Word: clay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Clay, 18, a freshman at a college in New Hampshire, spends a monthlong Christmas break back home in Los Angeles. He seems to remember that Blair, who picks him up at the airport, was his girlfriend before he went off to school. He also dimly recalls his parents' separation, "which was, I think, about a year ago." He stays with his mother and two younger sisters; the precocious girls watch porno videocassettes in their bedroom and assure Clay that they will not snitch any more cocaine from his room because they can now buy it on their own. Before...
...foreign-born servicemen who became new Americans that day in a small Southern town. Did his visit to the scene of old Army days bring back any tearful recollections? Not quite. As Kissinger told his audience, "If any of you have tried to dig a foxhole in the red clay of South Carolina, you won't have too many nostalgic memories...
Alvarez, his curiosity aroused, shipped samples of the sediment back to the U.S. and showed them to his father Luis, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist also at the University of California, who had the clay analyzed. To everybody's surprise, it turned out to be 30 times as rich in iridium as normal rocks. The Berkeley team knew of only a few places where such high concentrations of the rare element might occur: in the earth's core, perhaps 2,000 miles belowground; in extraterrestrial objects like asteroids (or their fragments, meteors) and comets; or in the cosmic dust drifting...
...slice of limestone, from the Tertiary period, almost devoid of these fossils. Like other samples of rock from that era, it showed that the creatures alive during the late Cretaceous period had, by geological time scales, suddenly disappeared. In between the limestone layers was a dull red layer of clay about half an inch thick, first discovered by an Italian paleontologist around...
...that concentrated the metal. Later an old favorite was proposed--volcanic eruptions, which might have forced iridium from the mantle to the surface. The most recent naysayers are Dartmouth Geologists Charles Officer and Charles Drake, who reported in Science on their studies of two other telltale elements in the clay boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. They found that the levels of arsenic and antimony correspond to decidedly terrestrial, not cosmic, concentrations...