Word: second
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...thousandth of a second longer than it was a century ago. Although this change has had no effect on clocks, it is highly significant for astronomers. Just before he died last July, venerable, 71-year-old Professor Ernest William Brown of Yale, who spent half a century studying the passage of time, sent the Smithsonian Institution an original hypothesis on the lengthening...
...known fact, said Professor Brown, accounts for slight variations in the day's length, but the moon's influence is not powerful enough to cause such large changes in time as that which occurred in 1897, when the apparent length of the year was changed by one second. Practical reason for studying the phenomenon, he added, is that the length of the day is more variable now than ever and a new change may soon occur...
...chestnut tree used to flourish from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from the Canadian frontier to North Carolina. It often reached a height of 100 feet, a ripe old age of 600 years. Today, where the once verdant chestnut forests stood, are scattered grey skeletons, a few scrubby little second growth trees. For Endothia parasitica, the chestnut fungus imported from Asia at the end of the last century, has systematically destroyed the American chestnut. Only a few stands are left in the Southern Appalachians and Endothia has started on them...
...Mother Cabrini. In a coffin in the chapel-crypt lay her body, removed there from a cemetery five years ago after being identified and reported "well-preserved" - an aid but not an essential to beatification. Last week Monsignor Natucci, his entourage and a few necessary witnesses beheld a second exhumation of Mother Cabrini. At some secret later time, the Devil's Advocate was to sever from the body a limb (which limb would not be revealed) - a "first-class" relic which he would take to Rome for use in the beatification ceremonies...
...First-class relics are parts of the body; second-class, clothing which the saint wore; third-class, anything the saint used or touched. Where relics are known to exist, any church, religious community or pious person may apply for one, usually obtaining a second-class relic...