carbon

Snow cleaning of the world's largest telescope mirrors was an impressive sight. The optics technicians would climb into a huge telescopic boom lift and spray immense clouds of cold carbon dioxide snow and gas onto the ten meter diameter mirrors high above the floor indoors. It would cause some of the accumulated dirt to magically fall off, leaving it less dirty.

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

During my time in high altitude astronomy, I routinely witnessed workers breathing medical oxygen, industrial carbon dioxide, nitrogen and helium gas as part of their daily work routine.

The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.

For the U.S., I think we should have a carbon tax, for environmental reasons.

A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens.

Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we__e made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life__he carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids__s by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.