When an underground gas main springs a leak, the break may not be found before enough gas has escaped to explode with devastating force. All over the U.S., gas companies are constantly on the alert for any gadget capable of pinpointing a small leak before it balloons into a big blowup.
Last week engineers from Illinois Institute of Technology were field-testing the most sensitive leak seeker yet, a device that does its sniffing by sound. The Illinois scientists discovered that if sound waves of 40 cycles per second (a frequency just above the piano's middle G) are fed into a gas...
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