Science and Industry

NUCLEAR reactors are becoming ever more specialized. This month the world’s first reactor designed specifically for medical use is scheduled to go into operation at the AEC’s Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island. Doctors and researchers, drawn from all over the United States, will have a unique tool built from the ground up to meet the special needs of nuclear medicine, and with special hospital and laboratory facilities that multiply its usefulness.

Medical research at Brookhaven is concentrated in three principal areas: treatment of disease, mainly cancer, with the reactor’s neutron beam; the use of radioisotopes both for basic research into body metabolism and for study of degenerative diseases and diseases of the central nervous system; and the study of radiation effects.

In the past decade nuclear medicine has made tremendous advances at Brookhaven. but medical researchers have shared the use of the laboratory’s general purpose reactor with half a dozen other research groups. The new reactor provides a beam with a neutron intensity about fifty times greater, permitting vastly reduced exposure time, more flexibility of treatment, and wider medical application of neutrons.

Two irradiation rooms — one for patients, one for experimental animals — are set next to the reactor core. Twenty-ton shutters, hydraulically operated, are built into the neutron apertures in the reactor shield, allowing great flexibility in directing and moderating the neutron beam in the treatment rooms, which are themselves heavily shielded. The room for patients is painted a pleasant pastel green and looks as much as possible like any hospital treatment room — quite a contrast, staff members point out, to the concrete pit into which patients were lowered for irradiation treatment with the old reactor.

Nuclear research and disease

Tracer studies are providing new insight into little-understood diseases. Observation that manganese intoxication produced symptoms like those of Parkinson’s disease, for example, has led to exhaustive studies to discover whether this palsy has some connection with how the patient’s body handles, or mishandles, manganese. Using manganese isotopes to follow the path of this element through the body, researchers feel they have found some evidence of a link. This is only one of a number of such studies of disease mechanisms; others are aimed at leukemia, arthritis, visceral cancer, diabetes, disorders of the thyroid, hypertension.

The study of radiation injury becomes more important as the number of atomic installations increases. Much work with animals will have direct benefits in saving human lives. In a study of twenty dogs that received four hundred units of X radiation, half of the irradiated animals were treated while half were not. Experimental therapy — antibiotics, fresh whole blood transfusions, parenteral fluid infusions, forced oral feeding, meticulous nursing care — enabled eight of ten animals to survive. Nine of the ten animals in the comparison group died.

The forty-eight-bed Research Hospital is an unorthodox, one-story building. Its four identical nursing units are circular, with twelve private rooms around the rim and various service areas in the center. The nurse’s central station in each unit enables her to keep an eye on a dozen patients right from her desk and saves her steps as well. Since the patients come from all over the United States, remote from family and friends, and stay three months on the average, the hospital is unusually well equipped with recreational facilities. Patients, referred to the center by their own doctors, are selected by the staff because it is thought that treatment at Brookhaven will benefit both the patient and his physician.

The development of nuclear medicine requires highly expensive and complex equipment and a heavy concentration of scientific manpower that are beyond the scope of most private institutions. Like the patients, therefore, the staff members come from all over the country to take advantage of the opportunities Brookhaven offers, returning eventually to their own communities or institutions. Brookhaven’s research will benefit the whole nation, as nuclear medicine is forged into a powerful weapon for man’s war against disease.

Air pollution

Most of us think of air pollution in terms of smoldering dumps or factory fumes. But concentrated research into the problem has shown that one of the biggest culprits is right in the family garage. The dangers of carbon monoxide are well known. A New York City survey a few years ago showed that concentrations in the open air could be great enough to inflict headaches and nausea on traffic policemen at rush hour.

Two other auto exhaust pollutants, less well known, play a much larger role in the formation of smog. One is hydrocarbons: those found in the 7 per cent of gasoline that passes through an auto engine unburned and others actually manufactured in the car cylinders by a “cracking” process much like that in an oil refinery.

Oxides of nitrogen, produced from the fixation of atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen under high temperatures in the engine cylinders, are an equally dangerous pollutant. In a concentration of twenty-five parts per million, these oxides attack the lungs in the same way as certain war gases, and when mixed with hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and exposed to intense sunlight, as in Los Angeles, they oxidize organic materials in the atmosphere and produce the elements in smog that cause eye smart, damage plants, and crack the rubber in tires.

Auto manufacturers’ research

Well aware of the exhaust problem, auto manufacturers have been spending a million dollars or more a year in intensive research. A recent meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers revealed some encouraging progress toward a solution.

Ford engineers reported that they have developed a catalytic converter system that replaces the muffler in the exhaust line. The unit contains twenty-five to thirty pounds of 1/8-inch pellets coated with vanadium pentoxide, die most promising of some one hundred catalysts Ford has tested. When the exhaust passes through the pellets in the presence of air fed in by an auxiliary pump, from 60 to 73 per cent of the hydrocarbons are chemically transformed into harmless substances. But there are still plenty of bugs. The catalyst overheats and sometimes smells bad. The converter costs about $150 installed. And the catalyst lasts for only 10,000 to 12,000 miles.

Another converter is under development by General Motors, using a special catalyst — the exact nature not revealed — developed by Houdry and produced by Oxy-Catalyst Inc. Two test cars were driven a total of 34,000 miles under all sorts of conditions. On a standard production model a single converter unit removed about 75 per cent of the hydrocarbons and a substantial amount of the carbon monoxide. The other car was equipped with a dual unit—one converter for each bank of cylinders — and a special carburetor supplying an enriched fuel mixture. This combination eliminated about 90 per cent of both hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, but increased fuel consumption by about a third.

The units are not ready for production. The converters replace mufflers but do nothing to muffle sound. Large and heavy, the units are hard to fit under low-hung cars. They heat up excessively — not only uncomfortable for passengers but dangerous for fuel and brake-fluid lines. The dual converters cracked up after 10,000 miles.

Thompson - RamoWooldridge is working on another approach, an afterburner that ignites the hydrocarbons before they can escape in the exhaust. The main problem is to keep combustion going during the wide range of engine speeds found in ordinary driving.

Adoption of either catalytic converters or afterburners would require fitting cars with yet another complicated and expensive device. In contrast, a Chrysler study suggests a remedy that requires no new gadgets and actually saves the car owner money. Chrysler compared the exhaust gases of cars in its engineering service fleet with those found in a field survey of some three hundred Los AngeleS automobiles of roughly comparable age and type. The service fleet exhaust was found to be markedly lower both in carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, and the only difference in the cars seemed to be that the fleet cars received a tuneup every 5000 miles.

Chrysler investigated further. A car was modified with a number of different combinations of used parts to simulate various kinds of poor maintenance. It was found that a marked increase in carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons resulted from such apparently minor defects as poor carburetor adjustment at idle, pitted points, fouled plugs, weak batteries, or excessive resistance in the electrical circuit resulting from corrosion or loose ends. Preventive maintenance, the study shows, should cut down the emission of hydrocarbons by about two thirds.

What should make this approach particularly attractive to the average car owner is the fact that he gets a bonus for eliminating pollution — simple preventive maintenance improves fuel economy by 15 or 20 per cent.

Ultrasonic welding

No heat, just sound, welds metals in a new device developed by Westinghouse scientists. The two pieces of metal are overlapped and passed between two metal wheels vibrated by a transducer that turns electrical energy into ultrasonic waves. By a kneading action 20,000 times a second, the oxide coatings on the metal surfaces are broken up and the metal crystals bound together by intermolecular forces.

Still experimental, the welder is said by Westinghouse engineers to show great promise. No electric current or outside source of heat is applied to the metal; no cleaning or surface preparation is required; dissimilar metals are welded together without deformations.

The ultrasonic welder has continuously welded together two pieces of aluminum .01 inch thick at a rate of 15 inches per minute. Aluminum is one of the most difficult metals to weld by conventional methods. Steel, copper, silver, and a number of alloys have also been welded ultrasonically.

Fodder for cows

Cows — or their owners — now have their choice of two completely opposite theories of what makes a good bovine meal, both unlike the usual barn diet. Under one new system the cow will be able to get fresh green grass all winter; under another, all her food will be compressed into small pellets.

A new application of hydroponics to farm use is said to make it possible to grow fresh green grass all winter long and supply a twenty-cow herd from an area no larger than your living-room rug. The Buckeye Corporation says use of its grass incubator trims costs by cutting fencing and cultivation requirements. In the incubator, cereal grains planted in water and chemicals under controlled temperature, humidity, and light produce sixto eight-inch grass in six days.

This hothouse product contains all the nutrients found in pasture grass, according to the manufacturer, who points out that milk production picks up when spring grazing starts. Supplementary rations are added for dairy cows.

It takes anywhere from three to thirty acres to graze one cow in the pasture. The twenty-cow incubator plant producing forty-five tons of grass a year consists of twelve culture trays in a shed 10 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 8 feet high. Warmth is supplied by a heat pump. Each tray is divided into five compartments. The grass is lifted out of these compartments in a solid mat and fed in chunks to the cows. The tray is then reseeded for a new sixday crop.

A radically different theory of feeding has been tested during the past year at Stanford Research Institute, where experiments have shown that ordinary winter fodder compressed into small pellets produces a better weight gain per pound of feed than the same fodder in loose form. Because the pellets are more adaptable to self-feeding devices, labor and handling expenses are also reduced by 10 to 12 per cent.

Two types of ration were pelletized: a high-roughage diet and a high-concentrate diet. Each was compared over a period of time with the same diet content in loose-mix form. Regardless of the content or the form of the feed, the grade of meat obtained from all the steers is about the same.

Explanations of the pellets’ greater feed efficiency vary. The fine grinding of the particles and the fact that they are heated during preparation may increase digestibility. At the same time the steer may use up less energy in eating because he does not have to ruminate. Whatever the answer, the results look good enough for a $150,000 pelletizing plant to be built on a California ranch.

Throwaway razor

Latest throwaway unit is a plastic razor. The blade is built in and goes right into the wastebasket with the razor after use. Smaller than a pack of cigarettes, the 25-cent razor package contains enough brushless shaving cream for one shave, will be sold in vending machines at air and railroad terminals. The manufacturer, Rochester Razor, Inc., suggests the razor’s use in hospitals, since it would be unnecessary to sterilize it.

Everlasting soles

A new kind of shoe sole is said to be so tough it will outwear the uppers. Made of a synthetic rubber called Paracril OZO, developed by U.S. Rubber, the soles are reported to have survived twenty weeks of rugged industrial use that wears out ordinary soles in three to four weeks. Projected uses: work shoes, children’s shoes, military boots that would never need resoling.