Word: polarity
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...climatology-the study of long-range trends in weather-is still an inexact science, to say the least. Climatologists still disagree on whether earth's long-range outlook is another ice age, which could bring mass starvation and fuel shortages, or a warming trend, which could melt the polar icecaps and flood coastal cities...
Indeed, Mars seems to possess many of the elements essential to life on earth. Most of Mars' visible water appears in the form of atmospheric vapor or ice locked in the planet's two polar caps (the surface pressure on Mars is so low* that liquid water would probably boil away). But liquid water apparently once did flow freely on the Martian surface in earlier days; Viking's orbital pictures show that the planet is crisscrossed by dry "riverbeds" and sinuous valleys, including a deep Grand Canyon-like depression called the Valles Marineris, that were probably carved...
...polar conflict of the play is be tween love and empire or desire and duty, with Egypt symbolizing one and Rome the other. Director Phillips sets up a telling counterpoint between the brisk, businesslike military scenes and the perfumed enchantment of the amorous interludes...
...Biographer Frank McShane, Professor of creative writing at Columbia University, offers sheaves of contradictions from Raymond Chandler's long but unprolific career. His colloquial American fiction was written by a snob trained in an English public school and weaned on Latin and Greek. The disabuse Marlowe was the polar opposite of his creator, a sentimentalist who liked to write doggerel about "brief butterfly hours." Marlowe was surrounded by young ladies of wondrously easy virtue; Chandler adored his mother and married a woman 20 years his senior. Marlowe never had a pedestrian afternoon; Chandler was a preoccupied oil company executive...
Some climatologists dispute whether there is, in fact, a cooling trend; they foresee instead a worldwide warming trend that could melt polar ice and raise the level of the oceans and possibly inundate coastal cities. But whatever their feelings about long-term trends, scientists generally agree that the world's climate is entering a period of more widely varying conditions that will make planning for agricultural production difficult. The experts are also worried about the impact of man-made pollution, which makes predictions based on historical weather cycles less reliable. "If humans interfere, we cannot say for sure that...