Word: plankton
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...film, little of this remains. Bits of themes, shreds of ideas float on the surface of the plot like so much plankton...
SOYLENT GREEN is not a park outside London, but a foodstuff supposedly manufactured from high-energy plankton. It is the very staff of life for the beleaguered citizens of smog-shrouded, dangerously overcrowded New York City in the year 2022, where there are nearly 200 murders a day and only a rich man can afford cigarettes. The plot of this intermittently interesting science-fiction thriller is about a cop (Charlton Heston) whose investigations lead him to the true and appalling origin of soylent green. The story is rather less notable than the fact that its alarming social prognosis has already...
...different intensity. Chlorophyll, for instance, a key chemical involved in the production of oxygen by green plants, has a very distinctive infra-red "fingerprint." Thus, by the color variations in photos, future ERTS satellites could quickly detect any large-and possibly dangerous -change in the chlorophyll content of ocean plankton, a principal source of the world's oxygen supply. By similar "fingerprinting," ERTS and its successors could warn of changes in the health of woodlands, detect harmful acidity in soil, find clues to new oil and mineral deposits, and perhaps even sniff out illegal fields of opium poppies...
...Oxford degree in English and gleaned most of her information about science "from reading books." Two men in particular inspired her. The first was Amateur Ethologist Robert Ardrey, the failed but imaginative playwright whose views she now rejects. The second was Oxford Zoologist Sir Alister Hardy, an authority on plankton who thought up a nonsexist version of aquatic evolution about a dozen years...
...isotopes. As a result, the carbon in the organic compounds that make up the plants' structure consists largely of carbon 12. What is more, the greater preponderance of that isotope becomes preserved in the earth's geological records when, for example, tiny green sea plants (plankton) die, sink to the ocean bottom, gradually decompose and become part of the sea-floor sediment. Still rich in carbon 12, this sediment is eventually compressed into rock and can be geologically dated with considerable accuracy. Thus, the researchers suggest, the 3.3-billion-year age of the South African rock layers...