Word: fossilization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS. Even the best fossil-fuel plants operate at about 40% efficiency. Only that portion of the fuel's energy is converted into electricity; the rest is simply turned into waste heat. A more efficient power-generation scheme, magnetohydrodynamics, creates an electric current by passing a stream of hot, ionized gas at high speed through a powerful magnetic field. MHD plants should be able to operate at nearly 50% efficiency. Unfortunately, the U.S. is leaving almost all research and development in MHD to the Russians, who figure that it will eventually fill 10% of their electrical needs...
Reese has been studying fossil pygmy elephants and hippopotamuses in the Museum of Comparative Zoology collection. Jenkins said that Reese hoped to augment the museum collection of early Cyprus fauna through his excavations this summer...
...Jessica Tandy), who is buried up to the waist in Act I of Happy Days and up to the neck in Act II, life is a slow, garrulous leak into the sands of death. The trivia of her handbag and stray threads of memory sustain her, together with a fossil of a husband who is scarcely seen and seldom heard. In Krapp's Last Tape, the dialogue is incestuous. A 69-year-old man (Hume Cronyn) communes with his recorded self of earlier birthdays and indulges a ravenous appetite for bananas. Krapp is another of Beckett's incorrigible...
...French paleontologists, the limestone quarries on the Canjuers Plateau in the Alpine foothills northwest of Nice are a rich mine of prehistoric treasures. Once a warm, atoll-dotted sea, the beds recently have yielded a pterodactyl (the earliest flying reptile), the fossilized remains of an ancient seagoing crocodile and a 140 million-year-old fish so well preserved that its scales are still clearly visible. Now, in the course of routine stonecutting, a quarry owner named Louis Ghirardi has turned up an even more important prize: a superbly preserved fossil of a birdlike dinosaur, one of the smallest ever unearthed...
...fuel too fast to sustain the reaction.) When the heat from this process became too intense, scientists believe, the water turned to steam, the neutrons speeded up, and the chain reaction halted until the uranium cooled sufficiently for the steam to condense back to water. Thus, Perrin believes, "the fossil pile at Oklo must have functioned intermittently, pulsating as it were...