Word: soiling
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...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...
...Federal Power Commission Head Lee White and Ralph Nader, charge that the oil industry has had an incentive to drag its feet in order to reduce the supply and force prices still higher. The evidence scarcely supports that accusation: petroleum producers lately have been sinking more holes into American soil than at any time since the mid-1960s. Trouble is, the new wells are not turning up much...
...chairman of the geography department of the University of California at Berkeley from 1923-54, Sauer impressed on his students the need to find "humane ways" to use earth's resources. Sauer was equally comfortable discussing ancient literature, leading expeditions to Baja California, or interviewing small farmers about soil erosion. His best-known books, Northern Mists and The Early Spanish Main, contended that Irish monks reached North America before Leif Ericson, and that Christopher Columbus had been an unstable governor of the West Indies, setting policies that nearly exterminated the region's Indians...