Word: mineralogists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SMITHSONIAN By James Conaway (Knopf; $60). This handsome volume commemorates the Smithsonian Institution's 150th anniversary. Ironically, the Smithsonian was founded with a financial gift from an Englishman who never set foot in the States. James Smithson was a noted mineralogist who, stung by the Royal Society's refusal to publish his scientific papers, bequeathed the U.S. government £100,000 to build "an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge." Today its trove ranges from the Wright brothers' airplane to a prototype of the Apple personal computer...
Other scholars are not so sure. USGS Mineralogist Ching Chang Woo, who was born in Canton, tried to date the messenger stone from its mineral crust, but could not do so because the sea deposits such materials at varying rates. Former U.C.L.A. Archaeologist William Clewlow allows that the stones are "enticing bits of evidence," but "just aren't conclusive...
...would probably have pulled more dense material to the side of the moon facing the earth. As a result the crust there would have been slightly squeezed and become thinner than that on the far side. Indeed, such an uneven distribution of crust was offered by University of Chicago Mineralogist Joseph Smith to explain the paucity of maria on the far side. These great lunar seas are believed to be vast upwellings of lava, perhaps from volcanic eruptions set off by the moon's collision with large asteroids. On the far side, where the crust is thicker, such impacts...
...postflight quarantine, teams of scientists are trying to put together bits and pieces of the lunar puzzle. Much of the work proceeds at a slow, painstaking pace. Last week, some NASA geologists seemed almost apologetic about their progress. "I've never been so frustrated in my life," complained Mineralogist Elbert King, the LRL's curator. "We've been working for years to get the lunar samples in our clutches. But I was unable to find a single mineral that I could immediately identify...
PRECIOUS STONES AND OTHER CRYSTALS, text by Rudolf Metz. 191 pages. Viking. $25. Dr. Metz, a mineralogist, has assembled the handsomest collection of minerals, precious, semiprecious and just plain beautiful, to be found anywhere outside a museum. The 89 flaw less color plates run the gamut from gold just as prospectors sometimes find it to the canary-yellow Tiffany diamond, 128.51 carats cut into 90 facets and worth $900,000. Dr. Metz's running comment is on the textbookish side, but no matter. With such cool splendors to survey, who wants to read...