Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...retired professor asked about Roman metal workers who wore face masks made from goats' bladders to protect themselves from dust and lead fumes (Roman Naturalist Pliny was the source). Three readers were baffled by the word glitch in one of our moon stories (it is a modernized term for World War II's famed gremlin); another was having trouble finding the word aelurophile (it is a variant of ailurophile, meaning lover of cats). Ofttimes the department is called upon to settle arguments-last year two college roommates quibbled about who makes more money, pro footballers or auto racers...
...more disappointed than Nobel Laureate Harold Urey, 76, when the 55 Ibs. of lunar samples brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts turned out to be igneous or heat-formed rock, possibly of volcanic origin. Long a champion of a "cold" moon-the theory that it has never had a molten core like the earth's-the University of California chemist sadly admitted that he could have been wrong. The moon, he conceded in the face of the rocks, might be hot, or geologically active, after all. "Poor old fellow," said one of NASA's younger geologists several...
Those added years had startling geological implications. They meant that the moon's maria, or seas, were not created by relatively recent-and possibly continuing-volcanic activity. Instead, the maria had probably survived largely intact since early in the moon's life. Because the relatively uncratered maria are probably the last major features to have been formed on the lunar surface, the moon's appearance has remained essentially unchanged for billions of years. "It's something, isn't it?" Urey reflected last week. "Rocks sticking up above the surface . . . perhaps they haven't changed...
Geologically Akin. The scientists had erred in other ways. In the first exciting days after the lunar specimens arrived in Houston, they had suggested that the moon and the earth were closely akin in geological evolution and structure, and that the moon was made of earthlike layers. Now more careful study is showing that these initial ideas have almost as many holes as the moon itself. Not only have the rocks sprung such chemical surprises as an unusually high content of titanium, but the moon's seismic activity is also not what it had seemed...
...first, the seismometer left behind at Tranquillity Base radioed back several signals that were interpreted in some quarters as distinct moonquakes, a hint that the moon-like the earth -was stratified and geologically alive. Now, says Geophysicist Gary Latham of Columbia University, investigators think that the patterns may have been caused spuriously by the seismometer itself. Yet, even while it seemed to be working well, says Latham, the seismometer detected only infrequent, relatively small lunar rumbles. He accounts for that odd seismic behavior by speculating that the moon contains a large amount of cold, fragmented material that would diffuse...