Word: dust
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lawmen sent hundreds of rounds of small-arms fire crackling toward the tower deck. A few smashed into the faces on the clocks above Whitman, and most pinked ineffectually into the four-foot-high wall in front of him, kicking up puffs of dust. Ducking below the wall, Whitman began using narrow drainage slits in the wall as gunports. He proved almost impossible to hit, but he kept finding targets?to the north, where he wounded two students on their way to the Biology Building; to the east, where he nicked a girl sitting at a window in the Business...
...Chick's Heartbeat. NASA Consultant Quentin L. Hartwig reported a fascinating example of the application of space research to earth-bound medicine. To record the impact of a speck of interplanetary dust on a man or vehicle in space, Engineer Vernon Rogallo devised an instrument so sensitive that it registered the force of a single grain of salt dropped less than one-half of an inch. Then, at the NASA Ames research center in California, Rogallo overheard a cafeteria conversation between two biologists: How could they record the heartbeat of a six-day-old chick embryo without piercing...
Rogallo made minor modifications in his dust detector, the biologists supplied the egg, and the unborn chick's heartbeat registered strongly through its unbroken shell. As proof, Rogallo exhibited the live and healthy chick of a bobwhite quail whose incubation had been monitored but undisturbed. And, said Dr. Hartwig proudly, the Food and Drug Administration is completing the space-to-chick-to-man cycle: it is using Rogallo's sensor to study the effects of drugs on the heart...
...From this far away," Pollack mused, "it's easy to be ingenious." But there is no real basis for believing the darkness on Mars is vegetation. Sagan and Pollack suggest instead that in the spring, some dust is blown off the continents, sharpening the contrast between the dark high-lands and the surrounding bright deserts...
...mapping of light and dark solves at least one meteorological mystery. During violent dust storms, no dust ever gets into the dark areas. Sometimes dust comes right up to a dark area and appears to bounce back suddenly. This would be difficult to explain if the dark areas were lowlands, Pollack said. But it fits perfectly if the dark areas are high plateaus which turn away dust streams...