Word: soiling
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...warm, waterlogged soil of wetlands is prime habitat for the anaerobic microbes that produce methane - and in general, the warmer and wetter, the more the methane. Since rice paddies are kept underwater during the wet growing season in Southeast Asia and other major rice producing areas, paddies too serve as ideal factories for methane. "[The farmers] use controlled floods, and that's guaranteed to produce methane," says Palmer...
...objects in question consist mostly of seashells, many of them pierced, with bits of pigment on them. It's always possible that the pigment was simply present in the soil where the shells ended up - but then you'd expect the coloring to be widespread. In fact, it's specific to certain shells. Beyond that, several shells contain different pigments that were clearly mixed together deliberately. In some cases, the pigments were of a type that is only known to have been used (in ancient Egypt, for example, so we have actual records) for body painting. "There's a sector...
...enemy-combatant option, however, raises a host of thorny legal questions. Since Sept. 11, only two terrorism suspects arrested on American soil - Jose Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri - have been designated as enemy combatants; the remainder were captured overseas. Both men were held for years in an offshore Navy brig, as challenges to their detentions dragged through the courts. The legality of their detention on those terms has never been cleanly settled. Just days before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear arguments in Padilla's case in late 2005, the Bush Justice Department moved the case...
...Qaeda: The attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack on an airliner landing in Detroit was a reminder that al-Qaeda is still with us - albeit in radically depleted form. While the war launched in Afghanistan in response to its first attack on U.S. soil remains a tough challenge, the terrorist network has been left on the defensive by years of intelligence and police work that have systematically rolled up or killed many of its key leaders. (Unfortunately, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have provided plenty of willing recruits for what remains of the organization.) Obama has tried to transform relations...
...attack reverberated beyond airport security lines, though those have already become longer and more complicated. The airline scare represented the second time in the past 12 months that purported Islamic terrorists have tried to launch a strike on American soil - and may be the first time that such an assault was directed from Yemen. That's a reminder that the struggle against jihadism is not confined to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where U.S. forces are now concentrated. In its provenance and near catastrophic outcome, the story of Flight 253 is a reminder that the war on terrorism is far from over...