Word: planetful
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...THINGS KEPT THE 3.15-ACRE GLASS-AND-STEEL structure called Biosphere 2 from being just another greenhouse: a hermetic seal separating 3,800 species of plants and animals, including four men and four women, from the rest of the planet, and a veneer of scientific legitimacy. The seal has been broken several times in the past year and a half -- most recently to pump in 10 tons of badly needed oxygen. Now the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked...
...THEIR QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE, SCIENTISTS WILL take advantage of anything that's helpful, even a nuclear blast. Studies of the shock waves given off by a Chinese .66-megaton nuclear test have revealed a "continent" 2,000 miles underground, at the boundary between the molten iron of the planet's core and the molten rock just above it. The word continent is used loosely; what two scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey found was a region 200 miles across and 80 miles deep that is denser than surrounding regions. The implication: the core-mantle boundary may be as complex...
...basic rules of chemistry are any guide, life should not exist. Scientists showed in the 1950s that shooting an electric spark through a soup of chemicals -- thus simulating lightning strikes on the primordial planet earth -- could produce simple organic compounds. But complex, self-reproducing chemicals like dna? They shouldn't have arisen in a trillion years. At an even deeper level, the second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe should inexorably move toward disorganization. Cups of tea always cool off; they never spontaneously get hotter. Iron rusts, but rust never turns into iron...
...over the eons, a chaotic universe organized itself into stars and galaxies and planets. And at least one planet, our own, is now bursting with life in bewildering varieties, filled with organisms that have arrayed themselves into ecosystems, communities and complex societies. How did this happen? That is the question posed by a brand-new field of science known as complexity...
That ought to be enough for any managing editor of TIME, but it is not what Muller is proudest of. It is his selection of the Endangered Earth as the Planet of the Year in 1988, a daring play on TIME's traditional Man of the Year choice. Says he: "We took a story that was all around us but that no one had treated in the depth it deserved. And we produced a list of solutions that stand up very well today...