Word: thinning
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...search for the Crater, the first clues were sifted out of clumps of gray clay. At dozens of sites around the world, that clay has been found in a thin boundary layer between the rock of the Tertiary period and the formations of the late Cretaceous period, which ended 65 million years ago. In the Cretaceous rock lie the fossil remains of giant dinosaurs and a profusion of other species. But in the Tertiary formations, just above the clay, no trace exists of the dinosaurs or many of the other Cretaceous species...
This week, at an astronomy conference in Flagstaff, Ariz., scientists will add an intriguing twist to the Alvarez scenario. Their interpretation is based on new evidence that the Cretaceous-clay boundary actually consists of two parts: a thin layer overlying a more substantial one. To Eugene Shoemaker, of the U.S. Geological Survey and a co-author of the report, two layers indicate not one but two impacts...
Straining even more to avoid giving offense, except to good usage, the < dictionary offers comfort to very short people (though not very tall ones) with heightism ("discrimination or prejudice based on a person's stature, esp. discrimination against short people"); and to very fat people (but not very thin ones) with weightism ("bias or discrimination against people who are overweight"). Omitted, fortunately, are such high-fad content terms as lookism (bias against people because of their appearance), ableism (bias against the handicapped) or differently abled (alternative to handicapped...
...pensions without offering any idea of how he proposes to raise the money. He runs pretty much a one-man show: he has made little attempt to organize his legions of admirers into a political party, and his staff of advisers and idea people, though excellent, is stretched very thin. Ironically, in fact, Yeltsin can carry out his program only with the cooperation of at least part of the very Communist Party bureaucracy and central Soviet administration he assails so vigorously...
...back as 1970, a church panel, echoing Fletcher's approach, declared that "sexual expression . . . cannot be confined to the married and about-to-be-married." Irate traditionalists got that year's assembly to reaffirm the sinfulness of adultery, fornication and homosexual practice, but their motion passed by a paper-thin margin...