Word: decayed
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Using radioactive dating methods based on the decay of the isotope carbon 14, scientists have estimated the seeds to be as much as 11,700 years old; the same tests on ancient grain samples found in the Middle East or Latin America show that none are more than 9,500 years old. Thus, says the director of the University of Hawaii expedition. Anthropologist Wilhelm G. Solheim II. Thailand's ancient inhabitants may well have been the world's first farmers...
...lives in Manhattan, a city in which outdoor pay telephones are used as urinals. He judges that Manhattan has come to exceed Naples or Salonika in the fluorescence of its decay. But the fact neither dismays nor gratifies him. It is his belief, in fact, that people have grown too fond of "the tragic accents of their condition." They use the upset of former respectabilities to justify silliness, shallowness, distemper, lust. He has seen worse than fouled phone booths...
...stylized masks of tribal art-the art that impressed and excited Picasso and Matisse and strongly deflected the course of modern art. Oddly enough, this tribal art owes much of its vitality to the wood-eating white ant of Africa. Because of its depredations-and some help from natural decay-each generation of carvers had to create new images and new variations on traditional forms, constantly revitalizing an image that was lodged in the tribe's consciousness...
...quality of life. Even so, the issue now attracts young and old, farmers, city dwellers and suburban housewives, scientists, industrialists and blue-collar workers. They know pollution well. It is as close as the water tap, the car-clogged streets and junk-filled landscape?their country's visible decay, America the Ugly...
...usable substances for the producers. As the key producers, green plants alone have the power to harness the sun's energy and combine it with elements from air, water and rocks into living tissue?the vegetation that sustains animals, which in turn add their wastes and corpses to natural decay. It is nature's efficient reuse of the decay that builds productive topsoil. Yet such is the delicacy of the process that it takes 500 years to create one inch of good topsoil...