Word: ancient
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Darnton relies on gentle satire to evoke the many ironies in newspapering and even his seemingly throwaway descriptions of news situations ring utterly true. The ancient pressroom at City Hall looks like "a crowded Mayan ruin littered with the detritus of tourists." The relentless questions rained on a journalist writing a page-one story on deadline is an experience "like getting nibbled to death by ducks...
...ancient Greeks, whose Olympiads can be traced back to 776 B.C., didn't give out medals but rather bestowed olive wreaths upon their victors. The medal tradition began with the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, where winners got silver, seconds got bronze and third place got zip. In the intervening 112 years, the coveted awards have been rectangular, ridged, doughnut-like, gilded and--for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games--shaped like an amorphous blob. At the 1900 Paris Games, some events forwent medals in favor of prizes: one pole-vault runner-up won an umbrella...
...snowmobile all day across Olympic-quality piste, make modern art out of 200-year-old ice crystals and relax at "night" (the sun never sets during the arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered by the U.S. Air Force? Oh, and in your downtime, you can extract ancient cores of ice that contain atmosphere from tens of thousands of years ago. "It's a cool gig," says Trevor Popp, a postdoctoral student and ice-core driller...
...more than a mile and a half (2.5 km) thick, the result of over 130,000 years of accumulated snow. Tiny air bubbles from the year the snow fell are trapped in layers of frost, and when the ice is brought back to the surface, scientists can analyze the ancient atmosphere and discover the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration of Greenland's air, say, 115,000 years ago. That's the end of the Eemian geologic period, the warm era before the earth's last Ice Age (which ran until about 11,700 years ago). We know the planet...
...there are none. But it is being slowly and carefully rebuilt under the direction of UNESCO, with the backing of the Iraqi government and the European Commission. Mourad Zmit, the Samarra project manager for UNESCO, says it may take four years, and up to $300 million to restore the ancient structure, depending on the results of the damage assessment over the next several months. But the fact that reconstruction is now possible offers hope. "All Iraqis are focusing on the shrine . . . It was a symbol [and] the shrine is part of the reconciliation process," he says...