Volatile hydrides may be prepared from ether solutions by the reaction of the appropriate chlorides with lithium hydroaluminate. In this general method, it is necessary to work with strictly anhydrous reagents and solvents because of the great reactivity of lithium hydroaluminate toward water. The procedures described here are believed to be much more convenient because the reducing agent employed is potassium hydroborate, which is relatively insensitive toward water. Since only aqueous solutions are involved, there are no solvent-purification steps and there is no dissolution or contamination of stopcock grease, etc.

Pulse-amplitude discriminators are useful in nuclear counting to separate signals of greater amplitude from a background of unwanted or noise signals of lesser amplitude. As used here, the term "fast" implies circuits capable of responding to pulses between a nanosecond and a microsecond in duration. An ideal discriminator would produce for any incoming signal whose amplitude is greater than a threshold bias level, an output pulse of constant amplitude, duration, and delay with respect to the input signal, regardless of the incoming duration and rate; and for signals less than the threshold, zero output.

Specimens suitable for transmission electron microscopy have been prepared from bulk polycrystalline molybdenum after tensile deformation and recovery. The resulting dislocation substructures are described. Some tentative conclusions concerning the mechanism of plastic deformation in molybdenum are discussed.

Both in magnetohydrodynamic shocks and in accelerated partially ionized gas flow across a magnetic field, space charge separation occurs that establishes very large electric fields in the direction of motion. The width of the current layers associated with the acceleration is never less than the electron Larmor radius with no collisions and is broadened by electron collisions to a width solely determined by the effective resistivity. The electrons gain an energy regardless of collisions equal to the electric potential difference across the layer. This potential corresponds to the change in kinetic energy of mass motion per ion. For slightly ionized gases, the additional stress of neutral ion collisions within the layer can make the electric potential and hence gain in electron energy very large for only modest changes in mass velocity. Hence ionization may occur when the change in kinetic energy of the ions is small compared to the ionization potential.