Word: decay
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...formulated his Theory of Strangeness (named after Francis Bacon's line: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"). He assigned a value to each of the puzzling new particles: a "strangeness" number based on their peculiar rate of decay. His analysis established a new and logical relationship between the particles and showed how they interacted...
...winning is apt to be short lived. "Everywhere the cities are tottering," reports TIME Senior Correspondent John Steele. "They face near-bankruptcy, decay, population loss, lower property values and ever-increasing tensions. Tomorrow's cities may be deserted at night, their streets foreboding and empty, a nocturnal black ghetto of despair. Even the fringe communities are in danger of becoming slum-burbs...
...once the product and the prisoner of his genes. Civilizations flourish and decay, like dinosaurs, in obedience to irreversible genetic decrees. All the marvelous fruits of man's distinctive intelligence, of his ascent from the apes, owe their conception not to reason but to the unreasoning mandates of heredity. The human evolutionary course is determined by the microscopic chromosomes that constitute the only true inheritance passed from one generation to the next...
Spongy Tundra. The Arctic, unlike land in temperate climates, does not easily recover from man-made disruptions. Because of the cold, orange peels do not decay for months. Twenty-five-year-old bulldozer tracks are still plainly visible on the tundra today, testimony to the slowness of the land's ability to heal itself. But the basic problem is that most of the Arctic lies on a hard foundation of permafrost-ever-frozen ground that prevents drainage. In the brief summer months, a thin cover of tundra soil thaws a foot deep. But if the ground is gouged...
...interpretations of data sent back from Mars by the twin Mariner probes. Hurriedly examining the readings from his infrared spectrometer on board Mariner 7, Chemist George C. Pimental had dramatically announced that the Martian atmosphere probably contained traces of ammonia and methane, two gases produced on earth by bacterial decay. The implication was clear: there might well be micro-organisms on Mars...