Word: soils
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mormon Church is by far the most numerically successful creed born on American soil and one of the fastest growing anywhere. Its U.S. membership of 4.8 million is the seventh largest in the country, while its hefty 4.7% annual American growth rate is nearly doubled abroad, where there are already 4.9 million adherents. Gordon B. Hinckley, the church's President--and its current Prophet--is engaged in massive foreign construction, spending billions to erect 350 church-size meetinghouses a year and adding 15 cathedral-size temples to the existing 50. University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark projects that in about...
...late work From a Day with Juan, 1977, whose white ramp jacked up into heaven presents a bland portentousness that is a lifetime away from O'Keeffe's revolutionary start. Through it all runs a whiff of pure Americana, a longing for an untroubled world sprung from native soil. "It is breathtaking as one rises up over the world one has been living in," O'Keeffe once wrote, "and looks down at it stretching away and away...
After bombarding the reddish dirt with helium nuclei and analyzing the resulting patterns of radiation, the spectrometer revealed that the soil was rich in iron and virtually identical to that examined at other sites 21 years earlier by the Viking landers. This suggested to scientists that Martian topsoil is widely distributed by the planet's frequent global dust storms. Why the reddish hue? "The surface of Mars is rusting," explains Jim Bell, a Cornell University scientist...
Moving on, Sojourner headed toward a nearby, bear-shaped rock named Yogi, stopping on the way to test the consistency of the soil by using five of its wheels for traction and one to dig into the dirt. Sojourner's cameras showed that the rover's shove had displaced what seemed to be a thin layer of crust over the soil. "We used the rover as sort of a bulldozer," explained Golombek...
Inside the lander, computer-driven devices measured the soil samples and fed them into the miniature biology lab, where they were analyzed for signs of growth, metabolism and respiration, processes that would signal the presence of living microorganisms. In one of the tests, a soil sample dampened with "chicken soup"--a nutrient broth--gave off a burst of oxygen. In another, unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide were released. While both results produced flurries of excitement at J.P.L., scientists eventually--though reluctantly--concluded that the gases resulted not from life processes, but from some exotic Martian chemistry...