the health safety
charts.

Exposure to formaldehyde at high enough levels causes irritation of the
eyes (50-2,000 parts per billion) and upper respiratory tract
(100-25,000 ppb) that can become impossible to stand, leading to
nausea, vomiting, and dizziness.  Numerous studies suggest that
formaldehyde triggers asthma.  The odor threshold of 50 to Ippb has
nothing to do with a safe level of exposure since most people become
somewhat acclimatized to the smell.  In 1946, the American Conference
of Govern-mental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) recommended an
eight-hour average of 10,000 ppb as the limit for formaldehyde in
workplace air.  Over the years, this has been lowered to 3,000 ppb. The
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends Ippb 
Several western European nations observe an indoor standard of 100 ppb.
During atmospheric inversion conditions over major cities,
concentrations in ambient air can reach 50 to 86 ppb, with Los Angeles
having suffered peaks of 90 to 150 ppb.  Even rural environments
register around 0.8 ppb.

In 1979, a sea change occurred in public health policies about
formaldehyde when lab rats were found to contract nasal cancer after
breathing concentrations of 14,300 ppb and 5,600 ppb in air for six
months.  Epidemiological studies have turned up limited evidence of
similar effects in humans, though some have uncovered higher than
normal risk for cancer in other organs.  Formaldehyde is therefore
classified as a suspected human carcinogen.  For this reason, the
Consumer Product Safety Commission voted in 1982 to ban
urea-formaldehyde foam insulation in houses, where concentrations were
averaging 120 ppb.

Exposures as high as 4,200 ppb were recorded in mobile homes, in which
such insulation was especially common.  Although industry lawyers
successfully challenged the ban in court, publicity about indoor
pollution led to changes in construction materials and techniques.
Still, concentrations of nearly 200 ppb have been detected in new
public buildings.

Most homes contain measurable levels, typical furniture, cabinetry, and
only one paneled room will generate 20 to 70 ppb.

Houses with particle board subflooring will measure 60 to 300 ppb two
to five years after installation.  Concentrations rise on hot humid
days.

Formaldehyde concentrations in a room where several people are smoking
can reach 250 ppb, with a typical puff of cigarette smoke containing
40,000 ppb.  By comparison, the exhaust of a car cruising at forty
miles per hour registers about 1,000 ppb (4,000 ppb if it's a diesel
engine).  Most people can-not tolerate prolonged levels of 4,000 to
5,000 ppb.

One of the neat things about formaldehyde is that if you kill yourself
by smoking it, you can also get pickled with it.  The chemical's
excellent preservative and hardening action on tis-sue was noted from
the start, spawning a variety of patented embalming fluids laced with
additional agents--salts, alcohols, lanolin, colorings--to create
lifelike cosmetic effects.  A proposal by Russian president Boris
Yeltsin to bury Lenin's body, which has been on display in Red Square
since 1924, brought a protest from the Russian Academy of Medical
Sciences that burial would ruin "a unique experiment in preserving
human tissues and cells in a constant state for decades."

Formaldehyde has long been used to keep myriad capitalistic
products--waxes and polishes, ferns and flowers, hides and textiles,
fats and oils, but nor food--from deterioration by BACTERIA, molds, and
FUNGI.  SO how could we leave this subject without a nod to notorious
thief John Dillinger's mythic member, sought by generations of field
trippers wandering through the Smithsonian Institution, which along
with Albert Einstein's brain and Che Guevara's hands has helped give
"pre-served in formaldehyde" its deliciously macabre ring.

freon h The trademark name for a family of so-called
chlorofluorocar-bon compounds, or CFCs, introduced by the E. I. DuPont
company in the late 1920s and 1930s.  They are harmless to people
except at extremely high concentrations, but destructive to the Earth's
OZONE layer and therefore banned by inter-national agreement.

Freon was invented in 1928 by Thomas Midgley (1889-1944), a
Cornell-educated engineer who had developed anti-.  k knock leaded
gasoline earlier in his career.  Searching for a non-toxic,
nonflammable refrigerant for the burgeoning air conditioner and home
refrigerator market, he discovered that by substituting chlorine or
fluorine atoms for hydrogen in ordinary hydrocarbons such as METHANE
and ethane, all the desirable features--inert, odorless, minuscule
viscosity, boiling point far below room temperature were cheaply
obtained.  Hundreds of such compounds were created at DuPont, with
those based on methane numbered from 1 to 100 and those from ethane
between 100 and 200.  Hence "R-12," chemically nota ted as CF2Cl2, the
common Freon refrigerant for auto-mobile air conditioners that has
become a hot black market commodity.

CFCs were also perfect for use as industrial solvents, de greasers and
especially aerosol propellants.  In 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario
Molina of the University of California published an article in the
journal Nature showing how chemically stable CFCs, particularly the
propellant R-11 (CFC13), could slowly rise into the stratosphere, be
broken down by ULTRAVIOLET radiation from the sun, and thereby release
chlorine atoms that interfere with natural production of ozone.  In
fact, one pound of Freon could destroy 70,000 pounds of ozone.  The
process remained theoretical until "holes" of abnormally low ozone
concentration were discovered over Antarctica in the mid-1980s.  From
zero at the beginning of this century, the concentration of CFCs in the
atmosphere has risen to more than 400 parts per trillion, and the
concomitant amount of chlorine in the stratosphere has tripled.

Though present at much lower concentrations than CAR-BON DIOXIDE and
methane, CFCs also contribute significantly to the greenhouse gas
alteration of the Earth's heat balance (CO2, 56%, CH4, 15%, CFCs, 24%).
A molecule of R-12, for example, can trap 15,800 times more heat than

CO2.

In 1987, more than 140 nations signed a treaty, known as the Montreal
Protocol, that made the manufacture of CFCs illegal in the United
States (except for medication inhalers) and many other countries after
January I, 1996.  Importation of foreign-made CFCs was also banned in
the United States.  By 1993, most new refrigerators and home or car air
conditioners were no longer using Freon, but the existence of older
units, especially in some 80 million autos, created a bootlegger's
paradise.

Recharging a car's air conditioner from the shrinking supply of legal
R-12 costs upward of $200, ten times the price of a decade ago.  The
entrepreneurial result, a black market for some 60 million pounds of
contraband Freon valued at $1.5 billion, making CFCs second only to
smuggled drugs.  In 1997, a Florida company was fined $37 million for
smuggling four thousand tons of R-12 in three years.

Where does it all come from?  The Montreal Protocol allows developing
countries to make CFCs until 2010.  Consumption in the Third World is
expected to double every seven years and soon reach levels attained by
industrial nations, according to a United Nations report.  Mexico is
thus a prime source for illegal Freon in the Colosso del Norte.  And
American companies such as DuPont still turn out CFCs at their plants
in India, Brazil, the Netherlands, and elsewhere offshore.  The Russian
mob--supplied by Russian or former Eastern Bloc factories defying the
treaty--runs some of the most lucrative action, tracked by a federal
interdiction program called Operation Cool Breeze, but there is plenty
of mom-and-pop traffic across the Rio Grande.  At the end of the
pipeline, service stations cop a hot thirty-pound tank of R-12 for
$400, then do recharge jobs at $80 a pound.  Cool.

Researchers in Belgium have found that two Freon substitutes, HCFC-123
and 124 (technically known as partially halogenated
hydrochlorofluorocarbons), whose use as coolants and cleaning agents is
on the rise because they are less destructive, cause liver damage at
high exposures.  Factory workers there developed acute hepatitis after
four months in contact with leaking air conditioner pipes.  According
to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, these HCFCs are actually
less toxic than the CFCs they replace and are necessary while
ozone-gobbling Freon is phased out around the world.  They, too, are
scheduled for gradual phase-out, but the Clinton administration has
acted on behalf of manufacturers in resisting demands from European
governments to accelerate the ban.

fungi i Merely "mushroom" in Latin, but in taxonomy a group also
including some 50,000 microbic molds, mildews, rusts, and yeasts that
may or may not be unicellular.  Without chlorophyll, they cannot rely
on photosynthesis for sustenance, so they need to grow on what they
eat, whether it's the sulfur in a concrete wall or the decaying organic
matter of a tree stump, a mucous membrane, or a baby's funky bottom.

When a fungal SPORE lands on a moist surface, it cracks open like an
egg so that myriad hyphae, or feeding tubes, can plug into the
surroundings to absorb food.  The creature cleans itself by venting an
aerosol of extraneous or excess material, which can build up to the
familiar "musty" smell of a summer cottage  Fungi growing on layers of
old oil-based paints binded with arsenic have actually poisoned people
as they released the unwanted element into stuffy rooms.

Fungi that may cause health problems when they directly colonize us are
usually opportunistic cowards that need weakened hosts.  They lead
benign existences until something--another infection, chemo-or
radiation therapy, diabetes, leukemia, or just the vagaries of
biology--hobbles our immune system enough to let them really get going.
Others may be confined to certain environments or geographic areas that
we encroach upon, such as the Coccidioides immitis in dusty regions of
the American Southwest that causes valley fever when its spores are
inhaled.

After the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake, 203 people
contracted the disease, which produces flu like symptoms at worst in
otherwise healthy individuals, but deadly pneumonia and meningitis in
the immunocompromised.

Aspergillus is as common in the human environment as bread, which it
will gladly turn green if you leave a slice out on the table long
enough.  It loves compost heaps, the insulation in walls and ceilings,
household surfaces, and the symbiosis heaven of our mouths and skin.
But about 5 percent of kidney and bone-marrow transplant patients come
down with bad systemic infections that are hard to diagnose because the
fungus is difficult to culture from blood samples.  In 1996,
Aspergillus fumigatus, which can cause respiratory problems, nausea,
dizziness, and irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, was blamed
along with airborne spores of Stachybotrys charta rum for making the
ten-story Department of Transportation headquarters in Washington,
D.C."  a "sick building."

Blastomyces dermatitidis will infect human lungs and skin, but is a
bigger problem for dogs (and may accompany their bites).

Most cases occur in the southeastern United States.  Candida albi cans
a yeast found naturally in our digestive tracts and various mucous
membranes, can mushroom when faced with a weak defensive system into
the disease called thrush, which is common among AIDS patients.  But
it's also one of the culprits behind diaper rash (in concert with
BACTERIA that make irritating AMMONIA from urea in urine) and yeast
infections of the female genital tract.  A nutritious cousin, Candida
utilis, was Candida albicansfungtls.

called upon during the food shortages of World War II and is enjoyed
today by truly die-hard Brits as "Marmite."

Cryptococcus neoformans (not related to the protozoan Cryp-tosporidium)
is ubiquitous, though it has a special yen for pigeon guano.  Usually
harmless, when inhaled by an individual with Hodgkin's disease or AIDS
it tends to spread into the nervous system and cause deadly meningitis.
Histoplasma capsulatum is also found almost everywhere, preferring
river valley soil that, when dried out, produces dust laced with its
spores.  The folk-name "caver's ague" refers to its predilection for
bat-infested caves, where spelunkers run higher than normal risk of
infection.  Hundreds of thousands of cases occur in the United States
every year--particularly in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and
Kentucky--bringing problems ranging from flu like symptoms to
pneumonia. For AIDS patients, however, it is deadly.

For you avid gardeners, Sporothrix schenck ii dwells on rose-bushes,
barberry, and in peat moss or other mulches.  It can cause skin
ulcerations and, if inhaled, pneumonia.

Then there is ringworm, or tinea, which is actually not due to a worm
but a fungus named Trichophyton.  Various species prefer the body, the
athlete's foot, the nails, the scalp, the crotch, the beard--basically
whatever is dark, moist, and grubby.

The fungal infections that most worry doctors today are the ones that
spring forth because of aggressive medical procedures like chemotherapy
and organ transplants, which undoubtedly prolong life but hobble
natural defenses against invading microbes.  Between 1980 and 1990,
nosocomial (acquired while in hospital) fungal infections doubled.
Getting rid of them is not easy.  They are much closer to our own
cellular makeup than bacteria, so few drugs are able to squelch them
without regrettable side effects.

Yet we have the fungus family to thank for lifesaving penicillin and
other antibiotics, delectably veined cheeses, brewer's yeast
(Saccharomyces cerevisiae, ole!), and succulent morels.  All in all, we
should be glad we are able to live among them.

gamma rays a A type of radiation that is analogous to x RAYS but more
powerful  Both are highly energetic forms of light, with much shorter
wavelengths than the visible spectrum.  The French physicist Paul
Villard discovered gamma rays in 1900, choosing the next letter of the
Greek alphabet after the already-taken ALPHA RAYS and BETA RAYS.

Gamma rays are spawned by nuclear interactions in violent cosmic
phenomena, such as supernovas and black holes, but the Earth's
atmosphere shields us from such distant sources.  A gamma-ray halo,
trillions of miles thick, surrounds the Milky Way galaxy.  Its photons
are a billion times more energetic than those of visible light.  In
February 1997, the Dutch-Italian satellite Beppo-Sax was able to
pinpoint for the first time the origin of a tremendous gamma-ray burst
(GRB) beyond our galaxy at least 7 billion light-years from Earth.  The
existence of GRBs has been known since the late 1960s, when they were
noticed accidentally by Vela satellites designed to detect clan-destine
nuclear weapons explosions in space, which would also release intense
gamma rays.  For seconds or minutes, they il ash in the sky about three
times a day with more energy than the Sun will release in its
10-billion-year life span.  The gamma-ray pulse that struck Beppo-Sax
lasted about eighty seconds from a position halfway between Alpha Tauri
and Gamma Orionis in the Orion constellation.  Possibly caused by
stellar material orbiting a black hole or the collision of two super
dense neutron" stars (collapsed cores of supernovas, only a few miles
in diameter), the GRB's light must have traveled for about half the age
of the universe before it bathe the satellite's sensors.

On Earth decaying radioactive elements also release gamma rays, which
are far more penetrating than alpha or beta radiation.  Alpha and beta
particles of a given energy have a definite range and will be
completely absorbed by a certain thickness of material.  But some gamma
rays will go through even very thick shielding.  Atomic weapons
researchers created the notion of tenth-value thickness as a measure of
how well various sub-stances block gamma rays, one tenth-value
thickness decreases the radiation hitting the material by a factor of
ten.  Thus, steel has a tenth-value thickness of 3.3 inches, concrete,
11 inches, earth,16 inches, water,24 inches, and wood,38 inches.
Perhaps it was this concept that emboldened T. K.Jones, an
undersecretary of defense for nuclear forces in the Reagan
administration, to proclaim in 1981 that anat ion could survive nuclear
war "if there are enough shovels to go around."

Compared with alpha and beta rays, gamma rays are less damaging to
living tissue, primarily because they have no sub-stance and zoom
through at the speed of light.  But they are still quite capable of
biochemical mayhem as they ionize--that is, strip electrons away
from--neutral atoms or molecules.  In the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
bombings, gamma rays are believed to have been the principal radiation
threat.  An acute, whole-body gamma-ray dose of about 100 rads would
probably kill half of the people exposed within a month, without
medical treatment.  The National Academy of Science's BEIR-V report of
1990 estimated that "if 100,000 persons of all ages received a
whole-body dose of [10 rads] of gamma radiation in a single brief
exposure, about 800 extra cancer deaths would be expected to occur
during their remaining lifetimes in addition to the nearly 20,000
cancer deaths that would occur in the absence of radiation."  Nearly
all natural gamma emitters of biological concern also give off alpha
and beta radiation, in which case the gamma ray does not represent a
large share of the total dose.

A rather macabre term from weapons research for rating the
destructiveness of different types of radiation is relative biological
effiectiveness, or RBE.  By definition, the RBE for X rays and gamma
rays is approximately unity, for the same dose of beta rays, roughly
10, and for alpha rays, 20.

God ffi He was a wise man who invented God, wrote Plato in Sisyphus.

Polls find that many professional scientists continue to believe in a
deity, though not necessarily one with all the traditional biblical
trappings.  Their faith is nonetheless higher than William Blake's
brand of pantheism, The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

The wrath of the lion is the unsdom of God.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

It goes beyond the simple respect expressed by the Polish proverb, God
can shave without soap.  And it is without cynicism, unlike Pope Xystus
I, who declared that "God is not the name of God, but an opinion about
Him."

Why would any educated person believe in God this far into the
scientific age, parental guilt trips aside?  Perhaps God is sometimes
an artifact of scientific inquiry itself--the further one digs, the
more of nature encompassed by theory, the grander the unification, the
less likely it seems that everything could be happenstance.  Even
Immanuel Kant, the great demol-is her of intellectual proofs of God,
rather grudgingly admitted that "God's perfections are marvelous (but
not lovable)."  He respected the argument that order in the universe
suggests purpose, but would consider only the possibility of an
Architect, not a full-blown Creator.  It was Kant, of course, who
believed that all planets were inhabited, and that the most distant
ones had the best inhabitants.

We can be thankful that God will always be invisible, as tate that
guarantees perpetual belief among mortals.  The Welsh say that there
are three things that only God knows, the beginning of things, the
cause of things, and the end of things.  They seem like natural-born
physicists.  And the Irish, who counsel that God is not as severe as He
is said to be, must be engineers.  For these hubris tic musings, God
will forgive me, because, as Heinrich Heine gasped on his deathbed, "It
is His trade."

gravity @ "Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords
of Orion?"  Nope, sure can't.  Thus did GOD put Job in his place,
because gravity is the one force in nature that cannot be switched off,
shielded, neutralized, reversed, released, or other-wise messed with,
the Wonderbra notwithstanding.  It is omnipotent and omnipresent, just
like You-Know-Who.

Those anonymous Hebrew mystics who produced the Book of Job in the
sixth or fifth century B.C. knew no more about gravity than a poor babe
who falls out of its manger, of course.

Around 330 B.C."  Aristotle surmised that the four so-called
elements--earth, air, fire, and water--tended to settle at increasing
speed into their natural resting places.  Not much better than the
mystics.  So let us leap ahead to Mikolaj Kopernik, a.k.a. Nicolaus
Copernicus, the Polish physician and astronomer who espoused a
heliocentric solar system, in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
of 1543, "Gravity is nothing else than anat ural force implanted by the
Creator of the world into its parts, so that, coming together in the
shape of a sphere, they might form a unified whole."  Or Giordano
Bruno, the radical humanist who believed the universe was infinite and
composed of many solar systems (and who was therefore burned at the
stake for pantheism in Rome's Campo de Fiori), in his Del infinito,
universo, e mondi of 1584, "Gravity and lightness are only attraction
and flight--nothing is naturally heavy or light."  Or Johannes Kepler,
who charted the elliptic planetary orbits, in his Astronomia nova of
1609, "Gravity is anat ural corporeal attraction between bodies toward
a connection, so that the earth attracts a stone much more than a stone
attracts the earth."  Lo and behold, these great Renaissance scholars
were still at the level of tribal poets when it came to thinking about
gravity.

Facing the inevitable at about 32 feet sec2

Though Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica,
written between 1684 and 1687, and Albert Einstein's general theory of
relativity, published 230 years later, explained how gravity acts, we
remain in the desert on why this force works.  But never mind, its
action alone is hard enough to grasp.

Newton and the falling apple is rightfully the most famous apocryphal
tableau in all of science.  His influence on modern society is--forgive
us, John--on a par with Jesus'.

Mastering the methodology of Newton's law of gravitation is the
starting point for any career in science or engineering.  He reasoned
that gravity acts on material objects "at-a-distance" throughout the
universe without requiring contact or an intervening medium and found
stunningly simple equations for describing its effect.  If the heavens
were thus subject to the same natural dictums as the Earth, then
perhaps social principles such as equality should be universal, too. Or
so European philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire began to think as
Newton's work resonated beyond scientific circles.  As for the heavy
question why do things attract each other.7--he was quite content to
believe that only God knows, thus leaving one foot safely in the
Bible.

Newton's law says that the force of gravity between two objects is
equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of the
distance between them, all multiplied by a numerical constant.  In
symbols this is written F = G(MA x MB/R2), where G, a fundamental
quantity of nature, is defined as the magnitude of attractive force
between two one-kilogram masses separated by one meter.  G was first
measured in 1798 by the English physicist Henry Cavendish (1731-1810),
whose family later endowed the famous physics laboratory at Cambridge
University.  The important thing to note about G, which equals 6.67259
x 10-l in metric units, is how small it is.

The force of gravity is minuscule unless at least one of the .

masses iS gigantic.

For example, it takes the entire bulk of the Earth (about kilograms) to
accelerate an object downward near the planet's surface at the same
rate that a sprinter achieves with muscle power at the start of a race.
Whenever you pick something up, you conquer this tremendous mass. Also,
gravitational force gets quickly smaller as the separation distance
increases, though it never reaches zero.  Of the four basic forces now
known to sciencc electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak
nuclear force, and gravity--gravity is by far the most feeble, yet it
binds the Pleiades.

To perceive his laws of motion, Newton postulated the existence of
"absolute space," a fixed frame of reference that is not moving
relative to anything else.  He understood the artificiality of this
assumption, but almost two and a half centuries passed before someone
came along who was so bothered by it that he invented a whole new
approach.  Einstein did away entirely with the Newtonian notions of
force and action-at-a-distance, reverting to a Grecian geometric point
of view and positing instead that all objects travel through a
four-dimensional realm defined by the three dimensions of normal space,
plus time.  To get from one point to another, they simply follow the
shortest path.  Masses make the streamlines of space-time curve
inward--barely at all at great distances, but sharply at short range.
Why?  Einstein didn't say.

For most situations in human experience, the methodologies of Newton
and Einstein give results that differ only trivially.  When NASA sends
astronauts to the Moon or robotic spacecraft to Mars, Newton is in
control.  To explain Galileo's famous (though unconfirmed) observation
at the Tower of Pisa that two different masses fall at the same rate,
Newton talked about the heavier object's greater inertia, whereas
Einstein chose to say that the flow of space-time carries each mass
along together like flotsam in a river.  They each covered Galileo.

On the scale of cosmic events, however, where gravity is titanic and
matter is moving close to the speed of light--such as during the
collapse of stars into black holes or in the first few moments after
the Big Bang--Einstein's approach is revealed as more fundamental.  The
first confirmation of his insight involved explaining a small
discrepancy between the orbit of Mercury as predicted by Newton's
equations and the observed path.  (In 1898, the American astronomer
Simon Newcomb had calculated the difference to be exceedingly
small--forty-three seconds of arc per century, or about the angle
subtended by a mouse one kilometer away.) Without the general theory of
relativity, astronomers had been driven to assume there must be an
undiscovered planet closer than Mercury to the Sun, which they called
"Vulcan," causing this perturbation.  But Einstein's way of dealing
with gravity relegated Vulcan to a future sci-fi television hit.  Then
came Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington's dramatic demonstration of'
gravitational lensing" during a solar eclipse in 1919, whereby the mass
of the Sun distorts starlight precisely as Einstein predicted.

One crucial feature of Einstein's work has yet to be confirmed, gravity
waves.  Whenever great masses change motion--say, when stars collidc
they should generate waves of energy that actually stretch and shrink
the three-dimensional geometry of space.  This effect would be
infinitesimally small, however, and none of the detectors built so far
on Earth have found any trace of it.  The European Space Agency has
proposed orbiting three satellites around the Sun linked by laser
beams, so that gravity waves passing across the array would squeeze one
side of the resultant triangle while stretching another enough to be
measured.  The 5-million-kilometer "legs" of the triangle would be
distorted by less than the diameter of an atom.

Indirect evidence of gravity waves is thought to be already in hand
from observing the energy lost since 1974 by a certain binary pulsar, a
pair of neutron stars spinning around each other on their way toward
ultimate collapse some 400 million years from now.  Only the escape of
energy via gravity waves could account for the magnitude of loss so
far, as calculated from the shortening separation between them.

But no one knows why.  If gravity is a quantum mechanical force like
the other three fundamental forces, there should be a corresponding
force-carrying particle like the PHOTON.

Physicists have a nice name for it--the graviton--but no evidence of
its existence.

As for black holes, perhaps the greatest gift of theorists to
twentieth-century science fiction writers, a half dozen or so
candidates have been identified since the concept gained credence in
the late 1960s.  They are presumed to be formed when old stars cool and
collapse upon themselves until all that remains is a pinpoint of
gravity so strong that neither light nor any other kind of radiation,
let alone mass, can escape.  The first one discovered, in 1971, is part
of a powerful X-ray emitter called Cygnus X-1, where a visible star is
apparently slipping gradually down the maw of the invisible black hole.
Our Mirky Way galaxy itself is thought to have a colossal black hole at
its center.  (We're too distant to get sucked in, unfortunately.)
Although the term black hole was coined in 1967, the possibility of an
object so massive and compact that light could not escape from it was
first imagined in 1783 by the Reverend John Mitchell, who devised Henry
Cavendish's method for determining the value of G. If the Sun could be
compressed to a diameter of six kilometers, it would become such a
thing.

During World War I, the German physicist Karl Schwarz-schild
calculated--while dying in a military hospital--what would happen if a
gravitational field were strong enough to make space curve in on itself
and be cut off from the rest of the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope has provided the most direct evidence for
black holes, especially since the installation of its imaging
spectrograph.  By measuring the velocity of gaseous streams within
twenty-six light-years of the center of galaxy M84 (about 50 million
light-years from Earth) to be as high as 880,000 miles per hour, Hubble
scientists confirmed a black hole with mass at least 300 million times
greater than the Sun's.

Though Orion's cords are as tight as ever, astronomers and physicists
remain vexed by the fact that there is not enough visible mass in the
universe to account for the gravitational pull required to slow the
universe's expansion since the Big Bang of creation.  About 90 percent
is missing, actually.  This "dark matter as they call it, could be
stars too dim to be seen (known as massive compact halo objects, or
machos).  Or it could be NEUTRINOS, particles of infinitesimal mass
that rarely interact with matter.  Or it could be something that so far
exists only in scientists' imaginations--stuff with unknown properties
aptly dubbed wimps, for weakly interacting massive particles.  Wimp
detectors are starting to appear at various sites around the world, but
the task of their builders is rather daunting, since they don't know
what they're looking for.  Roll over, Lewis Carroll.

Let us end on solid ground.  Consider that since the Earth is not a
perfect sphere, gravity is stronger at the poles than at the equator.
Why then aren't skinny girls in bikinis on tropical beaches flung off
the spinning globe by centrifugal force?

Because gravity is still 300 times stronger, praise God.  There is no
record that Newton considered this problem, but he did wonder what
gravity would feel like during a journey to the center of the Earth. In
the Principia, he showed that the pull would decrease continuously,
since the only mass that matters is what remains below you.  At the
center, you'd be weightless.

(Actually, because the planet is pear-shaped, there would be a
minuscule tug toward the south polar region).  A frictionless slide to
the opposite side of the Earth and back again would take ninety
minutes, with or without a bikini.

hydrogen sulfide a An invisible gas that smells like rotten eggs and is
as poisonous as cyanide.  Its darksome toxicological history traces
back to the sewers of Paris, as does its literary reputation.  There is
no more vivid description of H2S's effect on humans than in Victor
Hugo's Les Miserables (1862), "Slow asphyxia by uncleanliness, a
sarcophagus where asphyxia opens its claws in the filth and clutches
you by the throat, fetidness mingled with the death-rattle, mud instead
of sand, sulphuretted hydrogen in lieu of the hurricane, odure instead
of the ocean!"  Calling the sewer system the "Intestine of the
Leviathan," Hugo reflected the morbid obsession of Parisians with le
tout-d-l'egout.

As anat ural product of putrefying organic matter, hydrogen sulfide was
well known to ancient philosophers, who were apparently so impressed
with its noxious power that they named it "divine water" from the Greek
word the ion meaning0 "divine" or "sulfurous."  The Christian
relegation of this particular stench to the Devil was yet to come. H2S
was first analyzed in the 1770s, particularly by the Swedish apothe ary
and chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786), who referred to it as
Schwefellxft ("sulfur air") when he was feeling scientific or just
stinkende ("stinky" or "fetid") after a long day in the lab.

Though he had also discovered hydrogen cyanide and described its odor
and taste, he did not comprehend how toxic these gases were and was
lucky to live past forty.  He died from the gout.

During the time of Scheele's work, sewer gas leaks caused fatalities
regularly in Paris, and the effects of this as yet unidentified scourge
on the eyes of privy cleaners had been known empirically for decades. 
By the end of the eighteenth century, various researchers had proved
the presence of hydrogen sulfide, but lethal accidents continued for
decades in Paris and London.  Sulfur miners, including children, were
also prone to H2S asphyxiation.  The first reported American death
occurred in 1851--not in a city sewer or mine but in an outhouse.

Despite the growing body of scientific evidence about the gas's
toxicity to animals, plants, and people, bizarre clinical uses endured,
such as injecting it into the rectum to treat pulmonary diseases. What
comes out should be put back in (see

FLATUS) .

A 1929 account of hydrogen sulfide pollution in the Texas oil fields
noted that fifteen to thirty deaths had occurred in two years, all
wildlife had disappeared, and silver coins turned black with tarnish.
In 1950, 320 people were hospitalized and 22 died in Poza Rica, Mexico,
after a refinery flare malfunctioned and released unburned hydrogen
sulfide across a community of bamboo huts.  Until the advent of
air-quality regulations, the American emergency medical record of this
century was filled with reports of acute H2S poisoning among sewer,
refinery, and farm workers.  The reek of the local sewage plant for
miles downwind was a familiar fact of life in large cities.  In the
1960s and 1970s, biodegradation of industrial waste lagoons was still
known to generate high enough ambient concentrations (300 parts per
billion) to trigger mass episodes of nausea, breathlessness, and
headaches in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Alton, Illinois.

Today H2S remains a by-product and occupational hazard of many
industrial processes, including oil and gas drilling, petroleum
refining, paper manufacturing, fish meal production, rayon production,
leather tanning, the preparation of various sulfur compounds, and the
production of heavy water as a moderator for nuclear reactors.  In
general, thanks to environ-mental laws, the gas is no longer an
everyday pollutant of urban air.  Its background level in the
atmosphere is about 0.05 ppb, well below the odor detection threshold
of about 100 ppb, but enough to discolor house paints pigmented with
white lead.

The smell becomes clearly offensive at around 3,000 ppb, will cause
serious eye injuries at 50,000 ppb, olfactory paralysis at 150,000 ppb,
and imminent death above 300,000 ppb.  The federal limit is 10,000 ppb
for an eight-hour workday--not a job environment that anyone should
aspire to.

infrared -The region of the electromagnetic spectrum between visible
light and MICROWAVES.  It begins just below what we can see as the
color red--from about three-quarters of a micron in wave-length to one
millimeter--hence the Latin prefix infra.

William Herschel (1738-1822), an English astronomer and musician of
German birth who discovered Uranus, first detected infrared radiation
when he showed in 1800 that most of the heat in a prism's beam comes
from beyond the red band.

Despite this knowledge, he believed that the Sun was an orb much like
Earth, surrounded by luminous atmosphere, and inhabited.

Infrared rays are usually associated with heat, because an increase in
temperature is easy to detect when molecules absorb IR and start to
vibrate.  Conversely, all objects with temperatures above absolute zero
emit IR.  The higher the temperature, the shorter the wavelength.
Thomas Edison's first bulbs were hot but rather dim because the
filaments he used--carbonized strips of bamboo--operated at
temperatures where far more energy was radiated as infrared than as
visible light.  Even modern incandescent bulbs convert electricity to
light with only 5 percent efficiency.  If we could see infrared rays
naturally, there would be no such thing as a dark night, because the
Earth's own heat would illuminate everything like a full Moon.

Some 55 percent of the Sun's energy is in this thermal region of the
spectrum.  Of the 340 watts per square meter of solar energy that
reaches the Earth's outer atmosphere, about 100 watts are reflected
back into space, 80 watts are absorbed by the atmosphere, and 160 watts
are soaked up by the oceans and land masses.  In turn, the planet's
surface gives off heat by infrared radiation at 390 watts per square
meter, 320 watts of which gets reflected back down by clouds and
"greenhouse" gases (mainly WATER VAPOR, CARBON DIOXIDE, and METHANE),
which thus provide two times more heating of the surface than comes
directly from the Sun.

Generally, any biological damage from infrared radiation is due to
excessive heat, running the gamut from obvious burns to subtle effects
such as temporary oligospermia (deficiency of sperm cells) from tight
underwear.  A healthy adult typically radiates about 500 watts of IR,
triggering "motion detectors" and illuminating the sniper scopes of
World War II.  Rattlesnakes are exquisitely sensitive to infrared, with
two facial organs that can detect temperature differences of a few
thousandths of a degree sending nerve impulses to opposite sides of the
brain, where a stereo heat image is produced for precise nighttime
strikes.  How much would the generals pay for a targeting system like
that?

krypton -The ninth most common gas in unpolluted air, with a
concentration of about one part per million by volume.  In Greek,
kryptos means hidden, an image chosen by the British chemist Sir
William Ramsay (1852-1916) in 1898 when he discovered this rare element
during a quest for missing noble (or inert) gases in the periodic
table.  That same year, he also found neon (from Greek ncos, new) and
xenon (from xenos, strange).  In 1900 he filled in the last box with a
phosphorescent gas he called nit on from Latin nit ere to shine, but
the name was later dropped in favor of RADON.  Nonetheless, he won a
Nobel Prize for his work in 1904.

Like the far more abundant argon and neon, krypton is sometimes used in
fluorescent lights, but the difficulty of separating it from air makes
it generally too expensive for consumer products.  It solidifies
at--314 F hardly worth the effort, since a chunk of it will not rob
Superman of his powers.  Perhaps its most enduring role is as the
international standard for defining the meter, I,650,763.73 wavelengths
of the orange-red spectral line of one of its six stable isotopes,
krypton-86.  At least this seems preferable to the king's arm.

laughing gas -l Nitrous oxide, N20, a colorless gas with a sweet taste
and smell that will give you the sillies before knocking you out.  It
was a common anesthe ic for light surgery and dentistry until the
1970s, when studies found that female dental assistants were suffering
twice as many miscarriages as unexposed women.  A 52 percent increase
was also observed among dentists' unves.

Not funny.

N2O was discovered in 1772 by Joseph Priestley, the English chemist,
Congregationalist minister, and possibly repressed party animal who
also invented carbonated beverages (see CARBON DIOXIDE).  Its ability
to induce euphoria quickly led to the popular nickname as "revels" were
organized for amusement  Another chemist, Humphry Davy (1778-1829),
noticed that laughing gas also brought reduced sensitivity to pain.  He
Laughing gas, a prescription for scolding vmives, 1830.

proposed to no wide avail that it be inhaled during surgery.

(Davy soared to the top of his academic profession, was knighted, and
retired at the age of thirty-four.  He married a rich widow and spent
the rest of his life "traveling on the continent," as people used to
say.  The role laughing gas played in his lighthearted approach to
careerism is unclear.) Nitrous oxide was not used as a dental anesthe
ic until 1844, when an enterprising Connecticut tooth drawer named
Horace Wells (1815-1848) witnessed a public exhibition of its jolly
effects and then tried it while having one of his own yanked.  After
offering laughing gas to several clients, he arranged a demonstration
for a medical class at Harvard, where he was booed out of the hall as
the patient screamed in agony.  The modern era of painless surgery, or
"anesthesia" as Oliver Wendell Holmes christened it, thus had to wait a
few more years until the acceptance of ether and chloroform.

Properly classified as an asphyxiant, laughing gas's lingering
good-time reputation was finally ruined by reports that the
half-and-half mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen commonly administered
for continuous sedation causes temporary bone marrow loss.  A few
deaths from anemia set off loud alarms.  But it was the evidence of
reproductive hazards that changed N2O from entertainment to abuse.
Children of female dental assistants showed a 50 percent higher
incidence of birth defects than those of unexposed assistants.  A 25
percent increase was found in a survey of the offspring of 49,585 male
anesthesiologists, compared with children of male doctors who did not
work in operating rooms.  Nitrous oxide's teratogenic effects were
traced to its destruction of vitamin B,2, which is needed for cell
division and DNA production.

Although reaction-time performance tests suggest that laughing gas
doesn't really kick in until it reaches concentrations in the air
between 80,000 and 120,000 parts per million, a few studies have
noticed mood changes at 50 ppm, which is the federal limit.  People
really did show up at parties with bottles of the stuff, probably
obtained from ice-cream parlors where it was used as a foaming agent
for whipped cream.  Toxicology handbooks describe the effects of
nitrous oxide on the central nervous system in terms of paresthesias,
impairment of equilibrium, numbness, and difficulty in concentration.
In other words, you start to feel prickly all over, stumble around, and
go gaga.  This is what parties are for, after all, and the impotency
that also accompanies high exposure was seldom faced by revelers in the
pre-sexual revolution heyday of laughing gas.

Nitrous oxide is ubiquitous in the air because of natural bacterial
action on nitrates in soil.  The steep rise in use of nitrogen
fertilizers since World War II has pushed more and more into the
Earth's atmosphere, where it lingers for 150 years.  Its preindustrial
concentration was about 288 parts per billion, today it measures around
310 ppb.  Because it is also generated artificially by the burning of
petroleum products, its concentration is increasing by about 0.25
percent a year.  In the troposphere it acts as a relatively minor
greenhouse gas, but higher up in the stratosphere it contributes to the
production of nitrogen oxides that figure heavily in the destruction of
OZONE.

methane p A well-fed dairy cow jets about 500 liters of this gas every
day--out through its mouth as a BURP, not from the other end.

Count Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist after whom the unit of
electrical potential was named, is credited with first isolating
methane in 1776, but he was not known to consort with livestock.

There are about 4.5 trillion (4.5 x 1012) kilograms of methane in the
Earth's atmosphere, with slightly higher concentrations in the Northern
Hemisphere than Southern because of agriculture.  About 5 percent of
the worldwide energy from photosynthesis goes to generate methane. Its
presence as the most abundant organic gas has been known since the
1940s,when the physicist M.J. Migeotte found that it was absorbing
light in the INFRARED region of the solar spectrum.  Besides animal
flatulence the primary sources of methane are termites, which also
produce it in their guts, and so-called marsh gas released through
microbiological rotting of organic matter in swamps and rice paddies.
Poking a stick into the muddy bottom of a pond that gets seasonal
deposits of leaves and other vegetation will release bubbles of methane
formed by BACTERIA known as methanogens, which also inhabit those
cattle guts.

"Will o' the wisp," a flame of burning methane dancing across a peat
bog, is one of the rare elements of folklore (Irish, in this case) that
is genuine phenomenon.  The same process can be imitated industrially
using farm wastes or sewage, to create the "biogas" used as a power
source in Asia and Africa.  Significant amounts of methane are also
released from landfills, mines, sewage treatment plants, natural gas
wells, and pipelines, and around electrical power transmission lines.

For hundreds of years, the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been
slowly increasing due to animal husbandry, destruction of forests
(which results in a termite population boom), and other human habits.
Analysis of air bubbles trapped in deep polar ice shows that methane
levels were constant (at about 0.7 parts per million by volume in the
troposphere) from at least 25,000 B.C. to the end of the sixteenth
century, when concentrations started to ramp upward.  Around 1918, the
p , j I s L _ _.

annual increase accelerated and has stood at about I.7 percent per year
since 1965, producing concentrations today of around 1.7 ppm.  Because
methane is one of the "greenhouse" gases that regulate global
temperatures (the others are WATER VAPOR, CARBON DIOXIDE,
chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide), more and more methane has made
the world hotter by 0.4 F since the beginning of the industrial
revolution.  There are no signs of it stopping, so plan your
grandchildren's wardrobes accordingly.

A bit of simple math and chemistry drives home how human industry can
outstrip something as seemingly limitless as the planet's atmosphere.
As methane reacts readily with oxygen, CARBON MONOXIDE is produced at
the rate of about 8 x 10'4 grams per year.  (This is a lucky reaction,
since without it the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere would
rise from a safe and steady level of 21 percent to a highly combustible
25 percent in about 48,000 years.) These molecules last about two to
three months before converting to carbon dioxide, thus producing about
3.4 x 10l4 grams of carbon annually as CO2.  Yet the worldwide release
of CO2 through burning fossil fuels is far higher, at about 53 x 10t4
grams of carbon per year.

Methane's status as the main component (about 85%) of natural gas
underlines its usefulness as a fuel.  The combustion of one methane
molecule--which consists of four hydrogen atoms bonded to a single
carbon atom--produces 8 electron volts of energy.  As a point of
comparison, the fission of one uranium-235 atom produces 200 million
electron volts.  The separation of these two processes by eight orders
of magrutude helps explain why a certain stunt performed by flatulent
schoolboys has not eradicated the species.

Methane may be said to have contributed to world culture through its
historical role in ensuring the fortune of Alfred Nobel.  The inventor
of dynamite would not have found a lucrative enough market in time to
endow the Nobel Prizes had coal miners not considered his explosive far
safer than gun-powder for blasting purposes.  Dynamite's quick, cool
ilame was unlikely to ignite the deadly methane-coal dust mixture,
called firedamp, in subterranean tunnels that lacked a canary or two.

The comparative methane production of various animals may be of
interest to zoogoers.  Camels blow away the competition at 59 kilograms
per year, followed by giraffes and buffalo (50 kg), moose (31 kg),
elephants (26 kg), and hippos (17 kg).

Humans--hard as it may sometimes be to believe are at the extreme low
end of the scale (0.05 kg), just below wart hogs (1 kg).  Don't worry,
methane is totally odorless unless inhaled under high pressure.

ii methyl chloride * A poisonous, colorless gas that possesses what
toxicologists describe with uncharacteristic poeticism as an "ethereal"
smell.

It is an antiknock fuel additive, so we might try to evoke that
ever-so-slight, dreamy dizziness from gasoline fumes when filling up
the tank on a summer day.  Memories are made of CH3Cl.

After depressing your central nervous system, methyl chloride damages
your liver and kidneys.  You can die from either quick exposure to high
concentrations or prolonged breathing of low levels.  The former kind
of demise is highlighted by several hours of feeling fine, then
progressive drowsiness, staggering slurred speech, vomiting, diarrhea,
fever, convulsion, paralysis, and coma.  If you somehow survive all
that, neurological problems have been known to arise as long as
thirteen years later.  The slow-type exit involves confusion, emotional
instability insomnia, blurred vision, vertigo, tremors, and anorexia.

If this seems unusual soon enough and you get completely away from the
gas, you might recover in three months.  Take your pick.

The federal limit is fifty parts per million.  During that ethereal
fill-up you might get close.

microvraves s Between RADIO WAVES and INFRARED light on the spectrum of
electromagnetic radiation lies the territory of microwaves.

They range from 0.3 GHz to 300 GHz (gigahertz, or billion cycles per
second) in frequency, just short of human perception.  These are all
"non-ionizing" forms of energy, which means that they are not strong
enough to cause damage to living tissue by knocking electrons off atoms
or molecules the way x RAYS and GAMMA RAYS do.  But microwaves can
agitate electrons to the point where considerable heat is generated
within irradiated material--viola microwave ovens.  If they can pop
popcorn, they can cook your goose, so to speak, hence safety codes for
manufacturing myriad devices that emit micro-waves, cellular
telephones, pagers, VDTs, burglar alarms, radar, etcetera.

The skin, eyes, and testicles have long been known to be especially
sensitive to the thermal effects of microwaves, with cataracts a
well-established clinical effect.  Altered nervous system and
cardiovascular functions have been found in some occupational studies.
Headaches, insomnia, irritability, and lassitude are associated with
chronic over exposure especially at powers above ten milliwatts
(one-thousandth of a watt) per square centimeter of body surface.  A
study of 4,000 former employees at the American Embassy in Moscow,
which was bathe in microwaves several hundred times weaker than 10
mW/em2 by the Soviets for decades in an apparent attempt to disrupt
communications, found no short-term risks to health.

Cellular phones transmit microwaves at power levels that range as high
as 0.6 W. It is therefore possible to exceed the exposure limits to
radio frequency energy recommended by various professional groups--10
mW/em2 for one minute, less for longer durations, for example
particularly since the device's antenna is held virtually in contact
with the head.

Contrary to the faddish habits of many motorists and pedestrians, these
popular gadgets are not for long yakkity-yaks.

A ubiquitous group of arachnids (a class that also includes spiders,
ticks, scorpions, and daddy long legs with over 30,000 known species
and probably a million-odd more waiting to be identified.  This term
for tiny craw lies comes down to us through the unwashed civilizations
of northern Europe, tracing back through Old English to prehistoric
German, mi ton meaning "something cut into small pieces."  The singular
also means "little bit," of course, originally used in Dutch to refer
to a coin worth one-third of a penny.  The latter sense informed the
phrase "widow's mite," even though poor old women in medieval Flanders
undoubtedly possessed more of the bugs.

Strictly speaking, mites are not invisible to the human eye.

We just have to look hard to find them, which may amount to the same
thing.  The most minuscule are less than one sixty-fourth of an inch
across, but there are some big bruisers over an Dst mite, marvel of
adaptation.

inch long.  As with BACTERIA, most mites are harmless, many are
beneficial, a relative few cause problems when their populations
burgeon.

And like microbes, they occupy a seemingly endless range of habitats,
including the oceans and deep under-ground.

Acarologists, as those who study mites call themselves, are richly
rewarded intellectually for enduring the yuchs of repulsed laypeople.

Eight-legged and sightless, mites live on their own or in parasitic
bliss with myriad other creatures.  The latter sort may thrive
externally or internally on plants, mammals, birds, rep-tiles, insects,
or other invertebrates.  They have been found in the lungs, bladder,
and intestines of vertebrates, as well as on the skin.  Various species
have evolved complex appendages for grasping, piercing, and sucking
their preferred food.  Some carry their young internally.  Many mites
"drink" via a sub-stance in their leg joints that absorbs humidity.
Numerous species exhibit a clever trait known as phoresy, a non
parasitic relationship whereby they hitchhike on unfazed hosts in order
to find someplace suitable for the mitey good life.  If environ-.. 
.--i !

mental conditions become too stressful, some even molt into a highly
specialized form called a hypo pus to undertake such quests.  The
pilgrim is heavily armored, extra tolerant of dryness, and especially
adept at hanging on.  Hypopi wait for neighborly beasts on the move,
climb aboard, disembark when they reach a fresh habitat, and then
resume their normal life cycle.  Mites also spawn hypo pi on a seasonal
basis as conditions become best for reproduction.

A sterling show of phoresy is put on by so-called humming-bird flower
mites, which feed and mate on plants pollinated by those peripatetic
fliers.  They scurry around from one newly opened bud to another, but
when they need to find a whole new plant, they hop inside the nasal
cavity of a roving hummer.

Sometimes more than one species of mite will ride in the same bird's
nose, but each gets off only at the kind of flower it prefers, thus
avoiding the level of congestion humans endure at JFK or Heathrow.

Workaday collaborations between mites and insects are more common than
hummingbird-style airlifts, or at least better known to science.  They
have been evolving for perhaps 100 million years.  (One amber fossil of
a mite whose modern descendants consort with beetles dates from the
Oligocene period 25 to 40 million years ago.) Bees and other nest
makers are especially entwined with providing food and transport to
mites, usually without detriment to themselves.  The mites steal honey,
of course--a phenomenon known by the marvelously psycho term
cleptoparasitism--but also perform household chores, such as cleaning
up dead bees or the FUNGUS on feces and other organic clutter in the
nests.  They may even munch

BACTERIA.

Only a small minority of mites feed directly on their living hosts, an
indignity suffered by the highly social bumblebees and honeybees
(solitary bees would be a dead end), which counter with careful
grooming.  Phoresy-stage mites know exactly where to situate themselves
to avoid being brushed off, and different species on the same bee
maintain separate seating areas.

Carpenter bees have even developed a special pouch, called an
acarinaria, for carrying one kind of mite that kills another that eats
the bee's brood.

Birds and mammals, but not fish, are parasitized by mites worldwide.
Only penguins are free from feather mites, for example.  Itch mites,
Sarcoptes scabiei, can infest the skin of almost all domesticated
animals (except cats, which are the tar-get of another mite species,
Notoedres cah) with potentially lethal mange, perhaps due originally to
contact with humans.

While scabies is spread by S. scabiei from person to person usually by
sleeping in the same bed, polite texts skirt around this perverted
possibility for human-animal transmission by speaking of "husbandry and
domestication practices."  In people and animals, female itch mites
tunnel under the skin to lay their eggs, thus causing intense
scratching.

Humans also carry many other species of medical concern.

Liponyssus bacoti, for example, may spread murine typhus, though the
equally difficult-to-spot body louse, Pediculus huGot the itch.  Eggs
of scabies mite in skin.

manus (COOTIE), and rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, are better-known
vectors.  Mites of the family Dermanyssidae, which includes the house
mouse mite, transmit rickettsial pox, tularemia, and--via birds--a
painful skin irritation.  Ophionyssus natri-cis, the snake mite, causes
fatal diseases in captive snakes but also infests rats and people.  A
close cousin, O. bacoti, called the rat mite even though it also likes
other small mammals, happily bites people living in rat-infested
buildings.

Another rodent mite family, Laelapidae, transmits plague.  House DUST
mites, Dermatophagoidesfarinae and D. pteronyssinus, convey powerful
ALLERGENS that trigger asthma.  Chiggers, which are mite larvae of the
family Trombiculidae, also known as red bugs transmit scrub typhus
(tsutsugamushi fever) in the Asiatic-Pacific area and Q fever.  To
afreddugesi is the most common chigger in the United States that bites
humans, raising small red itch welts.  But not all mites that
parasitize humans are threatening

Demodexfolliculorum, for example, can be found in the pores on almost
anyone's nose.  In any case, good personal hygiene usually keeps things
from getting out of hand, a seemingly simple solution perpetually
undermined by war, famine, and poverty.

Hundreds of mite species are potential agricultural pests capable of
causing widespread damage to food crops and ornamentals.  The house
plant craze of the 1970s familiarized city dwellers with the family
Tetranychidae--spider mites that spin webs as they parasitize plants. 
They have evolved with specialized mouthparts for tapping the kegs of
plant cells.  During long summer droughts, entire fields of alfalfa may
turn yellow as plants un bathe by rain become heavily infested.  Grains
and grasses are home to numerous other types that normally are
parasites on insects but will attack people.

The ecological complexity of mites is anat ural wonder, whether or not
we can bear the thought of it, let alone the sight.

A somehow marvelously onomatapoeic word for one of the oldest
ingredients of PERFUME.  It is obtained from an abdominal gland in
Moschus moschferus, the antler less deer native to China and Tibet. 
The term traces back to the Sanskrit muska, which means "scrotum" or
"testicle," but literally "little mouse."

Ancient Persians, masters of the trade, adopted it as mushk, which
sounds seductive even at this great distance--a "Sabean odor from the
spicy shore / Of Araby the blest," wrote Milton in Paradise Lost.  In
the Koran, paradise is populated by "black-eyed nymphs of the purest
musk."  Horny Greeks pronounced it moschos, which became muscus in
Latin, muse in French, and finally musk in English at the end of the
fourteenth century.

Adult male musk deer, which were hunted nearly to extinction before the
advent of synthe ic chemicals, secrete the waxy brown gunk as a sexual
PHEROMONE.  Its active ingredient, called muscone, is a ring-shaped
chain of fifteen carbon molecules that is ravishingly large for such
compounds.  Workable substitutes can be stolen from a few other
creatures, such as beavers, alligators, octopuses, and snails, but none
of this information seems likely to appear in the advertising bumph on
per-fume bottles at Saks.

neutrinos * Hold out your glove hand like you're going to catch a
baseball.

Ready?  Each second 10 trillion neutrinos will pass right through it.
Don't feel klutzy--they'll zip through the Earth, too.  And 40 million
miles of solid steel.

A veritable gale of neutrinos spewed out by nuclear reactions in the
Sun, as well as by the collapse of distant stars and other cataclysmic
cosmic events, continually roars through our planet.  It has been said
that neutrinos are about as close as something can come to being
nothing, yet they are one of the most pervasive forms of matter in the
universe.  To even begin to understand what they are requires letting
go of common-sensical notions about the material world.

Neutrino means "little neutral object" in Italian, a most un-Italian
concept introduced by the physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) at the
University of Rome in 1931.  He was a luminary among the international
circle of scientists who were hammering out the basic structure of
atoms through arcane mathematics and laboratory experiments (a still
unfinished endeavor).  The existence of neutrinos was deemed a
theoretical necessity long before they were confirmed in nature in
1956.  So weird did the idea seem at first that Fermi's initial article
describing neutrinos was rejected by the British journal Nature as
being too detached from reality--quite a stern rebuke for anyone in
this rarefied line of work.

It is not hard to understand why.  Neutrinos are said to have no size,
no radius.  They might have no mass (an open question since exactly
zero mass is experimentally unprovable).

They don't even possess some of the run-of-the-mill abstract qualities
that physicists depend on, like electrical charge or electromagnetic
force.  Yet they exist, more like traveling energy, always on a
trajectory at or near the speed of light.

The Austrian physicist WolEgang Pauli (1900-1958) first suggested the
existence of such entities (which he called neutro-Then in his native
language) in 1930 as the only way to satisfy the principle of energy
conservation when an atom ejects an electron from its nucleus in a
process called beta decay.  (In the jargon of physics, "decay" is when
a heavier particle converts into a lighter one.) This was the same year
H. L. Mencken opined that "physics itself, as currently practiced, is
largely moonshine."

In the late 1920s, scientists had made precise measurements of such
radioactive atoms.  In beta decay, a neutron was sup-posed to change
into a proton and emit an electron.  So they calculated the mass of the
initial nucleus, then the mass of the final nucleus plus the energy and
mass of the emitted electron using Einstein's E = me2.  The before and
after figures should have been equal, but the usual math didn't work
properly.

Energy was missing somewhere.  With great trepidation, Pauli made his
audacious suggestion that a small electrically neutral object was
carrying the energy away like an invisible bandit.

The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr bet him that it would never be
found.  4 Fermi jumped in to help by hypothesizing that the neutron in
the nucleus decays into a proton, an electron, and Pauli's little
thing.  He further posited that a very feeble force in the nucleus is
responsible for this reaction.  Now universally known as the "weak
force," it is, in fact, absolutely wretched compared with
electromagnetism--the "strong force" that binds the nucleus together
(which, when suddenly released en masse, makes atomic bombs go boom).

Because neutrinos respond exclusively to the weak force, which is felt
only at vanishingly short range, the probability that they will
interact with any form of matter is vanishingly small.  It was
estimated that to ensure a collision of one neutrino with surrounding
matter would require a target made of lead one light-year thick--beyond
even Bill Gates's bud-get.  Fortunately, the development of nuclear
reactors in the 1950s provided intense sources of neutrinos.  The odds
of collision were much better under these circumstances--though still
rare--and resulted in the first experimental evidence of Pauli's
prediction, gathered in 1957 by two Americans at Los Alamos, Clyde
Cowan and Fred Reines.

Neutrinos were not directly observed, of course, rather chain of events
involving subatomic particles was detected that could only be accounted
for by their existence.  Like true thieves, their presence is betrayed
by something missing--that is, by the energy they spirit away.

Neutrinos from the Sun were first detected in 1968 using 100,000-gallon
tank of perchloroethylene (dry cleaning fluid) placed I,500 meters
below ground in South Dakota's Home-stake Gold Mine.  This depth was
necessary to screen the tank from COSMIC RAYS that would cause
interactions that mimic those signaling the presence of a neutrino.
When chlorine nuclei in the fluid captured neutrinos, they gave off
electrons and radioactive argon.  Every few months, the tank's contents
were filtered for the argon, a process that extracted perhaps a dozen
argon atoms from the 103 or so atoms in the tank.  Although the
apparatus worked like a charm for decades, the number of neutrinos
detected consistently amounted to only about half of what was expected
based on knowledge about the Sun, a puzzle verified by other detectors
and still unsolved.  Physicists believe that neutrinos may "oscillate"
between three different types, some of which cannot be detected by
current instruments.

Cosmic neutrinos are "seen" by waiting patiently for one to reveal
itself in an extremely large target.  To use the whole Earth as a
screen, all detectors are built to look down rather than up.

For example, 10,000 tons of ultrapure water were placed in a
Morton-Thiokol salt mine cavern 600 meters beneath the bottom of Lake
Erie.  The tank was lined with 2,048 light-sensitive phototubes, which
are triggered whenever a neutrino collides head-on with an electron or
proton in the water, creating charged particles that in turn produce
light.  These interactions occur about twice a day, giving a thrill to
young wallflower physicists.

The odds of finding neutrinos were demonstrated clearly in February
1987, when the closest supernova in 400 years sent some 60 billion
neutrinos through every square centimeter of Earth facing the
ten-second blast.  A large detector in Japan cataloged just eleven of
them.  Japan is now the center of neutrino mania, with its $100 million
Super Kamiokande detector holding 50,000 tons of water and 11,242
phototubes in a cavern a mile deep in the Kamioka zinc mine northwest
of Tokyo.

Because "Super Kam" can also determine the location in the heavens
where a neutrino came from, it functions as a type of telescope.

Maurice Goldhaber, a renowned physicist who endured way past the
wallflower stage, once said that neutrinos "induce courage in
theoreticians and perseverance in experimenters."

For the rest of us, they are a good reminder to practice humility.

A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that
silence heaves.

John Keats mused at one end of the semantic spectrum with his 1816
verse "I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill," masterfully describing the
sound of silence.  Today we use this term most often to identify an
annoyance, as N. W. McClachlan did in his classic 1935 textbook Noise,
"sound at the wrong time and in the wrong place."

Noise as unpleasantness traces back to the word's Greek origins, where
nausia meant "seasickness" or "disgust."  In Latin this became nausea,
whose spelling and meaning are retained in modern English, and then
noise in Old French, with the sense of commotion and complaint that
accompany being seasick.

During the nineteenth century, the British navy paid sailors "noise
money" to help palliate the maddening blast of foghorns in pea-soup
weather, when losing the horizon could also bring heightened propensity
for tossing one's cookies.  The American wit Ambrose Bierce caught
these etymological threads perfectly when he defined noise in 1906 as
"a stench in the ear."

Unlike the mere handful of non comparative words available for
describing SMELLS, there is a rich vocabulary for noises.  The 1963
Handbook of Noise Measurement listed 116 common terms, bang, bark,
beep, bellow, blare, blast, blat, bleat, bong, boom, bray, buzz,
cackle, cheep, chime, chirp, clack, clang, clank, clap, clatter, click,
clink, cluck, clunk, crack, crackle, crash, creak, ding dong drip,
drumming,fzz, glug, gnashing, gobble, grating, grinding, groan, growl,
grumble, grunt, gurgle, hiss, hoot, howl, hum, jingle, jangle, kachunk,
knock, mew, it fE W,ll Y WnAlr,n moan, moo, murmur, neigh, patter,
peal, peep, ping, pop, pounding, pow, pulsing, purr, put-put, rap,
rat-a-tat, rattle, ring, rippling, roar, rumble, rushing, rustle,
scream, screech, scrunch, shriek, sizzle, slam, snap, snarl, snort,
splash, sputter, squawk, squeak, squeal, squish, stamp, swish, swoosh,
tap, tattoo, tearing, throb, thud, thump, thunder, tickle, tick-tock,
tinkle, toot, trill, twang, twitler, wail, wheeze, whine, whir,
whisper, whistle, yap, yelp, and zap.  Yowl is inexplicably missing,
but this was before Bob Dylan went electric.  Quelfracas!

Noise has always been associated with manual labor, at least until the
advent of white-collar work.

"Noise is a torture to intellectual people," wrote Arthur Schopenhauer,
the nineteenth-century German philosopher of pessimism, implying that
the lower orders were less distracted by it.  He found the cracking of
whips to be an especially irksome sound (a rare annoyance nowadays
outside of fox hunting and S & M circles), despite his belief in
willpower as a fundamental driving force of nature.

Marcel Proust caulked his windows to keep out noise.  George Bernard
Shaw ordered his housekeeper never to vacuum, laugh, or raise her voice
when he was at home.  Noah Webster, who sired nine children, built a
study with foot-thick walls lined with cork.

Though the reduction of industrial noise has led to government
workplace standards in many nations, some manual occupations have been
known to resist the introduction of quiet machines, such as silent
vacuum cleaners (unavailable in Shaw's day) and typewriters.  In a 1927
study, typists performed better in a noisy off fice than a quiet one,
and said they actually believed they were working harder in the quiet.
This led to the curious innovation of "acoustic perfume," whereby a
little noise is nice.

Like any other kind of sound, noise is caused by mechanical vibrations
of particles in a gas, liquid, or solid.  At room temperature, noise
moves through air in waves of pressure at I,"5

feet per second, cork at I,148 f/s (Webster didn't get much insulation
for his money), pure water at 4,723 f/s, hard rubber at 4,875 f/s, sea
water at 4,920 f/s, pine wood at 9,460 f/s, concrete at 11,150 f/s, and
steel bars or glass at 16,500 f/s.  It is well known that noise outside
the nominal frequency range of human hearing (20 hertz to 20 kilohertz
for young adults, with 1,000 Hz considered the average threshold) can
sometimes be bothersome.  This is perhaps most obvious in the lower--or
infrasound--region, where the rumbling of heavy trucks or the throbbing
generated by an open car window at high speeds can actually be
sickening.  The effect has been exploited by military scientists to
design so-called nonlethal infrasound weapons reputed to make enemy
soldiers vomit, though combat has been making young men nauseous for
thousands of years.  On the other hand, low-frequency acoustic
vibrations sometimes produce feelings of euphoria.

In fact, human ears are most sensitive to lower pitches--the crucial
frequencies for understanding speech lie between 500 and 4,000 Hz.
Middle C on a piano is only 261 Hz.  The very highest frea,uency most
people can catch is 16 to 18 kHz, whereas chimpanzees can hear up to 22
kHz, dogs up to 38 kHz, cats up to 75 kHz, and bats up to 120 kHz.
Nonmammals are generally insensitive to high noises, with birds going
deaf at 8 to 12kHz.

Between the threshold of hearing and the onset of physical pain, the
human ear tolerates an enormous range of acoustic energy, differing in
magnitude by as much as 1014 from low end to high.  This energy is
measured in units called Bels, first used during telephone cable
research at Bell Laboratories to honor founder Alexander Graham Bell, x
Bels equals an energy ratio of 10X between the sound being measured and
astandard reference level.

Practically speaking, the reference point is the weakest sound that can
be heard by someone with excellent hearing in a very quiet place.  Thus
the human range is 14 Bels, more commonly noted as 140 decibels (1 Bel
= 10 dB).  Keat-sian rustling of leaves is just under 20 dB, an
electric shaver buzzes at 50 dB, conversational speech registers
between 50 and 60 dB, a toilet flushes at 65 dB, street traffic blares
at about 85 dB, shouting hits 90 dB, a jackhammer and live rock music
both pummel around 110 dB, and a full concert orchestra playing
fortissimo can reach 130 dB.  Handheld weapons, such as pistols and
rifles, produce noise bursts of 130 dB and up (high-est in front of the
weapon, where the bullet merits more concern).  Standing within
twenty-five yards of a jet aircraft engine roaring at 150 dB will
definitely hurt, hence those big ear muffs on the ground crew, which
attenuate noise by about 50 dB.  The Saturn V Moon rocket blasted of
fat 195 dB, enough to rumble the tummies of spectators on Cocoa Beach
miles from the launch pad  At sustained noise levels above 120 dB,
industrial workers should be wearing special body protective clothing
as well as ear covers.  Just stuffing dry cotton in your ears will not
provide much protection--a decrease of about 12 dB, at best.

Under everyday circumstances where noise pollution is not a problem,
the amount of acoustic power reaching our ears is minuscule.  Measured
in watts, conversational speech is only 0.00001 W. This produces a
displacement of the basilar membranes in our inner ears, which are
loaded with sensory cells, on the order of tenths of a nanometer--about
the diameter of a hydrogen atom.  If damaged, these nerve cells will
never grow back.

Technically, loss of hearing sensitivity is divided into three types,
presbysusis, due to normal aging, sociocusis, due to noise exposure,
and nosocusis, due to disease.  By the age of sixty in industrialized
societies, half of all men will have suffered a decrease of about 28 dB
in their ability to hear frequencies

-M_

An evidently serious ease of deafness.

around 4,000 Hz, just because of getting older.  For women, the loss is
about 16 dB.  As for sociocusis, it is perhaps unsurprising that the
threshold for risk of noise-induced hearing loss is not much above
normal speaking volume, at around 75 dB.  As such, the deafness of The
Who's Peter Townsend and many other vintage rock musicians is easy to
comprehend.  At the relatively tender age of fifty-one, President
Clinton was fitted with hearing aids in each ear due to years of
exposure to crowd noise and amplified music.  Beethoven, whose sleeve
had to be tugged so that he would notice the cheering after the first
performance of his Ninth Symphony, is a famous example of nosocusis
brought on by syphilis.

Recent government studies in Germany found that perhaps a quarter of
the country's youth have suffered significant hearing loss from loud
music.  Almost 10 percent of student subjects in Berlin between the
ages of sixteen and eighteen had trouble understanding normal
conversation, especially if they used headphones or went to discos
regularly.  Officials there want the European Union to cap the output
of personal stereos at 90 dB (many can put out 120 dB).  In 1996, the
French legislature passed a law stipulating a 100 dB max.

In 1627, Francis Bacon recorded his personal experience with
sociocusis, "Standing near one that lured [whistled to call back a
falcon] loud and shrill, [I] had suddenly an offence, as if something
had broken or been dislocated in my ear, and immediately after a loud
ringing (not an ordinary singing or hissing, but far louder and
differing) so as I feared some deafness."  In 1831, The Lancet
published an article by the physician John Fosbroke titled "Practical
Observations on the Pathology and Treatment of De'Xness."  The
industrial revolution was well under way, with hazards of continuous
occupational expo-sure to noise common enough for Fosbroke to observe,
"The blacksmiths' de'Xness is a consequence of their employment, it
creeps on them gradually, in general at about forty or fifty years of
age.  At first the patient is sensible of weak impressions of sound,
the deafness increases with a ringing and noise in the ears.... It has
been imputed to a paralytic state of the nerve, occasioned by the noise
of forging, by certain modern writers, and by the old writers, to
permanent over-tension of the membrane."  Another century would pass
before this kind of empirical evidence was substantiated
scientifically.

Until recently, the consensus among researchers was that noise-induced
hearing loss occurs when sound vibrations physically damage the ear.
But animal experiments suggest that chemical changes may be the
culprit.  Noise increases the level of certain enzymes in inner-ear
cell membranes, balancing reactions that would otherwise kill sensory
cells.  This raises the possibility of a deafness "vaccine" for workers
exposed to dangerous noise as well as rock n' rollers, of course.

Deafness aside, research has shown that chronic exposure to noise above
90 dB leads to general decline in physical and psychological
well-being.  In many nations, including the United States, 90 dB is
therefore the limit for eight-hour occupational exposure.  Just to
ensure 90 percent speech intelligibility between two people standing a
yard apart, back-ground "white" noise of mixed frequencies cannot
exceed 95 dB.  I can't hear you when the water's running!  In Germany,
the land of Schopenhauer, workplace guidelines recognize three
noise-level maximums, 55 dB for intellectual tasks (learning, intense
concentration, creative thinking), 70 dB for uncomplicated office work,
and 85 dB for all other kinds of labor.

Using an electric shaver in the math library is presumably frowned
upon.

Loud digital sound in movies such as Twister, the Star Wars trilogy,
and Star Trek (a Starfleet Cruiser can hit 95 dB, even in the vacuum of
outer space) triggered a warning from Dolby Laboratories that sound
engineers who work regularly on trailers could suffer hearing damage.
Theaters typically adjust their speaker systems around 85 dB, the
reference point for studio soundtracks, then come down a few to achieve
comfortable levels.

Why does a scream make our "blood run cold"?  The audi-tory system has
direct connections with the sympathe ic nervous system.  Sudden intense
noises lower our blood pressure and heart rate.  The effect is
small--not even as great as that accompanying a good laugh--and
disappears after a few repetitions (never cry wolf), but it helps alert
us to danger.  Sound is a much better warning signal than light, so we
have evolved with a valuable hair trigger.

Is it any wonder that the ultimate tribute is a moment of silence?

This is, as every white person knows, how Native Americans used to
talk.  You can't see them?  No see um, kemo sabe.  The term has been
applied to damnably small insect pests since the mid-nineteenth
century, but there is still confusion about exactly what it refers to.
The usually authoritative Webster's Tenth defines it as a "biting
midge," which would be fine except that these little flies (family
Chironomidae, 1-10 millimeters long) do not bite, though they're often
mistaken for mosquitoes when swarming.  Perhaps, as the Random House
Unabridged says, it means punkies (family Ceratopogonidae,1-5 mm long),
even tinier Jlies whose females sometimes do nip at humans but
generally prefer flowers or other insects.  Or it could be the dreaded
black gnat (Leptoconops kerteszi, 1-3 mm long), which is fierce enough
to make people vacation elsewhere next year.  Maybe what we have here
is just a little joke, a bit of levity among Indians who were rapidly
running out of things to laugh about as those itchy, scratchy, Manifest
Destiny-blinded settlers claimed every last square inch of bug-infested
land.

A pale blue, poisonous form of oxygen found in trace amounts near the
Earth's surface and in a concentrated stratospheric shield.  Basically,
we need it to go away down here but stay around up there.

The term was coined in 1839 by Christian Friedrich Schon-bern
(1799-1868), a chemistry professor at the University of Basel,
Switzerland, who noticed a peculiar Gestank while running electrical
currents through water.  In German he said Ozon, which is derived from
the Greek ozein, meaning "to smell."  His discovery indeed has a
distinctive biting odor, sometimes noticeable in a mild way after
thunderstorms, when it is generated as ordinary oxygen molecules ( 2)
are dissociated by lightning bolts and the free atoms recombine with
other 2 molecules to form triatomic ozone (03).

This obnoxious brand of oxygen is highly unstable it wants to get rid
of that extra member and go back to being 2-It will give away the
oxygen atom to almost any other sub-stance it comes into contact with.
Ozone is such a powerful "oxidizer" that it can damage many materials,
such as rubber, nylon, and the living tissues of plants and animals.
Its ability to kill BACTERIA makes it a potent disinfectant, but its
character as a severe lung irritant able to trigger asthma, bronchitis,
and other respiratory ailments is its most villainous biological
role.

In Schonbein's day, some scientists were so captivated by ozone that it
was promoted as a therapeutic agent for lung disease, much as x RAYS
were naively employed for many years after Rontgen's discovery.

Ozone occurs naturally in clean air, but in harmless quanti-ties--just
a few tens of parts per billion.  Measurements taken near Paris between
1876 and 1910 averaged around 10 ppb.

(The most unpolluted regions of Europe today have 20-45 ppb.) Its
reputation as a health hazard grew because of so-called photochemical
smog, the choking brown haze in which it is produced as sunlight
interacts with the hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides spewed by gasoline
engine exhaust.  Los Angeles with abundant sunshine and
bumper-to-bumper freeways, was the cradle of ozone pollution. Vegetable
crops in the L.A.

basin began to show damage in the 1940s.  By the 1950s, its bucolic
Mediterranean atmosphere had been sullied with acrid ozone
concentrations sometimes peaking over 400 ppb.  The current federal
standard is 120 ppb as a one-hour average, above which occur watery
eyes, headache, nausea, reduced lung volume, and bronchial
constriction.  In other words, you start to go blind and choke to
death.  Healthy children and adults will experience lung damage even
below this level when exercising.

Strict emissions controls have relegated LAs extremes to the sordid
history of industrialization, but "ozone action days" to limit tailpipe
exhaust and curtail outdoor activity are run-of-the-mill in and around
many American cities every summer  Washington, D.C."  had seven "Code
Red" alerts in 1995, when ozone levels exceeded 125 ppb/hour.  (The
nation's capital has never satisfied long-term ozone goals since the
Clean Air Act was passed in 1970.) A peak of 185 ppb/hour was recorded
between Washington and Baltimore during a July 1997 heat wave, the
highest since 1988.  The mid-Atlantic region is especially bedeviled by
weather patterns that import nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons from
coal-burning power plants and other industries as far away as the Ohio
River valley.  Only about half of Baltimore's ozone is homegrown. With
cars the undisputed major culprit, government policies that encourage
suburban sprawl and place a higher priority on road improvements than
transit lines have exacerbated the problem.

In general, temperatures in the mid-nineties, stationary high pressure,
no clouds or WIND, and no rain will set the stage for dangerous
buildups.  Children, the elderly, and anyone with chronic heart or lung
problems should think twice about going outside.  Any use of
gasoline-powered equipment or vehicles should be postponed, refueling
should be done after dusk, use of oil-based paints and solvents or any
other household products that release fumes should be deferred.  Since
ozone takes several hours to form in the sun, peak levels are recorded
from 3 to 7 P.M.

Rural areas far from the sources of pollution are no longer safe
havens, since the complexities of ozone chemistry permit great rivers
of 03 to form over vast geographic areas.  Ozone levels in the Northern
Hemisphere are known to be 100 to 200 percent higher than a century
ago, rising 1 to 2 percent a year since 1970.  Of course, the
burgeoning of megalopolises such as Sao Paulo or Mexico City where
environmental regulation takes a backseat to economic development,
compounded by biomass burning in the countryside, represents a giant
step backward.

There may be no safe haven.  On a much smaller--but still
irritating--scale, ozone created indoors by copiers, faxes, printers,
and other electronic equipment can react with volatile organic
compounds from furnishings, paints, dry-cleaned clothes, and even
personal deodorants and perfumes to create "office smog."

Scores of airborne chemicals mixing in ways that are not yet well
understood may harm delicate computer circuitry and cause adverse
health effects such as headaches, fatigue, and respiratory problems.

Before the early 1970s, interest in ozone's other important atmospheric
domain--a ten-mile-thick layer of 10,000 ppb concentration centered in
the stratosphere about twenty-five miles high--was limited to academic
circles.  British physicist Sydney Chapman (1888-1970) had first
proposed its existence in 1930 based on studies of how ULTRAVIOLET rays
from the Sun break apart 2 molecules.  The ozone layer is lowest at the
poles, highest at the equator, and so rarefied that it would compress
at sea level to a thickness of three millimeters.  Without its
absorption of ultraviolet energy, life could not exist on the planet's
surface.  (Ozone has also been detected on Ganymede, the Jovian moon,
and on two of Saturn's moons, Rhea and Dione.  In these instances, O3
is produced in surface ice by ultraviolet radiation.) Two developments
via the aerospace industry brought this subject to a far wider
audience.  First, researchers showed that fleets of supersonic
transports like the Concorde could inject enough nitrogen oxides into
the stratosphere to alter the deli-cate chemistry of the ozone shield.
Second, scientists studying the effects of the space shuttle's solid
rocket booster exhaust for NASA found that chlorine atoms could destroy
ozone molecules.  The shuttle would never be launched often enough to
cause problems, but other researchers soon realized that manufactured
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) such as FREON--used for half a century as
cleaning agents, refrigerants, fire suppressants, aerosol propellants,
and for other basic industrial needs--were already doing the same dirty
deed.  In fact, man-made chlorine compounds are the only ones up there
in big numbers.  Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of
California, Irvine, won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work connecting
CFCs to ozone depletion.

In 1974, the use of CFCs in spray cans was banned in the United States,
but worldwide production soon took up the slack.  In 1985, the journal
Nature reported the discovery of an ozone "hole"--an area of reduced
ozone concentration--in the stratosphere over Antarctica that could
only be accounted for by CFC reactions.  (Similar but less drastic
depletions have since been found over the Arctic.) Within two years,
twenty-four nations signed a treaty requiring them to stop production
of most CFCs (as well as three commonly used bromine compounds, which
are ten times worse vis-a-vis ozone destruction) by 2000.  In 1992,
this deadline was advanced to 1996 after a NASA satellite discovered
that chlorine monoxide levels over North America were 50 percent higher
than over Antarctica.

Because most chlorine compounds can linger in the atmosphere for a
century, ozone levels will keep dropping anyway, allowing more and more
W radiation to reach Earth.  According to the U.S. Senate report
supporting the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, this will result in
"increased rates of disease in humans, including .. . skin cancer,
cataracts, and, potentially, suppression of the immune system."  A 1994
United Nations study estimated that every 1 percent decrease in
atmospheric ozone causes at least a 1 percent increase in skin cancer
.

mcl(lence.

In 1996, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that
ozone holes opened earlier in the year and lasted longer than in any
period on record.  The 12,000-square-mile zones, including a 45 percent
decrease in O3 values over northern Europe, were the worst ever.

Why do some people jog on city streets in the noonday sun?

particulates o During our stay of three weeks at St.  Fago .. . the
atmosphere was often hazy, and very fine dust was almost constantly
falling, so that the astronomical instruments were roughened and a
little injured.  The dust collected on the Beagle was excessively
fine-grained, and of a reddish brown color.

Anyone who's ever been stuck in traffic behind a bus knows as much
about particulates as Charles Darwin, who described a Saharan dust fall
off the west coast of Africa in 1833.  Diesel engines are relatively
low emitters of CARBON MONOXIDE, but they belch plenty of black smoke
made of tiny carbon particles  These flecks adsorb carcinogenic
hydrocarbons onto their large surface areas, creating breathable
bullets that lodge in lung tissue.  Complaints?  Call 1-800-EAT-GRIT.

The size spectrum of particulates is divided by convention along a
continuous scale from about 0.001 microns (millionths of a meter, pm)
in diameter to 100 1lm, the width of a human hair.  They can be solid
or liquid, natural or man-made, a health threat or just a nuisance.  If
the atmosphere were totally devoid of them, there would be no rain
clouds because the air would be too clean for WATER VAPOR condensation,
relative humidity could reach 800 percent.  Dusts are defined as
suspensions of solid particles mixed in a gas by mechanical
disintegration, such as crushing and grinding, explosions, or volcanic
eruptions.

(Airborne dusts are called aeolian, after the Greek god of the WIND.
Fine-grain mineral DUST can blow two miles high off the Sahara and
eventually give the air over Florida a reddish tinge.) Smokes are made
of particles from burning or condensation, generally smaller than
dusts, that therefore do not settle as quickly.  Fumes are smokes mixed
with noxious vapors.  Mists are composed of atomized liquid droplets,
if concentrated enough to reduce vision, they are fog if made of
particles with absorbed water, they are haze.  Aerosols are clouds of
particles in air that are small enough for thermal motion to keep from
settling.

At the lower end of size are some metallurgical dusts and fumes whose
particles are clusters of molecules smaller than viruses.  At the upper
end are fine sands, mists, fly ash, coal and cement dusts, SPORES, and
POLLEN that may be visible to the naked eye.  (Particles larger than 20
,um are heavy enough to settle out of the atmosphere quickly.) In
between are such hazards as tobacco smoke (0.01-1 pm), carbon black
(0.01-0.15 pm), insecticide dusts (0.15-10 pm), oil smokes (0.015-1
pm), smog (0.01-5 1lm), and sundry other waftures.

Particles this small behave like gases.  We breathe them, and,
depending on their size, they land at various depths in our respiratory
system--larger ones in the nasal passages, smaller in the windpipe or
lungs.  The body's own defense mechanisms can sooner or later clear
away inhaled bits larger than about 2.5 1lm in diameter, taking
anywhere from less than a day to months for a clean sweep. (Even the
ruined lungs of coal miners who die of black lung disease may contain
less than 10 per-cent of the dust originally deposited.) Under 2.5 1lm
is the most dangerous category for human health, though dusts up to 5
pm are still considered damaging to lungs.  Tiny particles can carry
high concentrations of sulfates, nitrates, and poisonous metals such as
mercury, lead, and chromium.  The longer they stay in the lungs, the
more likely these substances will leach Donora, Pennsylvania, after the
killer smog of 1948.

into other organs, too.  Particulates may even amplify the toxic
effects of pollutants produced by the same source, such as SULFUR
DIOXIDE in coal burning, as experienced during the air pollution
disasters of Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948 and London in 1952.

On a global basis, about two-thirds of particulates are natural and
one-third man-made.  But locally, the natural versus anthropogenic
fraction is often reversed.  One to 3 trillion (1012) kilograms of dust
are normally emitted into the atmosphere every year, yet the 1982
eruption of El Chichon alone released 101" kg of dust (as well as I.2 x
10l() kg of sulfur compounds and an amount of hydrochloric acid
equivalent to 9 percent of the HCl in the whole atmosphere).  The
"clean" background level of particulates in North America is about 20
micrograms (millionths of a gram, pg) per cubic meter of air.

This translates into about 30 million tons of dust particles kicked up
across the United States every year by the wind, mostly from soil
erosion.  In urban areas, the mass concentration may range into the
hundreds of micrograms.  (A measurement taken in Chicago in 1915 topped
I,000,ug.) Polluted air, more-over, is usually fouled with the smallest
particles, which damage health the most.

Coal-fired power plants and engine exhaust account for most man-made
particulates.  Normally healthy city dwellers may not always be aware
of what they're breathing, but they know how grimy their windowsills
get even high above street level.  American Cancer Society studies have
shown that particulates cause more than 64,000 premature deaths every
year in U.S. cities from heart and lung disease, with the greatest
number occur-ring in Los Angeles (-5,900), New York (4,000), and
Chicago (3,500).  When their health histories were matched against
levels of small particle emissions, residents of the most polluted
regions were found to be 17 percent more likely to die than those in
the least.  Because federal air-quality regulations have focused on
particles down to 10 pm, the current standard of 50 pg of particulates
per cubic meter is not strict enough to control the critical
under-2.5-pm range.  (Since the weight of a spherical particle is
directly proportional to the cube of its radius, a few coarse ones in a
sample will obscure the presence of many fine ones.) Around 10 pm,
atmospheric particles are mainly silicon, iron, aluminum, sea salt, and
plant matter.  At 0.2 ,um, they are sulfates (the major component in
most urban areas), nitrates, ammonium, organic and lead compounds.

Besides being a respiratory hazard, some particulates can accidently
ignite.  Anything that will burn in air as a solid bulk may explode as
a dust.  Flammable dust clouds are usually visible and confined to
indoor spaces.  For most dusts, there is a certain combination of
particle size and concentration that will either self-heat or ignite on
a spark or hot surface.  Hence the perennial occurrence of grain
elevator, sawmill, foundry, and other agricultural or industrial
explosions.

The Versailles court of Louis XV, known as "la Cour par-fumee,"
required that a different perfume be worn every day of the week.  The
king's paramour, Madame de Pompadour, spent 1 million francs to
establish a personal perfume bank that would guarantee her perpetual
novelty.

If modern researchers are correct in their hypothesis that perfumes
were originally conceived not as sexual attractants but to mask one's
truly seductive personal odor from un-wanted suitors, then La
Pompadour's investment at Versailles was, tant pis, a grand gesture in
the wrong direction.

Nonetheless, dousing oneself with odiferous substances, whether to
lure, repel, or even disinfect, is a custom at least as old as the
evidence of ointments found in Egyptian tombs.

Crusaders brought Arabian distillations back to Europe, where the queen
of Hungary commissioned the first modern per-fume a mixture of oils and
alcohol--in 1370.  Italians dominated the art until Catherine de
Medici's private perfumer defected to France, where olfactory commerce
grew to indus-trial proportions.

The word perfume appeared in English in the 1530s, borrowed from the
French parfum, which came from Italian parfumare.  Befitting the
relative backwardness of Anglo-Saxons, perfume at first referred to the
fumes produced when something--incense, one hopes--burned.

Western sophisticates today wear only a hint of fragrance, if any, but
there was a time when the crowned heads of Europe sported so much MUSK
that their bedroom servants occasionally fainted.  Henry VIII preferred
his dollop laced with rose.  Civet, a secretion from the anal scent
glands of a certain Ethiopian cat, and ambergris, a greasy black
excretion from sperm whale intestines, were also used in breathtaking
concentrations.  The curious, yet apt, use of an auditory adjective in
the expression "loud per-fume"--which dates at least to John Donne's
bawdy youth--cannot begin to describe the impact of these precious
schmears.

In early modern Europe as in ancient Rome, every garment, bangle, wig,
and domestic animal was considered perfumable, at least by the
well-to-do.  By the late eighteenth century, fashion replaced putrid
animal products with sweet flower essences--especially orange blossom,
lavender, jasmine, and rose--meant to suggest innocence (a matter of
opinion, of course) rather than carnality.  The aristocracy was awash
in Eau de Cologne (or Kolnisches Wasser, depending on geopolitical
sentiment), a concoction of rosemary, citrus, and grape first employed
to fend off the plague.  Napoleon soaked himself with it daily, perhaps
to counteract Josephine's stubborn attachment to musk.  The i'
association of complex, fantastically expensive perfumes with haute
couturiers dates to the 1920s, when Chanel and Patou cultivated a
luxury market for mass-produced scents.

Though many of the traditional ingredients are still used by perfume
manufacturers, albeit in extreme dilution or synthe ic form, the modern
product is carefully positioned by advertising images that run the ga
met from highly sexed (Calvin Klein's Obsession) to bourgeois
adventurous (Guerlain's Champs-Elysees) to just plain rich (Givenchy's
Organza) to jocky (Polo Sport, the "women's fitness fragrance") to
somehow fatherly (Estee Lauder's Pleasures for Men, or is it for
labradors?).  Since only the most ardent consumer can possibly identify
these commodities in the field, they must be intended to enhance the
wearer's imagination, not the smeller's.  Smelling them may be almost
irrelevant, in fact, with the potent linguistic experience of brand
name being more important than olfactory messages.

It is well known that the smell of a perfume varies from per-son to
person, depending on interaction with the individual's own B.O. Hence
the tank car loads of supposedly rare fragrances given to shoppers as
free samples.  Perfumes are volatile chemicals, of course, which means
that as they evaporate off the body their odor changes.  Those that are
somewhat worth their retail price are formulated to achieve a
three-tiered effect from the "top note," the initial fresh blast,
through the "heart," a more mellow waft, to the "after-fragrance,"
which may last until next bath.  Stale perfume of any pedigree can be
as obnoxious as yesterday's socks.

pheromones c The term pheromone was coined in 1959--from the Greek
pherein ("to transfer") and hormon ("to excite")--by German chemists
Peter Karlson and Martin Luscher to describe chemical messages passed
between members of the same species, often for courtship.  (Kairomones
attract other species, allomones repel them.) Widespread in nature,
they are thought to be of relatively minor importance for humans,
though the PERFUME industry continues an age-old quest for Love Mist
No.9. "The smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon," King
Solomon rhapsodized long before the scientific-industrial age.

There is definitely something in the air, because it is known that
groups of women living in close contact--dormitory or barracks mates,
family household members, etcetera--may synchronize their menstrual
cycles through a still unidentified pheromone in underarm sweat. Nearby
male pits, in turn, can influence the period's regularity, bringing
long or short cycles into the normal range of 29.5 + 3 days. Whether
substances in human sweat, saliva, and urine known as androstenes and
copu-lines act as sex pheromones has been debated inconclusively for
years.  Gourmands may also wonder whether the high level of androstenes
in trufles accounts for their popularity.

The existence of MUSK scents in the animal kingdom must have been
empirically obvious to the earliest humans, if only because of the
usefulness of such knowledge in hunting.

Nineteenth-century entomologists began systematic studies of how female
moths and butterflies attract mates from miles away.  In the 1930s, the
German biochemist Adolph F.J. Butenandt (b.  1903), who had earlier
isolated the human sex hormones estrone and progesterone, began looking
for the female silkworm moth's sex attractant.  Twenty years and a
half-million sacrificed moths later, the substance was christened
bombykol, after the bug's Latin name, Bombyx mori.  Each moth carries
only about I.2 micrograms (millionths of a gram, 1lg) of born-bykol,
quite sufficient to make millions of males come hither when it wafts
across detector hairs on their feathery antennae.

The incredible potency of this pheromone and the sensitivity of the
detectors can be appreciated from the minimum concentration of bombykol
required for a turn-on, 1 x 10-12 ,ug/ml, or one trillionth of a
millionth of a gram per one thousandth of a liter.  Imagine what Chanel
would charge for every ounce of an analogous eau de cologne.

Recent research has shown that we humans, like reptiles and many other
mammals, may have a specialized "erotic nose," or vomeronasal organ
(VNO), consisting of a pair of tiny indentations about a centimeter up
from the nostrils on either side of the nasal septum.  The VNO is
clearly present during embryonic development, between the fifth and
eighth week of pregnancy, but then regresses and disappears in most
adults.

First noticed by anatomists three centuries ago, it is usually ignored
by modern textbooks (and thus by many plastic surgeons in the course of
a nose job).  Instead of being wired to the olfactory cortex like our
regular schnozola, the cells behind the pits (cigar shaped, of course)
hook straight into the hypothalamus and amygdala--unconscious regions
that control hormone levels and emotions.  So far, however, there is no
anatomical proof of this connection.  Whether the VNO actu-ally
responds to pheromones or is just a vestige of monkey love is a subject
of debate.  Happily, amputating the noses of adulterers is not as
popular today as in Virgil's time.  Having located genes in rats that
instruct how to make pheromone receptors, researchers are now looking
for similar DNA in people.

Animals also use pheromones to communicate fear and alarm.  Pregnant
mice will abort their fetuses if exposed to urine from male mice other
than the fetuses' father.  Karl von F,risch (1886-1982), the Austrian
zoologist who described the communicative dancing of honeybees, showed
how minnows discharge a chemical from cells in their outer skin when
injured.  This pheromone causes nearby minnows to dart away.  Similar
pheromones in other fish species trigger different reactions, such as
schooling more tightly or diving to the bottom.

But it is the social insects that demonstrate the most magnificent
pheromone repertoire in their complex divisions of labor.  Frisch's
beloved bees create a chemical symphony of more than thirty different
molecules.  Some are fanned through the hive by beating wings.  As far
back as 1609, naturalists observed that a single bee stinger will
attract others to attack the same site.  Ants, too, are renowned for
their chemical signals and, unlike bees, use pheromone trails to map
newly discovered food or colonies of slaves.  In one type of leaicutter
ant, a single milligram of trail pheromone could mark a path three
times around the Earth.

When Marx and Engels declared in The Communist Manifesto that "the
history of all hitherto existing society is the his-tory of class
struggles," they were not writing as entomologists, of course.  But
even the despised cockroach separates high and low individuals
according to the chemical composition of a sex pheromone.  Researchers
at Transylvania University (where else?) found that by manipulating the
quantity of three compounds that comprise the pheromone, male roaches
signal dominance or submission to competing males and to potential
female mates.

These chemical systems are by no means restricted to complex life
forms.  The brown algae or kelp familiar to beachgoers depend on
pheromones to bring together male and female reproductive cells called
gametes.  Sea anemones release an alarm substance when attacked that
causes others in the colony to withdraw their tentacles and close up.
Earthworms under stress add a special chemical to their slimy mucus
that not only warns fellow worms but repels predators such as
salamanders and birds.  (Some hungry snakes, wouldn't you know,
actually prefer the bummer mucus.) Nematodes, barnacles, and BACTE-RlA
all "communicate" with pheromones.  Bark beetles that carry Dutch elm
disease release aggregation pheromones to muster their forces for a
mass attack on single trees.

But the heck with insects, angel.  I have perfumed my bed with myrrh,
aloes, and cinnamon.  Come, let us take ourf'll of love until the
morning (Proverbs 7).

photons a Even the minutest molecule of light, That in an April
sunbeam'sfleetingglow Fugils its destined, though invisible work, The
universal Spiritguides.

What was Shelley on to here in Queen Mab, a century before Einstein?
Just versifying the scientific fashion of his day, which held to
Newton's theory (via Galileo) that light was a stream of "corpuscles,"
or tiny bodies of matter.  The term molecule, which was then a
fancy-sounding French word for mass, provided a bit of alliteration.

Shelley was not quite as up-to-date as this poem of 1813 might imply.
In 1804, an English doctor named Thomas Young had performed an
experiment showing that light behaved not like particles but like
waves.  When he shined a beam through a narrow slit, a simple image of
the opening appeared against a backdrop.  But if he aimed at two
parallel slits, interference patterns formed on the screen just as when
water waves collide.  Actually, light could be shown to act like waves
and particles, a paradox that lasted until the first decades of this
century.

For most educated observers, it endures.  Only physicists have learned
to live with it.  They say that light consists of photons--not matter
particles in the ordinary sense but discrete bundles of energy.  How
can a stream of bundles behave like a wave?  This is a perfectly good
question but an intellectual cul de sac.  There is no way to account
for the wave-particle duality in common-sensical terms.

Archimedes' solar mirrors torched Marcellus' fleet in 212 B.C."
regardless.  Physicists observe nature, then try to write mathematical
equations that both fit what they have "seen" and predict the
not-yet-observed.  If their math corresponds with everyday experiencc
as is the case with such classic concepts as mass, acceleration, and
momentum--then living is easy.  But if not, as has been the case since
the advent of Einstein's relativity theories, then predictive power
becomes the essence of reality.  Wave-particle duality is finessed
mathematically by saying, yes, light is made of particles, but we
cannot determine that an individual photon will hit a target, only the
probability.

To fit what had been observed in his Berlin laboratory, the physicist
Max Planck realized in 1900 that a photon's energy must be equal to the
light's frequency multiplied by some constant of nature, or E = hf, He
called h the "elementary quantum of action," but it soon became known
as "Planck's constant" in his honor.  Thus, blue light always has more
energy than red light, regardless of intensity.  Planck's constant,
which would pop up elsewhere in physics, is minusculc on the order of
10-lS--indicating the atomic scale at which quantum effects become
significant.  This equation was the starting point of a revolution that
dethroned classic (Newtonian) physics, which had been so reassuring to
human-scale experience.

Physicists also speak of real photons and virtual photons.

The former are able to make a Geiger counter (which really does record
the presence of discrete bits of matter) click, the latter can carry
the influence of electromagnetic fields (see EMF) across empty space
(visible light being just a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum).
From high-frequency GAMMA RAYS to low-frequency RADIO WAVES, photons
(or quanta ) of decreasing energy and zero mass act as force carriers.
Similarly, the attraction or repulsion of two charged particles is
carried by an exchange of photons.  We owe this dizzying picture to the
giants of twentieth-century physics, Planck, Paul Dirac, Werner
Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, WolEgang Pauli, Richard Feynman, to name but
a few who attained celebrity status during the evolution of quantum
mechanics.

When light strikes certain metals and knocks off electrons to form an
electric current, as in a solar cell, the release is called the
photoelectric effect.  Einstein won a Nobel Prize for describing it in
an article published in 1905, taking his cue from Planck to explain how
only light of sufficiently high frequency will work.  Even though there
are lots of photons in a bright red light, each one lacks enough energy
to undo an electron.  A dim blue light does just fine.  Einstein
himself was always uncomfortable with the dual nature of photons and
light waves.  Oddly enough, Planck disagreed with Einstein's momentous
article because it represented such a radical departure from what was
already known about the wavelike behavior of light.  It would take
decades of further research to unify the two concepts.

Human eyes are fantastically sensitive to light.  The wave-lengths they
respond to, between 0.4 and 0.7 microns, just happen to coincide with
the peak of the sun's spectral out-put--about 38 percent of the sun's
radiant energy is in this band.  But we wouldn't want to be much more
perceptive.

Only five or six photons are needed to activate a retinal nerve cell.
At just ten times this sensitivity, we would see dim colors in tiny
bursts instead of continuously.

The male gametophyte of plants, holding sperm necessary for
reproduction.  Pollen originally meant flour or mill DusT in English,
and was not used as a botanical term until the mid-eighteenth century. 
It derives from a Latin word of the same spelling related to
pulvis--from which came pulverize and powder--and polenta, a type of
barley.

wind-pollinated plants are the main source of pollen ALLERGENS, which
release irritating proteins when they contact mucosal surfaces in our
eyes, noses, and throats.  Only about 10 percent of all plant species
rely on wind to reproduce, but they comprise 90 percent of all plants.
Happily, most flowering plants are pollinated by insects or birds and
are thus of little concern to sneezy humans.  Unhappily, the windy ones
produce such enormous numbers of pollen grains that they are
essentially inescapable during their active seasons, as hay fever
sufferers know all too well.  A hundred million grains of pollen fall
Ragweed, the Genghis Khan of pollens.

annually on every square meter of the planet, some-times hundreds or
even thousands of miles from parent plants.

The allergic potential of various plant species is not well
characterized, with a few such as rag-weed and some grasses being
infamous, but many more being suspected only through local anecdotes.
Evolutionary puzzles abound, such as why conifers of the cypress family
(which include junipers) are often troublesome, but members of the pine
family are usually not, despite the fact that both shed huge tonnages
of pollen carried vast distances on the wind.  Willow, box elder, and
hickory pollen are the strongest tree allergens in North America. 
Maples and oaks, being so common, no doubt cause more misery.

Grasses, as the most ecologically dominant plants, are prime villains
in pollen afflictions, second only to ragweed (which accounts for more
cases of hay fever than all other plants together).  Bermuda grass,
orchard grass, fescue, rye grass blue-grass, and timothy--all familiar
to country folk and suburban lawn lords alike are among the most
sigruficant allergen pumps.  Corn produces extremely allergenic pollen,
but because its particles are relatively large and do not waft far, it
is bothersome only near the fields.

Perhaps of sentimental interest to aging boomers is the hemp family.
Naturalized cannabis is a widespread weed in North America, especially
from the Dakotas to Nebraska.  Its prodigious pollen output is very
buoyant, accounting for as much as 15 percent of the summer ragweed
count in Omaha.

The uniquely shaped pollen grains produce a buzz all their own, hay
fever followed by severe bronchial asthma.

Single-celled creatures well known to high school biology students as
Paramecium (first observed in 1674 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who
called it the "slipper animacule") and to science fiction fans as
Amoeba (from the Greek word for change, referring to the shifty green
blob that en gulEs foolish scientists).

These most complex of microbes cause several diseases in humans, mostly
due to poor hygiene or dirty water.  For example, amebiasis--from
Entamoeba histolytica--a colon infection producing mild diarrhea to
dysentery, occurs where food and water are contaminated by human feces,
such as migrant labor camps and Indian reservations, and among gay male
sexual partners.  Giardiasis--from Giardia lamblia--also travels the
fecal-oral route where sanitation is below par.  This protozoan has
been found in 7 percent of stool samples tested nationwide in the
United States.  Cryptosporidiosis is a diarrheal disease caused by
Cryptosporidium parvum, which has triggered mass outbreaks due to
water-treatment plant failures, such as the 1993 epidemic in Milwaukee
that struck some 300,000 residents.  It is life threatening for people
with weak immune systems.  Toxoplasmosis, spread by Toxoplasma gond ii
in cat feces, infects as much as 80 percent of some populations around
the world but is only dangerous for the unborn and the
immunocompromised.

Since the 1990 flare-up of civil war in Sudan destroyed that region's
medical infrastructure, thousands of people have developed advanced
cases of trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, from protozoa of the
genus Trypanosoma transmitted by tsetse flies.  After being limited to
less than 1 percent of the population in the late 1980s, incidence is
now estimated as high as 40 percent in some populous areas.  The
disease is capable of inflicting massive fatalities if untreated, as in
a 1906 Ugandan epidemic that killed 4 million.  Therapeutic drugs like
pentamidine cost hundreds of dollars for a complete course, with the
price driven up by demand from AIDS patients.

Finally, malaria, one of the great demographic forces in the history of
civilization, is caused by four species of Plasmodium protozoa.  Though
essentially gone from the developed world thanks to management of the
female Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit it, quinine-resistant malaria
is considered out of control in tropical Africa, Asia, and Latin
America.  About 400 million people suffer from it every year, with 1 to
3 million deaths, mostly among children.

Never drink groundwater.  If you must venture outside the Hilton bar
next time you're in Africa, use that bug spray.

quarks a "Three quarks for Muster Mark.  " James Joyce, the patron
fiend of modern English literature, planted this word in Finnegans Wake
in 1939.  He had uprooted it from German, where it referred to a kind
of cheese curd and was synonymous with Quatsch, which means "trivial
nonsense,"

"absolute rubbish," "bullshit."  By the early 1960s, subatomic physics
was starting to seem this way even to its high priests, so when Cal
Tech theorist Murray Gell-Mann (b.1929) named a hypo the ical new
particle the quark, his unscientific term quickly entered the
vernacular.

Gell-Mann and his whole profession were burdened with an unwieldy
constellation of supposedly "elementary" building blocks of nature,
many of which were spawned inside powerful new particle accelerators
known popularly as "atom smashers."

These huge machines, sometimes miles in length or circumference, were
designed to probe the interior of an atom much as one might explore the
inside of a peach by shooting it with a pellet at increasing
velocities.  Eventually the pellet will go fast enough to penetrate the
peach's skin and hit the pit.  An accelerator imparts so much energy to
subatomic collisions, how-ever, that new particles that did not exist
before the impact are often created from the interaction. (Remember
that mass and energy can turn into each other a la E = me2.) Since
Ernest Rutherford's discovery in 1910 that atoms were not uncut table
in the original Greek sense but possessed a structure of nucleus and
surrounding electrons, the picture had grown terribly complicated.  The
use of the word particle itself was confusing, since many of the new
entities defied ordinary notions about tangible matter. Gell-Mann
realized that the hodgepodge of subatomic particles could be organized
into groups of eight or ten with similar mathematical properties,
rather like chemistry's periodic table.  The whimsical (or desperate)
physicist called this system "The Eightfold Way" in homage to Buddha's
principles for life.  He further posited that these groups reflected
the existence of an underlying triplet of particles.  These became the
"three quarks."

From here the story gets even quirkier, or quarkier.

Gell-Mann called his three quarks "up, down, and strange."  Today three
more are recognized, charm, top, and bottom.  The six are now referred
to as quark "flavors" and considered truly fundamental particles (but
still not the only ones), of which protons and neutrons are made, for
example.  Because they occur only in clusters (e.g."  proton = two ups
and a down, neutron = two downs and an up), no one has ever seen an
individual, or "naked," quark, thus explaining such newspaper headlines
as

SEARCH FOR BARE BOTTOM.

Quarks are said to be "point-particles," a mathematical concept meaning
they have no volume.  Moreover, they possess a new kind of charge,
similar to an electric charge but occurring in more types than just the
traditional positive and negative.  It's called "color" but has nothing
to do with light.  Any intelligent person is entitled to wonder whether
quarks are real or just a fac on de parler.  For physicists, this is a
false dichotomy.  Quarks are obviously nothing like billiard balls, but
they're not imagi-I !

nary.  The best answer is that there are collisions observed in atom
smashers that can only be explained in terms of quarks.

"What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our
method of questioning," said Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), the German
physicist whose "uncertainty principle" became emblematic of the
field's giddy dictums.  (According to this principle, you can determine
the velocity of a particle or its position, but not both at once.)
Thus, truth is procedural, that is, concepts like quarks are defensible
only through their results.  This may sound like a logical cop-out to
ordinary mortals, but to physicists it is the essence of reality. 
Anybody who does not experience a kind of vertigo about these subjects,
as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) said, "has not
understood the first thing about them."

The dizzying fact is that "things" are not made of many of what
physicists call "particles" in the universe.  Quark proper-ties have no
correlative in the everyday world.  Yet they are intimately related to
what "things" are made of.  Get it?  Now try NEUTRINO.

Several times every minute, a quark (a top quark, actually) is really
produced somewhere in the Earth's atmosphere by the collision of a
COSMIC RAY from outer space with the nucleus of an atom.  The quark
immediately (truly immediately, in 10-24 seconds) decays--that is,
transforms--into other particles, leaving behind an unusual arrangement
of otherwise normal matter as the only sign of its brief existence.  In
1994 researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in
Illinois were able to create similar conditions artificially.  The top
quark turns out to be as heavy as an atom of gold.  So quarks are
"real," though this word still does not have as much descriptive value
to a physicist as to a machinist.

Most physicists now believe that all tangible matter is made of just
three particles, electrons, up quarks, and down quarks.  If so, these
would be the truly uncut table atoms imagined by Greek philosophers
2,500 years ago.  The other quarks may have been abundant immediately
after the Big Bang.  The fact that there is no empirical way to show
this does not mean the knowledge is useless.  A final answer awaits a
final theory of force and matter, which may turn out to say that
nature's elementary structures are not "particles" at all.

radio waves * Radio signals are waves of electromagnetic energy (see
EMF) that rise and fall with a frequency from a few thousand cycles per
second to a few million million (1012), thus occupying about
one-billionth of the total electromagnetic spectrum that extends beyond
the 1016 million cycles per second of COSMIC RAYS.  Practically
speaking, the limits of radio frequency for communication are about 10
kHz (thousand cycles per second) to 300 GHz (billion cycles per
second).  The FBI and CIA control much of the population by
transmitting signals that are picked up by tooth fillings or wires
implanted in our brains.

Kidding.

In 1831, the English physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who had
left school at the age of fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder,
conducted seminal experiments in electromagnetism during one ten-day
spurt of genius.  In the early 1860s, the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell
(1831-1879) unified electricity and magnetism with a set of
mathematical equations (for all but atomic dimensions, which require
quantum mechanics) .  In 1886, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz
(1857-1894) showed that radio waves behave like light waves.  Thus the
theoretical foundation was laid for tech-l nologies that shaped
twentieth-century civilization.  When Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937),
the Italian son of an Irish woman, became obsessed with wireless
communication and demonstrated that radio waves could skip over the
horizon by beaming some between St.  John Newfoundland, and Corn-wall,
England, in 1901, the global village was born.  In 1922 he proposed
what would become known as radar, but development of this device
depended on war, not commerce.

Any electrical spark, from a household short circuit to lightning bolt,
generates radio waves.  To make them carry useful information, such as
music, baseball games, or astarlet's come-hither voice, requires
shaping the waves with electronic circuitry.  Thanks to the insights of
Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, and several generations of clever engineers,
this can be done simply and cheaply.  Can aliens in outer space hear
the Glenn Miller band or news of appeasement at Munich?  Well, can they
see your flashlight beam when you shine it up into as tarry sky?

And do the FBI and CIA control the aliens, or vice versa?

Much of the television spectrum, at least, is now devoted to answering
such important questions.

radon -In De re metallica, a study of mining published posthumously by
the German physician and town administrator Georgius Agri-cola
(1494-1556), silver miners in the Erz (literally "Ore") Mountains
between Germany and Czechoslovakia were noted to be so plagued by fatal
lung disease that some women there had been widowed seven times.  Not
until 1879, in an article titled "Der Lungenkrebs, die Bergkrankheit in
den Schneeberger Gruben" ("Lung Cancer, Mountain Sickness of the
Schneeberg Good old days.  In May 1921, Marie ct fris rereives agram of
radium, the ptatural sour re of radon, frosn President Warrefit Harding
"on behalf of the woment (If America.

Miners"), was the affliction identified as cancer from autopsies by two
German researchers, with mortality rates reaching 50 percent among men
in the "death shafts."

As knowledge about radioactivity grew in the first decades of this
century, some doctors began to connect these cases with high
concentrations of uranium in the ore, but others blamed genetic
inbreeding among the insular miners.  Digging never slowed down, of
course.  An Erz mine near Joachimisthal, Bohemia, supplied more than a
ton of pitchblende (UO2) to Marie Curie for her pioneering (and
physically backbreaking) isolation of radium.  In the United States,
radium-containing products--which over the years had included even
toothpaste and laxatives--were not banned until 1938.  Finally, the
burgeoning demand for uranium after World War II provided enough
epidemiological evidence to confirm that prolonged exposure to radon
gas--anat ural radioactive decay product of uranium and radium--causes
lung cancer.

Technically, radon (specifically radon-222, the most common isotope)
forms directly from ALPHA RAY decay of radium-226, which in turn comes
from the uranium-238 that comprises 99.3 percent of all uranium in
nature.  The word radon was coined from radium emanation during early
studies of radioactivity by Ernest Rutherford, Fritz Dorn, and other
physicists around 1900.  In their attempts to understand how one
substance could emit something that was also radioactive, Rutherford
and Frederick Soddy, a chemist, produced the first evidence of elements
transmuting into others--the ancient dream of alchemy.

Both uranium-238 and radium-226 are found in most soils and rocks,
albeit in widely varying concentrations.  Certain types of granite,
black shale, and phosphatic rocks are the rich-est.  In the United
States, the core rocks of the Appalachians from Maine to Alabama are
high in radon, as are areas with granitic sediment in California,
Colorado, Idaho, and New Mexico.  A radon hot spot surrounds Tampa Bay,
Florida, due to phosphate rock high in uranium and radium.  But
geologic factors alone cannot always predict local radon levels.  On
aver-age, radon accounts for 67 percent of each American's radiation
dose from natural sources.

An invisible, odorless, tasteless inert gas above143 F, radon leaves
the ground and enters surrounding air or dissolves in water.  Its
concentration depends on how rich the source is and the adequacy of
ventilation.  Radon itself decays, with a half-life of 3.82 days, into
solid polonium isotopes.  (Polonium was named by Marie Curie after her
native Poland, her maiden name was Manya Sklodowska.) These isotopes,
which are also radioactive, used to be called radon daughters but are
now correctly addressed as radon progeny.  They are actually the main
causes of lung cancer.

At the Earth's surface, the health hazard from radon is negligible, but
any building will accumulate the seeping gas to some extent--typically
four or five times the outdoor concentration.  Skin is an effective
barrier against alpha radiation, but when radon and its progeny enter
the lungs, soft tissue cells lining the airways may be altered by
emitted alpha particles to trigger the growth of malignant tumors. 
(Technically speaking, an alpha particle from polonium-214 will deposit
7.69 million electron volts of energy within about seventy microns of
tis-sue.) Tobacco smoke and radon are known to be synergistic
carcinogens.  While underground miners were the first to be associated
with adverse health effects from breathing radon, the gas is now known
to be a ubiquitous indoor air pollutant due to its presence in soil
underneath buildings, construction mate-rials like cement blocks, well
water, and utility natural gas.  In some houses, concentrations have
measured as high as those found in mines.

Indoor radon is thus an important public-health problem, though
scientists and politicians continue to debate the magnitude of risk. In
1966 the federal government ordered a halt to the practice in some
areas of the United States of using uranium mill tailing sands rich in
radium-226 to make concrete or as backfill during building
construction.  In the 1970s more than 700 homes and other structures
around Grand Junction, Colorado, were razed or excavated to remove
radioactive fill and bricks at an average cost of $13,500.  Under the
Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978, the Environmental
Protection Agency established a threshold radiation measure of 4 pico
curies (trillionths of a curie, astandard unit of radiation equal to 37
billion disintegrations per second) per liter of air in such houses,
above which the government would pay for cleanup.

At this level, the chance of lung cancer from lifetime expo-sure
(seventy years) is equivalent to one to five cases per him-dred people,
assuming 75 percent of time is spent indoors.  In 1984 a house near
Boyertown, in Pennsylvania's uranium-rich Reading Prong geologic
region, was discovered to have 3,000 pico curies per liter--the
equivalent in lung-cancer risk to smoking 135 packs a day--after its
owner, Stanley Watras, kept setting off radiation alarms at the
Limerick nuclear power plant where he worked.  This watershed incident
set off a wave of publicity about radon hazards.  For comparison, radon
levels in Erz Mountain mines averaged about 2,900 pico curies and up.

In 1986, after finding that about 10 percent of the nation's 80 million
homes probably harbored radon levels above 4 pico-curies, even if they
weren't located in uranium-rich regions, the EPA began to issue
advisories for the general public.  The goal was to make indoor levels
as low.  as those outdoors, which vary geographically--averaging, for
example,5.4 pico curies in New Jersey 0.8 in Texas, 0.24 in New Mexico,
0.13 in New York City, 0.12 in Washington, DC.  In Maine and Rhode
Island, the average radon concentration in private well water exceeds
6,000 pico curies per liter, contributing to indoor pollution through
aeration in showers, toilets, and washers.  Aver-age indoor exposure in
the United States is probably 1 to 2 pico curies

The EPA estimates that indoor radon exposure causes between 7,000 and
30,000 lung-cancer deaths a year.  Anyone wishing to pooh-pooh these
figures is free to visit the famous radon spas of Europe, such as
Badgastein in the Austrian Alps, where "treatment galleries" boast of
3,000 pico curies  Prosit!

smells * The "real secret" of class distinctions, wrote George Orwell
in The Road to Wigan Pier, can be summed up in "four frightful words",
The lower classes smell.  Along these lines, we must also recall the
French perfumer of 1709 who proposed a royal scent for the aristocracy,
a bourgeois cologne for the middle class, and a disinfectant for the
poor.  Of course, even Versailles in its heyday reeked of pis se et
merde not only from court privies and chamber pots, but from every
fireplace and dark corner where the ill-mannered relieved themselves
regardless of birthright.

And pity poor Flaubert, obsessed with the odeur of his mistress's
slippers.

Being in good odor has always depended on more than fragrance, as les
putains the world over can attest.  If the Devil could mask his
sulfurous stench, he would still be evil incarnate.  But smells alone
have been potent sources of social meaning since ancient times, the
Latin antecedent for sagacious, sag ax meant having a good sense of
smell as well as being perceptive.

The human nose is capable of recognizing tens of thousands of different
odors, most with just a single sniff as short as 400 milliseconds.
There are upward of half a million different smelly things out there
somewhere.  In general, women's sense of smell is better by any measure
than men's, and they are better at naming them.  Yet our main
categories are borrowed from a few taste terms, sweet, burned, pungent,
bitter, sour, and so forth.  In the past century of more or less
scientific inquiry, researchers have proposed various subdivisions of
basic odors, including ambrosial, balsamic, ethereal, resinous,
aromatic, putrid, fetid, and goaty.  Smells are otherwise designated by
what they emanate from.  In English there is only one verb to express
both inhaling and emitting odors, to smell.

"You smell, I stink," Samuel Johnson reminded a young lady offended by
his sweatiness on a hot London day.  While there is an enormous gap
between the olfactory environment of past centuries and our deodorized
era, the way we talk about smells--in metonymic figures of speech,
which refer to the origin of the phenomenon ("like a rose") rather than
to a paradigm ("red")--is the same.

Despite this linguistic poverty and the fact that smells have been
purged, euphemized, and repressed by modern Western society, their
symbolic power has never been eradicated.  Hence Proust's search for
lost time, his "smells changing with the sea-son, but plenishing and
homely, offsetting the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweetness of
warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and
settled, heedless and provident, linen smells, morning smells, pious
smells."

But the difficulty of naming, measuring, preserving, or re-creating
smells has ensured that science would give them short shrift compared
with other sensory experiences, particularly vision.  Rene Descartes
believed unequivocally that the sense of science is sight.  Immanuel
Kant was downright disparaging, "To which organic sense do we owe the
least and which seems to be the most dispensable?  The sense of smell.
It does not pay us to cultivate it or refine it."  Before the twentieth
century, what little scientific interest there was in smells derived
from their miasmic association with disease.  Stench was held either to
cause illness, as in malaria (from the Italian malaria, literally "bad
air"), or to prevent it, as in the wearing of garlic cloves or folk
nostrums against the plague.  London cesspools were ordered open during
Charles II's reign to turn back the plague with their fierce odor.  In
Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the Yahoos treat themselves with a mixture
of their own dung and urine, parodying the actual anti plague practice
of inhaling stink from a privy hole (preferably on an empty stomach). 
After Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch established the germ theory of
disease in the late nineteenth century, odors depreciated in value,
though there are diseases that can be legitimately--albeit
archaically--diagnosed from smells (cirrhosis of the liver, gout,
yellow fever, typhoid, diphtheria, scurvy, rubella, diabetes).

Only 7 of the 105 natural elements--fluorine, chlorine, bromine,
iodine, oxygen (in the form of OZONE), phosphorus, and arsenic--have an
odor.  Molecules that we can smell must be in a gaseous state and
capable of being transported by our inspiration, which normally occurs
at a velocity of about five miles per hour.  Two branches of the
trigeminal nerve the main conduit for motor and sensory fibers to the
face run from the brain to nerve endings throughout the nasal cavities,
where air is screened for irritating odors.  Chemical receptors react
with a prickly sensation that causes us to sneeze away any offenders.
An estimated 10 million olfactory neurons (dogs possess some 200
million) in two narrow chambers behind the nasal bridge are activated
when their receptors find matching aromatic molecules in the air we
inhale.  Smellable substances must therefore also be soluble in the
mucus that surrounds these nerve endings.  Whether the distinctiveness
of their odor is due mainly to chemical characteristics or molecular
shape is still not completely understood.

Unlike the neurons for sight, hearing, and touch, our olfactory nerves
are connected directly to the brain without any intervening apparatus.
The olfactory system has thus long been known as an express train to
the brain, as cocaine snorters can attest.  The oracle at Delphi, after
all, primed her-self with wisps of smoldering bur el  The fact that the
processing of olfactory information is dominated by primitive areas of
the brain (amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus) helps explain why the
perception of smells is relatively un verbal and has as much to do with
emotion as reason.  A color will never seem as ugly as a rotten-egg
smell is repulsive.  PET (positive emission tomography) scans have
shown increased activity in the left side of the amygdala, an
almond-shaped section of the midbrain associated with fear and other
negative feelings, when test subjects smelled sulfurous gases.  Regions
on the right side of the brain associated with language are not
strongly connected to the olfactory circuitry.

Perhaps inspired by Proust, researchers in recent years have tested the
tenacity of olfactory memories.  As long as laboratory subjects do not
have to verbally identify odors, they easily remember many different
smells experienced several months earlier.  After a year, their scores
slip to around 70 percent.  This is much better than our retention of
visual information, which stays high for the first few weeks and then
heads for zero after about four months.  But if asked to name the test
odors, even our short-term olfactory memory is poor, demonstrating the
difficulty most people have when they try to talk about smells.

In general, olfactory memory peaks around the age of thirty, like so
much else in life.

'lh4 SN I FFMOBILE

PUBLIC OPINION ODOR 0

TESTING SURVEY t SOUTHIItEST AtSESEH tSSrWuTt .. b Coming to a city
near you.  The Snifmobile, a mobile laboratory for testing public
reaction to urban smells.

Such results support the theory that the essential purpose of our sense
of smell is to act as an alarm system, provoking quick individual
emotional responses rather than elaborate cognitive analyses.

"I smell a rat!"  Almost all odors are immediately liked or disliked,
few seem neutral.  (For Plato, who was suspicious of the connection
between smells and emotions, there were only two classes of odors,
stinky and pleasant.) Most people would agree that HYDROGEN SULFIDE is
awful, and lavender is pleas-ant.  There are toxic substances, such as
CARBON MONOXIDE, that are odorless, as well as some, like cyanide, that
are rather nice.  And even agreeable odors become disagreeable when
they get too strong.  Conversely, some stinky ones get delectable at
low concentrations.

"A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog
like elder flowers," declared Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an 1823 book
titled, oddly, Table Talk.  In general, preferences and aversions are
learned through personal experience, with the latter being more
persistent.

Only 20 percent of the estimated 400,000 odorous compounds are
classified as pleasant, perhaps because people tend to judge any
unfamiliar smell as bad.

Artificial olfaction--using arrays of electrochemical sensors connected
to computers--has been employed in recent years for quality control in
the food and beverage industry, and to monitor the production of smelly
chemicals such as airplane deicer.  In breweries, for example,
electronic noses can detect the presence of diacetyl, which gives beer
a buttery "off" flavor.

More finely tuned models can discriminate among varieties of wine.
Using plastic sensors that swell to different degrees in the presence
of various odor molecules, artificial olfaction is mov-Test sniffers
with period hairdos, mid-1960sing closer to the ultimate goal of
creating a "nose brain" that consists of thousands of sensors on a
single silicon chip along with all the neural network circuitry to run
them.

Surveys have found that the most offensive odors from industrial
processes are those of hydrogen sulfide, pyridine, butyric acid,
phenol, methyl and ethyl mercaptan, dim ethyl sulfide, and dim ethyl
disulfide.  In the home, among the worst are carboxylic acids in sweat
and rancid food, thiols, amines, and the complex makeup of "stale"
tobacco smoke.  Tetrahydrothio-phene, the natural-gas leak alarm
additive that is considered exquisitely smell able can be detected when
concentrations reach about four billion molecules per liter of air.
Skunks, by the way, disable enemies up to thirty feet away with a fine
spray of butyl mercaptan allomone (see PHEROMONE) shot from two
strongly muscled anal glands.

Over the long haul, of course, none of this matters much.

Half of all people between the ages of sixty-five and eighty have lost
their sense of smell.  Past eighty, only a quarter are still getting a
good whiff of the world.  Of some consolation to men, at least, is the
fact that the nose itself doesn't shrink with age and thereby negate
one of the last physical emblems of virility.

soot h A term that traces back to the grimy campfires of prehistory.
Its Indo-European base is sod-or sed-, which are also the roots for
"sit" and "settle."  Soot is that which settles, namely the fine black
particles of nagging concern to any primitive society in constant
contact with dirty air.

Like the inhabitants of New York City.  Soots are of concern to modern
industrial societies because they form during the F POLIT Ia8 F az
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burning of hydrocarbon fuels.  Ideally, only CARBON DIOXIDE and water
would result from such combustion, but in the real world of engines and
furnaces there is also soot (as well as other pollutants, such as
CARBON MONOXIDE).  Soot forms as fuel molecules agglomerate into
carbonaceous particles large enough to be pulled down by gravity
instead of riding on the WIND.  Besides making a greasy film on city
windowsills, they are often carcinogenic.  Yes, Virginia, Santa Claus
would never survive exposure to so much chimney soot.  The chemical
industry, which creates lots of it, recycles some as filler in tires,
copy machine toner, and printing inks.

Soot occupies a special niche in the study of physics, where it
provides a simple means to approximate the ideal of a "black body"--one
that absorbs all radiation that strikes it, thus appearing black.
Surfaces coated with soot, or carbon black, soak up about 97 percent of
incident energy.

spores e Many plants, PROTOZOA, and BACTERIA form special cells that
germinate under the right conditions to create the next generation
Think of them as time capsules containing all the information required
to restart the creatures' existence.  The term spore was first used in
1836, borrowed from Greek spora, meaning "seed," and sporos, "sowing."
(As a terminological rule of thumb, spores are asexual, non dividing
reproductive cells, POLLEN contains plant sperm, and seeds are embryos
for new plants.) Spores are often remarkable for their tough resistance
to extreme environmental conditions and, thus, long-term viability. For
reasons that are not completely understood, some can survive incredibly
harsh insults, extensive boiling and freezing, radiation exposure,
chemical attack, desiccation, and seemingly endless storage. Slime mold
spores have been shown to keep on ticking for more than fifty years,
while those of mosses may last for thousands.  Bacillus anthracis
bacterial spores can persist for years in alluvial soil like that of
the Nile valley, explaining how the Lord could visit "a very severe
plague"--anthrax--upon Pharaoh's cattle in Exodus 9. Spores of
Clostridium botu-linum must be heated above 250 F (only possible in a
pressure cooker) to guarantee destruction.  Such spores, along with
their nasty cousins from C. tetani, are ubiquitous in nature and
present a constant challenge in the prevention of botulism in preserved
food and tetanus poisoning in wounds.

Like pollen, plant spores can be allergenic.  Bracken fern and club
moss are infamous offenders, their spores showing up thickly on air
sample slides in the northwestern United States.

Dried club moss spores are sometimes used in cosmetic powders which can
cause wicked hay fever, and in fireworks because of their high
flammability.  (Don't fret about your face catching fire.) Spores from
the horsetail rush are in the breeze over the eastern United States
from March to September.  Each carries four "elaters"--long tendrils
with spatulate ends--that expand under dry conditions for extra
buoyancy on the wind and hug the spore when wet to help keep it on the
ground.

Tropical winds carry as many as 2,800 fungal spores per cubic meter of
air across North America in the Arctic.  Inhaling those of the fungus
Coccidioides immitis can cause a disease known as San Joaquin or valley
fever.  The infection rate may be as high as 90 percent in the U.S.
Southwest, though many people never notice it or experience flu like
symptoms at worst.  Anyone whose immune system is sub par however,
could be in store for a progressive form of the illness with a high
fatality rate.

Mushrooms reproduce via spores.  In fact, what we call mushroom is just
the aboveground portion of these fungal organisms, a "fruiting body"
(somewhat analogous to an apple on an apple tree) that grows expressly
for the release of enormous numbers of spores.  A four-inch cap can
shed 100 million per hour when ripe.  If they fall on friendly,
unoccupied territory, a new underground vegetative network, or
"mycelium," will develop, but if they land somewhere already claimed,
they will fuse with the resident mycelium.  Most mushroom spores are
meant to go airborne, but some rely on novel means of transport.
Truffles, for example, need to be eaten by mice or squirrels, which
disperse the spores in their feces.  Fairy caps hold their spores in a
bowl-like depression, from where they are splashed afar by raindrops.
And stink horns coat their spores with sticky slime, containing the
same volatile compounds that waft off a corpse, to attract flies.

In the mid-1970s, mycologists isolated a mycelium of Armillaria ostoyae
threaded across I,500 acres in Klickitat County, Washington. The thrill
of stomping on a big ripe puffball, Cal-vat ia gig antea comes from
watching the exodus of trillions of purple-brown spores.

sulfur dioxide -A sharply odored, colorless gas that is powerfully
irritating because it turns into sulfurous acid on contact with
moisture.

Emissions of SO2 from oil-and coal-fired power plants, petroleum
refineries, metal smelters, acid manufacturers, and auto-motive exhaust
have contributed heavily to "acid rain," photochemical smog, and the
destruction of books in libraries around the world.

Thanks to government intervention, the days are over when a large
copper smelting factory, such as in Sudbury, Ontario, denuded its
downwind environs for miles of all plant life.  But industry still
battles federal efforts on behalf of less sulfur dioxide pollution. In
1990, for example, corporate lobbyists warned that new controls on
power stations would cost X1,500 per ton of SO2 removed, driving up the
cost of electricity at a rate that consumers would find unpalatable.
The actual cost turned out to be $70 to $100.

The U.S. air-quality standard for sulfur dioxide is a maxi-mum
concentration of 0.14 parts per million over twenty-four hours.  People
start to smell and taste it in the range of 0.3 to 1 ppm.  In urban
areas, hourly peaks may hit 0.5 ppm.  Near metal smelters,1.5 to 2.3
ppm have been recorded.  During the catastrophic London smog of
December 1952, SO2 concentrations in air were measured as high as I.34
ppm.  These levels were nowhere near the toxic threshold of 10 ppm, at
which healthy people are generally affected (exposure to 0.1 ppm has
been shown to bother mild asthmatics), but sufficient in combination
with coal smoke to kill from 3,500 to 4,000 Londoners.

About 90 percent of inhaled sulfur dioxide is absorbed in the upper
respiratory tract, where it plays havoc with mucous membranes,
explaining why bronchitis used to be called the national disease of
Great Britain.

The fifty largest electric utility companies in the eastern half of the
United States account for half of the nation's SO2 emissions, led in
1995 by Illinois Power.  All of the utilities are in compliance with
the Clean Air Act, but the law permits regional differences that do not
fully recognize how pollution travels.  Ever notice any lichens growing
near where you live?

These hardy symbiotic communities of FUNGI and alga are highly
sensitive to SO2.  So if they're gone, beware.

thoughts" What can be the traces of words, of actual objects, what
further could be the enormous space adequate to the representation of
such a mass of material?"  wondered Cicero, his head spinning with
Roman intrigues, in the Tusculan Disputations.

Our mind is full of thoughts that no one else can see, all constrained
within the convoluted surface of our brain.  Since Descartes had the
audacity to divide the world into two sepa-The waviest gravy, PET and
MRI scans of schizophrenia.

rate realms, mental and physical, this dualism has probably generated
more neurosis than all the mothers in Brooklyn.

Translating the mind's eye into specific neuronal activity is the Holy
Grail of neuro science  For fifty years, electro encephalography (EEG)
has been used to record the electrical activity that accompanies
external stimuli to the brain, but the technique is dulled by having to
place electrodes outside on the scalp.  In the 1970s, X-ray computed
tomography, or X-ray CT, was developed, using precisely focused beams
of radiation that pass through a planar section of tissue at multiple
angles to create an image of the "sliced" surface.  This process
introduced a relatively noninvasive way to examine the inside of a
living brain.  It was followed by positron emission tomography, or PET,
whereby the brain's blood flow or other chemical functions are
portrayed via injected radioisotopes that emit detectable GAMMA RAYS.
Most recently, magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, induces atoms to
give Off RAD10 WAVES that reveal aspects of their biochemical
environment.  While the latest techniques can show which areas of the
brain are working as it "thinks," they are still too slow and coarsely
resolved to reveal what transpires at the cellular level.  Rest assured
that when such a device arrives, it will cost more than a penny per
thought.

Will happy thoughts look different than other kinds?

Peter Pan would never, never take no for an answer.  Still, the classic
boundary between cognition and anatomy is already gone, at least in the
laboratory.

The portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between visible light and x
RAYS, first noticed by the British chemist John Ritter in 1801 while
studying the effects of sunlight with a prism.

It begins just beyond what we can see as violet--hence the Latin prefix
ultra and the sobriquet "black light."  Ultraviolet light is
carcinogenic and capable of inflicting severe burns, which is why what
used to be called the "California look" is confined to a few living
legends like George Hamilton.

Except for occupational or incidental exposure from man-made sources
such as arc welders, sunlamps, and mercury vapor or tungsten halide
lights, all W radiation of biological concern comes from the nearest
star.  Of the 3.9 x 1026 watts of energy given off by the Sun--in terms
of wavelenghs, from 10 microns (,um) down to 0.2 pm--about 340 watts
per square meter reach the top of the planet's atmosphere.  Only about
7 percent of this energy is in the form of ultraviolet rays (defined as
running from 0.4 zm all the way down to about 0.001 pm), the biggest
shares being carried by visible light (from 0.7 1lm down to 0.4 pm)
and

INFRARED.

The most dangerous his--those in the so-called vacuum region of the
spectrum below 0.2 pm--are absorbed by molecular oxygen ( 2) and OZONE
(03) in the atmosphere before reaching the surface.  Otherwise, we and
every other form of life would be sizzled.

"Far" ultraviolet wavelengths between 0.2 and 0.3 11m are also strongly
blocked.  What little is left shining upon our tender pates--commonly
called UVB from 0.28 to 0.32 1lm and WA from 0.32 to 0.40 pm--is not an
acute hazard, except to some kinds of BACTERIA (such as, fortunately
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the agent of TB).  Certain plant species,
like the wild parsnip, depend on these rays to activate chemicals in
their leaves and flowers (called fura-nocoumarins) that poison foraging
insects.  Busy pollinators such as butterflies and honeybees, which can
see ultraviolet light reflected by flowers, are welcome.

W intensity on any given day varies greatly according to altitude,
atmospheric conditions, and the season.  Unlike X rays and GAMMA RAYS,
ultraviolet radiation is not strong enough to ionize the molecules it
hits, so it is less destructive of living tis-sue.  It can't even pass
through window glass, so you'll never get tanned in a greenhouse.  City
dwellers may take small comfort in the fact that smoke and smog also
filter it out.  But those UVB sunburn rays will buzz right through
clouds or fog, as many Cape Cod vacationers discover the hard way every
summer  They'll also penetrate a foot into clear water, making
water-resistant sunblock a necessity for long days at the beach.

Cumulative exposure, amounting to mere hours for a sunburn or many
years for cataracts and skin cancer, guarantees regret.

Lotions are very effective at keeping everyone happy if rated with SPF
> 15 and applied at least a half hour before exposure.

If you bake by mistake, oral corticosteroids like prednisone will bring
some relief (topical ointments are no better than cold water), but
forget anesthe ic gunk such as benzocaine.

Ultraviolet irradiation of skin cells has a worrisome ability to
distort the DNA helix.  It induces the production of chemicals from thy
mine--one of the four bases encoding genetic information in the DNA
chain--that act to impair faithful DNA replication.  That is, it may
cause mutations.  The longer the exposure, the greater the odds of
creating cancerous cells--especially in fair, white-skinned persons who
started getting lots of sun as children.  Due to changes in clothing
fashion and leisure time, 1 out of every 84 Americans is now expected
to develop melanoma, the least common but most dangerous form of skin
cancer, compared with 1 in 600 in 1960 and 1 in 1,500 in 1935. Melanoma
is the fifth most common cancer in the United States, with the
fastest-growing number of new cases.  The risk of developing
superficial skin cancers, such as squamous and basal cell carcinoma, is
also greatly increased by sun exposure.

Short of malignancy, damaged cells can die and produce the appearance
of premature aging.  None of the hugely advertised cosmetic "peels"
used to turn back the clock of sun damage can reverse such tissue
pathology.  It is a well-known scientific fact that older women who
have invested heavily in peels start to resemble insects, which can see
ultraviolet light.

The other major human organ affected by W is the eye.

Reactions range from mild to severe, with conjunctivitis and keratitis
(welder's flash or inflammation of the cornea) at one end and cataracts
of the lens at the other.  Sunglasses that block all W rays are the
preventive answer, particularly at high altitudes or under brightly
reflective conditions on snow or open water.

How did that groovy black light in your old dorm room work? Fluorescent
lamps produce lots of W light, which is filtered out by coatings when
they are used for conventional lighting.  Different coatings will block
the visible spectrum but pass W, makingJimi Hendrix posters glow via
induced luminescence of special inks.  Foxy lady!

A packet of genetic instructions able to commandeer a living cell's
metabolism and make copies of itself.  Otherwise, it's as dead as a
stone.  In Latin the word meant "poison," which expresses with Spartan
laconism what these things do to animals, plants, and even sAcTExIA.
(Here is the perfect place to insert the odd fact that English
originally had no words beginning with v--they've all been borrowed.)
In an age when most bacterial diseases are treatable, viruses are still
wild cards of fate.

In the fourteenth century, virus referred to any venomous substance. By
the early eighteenth, it was being applied to agents of infectious
disease, though over a century would pass before anyone understood what
was really happening.  In 1886, a German chemist, Adolph Mayer, found
that whatever was causing destructive mosaic patterns on tobacco leaves
could not be cultured.  In 1892, a Russian scientist reported that sap
from tobacco plants with mosaic disease could infect other plants even
after passing through a filter fine enough to remove bacteria.  By
1898, tobacco mosaic virus was the first germ to bear the term,
followed by the foot-and-mouth disease virus in cattle and the yellow
fever virus in humans (1900).  With the advent of electron microscopes
in Germany during the 1930s, the realm of viruses was opened up to
classification.

There are about 5,000 known viruses in a dazzling variety of
Buckminster Fullerian shapes from about 0.3 to 0.02 microns long.
Several hundred infect humans, mainly via close person-to-person
respiratory contact or body excretions.  Others prefer animals and
infect us only secondarily or if we encroach upon their ecosystems,
which may involve insects somewhere in the reproductive cycle.  While
the human viruses are ubiquitous, the "zoonotic" ones are generally
confined to the same environments as their reservoirs and vectors.  In
most cases of viral infection, there is no specific therapy, your
immune system either wins or loses the fight.

Respiratory viruses that cycle primarily in humans include influenza,
mumps, Epstein-Barr (mononucleosis), and myriad rhino viruses of the
common cold.  Measles is also transmitted in fine droplets spread by
coughing or sneezing, but the virus disappears from the nose and throat
after a rash appears.  Human "enteric" viruses that reside in the
intestinal tract and therefore pass around through the so-called
fecal-oral route include polio, Coxsackie (meningitis, paralysis), and
Norwalk (gastroenteritis  The ability of some viruses to hide from the
immune system and lie latent in the body is shown by hepatitis, herpes,
and papillomavirus (warts).  Retroviruses can cause cancer. Many
viruses, like polio, are symptom less more often than debilitating,
while a few, like measles and chicken pox, spread like fire in
susceptible populations.

Viruses that jump to us from animals or insects include those that
cause rabies, encephalitis, yellow fever, dengue, and various exotic
hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.  And, of course, there is HIV, the
agent of AIDS.  After nearly two decades of frenetic research, no one
yet knows where it came from.

Viruses are invulnerable to antibiotics.  A handful of antiviral drugs
are available, such as amantadine for influenza A and acy-clovir for
herpes, but most medicines that can zap a virus are AIDS virus budding
form human T-4 immune system cell.

also apt to cause troublesome side effects among good cells.

Vaccines are still the only technological adjunct to the natural immune
system against viruses, and there are precious few of them in general
use.  Smallpox remains the single example of a virus--or any other
microorganism, for that matter--brought to extinction in nature by the
hand of man, though polio has reached that status in the Western
Hemisphere.

Since the 1996 "mad cow disease" scare in Britain, sub viral particles
called pr ions (pronounced PREE-ons) have entered the medical
vernacular, if not many human bodies.  An order of magnitude smaller
than viruses, pr ions are believed to be deformed proteins that somehow
make normal cell protein molecules mimic their shape.  They contain no
genetic material and can withstand boiling temperatures, x RAYS,
ULTRAVIOLET radiation, and sundry chemical insults, like ten years in
FOrMALDEHYDE.  Whether pr ions or some more conventional infectious
agent cause mad cow disease is subject to debate, though the 1997 Nobel
Prize in medicine was awarded to their discoverer, neurologist Stanley
B. Prusiner.

A sheep disease known as scrapie (from the intense itching or scraping
behavior of infected animals), which has been recognized for centuries,
began to appear in British cattle during the 1980s. Characterized by
spongy holes in the brain that bring loss of coordination, paralysis,
and death, scrapie pr ions apparently jumped species through feed
concentrates containing sheep offal.  As vegetarians, cows were totally
unprepared to defend themselves against the new pathogens, which also
reached zoo antelopes in the same fashion.  Over the past decade, they
have killed 160,000 cattle in the United Kingdom with hundreds of
thousands more slaughtered as a preventive measure.

A similar form of' transmissible spongiform encephalopathy" (TSE),
known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, occurs with extreme rarity in
humans throughout the world, mostly adults in their late fifties.  In
the early 1970s, small studies found that victims were more likely to
have dined upon brains.  Thus, when sixteen youthful cases arose in
Great Britain in 1996, alarms went off about pr ion-infected meat from
nwad cows.

The feeding of offal to all food animals was banned, suspect herds were
destroyed, and exports nose-dived.

American cattle herds are considered to be free of mad cow disease, yet
scrapie exists in sheep and mammal remains are not totally banned from
feeds.  Meatpackers cut away the spinal cord and brain from edible
portions of beef, but the common practice of "stunning" cattle with a
power-driven plunger through the skull before butchering can spread
brain tissue throughout the animal's body.  (Poultry, fish, and dairy
products have never been implicated in TSE.) Whether and how the
disease experienced by animals can vault across the species bar-rier to
humans are matters of intense study.  Test-tube experiments have shown
that brain protein from cattle with mad cow disease and sheep with
scrapie can deform human brain protein.  Furthermore, mice injected
with brain tissue extracts from human victims of the new variant of
Creutzfeldt-Jakob associated with mad cow disease developed symptoms
just like those seen in mice exposed directly to extracts from sick
cows.

So skipping the cerveau might be prudent, along with cut-ting back on
hot dogs and sausages.  (There are lots of other good, noncontroversial
reasons to do this.) When in rural Kentucky, politely decline offers of
fried squirrel brains, which have been implicated in an unusual cluster
of Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases there.  Or just decide that now's finally
the time to go vegetarian.

While it is easy to state that most bacteria are harmless or
beneficial, it's a stretch to find something positive about viruses.

They do bring new evolutionary possibilities to their host--human
chromosomes may contain remnants of viral DNA.  For the sake of
diversity, at least, this can be construed as good.

water vapor r The Earth's atmosphere contains about 13 quadrillion
(1015) kilograms of evaporated H2Q or water vapor, which is equivalent
to a liquid volume of 15,500 cubic kilometers enough for maybe ten days
and nights of global rainfall, not forty.

Sounds like quite a bit of wet stuff, but this is only 0.001 per-cent
of the planet's total water supply, about 99 percent of which is in the
oceans and polar ice caps.

All that vapor is not evenly distributed, of course.  The best-known
expression for the amount in local air at a given temperature is
relative humidity, or the ratio (figured as a percentage) of the
existing water vapor pressure that is, the part of atmospheric pressure
caused by water vapor--to the saturation vapor pressure, which is the
point where vapor turns into liquid or ice.  (Dewpoint is the
temperature at which saturation occurs for a given pressure.)
Meteorologists know how to measure such parameters, but anyone who
spends summer in a big city between New York and Miami learns enough
about humidity to avoid repeating the experience if possible.

Finding the weight of water vapor in an imaginary column of air gives
another way of comprehending all those quadrillions  By convention, the
column covers a one-square-meter patch of ground and rises to the
boundary between the troposphere (from Greek tropos, "turn," referring
to the turbulence of this lowest section of the atmosphere) and
stratosphere (from Latin stratos, "flat layer")--about 10 kilometers
up--where the temperature is cold enough to condense most of the vapor.
If all the atmosphere's water vapor were spread out evenly, this pillar
would hold about 25 kg.  In reality, due to temperature differences, it
contains only about 5 kg at the North Pole, increasing to 45 kg at the
equator.  It averages about 9 kg over the United States in the
wintertime and 27 kg in the summer.  Describing the humid ness of an
August day as "heavy" is thus literally correct.

When water evaporates off the oceans or land, the molecules don't stay
in the atmosphere very long.  After an average of eleven days, they
fall back down in raindrops or snowElakes.

During this time they may travel long distances on the WIND--a mean
path of about I,000 kilometers in temperate climates.

This implies that local precipitation rarely comes from local
evaporation.  Prodigious amounts of water vapor drift over land from
the seas.  For example, the summer flow into the United States along
the Gulf of Mexico may be ten times the Mississippi debouchment.

But much of it never forms any precipitation at all.  Less than
two-thirds of the moisture blowing from the Pacific Ocean across the
United States and Canada falls to the ground.

Over parched regions such as the Southwest, the fraction may drop to
one tenth.  Unless water vapor can condense into droplets about I,000
microns in diameter (ten times the width of a human hair), it won't
come down.  When the air is super-saturated, moisture still needs
PARTICULATES to form droplets around.  The most common ones are salt
from sea spray, DUST from soil, and pollutants such as sulfuric or
nitric acid from fossil fuels (hence, acid rain).

The other major function of water vapor in the atmosphere is to act as
a cozy blanket.  H2O molecules in the air are too far apart to
interfere with the short wavelengths of solar radiation streaming in
from space.  But the Earth, being much cooler than the Sun, radiates
enennr back in long INFRARED waves, which get partially reflected down
again by the water vapor.  This "greenhouse" action--which is also
performed by CARBON DIOXIDE, METHANE, OZONE, and other gases--keeps the
surface as much as 54 F warmer than would other-wise be the case.

Where did the planet's water vapor come from originally?

Geologists and space scientists have debated for years whether
earthbound H2O derived from primordial volcanic eruptions, as first
proposed in the 1890s, or some extraterrestrial source such as
meteorites.  In 1986, Louis A. Frank of the University of Iowa
theorized that comets, whose nuclei are often likened to dirty
snowballs, carried water here from the outer reaches of the solar
system.  His novel idea was held in rather low regard until the spring
of 1997, when the NASA Polar satellite detected small comets (about
forty feet in diameter, not the twenty-five-mile caliber of Hale-Bopp)
entering the atmosphere at a rate of five to thirty every minute. Being
so small, they do not heat up to the point where their constituent
molecules would break apart.  They disintegrate at an altitude of 600
to 15,000 miles, where solar energy vaporizes their ice.  This process
could account for adding an inch of water to the surface every 10,000
to 20,000 years--quite sufficient to provide all the H20 now on
Earth.

In the summer of 1997, the German CRISTA-SPAS atmospheric research
satellite launched and retrieved by the space shuttle found evidence of
much more water vapor at high altitudes than geological theories can
explain.

When Aristotle coined the word we now know as meteorology around 330
B.C."  he believed that the sun raised up "moist vapors" from the
earth, which produced "meteors" of precipitation.  Comets, on the other
hand, were somehow the result of "dry exhalations" that also caused
lightning and earthquakes.

Given that he had only four elements to work with--earth, water, fire,
and air--this was not bad for seat-of-the-pants cosmology  That comets
might turn out to be the source of all moisture would surely have
appealed to his imagination, if not his dogma.

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!  Rage!"  cries King Lear upon the
stormy heath, attended only by his devoted fool.  But then there is
Shelley's wind among the pines in Promethe s Unbound, making "low,
sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts."  Agamemnon
sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, just to make sure the winds stayed
friendly on the way to Troy.  Always invisible or "viewless," as
Shakespeare preferred--except for what it perturbs, wind may be the
most anthropomorphized of all natural phenomena.  From the Aajej, a
Morrocan twister, to the Zonda, a hot westerly off the Andes, there are
myriad breezes hard and soft, named and sometimes worshiped as though
they were sentient beings.

Wind is where the answer is blowing, yet to converse with it is insane.
Great doomed empires, like the antebellum South, have utterly
disappeared with it.  Sowing it creates something far worse.  Being
three sheets to it is rife with pleasure, but fraught with regret. When
it leaves our sails we are done for.

And may the gods help anyone who spits or pisses into it.

Some of the earliest graphic symbols, such as the sigma and the
swastika, were used by aboriginal residents of North and South America
to represent hurricanes.  The word itself represents a linguistic whirl
over great time and distance from an Indo-European base, we-, which
became the Greek actes, wind, and aer, air, as well as Sanskrit vat as
wind, and Russian vejat, blow.  The progenitor itself eventually turned
into went-, which evolved into Latin vent us (from which English
developed vent, ventilate, and so forth), prehistoric Germanic wind az
and then German and Dutch wind plus Swedish and Danish vind.  The words
breath, spirit, and Ife are all etymologically entwined through the
Greek root pneuma, the Arabic ruh, and the Latin anima, each of which
also meant wind.  Besides our noun in English, there was once a verb
meaning "blow a horn" that survives in the term wind instrument.  The
twists and turns of thought leading to "break wind," the release of
FLATUS, should be intuitively obvious.

From the doldrums of equatorial latitudes, named by sailors for their
maddening dullness, to the jet streams discovered roaring around the
world at 200 miles per hour by World War II bomber pilots, wind or the
lack thereof is fundamental to maintaining a liveable planet.

"Anybody is as there is wind or no wind there," as Gertrude Stein put
it in "An American and France."  The 5.6 x 1015 tons of air that
envelop the earth, roiled by the planet's rotation, regulate an uneven
distribution of solar energy that otherwise would bake or freeze all
but a narrow zone passing through San Francisco, Madrid, and Athens in
the Northern Hemisphere, and Cape Town and Sydney in the Southern.

Edmund Halley, the English astronomer and comet name-sake, first
proposed solar heating as the cause of tropical winds in 1680. Immanuel
Kant wrote a treatise on wind and an essay about whether the westerly
in Europe picked up its moisture over the Atlantic.  About 2 percent of
all radiant energy from the sun becomes kinetic wind energy, which
circulates the air endlessly along lines of equal atmospheric
pres-sure.  Alexander Calder's mobiles would otherwise be known as
static art.  For the continental United States, the mean annual wind
speed is only eight to twelve miles per hour, but much higher gusts are
ubiquitous.  Between 1953 and 1989, 3,550 Americans were killed by some
27,000 documented tornadoes.

Windstorms claim an average of 30,000 lives around the world every
year.

Possession of a few elementary facts about wind and a bit of open space
can make anyone the scientific, if not financial, equal of TV
weathermen.  With your back to the wind, low pressure is always to the
left, high to the right--a rule known as Ballot's Law, after the Dutch
physicist who worked it out in 1857.  Since the wind turns
counterclockwise around a low-pressure area in the Northern Hemisphere,
a southerly breeze heralds a storm approaching from the west.  (Try
drawing it on a piece of paper--it's obvious.) If the wind then shifts
or "veers" to the west, the bad weather is heading north and your local
skies will probably clear up.  If it "backs" to the east, you'll soon
be in cold, wet air.  By noticing where high clouds are coming from,
you can get another reading, with your back to the wind again, if
clouds are blowing in from the left, the weather will worsen, from the
right, it will brighten.  Every-thing reverses in the Southern
Hemisphere, where people walk around upside down anyway.

To further insulate yourself from the inanities of weather
infotainment, you can turn the TV itself into a storm detector.

(Don't try this unless in the company of a licensed psychiatrist.)
Lightning produces electromagnetic waves with frequencies centered on
about 150 kilohertz, of which those between 54 and 60 kHz are picked up
by televisions.  Pop some corn, set the contrast at max, turn to the
highest numbered channel, then adjust the brightness down to nearly
black.  Go back to channel 2 and lightning will make flashes on the
tube.  If the screen goes completely bright or a picture appears, a
tornado may be within twenty miles.  Or you may already be in Oz.

Most of us will continue to leave weather forecasting to professionals,
but how fast the wind is blowing is an everyday concern.  The little
spinning cups called anemometers date from the mid-fifteenth century
and still provide the bulk of traditional wind speed data, enhanced
nowadays by Doppler radar systems that can measure up to 112 mph.  (The
knot, equal to I.15 mph, is the standard technical unit.) In 1805, an
English naval officer named Francis Beau Sort created a scale from zero
to twelve corresponding to the effects of rising wind speed on a fully
rigged frigate.  At force zero (less than one knot), there was not
enough wind to go anywhere on a glassy sea.  At force twelve (above 65
miles per hour) there was too much to hoist any sail safely.  Between
force six, a strong breeze of 22 to 27 knots that triggers small craft
warnings, and force seven, a moderate gale of 28 to 33 knots, many
birds and insects give up flying and humans find that walking straight
requires concentration.

Hurricanes are now categorized according to the Saffir-Simpson scale
from one (74-95 mph) to five (greater than 155 mph).  Between 1899 and
1980, 138 hurricanes battered the continental United States, of which
82 were category 1 or 2,54 were category 3 or 4, and just 2 were
dreaded cate-gory 5, the infamous Labor Day storm that struck the
Florida Keys in 1935 and Hurricane Camille, which raked the Gulf Coast
in 1969, both of which carried maximum sustained winds of about 200
mph.  Because friction reduces wind speed to nothing at ground level,
hugging the earth is what to do next time you're caught between home
and the liquor store in a cane.

Tornado wind speeds require their own scale, devised by T. T. Fujita.
It was based on analysis of damage produced by a 1970 funnel in
Lubbock, Texas, that was strong enough to put a permanent twelve-inch
twist in a twenty-two-story steel-frame building.

Ranging from F0, where 40-to-72-mph winds cause "light" damage, to F5,
where "incredible" destruction results from blasts between 261 and 318
mph (never actually observed, except in Spielberg's dreams), the
F-scale indicates that half of all tornadoes carry winds well below 100
mph, which cause only minor structural damage.  Australians seem to
have special affection for tornadoes, calling them "cockeyed bob" and'
willy-willy."

Downtown Lubbock survived the forced abandonment of its contorted
office building, but truly Texas-sized skyscrapers cannot be left to
the whimsy of Boreas.  Each of Manhattan's twin World Trade Center
towers rests upon 10,000 shock absorber sandwiches made of two slices
of neoprene rubber between three steel plates (what more fitting device
in the cap-ital of nosh?).

A few miles uptown, the distinctive slanted top of the Citicorp Center
conceals an 800,000-pound chunk of concrete that slides back and forth
across a steel plate to dampen structural vibrations from high winds.
Without such mechanisms, these prestigious monuments to free enterprise
might suffer the same ignominy as Boston's John Hancock Tower, half of
whose 10,000 sleek blue-green windows had to be boarded up with plywood
in the early 1970s until the edifice was bolstered against the
breeze.

Since wind pressure increases in proportion to the square of wind
speed, it is not hard to understand how great storms can level a
landscape.  The highest wind gust (nontornadic) ever recorded--231 mph
atop New Hampshire's Mount Washington on April 12, 1934--packed a
wallop of about 137 pounds per square foot, quite enough to send Mary
Pop-pins skyward.

While he was still a young rake, certainly long before he became dean
of St.  Paul's, John Donne celebrated the wind's mysteries, Go and
catch afalling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all
past years are, Or who cleft the Devil'sfoot, Teach me to hear mermaids
singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, Andf nd What wind Serves to
advance an honest mind.

x rays a "Behind a bound book of about one thousand pages I saw the
fluorescent screen light up brightly, the printers' ink offering
scarcely a noticeable hinderance."  Thus did a German professor named
Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) describe his first observation of
the miraculous penetrating power of a strange new radiant energy.  The
article, dated December 1895, bore the kind of stark title that even a
century later conveys the awestruck state of its author, "On a New Kind
of Rays."  What was the big book?  The Bible, perhaps?  If so, he was
smart not to mention it.

After listing assorted things that were rendered transparent by the
mysterious "active agent"--a pack of cards, a sheet of tinfoil, thick
blocks of wood, plates of metal and glass, strips of rubber, and so on
(one imagines Herr Doktor Rontgen racing around the laboratory trying
everything he could lay hands on, including, most importantly, Frau
Rontgen)--he ventures to name his discovery X-Strahlen in German, or X
rays.  Here merely was Descartes's traditional mathematical symbol for
an unknown quantity, but somehow it captured for the popular
imagination a quality both futuristic and sinister.

Wilhelm Rontgen's first X-ray photo, Frau Rontgen's hand, mit
Ringfinger.

Rontgen had noticed by accident that unexposed photo-graphic plates got
foggy after being left near a laboratory fad called a Crookes tube
(after British physicist-spiritualist William Crookes,1832-1919).
Similar to modern mercury or sodium street lights, Crookes tubes were
glass cylinders through which electrical currents passed in rarefied
air, causing eerie fluorescent glows in the residual gas and the glass
itself.

One night when Rontgen returned to his lab after forgetting to turn off
his Crookes tube, he noticed a sheet of paper coated with fluorescent
material glowing in the dark near the tube, which itself was covered by
cardboard.  Surmising that this might be related to the fogged photo
plates, he decided that invisible rays must be emanating from the
Crookes tube.  Lesser researchers had noticed the same effect before,
but thought something was wrong with the plates.

The most astonishing feature, by far, was that "if the hand be held
between the discharge-tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the
bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand
itself."  Was this a gift from Hades or Mount Olympus?

Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics in 1901.  By then, X-ray
photographs were a public sensation, though still a scientific
conundrum.  While researchers tried to figure out exactly where X rays
came from, polite society was electrified by the thought that they
might reveal a bare bottom under all those Victorian petticoats.

Unlike GAMMA RAYS, which are emitted naturally by radioactive elements,
X rays in the Earth's environment must be produced artificially.  There
are many cosmic sources of X rays, such as the Crab Nebula (the remains
of as tar that exploded in 1054), but the atmosphere shields us from
them.  The most common source in everyday life is, of course, the
diagnostic or therapeutic X-ray machine, which has been a fixture of
medical technology for much of this century.  In the years after X rays
were discovered, anecdotal evidencffuch as dermatitis and hair
loss--arose that they could be harmful.  Pierre and Marie Curie
suffered burns within a year of Rontgen's discovery.  Thomas Edison,
who foresaw a profitable business in building X-ray machines, quickly
abandoned the field after seeing strange pits develop in his
assistant's skin and experiencing redness around his own eyes. Initial
reports of carcinomas on the hands of radiologists surfaced in 1902. 
In 1906, after shining X rays on goats' testes, French researchers
concluded that reproductive cells were especially vulnerable.  But
general protective measures were not adopted until 1915 (by the British
Rontgen Society).  In the 1920s, the ability of X rays to cause genetic
mutations was shown in experiments with fruit flies, and birth defects
were studied in children whose mothers had been exposed during
pregnancy.

Nonetheless, medical X rays were routinely abused as doctors ignored
the hazards until the danger of even low-dose exposure was widely
appreciated in the 1960s and 1970s.

From their earliest application to locate bullets and broken bones,
through the use of dyes and radio-opaque barium to photograph internal
organs, they are still a basic tool, especially since the advent of CAT
(computerized axial tomography) scanners in 1973.  Perhaps 90 percent
of all nonnatural radiation exposure comes from medical and dental X
rays.

Benign diseases such as acne and ringworm, which were once zapped
copiously, are no longer treated this way.  (During the influx of North
African immigrants following Israel's independence doctors there
blasted more than 10,000 children with X rays to cure ringworm of the
scalp, resulting in a six-fold increase in thyroid cancers.) But sundry
forms of cancer are attacked with prodigious doses--aimed (at least in
theory) only at tumor cells.

In a typical X-ray machine, a stream of electrons from a heated
tungsten filament strikes a small metal dish made of tungsten or
chromium, knocking electrons from the inner shells of atoms in the
target, which generates X rays.  Some of the bombarding electrons are
also sharply deflected near atomic nuclei, producing more X rays.  The
tube in which this occurs is surrounded by heavy lead casing with an
aperture through which the useful rays escape.  (All X-ray machines
leak to some extent, and the beams scatter, which is why your dental
hygienist ducks out of the room.) The X-ray beam aimed at teeth or a
broken arm is a composite of various wavelengths and degrees of
penetrability.  Dense tissue like bone absorbs the less energetic rays,
leaving shadows on photographic film.

According to the National Academy of Science's BEIR-V report of 1990,
an X-ray dose of 300 to 500 rads to the human testes, either acute or
over several weeks, can cause permanent sterility.  A similar effect on
the female ovaries occurs between 250 and 600 rads.

zeitgeist @ Germans love to string nouns together.  Here George Wilhem
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) fused Geist, spirit, with Zeit, time, to
coin a wondrously resonant word for "spirit of the age."  Invisible,
evanescent, ineluctable, and stark, the zeitgeist is not to be trifled
with.  Just ask the Germans, who followed one of this century's monster
zeitgeists straight to hell.

The term was popular at least as far back as the mid-nineteenth
century, when Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), a Swiss pastor and
moralistic novelist, published a book titled Zeitgeist und Berner Geist
(roughly, lXe Spirit of the Age and the Spirit of Bern), defending
rural values against urban decadence.

It eventually acquired the linguistic power of another German word,
Rausch, which is the feeling one gets from listening to Wagner, say, or
the exhilaration of modernism, the drug like "rush" of being perfectly
atuned.  By now it has largely shed its darksome utopian connotations
and become generalized, but it can take them on again in spontaneous
fashion.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the zeitgeist is how it coalesces
almost before anyone knows it, certainly long in advance of the pundits
who describe it.  Those enthralled by it are onboard before they know
it.  There is little to resist should they want to.  Geist also means
ghost, of course, another kind of irresistible ephemeron.  And it may
be used to express the concept of mind or intellect, the incorporeal
part of the brain where THOUGHTS lurk.

What sort of zeitgeist spawns a list of invisible things?

These are times of aimless anxiety and greed, poor Reverend God-help
might have preached.  In the long run, he was on the wrong side of
history.  Now we can aspire only to a combination of utility and levity
for which no one has yet found a word.

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Index.

absolute space,73 acetic acid,24 acid rain,146,158 acoustic
energy,101-102 aerosols,"2 Agent Orange, 43,44 Agricola, Georgius,131

AIDS,65,66,126,154

air, xv-xvi air pollution,"4,134 air-quality regulations,29,32-33,78,
air showers,38 aldehydes,59 allergens,3-5,46-47,93,124,125,
allomones,"8 alpha rays,5-10,15,21,22,67,68, 69,133,134 ambergris,"6
amebiasis,126 American Cancer Society,"2 American Conference of
Govern-mental Industrial Hygienists

(ACGIH),59

ammonia,5,10-13,18,24,34,65 Amoeba, 125 androstenes,"8 androstenol,25
androstenone,25 anemometers,163 anesthesia,82,83 animal dander,4,46,47
antibiotics,17,19,37,67,154 ants,120 apocrine glands,25 Apollonius,34
arachnids,89 Archimedes,122 argon,27,81,97 Aristotle,23,27,34,71,159
Arrhenius, Svante,28,34 asthma,4,46,47,59,93,107,125 atmosphere,
xvi,27,28-29,31,80, 84,85,86 ammonia in,"-12 CFCs in,62 methane
in,85-86 water vapor in,157--59 atom smashers,8,39,127-28,129 Atomic
Energy Commission,52,53 atoms,8,21-22,95,128,130 fundamental forces
governing behavior of, 49-50 aura seminal is,24 auto
emissions,29-30,49,60,108 background radiation, xvi,13-16, 40 Bacon,
Francis,104 bacteria, 4,",16 19,27,61,65,90, 91,107,121,153,156 effect
of W radiation on,150 methanogens,18,57,85 oral,20 spores,144
Bacteroldes, 57 bad breath,19-21 Ballot's Law,162 Beau Sort Francis,163
Becquerel, Henri,5-6,7,21,53 bees,91-92,"9,120 Beethoven, Ludwig
van,103-4 Bell, Alexander Graham,101 beta burn,23 beta decay, 95-96
beta rays,7,9,14,21-23,67,68, 69 Bierce, Ambrose,99 Big Bang,74,76,130
biogas,85 biomass burning,12,109 biosphere, ammonia in," biphenyls,41
"black body," 144 black holes,67,68,74,75-76 Blake, William,70

B.0.,23-26,"7

body lice,36-37 Bohr, Niels,8,22,96,129 bombykol,"8-19
Bordetellapertussis, 19 Bosch, Carl,10 11 brain, xv,139,148 Bruno,
Giordano,71 burps,26-27 Butenandt, Adolph EJ.,"8 Buderov, Alexander
Mikhailovich, Caesar' Julius xvi Calder, Alexander,161 Callendar,
George,28 cancer,23, 42,55,133,134,150,154, alpha radiation and,9-10
background radiation and,14 EMF and,48-49 lung,135,136 skin,151-52
carbon,18 carbon dioxide,17,27-32,57,62, 80,86,143,159 sources of,29
carbon-14,40,54,55 carbon monoxide, xvii,32-34,35, 86,"1,140,143
carbonated beverages,31-32,82 carbonic acid,27 carcinogens,9,
42,43,49,60,"2, 134,143,149 CAT (computerized axial tomography)
scanners,168 cathode rays,21 Cavendish, Henry,73,76 Cavendish
Laboratory, Cambridge, 7,8 cesium-137,54,55 Chadwick' James,22 Chanel,
Coco,"7,"9 Chapman, Sydney,109 Charles II, king of England,138 chemical
warfare,10-11,34 chiggers,93 chlorine,41,62,"0-11 chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs),61-64, 86,"0 Cicero,147 cigarette smoke see tobacco smoke
civet,"6 Clean Air Act,108,"1,147 cleptoparasitism,91 Clinton, Bill,103
Clinton administration,29,64 Clostridia, 57,144 cloud chamber,38 cobalt
bomb,52 cocaine,13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,141 comet tails, 34 36
comets,159-60 Consumer Product Safety Commission,60 cooties,36-37,92
Copernicus, Nicolaus,71 copulines,"8 cosmic rays,14,38-40,97,129,130
Cowan, Clyde,96 Coward, Noel,3 Crab Nebula,167 CreutzEeldt-Jakob
disease,155-56 Crookes, William,166 cryptosporidiosis,126 Curie,
Marie,6,9,10,21,133,134,167 Curie, Pierre,6-7,21,167 cyanobacteria,18
cyanogen (CN),35 cyclonite (RDX),59 Cygnus X-1,75 dark matter,76
Darwin, Charles,"I Davy, Humphry,82-83 Dermatophagoidesfarinae, 93
Descartes, Rene,137,147-48,165 dew point,157 Dickinson, Emily, xviii
Dillinger'John, 61 dioxin,41-44,56 Dirac, Paul,123 disease,19 germ
theory of,138 see also health effects

DNA,150-51,157

Donne'John,"6,164-65 Doppler radar systems,163 Dorn, Fritz,133 Dow
Chemical Company,42,43,44 DuPont, E. l. (co.),61,62,63 dust,17,
44-47,"2,"4,"5,124 dust mites, 4,93 dust particles,35 dynamite,87
Earth,xvi,14,35,61,62,77,80, 158-59 temperature,28-29,31 see also
atmosphere Eaton, R.J.,28 eccrine glands,24 Eddington, Sir Arthur
Stanley,74 Edison, Thomas,80,167 Edward I, king of England, xvii
"Eightfold Way, The," 128 Einstein, Albert,61,72,73-74,96, 122,123
Eisenhower, Dwight D.,51,53,54 electroencephalography (EEG),148
electromagnetic energy,130 electromagnetic fields see EMF
electromagnenc radiation,86 electromagnetic spectrum,123, 149-50
electromagnetism,49-50,73,96, 130 31 electrons,21-22,35,50,88,96,129
elements,71,138 EMF (electromagnetic fields),47-51, energy,88,128
energy conservation (principle),22, _ 180 Index Engels, Friedrich,120
Environmental Protection Agency

(EPA),12,42,43,56,64,135,

environmental regulation,79,109 Escherichia coli, 17,18,57 ethane,62
ethyl alcohol,24 European Space Agency,75 eutrophocation,12
fallout,15,16,23,41,51-56 Faraday, Michael,130,131 federal standards
limits air quality,29,32-33,78,"5 ammonia," carbon monoxide,32-33

EMF,50-51

formaldehyde,59-60 hydrogen sulfide,79 laughing gas,84 methyl
chloride,88 noise,105 ozone,108 radon,135 sulfur dioxide,146-47 Fermi,
Enrico,39,95,96,123 fetor hepatic us,21 Feynman, Richard,123
flatus,27,57-58,161 Flaubert, Gustave,136 Fleming, Alexander,19 fog,"2
foods,"hot," 14-15 force, theory of,130 forces, fundamental,49-50,73,75
formaldehyde, xv, xvi,58-61,155 Fosbroke'John,104 Frank, Louis A.,159
Freon,61-64,"0 Frisch, Karl von,"9,120 Fujita, T. T.,163 fumes,"2 Index
181 fungi,4,46,47, 61,64 67,91,147 furans,41 Galileo,74,121 gamma ray
bursts (GRBs),68 gamma rays,14,23,55,67-69,88, 123,148,150,167 gases,
xv-xvi, xvii battlefield,10-11 Geiger counter,38 Gell-Mann,
Murray,127,128 general theory of relativity,72,74
germs,13,18-19,37,138,153 giardiasis,126 global warming,30-31
glycoproteins,4 God,69-70,71,72 Goethe' Johann von,23 Gol&aber,
Maurice,98 Gotthelf'Jeremias,169 grasses,125 gravitatonal lensing,74
graviton,75 gravity,49,71-77 gravity waves,74-75 greenhouse
effect,28-29,62,159 greenhouse gases,30,80,84,86 Guevara, Che, 61
H-bomb,23,51,52,53,54,56 Haber, Fritz,10-11,34 Haber-Bosch
process,10-11,12 Hahn, Otto,22 halitosis,20 Halley, Edmund,161 Halley's
comet,35 halogenated hydrochlorofluoro-carbons,63-64 hay fever,3
haze,"2 health effects from allergens,3-5 from alpha rays,8-10 from
ammonia," from background radiation,13-14 from bacteria,18-19 from beta
rays,22-23 from body lice,37 from carbon monoxide,32,33-34 from
dioxin,42,43,44 from dust,46-47 from EMF,48-49,50 from fallout,52,54 56
from formaldehyde,58,59-60 from fungi, 64-67 from gamma rays,69 from
hydrogen sulfide,78-79 from infrared rdiation,80-81 from methyl
chloride,87-88 from microwaves,88-89 from mites,92-93 from nitrous
oxide,82,83,84 from noise,102-5 from ozone,107-8
fromparticulates,"2,"3-14 from pollen,124--25 from protozoa,126 27 from
radon,134,135-36 from spores,145 from sulfur dioxide,147 from
ultraviolet radiation,149, 150-52 from viruses,153-54,155-56 from X
rays,167-69 hearing loss,102-5 Heine, Heinrich,70 Heisenberg,
Werner,123,129 helium ions,7 hemoglobin,32,33 Henri III, ring of
France,23 Henry VIII, king of England,"6 Herrick, Robert,23 Herschel,
William,79-80 Hertz, Heinrich,130-31 Hess, Victor,38 histamine,4

Holmes, Oliver Wendell,83 hormesis,15-16 Hubble Space Telescope,76
Hugo, Victor,77 hummingbird flower mites,91 hurricanes,160,163
hyberbaric oxygen therapy,33 hydrocarbons,62,107,"2 hydrogen,10,57
hydrogen cyanide,35,78 hydrogen sulfide,20,24,35,57, 77-79,140,142
hygiene,37,93,126 hypopus(i),91 hypoxic water,12 immune
system,3,19,65,126,145, immunoglobulin antibodies,4 infrared
radiation,28,79-81,85,88, 149,158-59 International Geophysical Year,28
invisible (the), xv-xviii iodine-131,55 iron-55,14 isovaleric acid,25
itch mites,92 Johnson, Samuel,137 Johot-Curie, Irene, 6-7 Jones, T.
K.,68 Joyce' James,127 kairomones,"8 Kant, Immanuel,70,137-38,161
Karlson, Peter,"8 Kaufmann, Walter,21 Keats'John,98 Kennedy' John E,54
Kepler'Johannes,71 Khrushchev, Nikita,54 Koch, Robert,138 krypton,81 l
82 Index Lambert, Gerard,20 latex,4 laughing gas,82-84 law of
gravity,72-73 Leeper, Ed,47-48 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van,125 Lenin, V.
I.,60 leukemia,10,48-49,55 light wave-particle duality,121-22,123
lightning,162 lithoautotrophic bacteria,18 Locke'John,72 Louis XV, ring
of France,"5 Lucilius,20 Luscher, Martin,"8 McClachlan, N. W.,98 mad
cow disease,155 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), malaria,126--27,138
Marcellus,122 Marconi, Guglielmo,131 Marshall Islanders,23,51-52 Marx,
Karl,120 Mary of Cleves,23 mass,72--74,95,96 massive compact halo
objects (machos),76 matter,8,130 Maxwell' James Clerk,50,130,131 Mayer,
Adolph,153 Meitner, Lise,22 melanoma,151-52 Mencken, H. L.,95 Menes,
king of Memphis,3 mercaptans,20,24,142 Mercury,74 methane,
xv,18,35,57,62,80, 84-87,159 methanogenic bacteria,18,57,85 methyl
chloride,87-88 methyl cyanide,35 methyl mercaptan,20
microbes,12,17,18,19,46,67,126 microwaves,50,79,88-89 Midgley,
Thomas,61-62 Migeotte, M.J.,85 Milky Way,40,68,75 Millikan, Robert,38
Milton' John,94 mists,"2 Mitchell' John,76 mites,46-47,89--93 mold,4,61
Molina, Mario,62 Montreal Protocol,63 mushrooms,145-46 musk,93-94,"6,"8
Myobacterium tuberculosis, 19,150 Napoleon,"6

NASA,74,"0,"1,159

nasopharyngeal radium therapy,9-10 National Academy of Science BEIR-V
report,69,168-69 National Cancer Institute,48-49,55 National Institute
for Occupational Safety and Health,59-60 National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration,"I National Research Council,48 neon,81
neutrinos,22,76,94-98,129 neutron bomb,54 neutron stars,68
neutrons,7,128 Newcomb, Simon,74 Newton, Isaac,72--73,74,77,121
nicotine,13 nit on,81 nitrogen,10,18,27,57 nitrogen
fertilizers,10,12,84 nitrogen oxides,84,107,"0 nitrous oxide,82-84,86 I
Index 183 Nobel, Alfred, 86-87 Nobel Prize,87 H. Becquerel,6 C. Bosch,"
M.Curie,6 7 A. Einstein,123 E Haber,10,34 V. Hess,38 I.Joliot-Curie,6 7
S. B. Prusiner,155 W Ramsay,81 W C. Rontgen,167 S. Rowland,"0 E.
Rutherford, 7 noise, xvi,98-106 no-see-urns,106 nuclear fission,22
nuclear reactors,96 nuclear weapons,51-56,68 nucleus(i),7,8 nuclides,54
olfaction, artificial,141-42 olfactory memory,139 olfactory neurons,138
Operation Cool Breeze, 63 Orwell, George,136 oxygen, xv,
xvi,18,27,28,57,86, 107,150 ozone, xvii,28,61,106-11,150,159
depletion/destruction,62,64,84, 109-11 ozone acton days,108 Paramecium,
125 particle accelerators,39-40,127-28 particles fundamental,39,128
matter made of,129-30 subatomic,127-28 particulates,46,"1--15,158
Pasteur, Louis,16,138 Pauli, Wolfgang,95,96,123 Pauling, Linus,53
PCBs,41 perfume,10,26,93, 94,"5-17,"8 pheromonal functions,25
pheromones,94,"7-21 Phiesteriapiscicida, 12 phlogistic matter,27-28,31
phoresy,90-91, 92 phosgene,34 phosphorescence,5,6 phosphorus,18
photochemical smog,107,146 photoelectric effect,123
photons,35,75,121-23 real virtual,122-23 photosynthesis,27-28,64,85
bacterial,18 physicists, xvii,122,128-29 physics,122,127 Pirquet,
Clemens von,3 Planck, Max,122,123 Planck's constant,122
planes,18,124-25,144,145,150 Plato,69,140 plutonium, 9,55
point-particles,128 politicization of science,43 44
pollen,3,4,46,"2,124-25,144,145 pollution pollutants air,"4,134
ammonia," carbon dioxide,30 dioxin,43-44 ozone,108 water,10,136
polonium,9,15,134 Pompadour, Madame de,"5 Pope, Alexander, xviu
positron emission tomography

(PET),148

potassium,13,14,22-23 Priestley' Joseph,27-28,31,32,82 primordial
nuclides,14 184 Index pr ions,155 proteins,4 protons,7,8,35,40,96,128
protozoa,57,125-27,144 Proust, Marcel,100,137,139 Prowazek, Stanislas
von,37 Prusiner, Stanley B.,155 pseudomonads,16-17 quantum
electrodynamics, xvu,50 quantum mechanics,123 quarks, xvii,127-30
radiation, xvii,69,134,149-50 radiation burns,52 radio
waves,88,123,130-31,133, radioactivity,6,7,13,49,53 radionuclides,40
radium,8,9-10,133,135 radon,14,15,81,131-36 radon progeny,134
ragweed,5,124,125 Ramsay, Sir William, 81 Reines, Fred,96 relative
biological effectiveness

(RBE),69

relative humidity,157 relativiry theories,72,74,122 retroviruses,154
Ricketts, Howard T.,37 Rickettsia prouaazekii, 37 Ritter' John,149
Rentgen, Wilhelm Conrad,5,107, 165-67 Rowland, Sherwood,62,"0
rubidium-87,14 Rutherford, Ernest,7-8,21,22,128,

SANE,53

satellites,68 scabies,92 Index 185 Scheele, Carl Wilhelm,78 Schenbein,
Christian Friedrich, Schopenhauer, Arthur,100 Schwarzschild, Karl,76
scrapie,155,156 sebaceous glands,24-25 seeing, xvii, xviii senses, xvi,
xvii Shakespeare, William,17,160 Shaw, George Bernard,100 Shelley,
Percy Bysshe,121,160 skin secretions,24-25 smells, xvii,20,99,136-42
smog,107,146,147 office,109 smokers/smohng,32,33,"2 see also tobacco
smoke Soddy, Frederick,133 solar energy,28,161 soot,142-44 spirits, xvi
spores,17-18,46,64,"2,144-46 stars,39 Stein, Gertrude,161 steroids,25
Stevenson, Adlai,52 stratosphere,28,62,84,157 stratospheric
ozone,106-7,109-10 Strauss, Roger,52,53 Streptococcus mutans, 19
streptomycetes,17 strong force,49,73,96 strontium-90,14-15,54,55
sulfur,18 sulfur dioxide,"4,146-47 Sun,34,35,38,39,80,149,161 neutrinos
from,94,97 Superconducting Super Collider project,40
supernovas,38,67,68,97 Swedish Academy of Sciences,7,10 Swift'
Jonathan,138

TCDD,41-44

Teller, Edward,13,16,53-54 temperature effect of atmospheric carbon
dioxide on,28-29,31 tenth-value thickness,68 test ban treaty,54
thorium,7,8,14 thoughts,147-49,169 Three Mile Island,13 tobacco,13
tobacco smoke,15,32, 44,58,59,60, 112,134,142 tornadoes,162,163-64
Townsend, Peter,103 toxoplasmosis,126 tritium, 9,40,54
troposphere,28,31,84,85,157 trypanosomiasis,126 typhus,37 ultraviolet
radiation, xvi,28,62,109, 111,149-52,155 uncertainty principle,129
United Nations,63,"I global-warming treaty,30 uranium,7,14,133,135
Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act,135 uranium rays,6,7,21
uranium salts,5,6 Van Allen radiation belts,39 vibrations,100 Villard,
Paul,67 virus,152-57 Volta, Count Alessandro,84-85 Voltaire,72
vomeronasal organ (VNO),"9 water pollution,10,136 water vapor, 28, 80,
86, 112, 157-60 Watras, Stanley,135 weak force,49,73, 96 Webster,
Noah,100,101 Wells, Horace,83 Wertheimer, Nancy,47-48 wimps (weakly
interacting massive particles),76 wind,"2,"4,124,125,143,158, 160-65
World Health Organization,42 Wulf, Theodor,38 X-ray computed
tomography,148 X rays,5,6,9,15,23,67,88,107, 149,150,155,165-69
xenon,81 Xystus I, Pope,70 Yeltsin, Boris, 61 Young, Thomas,121
zeitgeist,169-70 zen on-65,14 The end.