Word: fossils
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There hasn't even been a political trend worth mentioning -- the election signifying less a leftward trend than a rejection of the rightward trend, which has been slithering around for two decades now. As a result, we've been forced to import trends, like karaoke, or revive fossil trends like troll dolls, who first showed their wizened little rubber faces almost 30 years...
Even more to their astonishment, researchers discovered that biology played an important role in the rock-dissolving process. By poring over slices of limestone under microscopes, scientists found the fossil remains of primitive bacteria that had thrived in the once hostile environment. Using sulfur instead of sunlight as their source of energy, these organisms actually bolstered the acid's power to etch rock. Descendants of these strange microbes have recently been found and are being studied at Lechuguilla Cave, not far from Carlsbad...
...looking at fossil specimens and studying current species, researchers have concluded that most cave dwellers started out at the entrance of the cave. As they and their descendants traveled deeper inside and away from sunlight, they began to lose their eyes and develop other sensory organs to compensate. But is this loss an active process or just a question of disuse? "That's been a raging debate ever since Darwin's time," Poulson says. "What we've found is that it's disuse. There is no natural selection to screen out any bad mutations that affect the eyes. So eventually...
These varied sources would produce electricity for local consumption and clean-burning hydrogen for distribution via pipelines. According to one estimate, a single solar-cell farm covering roughly one-quarter the area of New Mexico could supply enough electrically produced hydrogen to replace all the fossil fuels consumed in the U.S. If the necessary real estate can't be found on the planet's surface, the solar collectors could be parked in orbit, beaming energy to earth via high-power microwaves...
GLOBAL-WARMING SCENARIOS ARE MOSTLY GLOOM and doom. As humans burn more fossil fuels, more carbon dioxide (CO2) enters the atmosphere. CO2 traps the sun's heat, causing a warmer climate, rising sea levels and drastic changes in weather. The one bright spot seemed to be that because plants "breathe" CO2, they might be expected to thrive...