Word: sunlight
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...Argentines still believed that things were going well for them in the Falklands, shop windows throughout the country were plastered with sky-blue-and-white signs proclaiming UNIDOS, ES MÁS FACIL (United, it's easier). By last week those painted proclamations had faded in the weak sunlight of the southern winter-and so had Argentina's façade of political unity. As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confirmed to President Ronald Reagan that Argentina would have no say in the future of the disputed Falkland Islands, the defeated nation bordered dangerously on anarchy...
...possibility is not idle speculation. As far back as 1783, when the eruption of Iceland's Laki volcano was followed by an extremely cold winter, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that volcanic dust could partly block sunlight. After the explosion of Indonesia's Tambora volcano in 1815, there were so many frosty nights the following June in Canada and the U.S. that people called it the "year without a summer." Some scientists believe a very large amount of volcanic dust in the atmosphere could send the earth tumbling into another...
...died, after a long bout with cancer, just three days before the summer solstice and the principal season of his imagination. Author John Cheever, 70, was a celebrant of sunlight, of manicured suburban lawns and shaved ice swimming in gin. Not all of his fiction (five novels and more than 100 short stories) was set in the heat of the year, but his dominant landscape radiated warmth and possibilities. It was filled with earnest people blinking in the glare of sudden and temporary freedom, with winter a chilly reflex of conscience. Seaside houses stimulated the senses: "Lying...
...white eellike fish that hover around the scorching vents. For lack of a better name, the scientists have labeled them "21-degree-north vent fish" (after the latitude of the site). Researchers believe the vent fish may be the first vertebrate discovered whose existence does not ultimately depend upon sunlight...
Intensive study of the creatures has provided some tantalizing hints about the bizarre life processes in this lightless world. On the earth's surface, all life, with minor exceptions, stems from the sun. Green plants, synthesizing sugars and other carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide in a sunlight-powered process called photosynthesis, provide sustenance for virtually all other living things. But in the world of the deep sea vents, there is no sun. How then do its inhabitants survive...