Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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under your soil...
Earthquakes, floods and fugitive diseases are, at any rate, random evidence that the earth itself is mysteriously and sometimes wildly alive. That somehow added to the metaphysical fascination of watching the Americans' Viking lander scratch around in the rusty Martian soil to see if that world, too, had been visited by the secret force...
Communist countries are almost always disjointed by bureaucratic stupidity. The most frequently cited example is agriculture. It is true that the Soviet Union suffers from natural handicaps, including bad weather and arid soil. Even so, the basic problem is its communal farming system, which fails to provide the farmers with sufficient motivation. The dismal results are well known; Moscow must buy huge tonnages of grain from the profit-seeking farmers...
...only from malnutrition but also from infections picked up at sea. Some, such as smallpox, malaria and measles, proved effective biological-warfare weapons, ravaging the Indians, who had no immunity against them. But most of the disease-causing microbes of the Old World took readily to the fertile soil of the New World, and so did the insects and vermin that carry them. The result: for fully three centuries, North America was scourged by deadly epidemics...
...Martian life is discovered, Project Scientist Gerald Soffen speculates, it will probably be quite different from anything found on earth. Martian organisms are likely to be microscopic in size. They would also have to be capable of extracting life-giving moisture from the planet's arid soil and atmosphere. Soffen believes they might do this by means of some sort of biological pump or natural siphon. "Martian critters have had billions of years to adapt," he explains. Somewhere in the process of evolution they must have had to face-and overcome-the need for water. "So what they developed...