Word: dinosaurs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When a scientific principle is common knowledge even in grammar school, you know it has long since crossed the line from theory to established fact. That's the case with dinosaur extinction. Some 65 million years ago - as we've all come to know - an asteroid struck the earth, sending up a cloud that blocked the sun and cooled the planet. That, in turn, wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals. The suddenness with which so many species vanished after that time always suggested a single cataclysmic event, and the 1978 discovery...
...however, a study in the Journal of the Geological Society throws all that into question. The asteroid impact and dinosaur extinction, say the authors, may not have been simultaneous, instead occurring 300,000 years apart. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's a relevant eyeblink all the same - one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to send the extinction theory entirely awry. (See pictures of meteors striking the earth...
...controversial paper was written by geoscientists Gerta Keller of Princeton University and Thierry Addate of the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland. Both researchers knew that challenging the impact doctrine would not be easy. The asteroid charged with killing the dinosaurs, after all, left more than the Chicxulub crater as its calling card. At the same 65-million-year depth, the geologic record reveals that a thin layer of iridium was deposited pretty much everywhere in the world. Iridium is an element that's rare on Earth but common in asteroids, and a fine global dusting of the stuff is precisely...
...electronic devices - flat-screen high-def TVs, 2-lb. laptop computers, the iPhone - the national power grid we plug them into is almost as old and unchanged as Edison's lightbulb. We rely on the grid to juice everything from vacuum cleaners to dialysis machines, but it is a dinosaur, a leaky, money-wasting, carbon-dioxide-spewing system that remains shockingly vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks...
...late 1970s, China's economic reform and opening up spurred a fervor of fossil-hunting among impoverished peasants, who began selling their finds to the highest bidders - state institutions, private individuals and foreigners alike. Since then, numerous dinosaur and bird fossils have been identified in the northeast province of Liaoning, and the southwest regions of Guizhou and Yunnan have become well known for their massive output of Triassic marine-life fossils. Fakery became a natural part of this lucrative business, and several Chinese paleontologists say fakes, typically made into the shape of bones using plastic, charcoal and construction materials...