Word: ashli
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Ideally, the researchers would have preferred to find the bones sandwiched between layers of volcanic ash containing potassium and argon, as these can be precisely dated by tests involving radioactive decay. Unfortunately, the geology at Toros-Menalla did not cooperate. But the scientists found something nearly as good. The site was replete with fossils from all sorts of other primitive animals, including fish, crocodiles, rodents, elephants, giraffes, aardvarks and more--42 types in all. Many were identical to specimens that have been radiometrically dated with great precision elsewhere. As a result, a team led by Vignaud confidently pinpointed the skull...
...worst thing we eat is ashcakes. I mix cornmeal with a bit of salt and water, form patties and slap them onto a rock in the middle of the fire, which allows them to be covered with yummy carcinogenic ash. They are perhaps the driest things I have ever eaten--and as a child I would often be caught eating sand at the beach. "Oh Lordy, that's dry. It sucks the tissues out of your mouth," says retired plant ecologist Jack Taylor, after putting up a good fight with...
...other bodies have been burning since dawn. The funeral pyres, once piled more than a meter high, are now nothing but smoldering heaps of ash and fragmented bone. A blackened skull is all that remains of one; on the other a heat-shriveled thigh juts out, still attached to a cracked pelvis bone. Curiously, there is no odor of burnt flesh or hair. The bodies, in preparation for burning, have been dipped in the Ganges. "The holy river purifies all beings," says Papu, spitting betel juice from between blackened teeth. "That is why there is no odor...
With its hardened shell and oversize antennae, it looks like a cockroach with antlers. But the Asian long-horned beetle is no ordinary menace. It's a hungry tree-eating machine with no natural predators and a hankering for U.S. hardwoods-maple, poplar, birch, elm, ash, horse chestnut and willow. The first specimens came to the U.S. as stowaways in wooden packing crates from China and Hong Kong. The beetles turned up in Brooklyn, N.Y., six years ago, in Chicago two years later and in New York City's Central Park this winter, and have already destroyed thousands of trees...
...BLACK HAWKE DOWN: On July 23, Knopf will publish "Ash Wednesday," a novel by actor-author Ethan Hawke. The book is "the story of Jimmy - a young soldier who is AWOL from the army - and Christy, who pregnant with his child, and their journey toward becoming a family." 11-city author tour; first printing of 100,000 copies...