Word: fossils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Famed Chemist Urey (Nobel Prize, 1934) proved three years ago that certain fossil sea shells can be used as fossil thermometers to measure "paleotemperatures." His method takes advantage of the fact that normal oxygen contains two stable isotopes, oxygen 18 and oxygen 16, in the proportion of 1 to 500. When a sea mollusk takes up calcium carbonate (CaCO3) to build its shell, the proportions of the oxygen isotopes in it vary with the temperature of the sea water. The warmer the water the less oxygen 18 is built into the shell...
Another theory was developed by Britain's late Mathematician Edward A. Milne, who died last year. The light from the distant nebulae, said Milne, is "fossil light." It started its journey several hundred million years ago, and light in those ancient days may have been different from light today, just as dinosaurs are different from modern animals. The glowing calcium atoms that now give blue light, for instance, may have given green light then. When the fossil green light reaches the earth, Milne said, it fools astronomers into thinking that the nebulae it came from are moving away from...
...most commonly used methods for freeing fossils are risky. Acid, for instance, dissolves limestone, but it also destroys many types of fossils. Some grades of stone can be scaled away with the flame of a blow torch, but this method is limited and difficult. Other stones, heated and then dipped in cold water, sometimes crack away from the fossils they contain. Too often, the rapid change of temperature shatters the fossil as well as the stone...
Movins said evidence of equally ancient human existence has been unearthed in Europe but never before in Asia. Coon's assertion that the fossil dates back to the third interglacial period still has to be substantiated by geologists, Movius pointed...
...next six months. Wherever there is time for him to train assistants, he will also conduct a demonstration of the Mass as it was performed in approximately 200 A.D. Such Dix demonstrations aim to make Communion meaningful to Christians for whom it has been a beautiful but meaningless fossil of antique forms...