Word: fossilized
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...Fading Fossil...
...poor, mildewed old fossil," Mark Twain called the Smithsonian Institution. He was wrong: in 1869, when the great author let fly at it, the Smithsonian, founded 23 years before, only seemed old. But the museum doggedly proceeded to fossilize itself with quaint, dutiful and embarrassing exhibits. Into its red brick neo-Romanesque castle on the edge of the Mall in Washington, D.C., went the Lord's Prayer, engraved in the space of a needle's eye, a necklace made of human fingers, and a pair of Thomas Jefferson's leather britches. Civil War General Phil Sheridan...
...official U.S. national museum, faithfully attended by 14.5 million visitors a year, the Smithsonian still avidly collects national memorabilia-General Eisenhower's dress uniform, the Friendship 7 space capsule-but at the venerable age of 118, much of its mildew has been cleaned off. The old fossil is in the midst of a flourishing rejuvenation. In the first step of an ambitious new building program, the Smithsonian's vast Museum of History and Technology last month moved from cramped, cluttered quarters into a $36 million pink Tennessee marble palace that squats with blank-walled solidity on Constitution Avenue...
...with Dorothy Osgood, his assistant, Alan K. Graham, a research fellow in Biology, and Graham's wife. The group intended to college rock core samples which had been taken from Lake Gatun by the Panama Canal Company as part of a geological study. Barghoorn hoped to recover fossil pollens from the rock samples...
...utilize "the three-quarters of the world that is water." He has projected service stations anchored to the sea bottom for submarines to nestle up to. "It is well known that below 40 feet, turbulence is manageable." he says. He proposes that the automobile may be the next fossil. "We will put little jet wings on our backs and fly out the window on high-frequency beams." Divining that the compression and tension factors can be separated in any structure, he has designed a "tensegrity mast" that seems to be held up by nothing at all. But Fuller insists that...