Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Spirit. Not every ecologist is as active as Commoner. Some are ill-equipped to influence political decisions in the right directions. Some risk making ecology more of a passing fad than a permanent force in U.S. life. Nevertheless, Americans can expect to hear many more expert warnings about the damage they are doing to their environment. Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover has described ecology as "the key science for correctly assessing the negative aspects of technology." And the new Jeremiahs are right in the spirit of the old: "I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof...
What the scientists were unable to detect conclusively was any sign of life. One chemist placed samples of lunar dust and rock chips under a 300,000-power microscope and found no evidence of lunar organisms, either living or fossilized. Another chemist did detect a trace of carbon, an element essential to life. But it was mainly volatile hydrocarbons that are familiar ingredients of lubricating oil; they might well have come from tools, or from the cabinets in which the samples had been placed...
...first, the data sent back to earth by two Mariner spacecraft more than 60 million miles away seemed to offer as little hope as the lunar rocks that life would be found elsewhere in the solar system. Flying past the planet Mars, the small, instrument-packed spacecraft detected no evidence of nitrogen, an indispensable ingredient of life on earth. Probing the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere, they failed to find anything like the ozone shield that protects the earth's surface from the sun's deadly rain of ultraviolet radiation. Even their stunning close-up photographs from...
...week's end the infra-red spectrometer on board Mariner 7, the second of the two vehicles that flew past Mars, detected two gases-ammonia and methane-that could indicate the presence of primitive life. Both are produced on earth by biological decay. George C. Pimentel, a University of California chemist, said that he was unable to determine the amount of ammonia in the Martian atmosphere, but he estimated the concentration of methane as "no more than a few parts per million." In the earth's atmosphere, the amount is about 1.5 p.p.m.-and added rather jovially that...
Even so, scientists are not quite ready to dismiss the possibility of life there altogether. Investigators think that microbes or other primitive forms of life may yet be discovered on Mars. In a number of studies, biologists have already shown that algae, plant seeds and even beetles can survive temperatures similar to those found on the red planet. "Considering the extreme conditions that organisms tolerate here on earth," adds the University of Hawaii's Sanford Siegel, a physiologist whose studies on low-temperature life have been supported by NASA, "I would be very surprised indeed if we didn...