Word: carbons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...buttress their case, exobiologists have exposed microorganisms to simulated Martian environments (carbon dioxide, extreme cold, small amounts of water) in so-called "Mars jars." Some of the bugs readily adapted to the Martian conditions. For this reason, Western scientists were all the more concerned last week that the Russian lander might, if not completely sterilized, introduce earthly life forms to Mars...
Photographing Deimos. There was disagreement about the composition of the glaciers. Carl Sagan, director of Cornell University's Planetary Studies Lab, suggested that the glaciers are frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), the major constituent of the polar cap. Smith felt that dry ice would not flow like a glacier. "The only thing that does," he said, "is water." Mariner's instruments did detect water vapor in the atmosphere above the south polar cap, suggesting that it had risen from the ice below. Those readings encouraged scientists who still hope to find some form of ife, however rudimentary...
...Martian crust, including quartz, granite and anorthocite. Those findings caused considerable excitement among the scientists. They indicated that Mars had at one point in its history undergone melting and that lighter elements had floated to the surface, later hardening into an earthlike crust. Included among the lighter elements are carbon compounds that were necessary for the development of life on earth. Said NASA Exobiologist Jerry Soffen, who is project scientist for the Viking program that will make a purposeful attempt to find life on Mars in 1976: "There can't be biological evolution if there is not geological differentiation...
Before the Pyramids. Working with hundreds of ancient wood samples, Geochemist Hans Suess of the University of California at San Diego recalibrated archaeological ages derived by carbon 14 dating in all parts of the world. His corrections did not affect the commonly accepted dates of Near East events and artifacts, which have been largely deduced from ancient calendars. But they did show that carbon-14-based European dates before 1500 B.C. must be adjusted by the addition of as many as 700 years...
...adjustments have already stirred what Renfrew calls a major revolution in archaeological thinking. Brittany's tombs, for example, are now acknowledged to have been built at least a millennium before the first stone tombs in the eastern Mediterranean and 1,500 years before the first pyramids. The revised carbon 14 dates have also shown that skilled coppersmiths may have been at work in the Balkans and possibly prehistoric Spain even before the Greeks managed to master the metallurgical arts. "The central moral is inescapable," Renfrew recently wrote in Scientific American. "We have completely undervalued the originality and creativity...