Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...National Academy of Science. The study's authors theorize that an explosion as far as 185 trillion miles away could have eroded the earth's protective layer, exposing plant life to deadly ultraviolet radiation and thus disrupting the food chain. A supernova has long been a suspect in the planet's most severe episode of mass extinction, but today's evidence is the first to connect an exploding star with destruction of the ozone. TIME science writer Michael Lemonick explains, "This is a theory that has been around, but nobody has had a good explanation until now. It looks...
...planet's farmers are hard pressed to feed 5.7 billion people -- and nearly 100 million newborns each year. So it was more than welcome news when the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute announced a new strain of rice that yields as much as 25% more grain per acre than existing plants do. Once disease and insect resistance have been bred into the rice, a process expected to take about five years, the miracle grain will be set to join the fight against hunger...
...gotta go, go with a bang. That's what Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did last July. Nearly two dozen mountain-size chunks of this fragmented interplanetary wanderer slammed into Jupiter, creating 2,000-mile-high fireballs and sooty smudges on the planet's cloud tops that were visible from backyard telescopes. Scientists learned much about Jupiter's atmosphere, about comets, and even about how a similar impact on earth might have killed off the dinosaurs. For most onlookers, though, it was just a fantastic show...
...China meets its energy needs has an impact far beyond its boundaries. Sulfurous emissions from Chinese power plants and factories blow eastward and fall as acid rain on Japan and Korea. In fact, the pollution has planet-wide + implications: China is the world's second-largest producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are collecting in the atmosphere and may, many scientists believe, lead to global warming. If China maintains its annual economic growth rate of 11%, the country will need to add 17,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity each year for the rest of the decade...
...project as audacious and controversial as Three Gorges, many indisputably worthy ventures, from coal gasification to experiments with solar power, are also begging for funds. Governments and investors naturally wonder if they can afford to gamble on China. But as the most populous nation threatens to pollute the entire planet, can the rest of the world afford to turn its back...