Word: soiling
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...break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely to be successful, and it now seems possible that sustained-yield forests based on clear-cutting simply may not work...
July has not been kind to Tehran. Only two weeks after the U.S.S. Vincennes downed an Iran Air Airbus, Baghdad began the last stages of a counteroffensive that promised to drive the remaining Iranian soldiers from Iraqi soil. By overrunning Iran's military headquarters on the southern front, Iraq gained control of the vital Shatt al Arab waterway, providing another sign that the eight-year-old gulf war was tilting in Iraq's favor...
...first soil sample briefly breathed new life into the Mars mystique. After being moistened inside the lab, it suddenly released an unexpectedly high burst of oxygen, setting off a flurry of speculation among scientists on earth. Did the oxygen come from some tiny form of Martian life in the soil? After further tests failed to confirm those first results, scientists reluctantly concluded that the large amount of oxygen had probably been produced by a simple chemical reaction between water vapor and some unidentified oxygen-rich compound in the soil sample...
Some scientists, Soviet and American alike, have still not abandoned hope of finding life or its remnants deeper in the Martian soil. There life forms might have access to water and be protected from the fierce solar ultraviolet radiation that rains down on the surface, virtually unobstructed by the Martian atmosphere. Sedimentary rocks in the ancient riverbeds would be an ideal place to hunt for fossils of organisms that may have lived when Mars was more benign, with a thicker atmosphere, warmer climate and running water on its surface...
...miles from the lander. It will be equipped with TV cameras, scoops and drills to sample materials and a minilab to analyze them. With information gained from this mission, the Soviets hope to launch as early as 1998 a larger Mars lander-rover that could return soil samples to earth...