Word: decayed
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...history into a sequence of periods: Permian, Jurassic, etc. But seldom do they agree on the age of each period, and a particularly annoying question mark is the Pleistocene, an epoch of intermittent ice ages during which man became true man. The geological dating system that uses the decay of uranium and other radioactive elements to tell the age of very ancient rocks is much too vague for the comparatively short Pleistocene. Dating by carbon 14, which is fine for recent times, reaches back only 60,000 years-not nearly enough...
...system promises to pinpoint the Pleistocene. Developed at the University of Miami by Dr. John Rosholt of the U.S. Geological Survey and Italian-born Dr. Cesare Emiliani, it depends on the fact that a tiny amount of uranium is dissolved in all sea water. When it slowly decays radioactively, it yields protoactinium 231 and thorium 230, both of which attach themselves to sediment particles and sink slowly to the bottom. There they in turn decay, but protoactinium 231 decays faster than thorium 230. The age of sediment on the ocean floor can therefore be determined by measuring the relative abundance...
...often at the heart of current fiction: "That all those disturbing things seen and felt in the father, which as a boy had given him an uncomprehending sense of dread and hostility, were only intimations of his older self to come, a self marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth...
...that surround the earth is still iffy, reported Iowa's Professor James A. Van Allen, who discovered them. The upper belt, which fluctuates wildly in intensity, is probably made of charged particles coming from the sun. The narrow inner belt, he suspects, contains protons and electrons that are decay products of neutrons created by the impact of cosmic rays hitting atoms in the atmosphere. It has not changed appreciably, he said, during the last two years...
Aristocracy, like fine cheese, is usually at its most interesting in an advanced state of decay. Chekhov demonstrated this in prerevolutionary Russia, William Faulkner in post-Civil War America. Theoretically the decline of the Austro-Hungarian nobility before and after World War I ought to make equally pungent fiction. Unfortunately this is only sometimes the case in Author de Born's new novel, the second installment of a trilogy (the first, Felding Castle, published early last year, was set in 1900 and carried a nostalgic remembrance of that time of sunlit lawns, masquerade balls and respectful peasants...