Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...obsessive fans (Nathan Lane) is extravagantly camp, a walking aria of loveless lament. The other (Anthony Heald), casually straight in manner but for an occasional nervous flutter of his hands, has a thriving career as a book editor and a cozy home life with a physician. They amount to a before-and-after picture of homosexuals in the age of liberation. The campy one, very '50s, is witty but a self-denigrating cartoon; his friend, very '80s, acts relaxed even when disclosing that his relationship is turning into an "open" one. The twist in Terrence McNally's midnight-dark comedy...
...benefits of the Apollo space program was the image in the rearview mirror as the astronauts rocketed to the moon. It was the first time earthlings could see their home as a whole, and NASA's pictures said with stunning force what neither words nor theories could adequately convey: life has radically transformed this numinous sphere. The heart-stopping beauty of the earth set against the dark void of space earned inventor-scientist James Lovelock the first adherents to a theory that appears to reconcile science and religion in the study of life on earth. Lovelock's idea, named...
...first articulated his hypothesis in the early 1970s, in collaboration with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, it has only recently begun to have significant impact on the scientific world. Initially, Gaia was only embraced by New Age types who responded to a holistic view of nature that blurred the distinction between life and death...
According to the Gaia hypothesis, earth's atmosphere would be unstable for life if it were not regulated by the biosphere, the envelope of life surrounding earth. Oxygen levels have remained at roughly 21% of the atmosphere for 200 million years, Lovelock asserts, whereas they should have fluctuated wildly, according to some geochemical models of the atmosphere. Were oxygen levels to rise above 25%, spontaneous fires would break out; if they dropped below 15%, many higher life-forms would suffocate. Climatologist Tyler Volk of New York University argues that life controls earth's temperature as well. In a study recently...
Scientists have yet to uncover the actual mechanisms by which life processes regulate earth's climate and atmosphere. Lovelock maintains that this makes it all the more imperative that man halt the mass extinctions threatened by the destruction of tropical forests, because he does not know what creatures are essential to his own survival. At the American Geophysical Union conference on Gaia, Lovelock argued that diversity makes earth both stable and habitable: "You cannot have a sparse planet any more than you can have half an animal...