Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Soviet Union is making huge new investments in fertilizer plants. Nonetheless, Soviet farmers still lack soil additives. Further, Soviet farm managers are relatively unschooled in such important crop-producing techniques as soil conservation, herbicide use and pest control-a legacy of the decades during which the head of a collective farm was most often not its best manager but its most politically reliable Communist. As a result, a Soviet farmer produces only one-tenth as much grain as his U.S. counterpart. Reports a member of a U.S. Agriculture Department team that studied Soviet farms last month: "The managing staffs...
...Soil Scoop. On Mars, the laboratory will be served by a mechanical arm, which will reach out and scoop soil up from the surface. One small sample of soil will be dropped into a vessel containing natural Martian atmosphere. Then water vapor and carbon dioxide tagged with radioactive carbon 14 will be added. After five days of incubation under simulated Martian sunlight, the atmosphere will be removed, and the soil heated to 1160° F., hot enough to vaporize organic material. If any organism in the soil has incorporated the radioactive carbon dioxide by a process similar to terrestrial photosynthesis...
...chance that Mars may be the home of primitive living things something like bacteria, a soil sample in another chamber will be slightly moistened by a nutrient solution laced with carbon 14. The sample will be incubated, then tested to learn whether anything in the soil has consumed the nutrient and released waste gases containing the telltale carbon...
...acquaintance suggested that Leventhal try a nearby field that was lying fallow. After bicycling to the site, Leventhal began to sweep the area with his detector. Soon the beep-beep in his earphones changed to a wail. Leventhal unsheathed his 8-in. scout knife, dug through the dry soil and unearthed a peculiarly shaped cylinder that he thought was just "another sewer pipe." Then the detector sounded off for another hit. More knife digging, and Leventhal was suddenly staring at what seemed to be curls on the back of a bronze head. He dug out the head, wrapped...
...decompose naturally in five years. The secret: addition of clean, dry starch to plastic polymers. "By putting in the starch," explains Inventor Gerald J.C. Griffin, a teacher of plastics technology at Brunei University, "we are adding carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The bags will act as a carbon source for soil bacteria, breaking down into humus and carbon dioxide." Griffin's process, which can be used for most plastic products, has a powerful appeal beyond reducing long-lived litter. Because starch costs much less than polymer plastics, the process saves money -up to $4.50 per 1,000 bags right...