Word: scientist
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Halfway across the Pacific, marine biologist A. Peter Klimley of the University of California at Davis has for decades been getting his own incredible insights into shark behavior, frequently by taking risks others would call insane. While a graduate student in the 1970s, Klimley became the first scientist ever to swim directly into schools of adult hammerhead sharks. He dived as deep as 70 ft. without scuba gear so his air bubbles wouldn't disturb the skittish fish...
...that happens in the absence of plate tectonics is not well understood," admits Robert Strom, a University of Arizona planetary scientist. To NASA Goddard scientist Jim Garvin, the finding suggests that a geology significantly more complex than scientists had expected was at work on Mars. "It's not the easiest rock to make," he says, "and that alone is very exciting...
Sojourner also managed to obtain a "fingerprint" of the other chemicals in Barnacle Bill. The fingerprint turned out to be virtually identical to those of the 12 meteorites found on Earth that are believed to have Martian origins. "So," concluded University of Tennessee scientist Hap McSween after the visit to Barnacle Bill, "now we can say that we have analyzed 13 Martian rocks...
Then, demonstrating a technique that any driver maneuvering into a tight parking spot would envy, Sojourner energetically swiveled its wheels back and forth and "crabbed" sideways into a position near Yogi. The next day, however, when the rover moved toward the rock to perform X-ray spectroscopy, says project scientist Justin Maki, "it got a little too enthusiastic." What really happened is that Sojourner's controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory failed to take into account a small outcropping at the base of the rock. Pushed ever so slightly upward, the rover gently bumped into the rock and began...
This is not, frankly, a place at which one is rooting for Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway to end up. Foster has always been an actress who gives intelligence a good name, and she's very attractive here as a stubbornly obsessive scientist, convinced there are brainy beings out there in deep space trying to get in touch with us, then triumphantly picking up their mysterious signals from the void...