Word: vaporous
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Discovery of the valley has increased speculation that water-dependent forms of life may once have existed-or still exist-on Mars. That possibility has also been strengthened by readings from Mariner's instruments. They indicate that about 100,000 gallons of water vapor escape daily into space from the Martian atmosphere. Scientists believe that the vapor and carbon dioxide are being continually vented from volcanoes in the same kind of process that created the earth's early atmosphere...
Traditionally, most laymen have thought of nicotine as the principal villain in tobacco. For two decades, scientists have been concentrating on "tars," a catchall term for the viscous gunk that is left from cigarette smoke after the gases and water vapor have been boiled off. Now, while they do not exonerate these culprits, researchers are studying carbon monoxide, a product of incomplete combustion in cigarettes as in automobile engines...
...Planetary Studies Lab, suggested that the glaciers are frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), the major constituent of the polar cap. Smith felt that dry ice would not flow like a glacier. "The only thing that does," he said, "is water." Mariner's instruments did detect water vapor in the atmosphere above the south polar cap, suggesting that it had risen from the ice below. Those readings encouraged scientists who still hope to find some form of ife, however rudimentary, on the desolate Martian surface...
...itself, that modest plot cannot fully convey the quinine-flavored humor of the evening. Simon creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of copelessness from which laughter seems to be released like vapor escaping from the city's manholes...
...moonlike craters, the virtual lack of a magnetic field and the extremely low atmospheric pressure (only one one-hundred-fiftieth that of the earth's). Finally, although many scientists are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the prospect of finding life on Mars, Mariner will look for telltale evidence (water vapor, temperature) that the planet could possibly support rudimentary biological activity...