Word: earths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When polarized light was passed through solutions of water and some of the amino acids, it was deflected to the right. "In all the '20 amino acids we know of on earth," says Ponnamperuma, "the polarized light turns to the left." But, he adds, "In all the pre-biotic experiments conducted in our laboratory, we got both lefthanded and righthanded amino acids." His conclusion: the amino acids are not due to terrestrial contamination, but to pre-life forms that evolved somewhere in space...
...carbon 12, the isotope most utilized in biological processes, was high in relation to carbon 13. This indicates that the hydrocarbons were produced by photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds and oxygen. Ponnamperuma's find shows that life was present on earth 3.8 billion years ago, when the planet was only 800 million years old. The oldest previously known terrestrial life dated back 3.4 billion years...
...astronauts were sensitive about their missions' being controlled by earth-bound technicians. The chosen seven had pulled out of enough tight corners and survived enough glitches to rise to the top of what Wolfe, in a seizure of cliché avoidance, calls "the ziggurat." As a reminder that he was there too, Yeager told reporters he did not want to be an astronaut because they did no real flying. He then rubbed it in by saying that "a monkey's gonna make the first flight." Shepard, Glenn and company bucked back, demanding and getting concessions like an override...
...kind." Gus Grissom almost certainly blew the hatch too soon, flooding and sinking his capsule, and then stubbornly maintained that the machine "malfunctioned." Scott Carpenter, a man who could hold his breath for 171 seconds, ignored warnings about wasting hydrogen peroxide fuel and nearly skipped off the earth's atmosphere during reentry...
...announce the coming of the pop-rock culture. Readers accustomed to spending their weekends with articles like "Brazil: Colossus of the South" were suddenly snapping awake to such Wolfean fare as "Oh, Rotten Gotham -Sliding Down Into the Behavioral Sink," "Natalie Wood and the Shockkkkkk of Recognition" and "Muvva Earth and Codpiece Pants." The prose itself rollicked with words like "lollygagging" and "infarcted," embedded in pages that were covered with a confetti of punctuation marks...