Word: permafrost
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this era of big science, most of the research on the 1918 virus has been done on shoestring budgets by determined individuals. Kolata celebrates the obscure scientists who did the scut work, which included collecting tissue samples from bodies moldering in permafrost for eight decades. Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington didn't have to go far. While searching through the institute's museum of diseased body parts ("a Library of Congress of the Dead," says Kolata), Taubenberger found a lung scrap from an Army private who died on Sept...
About 20,000 years ago, a very big animal had a very bad day. Deep in Siberia, an 11-ft.-tall woolly mammoth fell over dead. It became entombed in the permafrost, where it remained until last week, when it was finally freed. If scientists have their way, the same mammoth--or rather, its cloned kin--could walk again...
...scientific eyes of the world--and a few well-placed network cameras--watched, Russian scientists used a helicopter to extract a twenty-ton block of ice from the permafrost of Siberia. The block, believed to contain the fully intact remains of a 23,000 year-old woolly mammoth, was transported to Moscow where it now sits in a permanently frozen cave awaiting further scientific examination...
Arkady Renko, the admirable outcast cop of Gorky Park, is a man of northern mists and bureaucratic permafrost. What's he doing in Havana? And why does he walk the streets sunk in gloom, a parody Russian, wearing that heavy overcoat? One question at a time: Havana because he's looking into the death of a colleague (the Cubans, fed up with Russians, want him to identify the body and scram--but no, Renko investigates); the sweltering coat because it is a last gift from his wife, dead of medical bungling in Moscow. The story is all amiable, well-told...
...sublimes in the multiplicity of the villager's interpretations, hardly solid as it is pushed into each individual's hopes and terrors. Though the place and time in which the novel occurs is limited to a single day in a very small village, what seems stagnant and solid as permafrost liquefies and then reforms as it is seen from each character's perspective. Just like the zone between the land and the sea that is never dry for the lapping waves, what seems neatly defined land and water mixes, leaving enough room for interpretation to fill the novel...