Word: fossils
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...science's most audacious hoaxes. For four decades after the announcement in 1912 of its discovery near the English hamlet of Piltdown, the curious fossil with the humanlike cranium and the apelike jaw was believed by many anthropologists to be the long-sought "missing link" between man and ape. But in 1953, after application of new analytic techniques to thefamous skull, the ruse was finally revealed: the Piltdown man, as the fossil was dubbed, was a fraud. It consisted of nothing more than fragments of modern human skulls mingled with portions of a contemporary ape jaw with teeth doctored...
Hampered by an inefficient industrial system and a ponderous bureaucracy, Soviet nuclear development is still years behind that of the U.S. and Western European countries. Still, the Soviets, caught between increasing demands for energy and declining supplies of fossil fuels, are catching up. They are not only expanding their use of established nuclear technologies and plants but, with a speed sure to cause concern on the western side of the Iron Curtain, they are moving into new-and not wholly proven-ways of harnessing the atom...
Over the past decade, new discoveries of ancient human and pre-human fossils in Africa are forcing paleontologists and anthropologists to re-examine the history of the human species. Many of these important fossil discoveries have occured and are still occurring on the banks of Lake Turkana in Kenya, where a large team of workers at the Koobi Fora camp is making discoveries which trace human evolution back two and three million years. The head of the highly successful and productive Koobi Fora project is Richard E. Leakey, son of the world-famous prehistorians Louis and Mary Leakey. In light...
...prevent his book from becoming an endless series of dated skulls and cranium sizes, Leakey goes beyond the cell of paleontology. He uses his fossil discoveries to speculate about the nature of ancestral societies. Leakey pieces together his chips and bones and then tries to pinpoint social and economic attributes of the hunter-gatherer bands that once inhabited the earth...
...nuclear physicist trained in the '50s, I have been appalled at the low level on which the nuclear energy debate has been conducted. When dozens of workers are killed in an oil refinery explosion, no one suggests that we abandon the use of fossil fuels. When a water pipe in a nuclear reactor develops a hairline fracture, hysteria follows. Nuclear reactor safety is a highly quantitative and technical matter. It is high time that responsible journalism calls for rational discourse...