Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pods are designed to shatter on impact, releasing a pair of 7-in. probes. Slamming into the surface, the probes are supposed to drive themselves 4 ft. into the Martian crust. Once buried, they will deploy tiny drills and begin sampling the chemical makeup of the soil around them. Scientists believe that chemistry could be remarkably rich. "The surface of Mars has been pretty well sterilized by ultraviolet radiation," says Sam Thurman, the mission's flight-operations manager. The subsurface has been spared that scrubbing...
...them myriad natural explanations, including a comet and a volcanic eruption on the Mediterranean island of Santorini. The most ingenious effort is an ecological domino theory proposed in the 1950s by a scholar named Greta Hort: the Nile's many tributaries flood, infesting the great river with blood-red soil from the high plateaus and reddish micro-organisms usually confined to up-country lakes. These micro-organisms poison the fish, whose rotting bodies pollute the frogs' habitats, forcing them to hop onto dry land. Insects (gnats, flies) feeding on the dead fish proliferate and convey the anthrax that eventually infects...
...once the pillars and the superintendents of the rain forest, the frame of the house and its chief occupants. The spiny understory palm trees make baskets from branches growing out of their trunks, which become compost machines for falling leaves, which in turn sustain the trees. Since the soil is not deep enough for roots to penetrate, the larger trees like the ceiba have buttresses that lie flat on the platform of the forest; some of the narrower trees are supported by stilt-roots at the base that look like whisk brooms. The Parkia tree rises...
...collapse of the English revolution that he helped foment--itself a catastrophic result of the Protestantism set loose by Henry VIII's divorce. Instead of writing Paradise Lost, the blind and defeated rebel arrives near Plymouth in 1660. As he proceeds to plant an intolerant city-state on American soil, this Milton sneers at the memory of More, calling him an idolater who had had his head chopped off. And yet Milton must repress his delight in Utopia, More's 1516 tract about a perversely perfect new world. He heaps murderous scorn on neighboring English Catholics, although he is surreptitiously...
...news conference in New York City last week, as well as in a report in Nature, scientists revealed that they had stumbled upon the site of the doomed dinosaur rookery during an expedition to remote badlands in central Argentina last November. Scattered over a square mile of parched Patagonian soil, they found the whole or shattered remains of thousands of grapefruit-size, fossilized dinosaur eggs--so many, in fact, that they couldn't avoid crushing them underfoot or with the wheels of their cars. "We were picking up eggs all over the place," says the American Museum of Natural History...