Word: soils
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...YORK is an urban wilderness. A forest of skyscrapers supports a canopy of smog, the streets are a desolate and forbidding territory, human artifices like subway tunnels and telephone booths are derelict endeavors slowly returning to the soil, while primitive creatures roam about. Yes sir, this is the new frontier, and Charlie Bronson is its trailblazing pioneer in Death Wish...
...incident might have passed without serious challenge had not Anderson's lawyers been able to produce eyewitness reports, photographs and even a movie film to back up their contention that a Canadian landed immigrant had been seized on Canadian soil. After five days, the U.S. Customs Service finally acknowledged that Anderson had indeed been captured "a few yards" across the border. At week's end, after the Ottawa government complained that the seizure had been a violation of Canadian sovereignty, the State Department returned Anderson to Canada...
...spindly three-legged spacecraft sits silently on the dry, barren landscape. Suddenly, on command from controllers some 200 million miles away, the robot comes alive. A motor whirls; a slender, 10-ft. long arm reaches out, opens a small scoop and digs up some of the reddish soil...
This dramatic scenario is no longer confined to the daydreams of imaginative exobiologists.* Last week technicians at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, Calif., were finishing two miniaturized laboratories that will be able to test Martian soil for evidence of life. Next August, in the climax to NASA'S $1 billion Project Viking, two unmanned spacecraft will be fired aloft from Cape Canaveral. After an eleven-month journey, the Viking ships will swing into orbit around Mars. Each will release a lander containing a life-seeking laboratory. After descending with the aid of parachute and braking rockets, the first sterilized...
...test, a small sample of Martian soil will be partially submerged in a nutrient-rich solution (called "chicken soup" by the experimenters). If any Martian organisms grow in the broth and give off carbon dioxide or other common byproducts of respiration-like life processes, instruments will detect these chemicals. In another test, soil will be exposed to a nutrient containing radioactive carbon 14. If any microorganisms consume the nutrient and give off carbon-bearing gases as metabolic wastes, those wastes will be radioactively "tagged" and readily identified. Lastly, a Martian soil sample will be exposed to xenon "sunlight...