Word: soils
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...great moment for Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the 36-year-old soldier-revolutionary who is Premier of Egypt. He had achieved what Egyptians had been trying to do for over 70 years: get Britain's troops off their country's soil. London had at last agreed to evacuate its mighty Suez Canal base. "Now I am worthy of my uniform," exulted Nasser's close friend, General Abdel Hakim Amer, commander of Egypt's army...
...bacteria as an aid to exploration, e.g., certain important layers of rock can be identified by the fossil microorganisms imbedded in the strata. Some of these are remains of bacteria that lived freakishly on iron or sulphur compounds; others, still living, get along on petroleum itself. Most common soils contain bacteria that can "eat" hydrocarbons; if oil is spilled on the soil, they multiply enthusiastically, and soon the oil disappears...
...paraffin, asphalt and natural gas, says Dr. Beerstecher. Sometimes the ground above an oil pool is greasy with a substance that oil prospectors call "paraffin dirt." This is mostly the fat-rich bodies of bacteria that prospered for years on trickles of natural gas seeping up through the soil. Dr. Beerstecher believes that bacteria can be trained like truffle hounds to find oil under the ground. His proposal: expose gas-eating bacteria to air taken from below the soil; if they grow, it will prove that the air contains gas and that chances are good that...
...MOTHER DITCH, by Oliver La Farge (Houghton Mifflin; $2.25), follows a young Spanish-American boy as he earns his bread by the sweat of his brow in the arid New Mexican soil that Novelist-Anthropologist La Farge (Laughing Boy) knows and loves...
...Castile," says British Author V. S. Pritchett, "is a landscape of hidden villages, suddenly come upon, like crocks of earthenware in the soil, crumbling in the summer heat, sodden in the torrential rains of winter; it is a place of sunsets in the haze of dust and of short twilights when the sky at the last moment goes green over the sharp, violet mountains, which seem to have been cut out by a knife . . . The landscape of Castile, Unamuno said, is for monotheism, not pantheism. God is a precise thing like a stone, the Christ is a real man bleeding...