Word: fossils
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...deprivation of this grim landscape is superbly evoked by David Thomson, another movie-mad poet, in Try to Tell the Story, his new memoir of growing up in London around the same time as Davies in Liverpool. Davies shows a righteous class contempt for the excesses of Britain's "fossil monarchy," such as "the Betty and Phil Show," his phrase for the marriage of Prince Philip to Elizabeth II. "Even more money was wasted on her coronation... whilst in England's green and pleasant land the rest of the nation survived on rationing in some of the worst slums...
...biofuel from field to vehicle - to show that converting biomass to electricity (to power electric cars) produces 80% more transportation energy than turning it into ethanol (to power a flex-fuel car), with a carbon footprint that is half as small. (Bioelectricity is created the same way fossil fuel-generated electricity is: Biomass is usually burned to generate heat, turning water to steam and driving an electrical generator...
...element that's rare on Earth but common in asteroids, and a fine global dusting of the stuff is precisely what you'd expect to find if an asteroid struck the ground, vaporized on impact and eventually rained its remains back down. Below that iridium layer, the fossil record shows that a riot of species was thriving; above it, 65% of them went suddenly missing. (Read about China's dinosaur fossils...
...Keller and Addate worried that we were misreading both the geologic and fossil records. They conducted surveys at numerous sites in Mexico, including a spot called El Peñón, near the impact crater. They were especially interested in a 30-ft. layer of sediment just above the iridium layer. That sediment, they calculate, was laid down at a rate of about 0.8 in. to 1.2 in. per thousand years, meaning that all 30 feet took 300,000 years to settle into place...
...theory comes from recent analyses of the interior of the skull of Flo - as some call the 18,000-year-old fossil remains. A young female, Flo exhibits features that bear an uncanny resemblance to skulls from the hominid genus Australopithecus, which lived in Africa from roughly 4 million to 1.5 million years ago. The best-known australopithecene fossils are the 3.2 million-year-old A. afarensis Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia, and the 3 million-year-old A. africanus Taung Child, unearthed in South Africa. (See pictures of South Africa, fifteen years...