Word: dust
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...British India a generation ago, scientists unearthed two small fossils that consisted of no more than partial jawbones and a few teeth. For many years, they gathered dust-one in London's British Museum, the other in the Calcutta Museum. The ancient bones were largely ignored by professionals and the public alike. That oversight may have been one of paleontology's biggest bloopers. After carefully studying those neglected fossils, two Yale investigators have now become convinced that they are rare remnants of the first manlike creatures on earth...
Rare Gases. About one thing, U.S. space scientists have no complaint: Apollo 11 provided them with a wealth of data and lunar material. Last week, as they completed no fewer than 152 preliminary tests on 55 lbs. of lunar rocks and dust, they made several more interesting discoveries. Geochemist Oliver Schaeffer, seeking to determine what gases are expelled from the sun as solar wind, heated a pinch of moon dust to 3,000° F. Analyzing the escaping gases, he found that the lunar surface had absorbed considerable helium and hydrogen from the sun. But he also noted surprisingly large...
What the scientists were unable to detect conclusively was any sign of life. One chemist placed samples of lunar dust and rock chips under a 300,000-power microscope and found no evidence of lunar organisms, either living or fossilized. Another chemist did detect a trace of carbon, an element essential to life. But it was mainly volatile hydrocarbons that are familiar ingredients of lubricating oil; they might well have come from tools, or from the cabinets in which the samples had been placed...
...face of the moon is slowly beginning to emerge. Poring over the moon rocks with their microscopes, spectroscopes and radiation counters, the LRL's scientists have already pried loose some of the moon's long-guarded secrets. By analyzing a pinch of the powdery lunar dust with a flame ionization detector, Chemist Richard Johnson of NASA's Ames Research Center found the first conclusive evidence of organic compounds on the moon. The presence of these carbon-containing compounds does not prove the existence of life on the moon-simply that its soil contains an element that...
Perhaps the most fascinating find, geologically, was the discovery of tiny beads or grains of glass in the lunar dust -which seemed to explain what Astronaut Buzz Aldrin meant when he described the lunar surface as slippery. Geologists tentatively ascribed the abundance of the glassy material to meteors. Because of the immense heat generated on impact, speculated Harvard's Clifford Frondel, the invading material would have been vaporized, along with chunks of the lunar surface. After cooling, the vapor may have rained back in the form of glass spheroids. But that explanation raised a baffling question: Since lunar gravity...