Word: decay
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Technology may help ease the looming crisis. One of the most troublesome elements in the garbage stream is the soaring use of plastic, which is difficult to burn or recycle and, because it is not biodegradable, will clog landfills for centuries. Early efforts to produce plastics that decay were less than successful: some disintegrated under sunlight, unavailable at the bottom of landfills. Others came apart after contact with water, causing supermarket executives to shudder at the thought of what would happen to the groceries in a plastic shopping bag containing a leaky milk bottle. But now there is a method...
Critics of the rent-a-judge system call it Cadillac justice, which lets more affluent litigants evade the problems of the judicial system. "The elite abandoning a public system in decay ensures that it will never be improved," argues Robert Gnaizda of Public Advocates, a San Francisco public interest group. Critics also charge that rent-a-judging lures experienced jurists into early retirement to collect the combination of public pensions and private fees. Another complaint against private judging is that it lets corporations and other litigants shield their doings from public scrutiny. In normal civil- court proceedings, hearings are generally...
...comes a film about one of the most ignored empires of all time, that of the Ottoman Turks. At its height, this empire ruled the entire Balkan peninsula, Syria, Egypt, Hungary, even the Levant. But the rise of European empires in the 19th century hastened the decay of the Ottomans, who were ruffled by strong independence movements in Greece and European competition for Fgypt and Palestine...
...every physics student learns, there are four known forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, a "strong" force that binds atomic nuclei and a "weak" one that governs certain types of radioactive decay. Last week researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that they may have found the best evidence yet for a hypothetical, elusive "fifth force." If confirmed, their findings could mean that Sir Isaac Newton's famous inverse- square law of gravity* is in danger of losing the exalted position it has held for three centuries. "It's like saying Mom and apple pie's no good anymore," admits...
...growth are unknown. They can be triggered, for example, by extended periods of sunny weather following heavy rains. Scientists believe algal growth is speeded up by the runoff of agricultural fertilizers. The burgeoning algae form a dense layer of vegetation that displaces other plants. As the algae die and decay, they sap enormous amounts of oxygen from the water, asphyxiating fish and other organisms...