Word: vast
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...working like a patient gardener, pruning species that don't quite fit, bit by bit. But that's not how extinction works in practice. Throughout our planet's history, mass extinction has occurred five times - most recently 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs finally died out - taking out vast amounts of life all at once, usually due to a catastrophic and sudden climatic change. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...launch of Sputnik and the release of the movie Jailhouse Rock - 43% of Manhattan students and 11% of New York City teachers reported absent from school in a single day. By the time it dissipated, about 1 in 4 Americans had taken ill from the disease, though the vast majority recovered without any lasting harm, according to a study by the Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore...
...Mosque, one of the world's oldest, having been completed in 715. Before that, it was successively an Aramaean temple, a Roman temple and then a Byzantine church. Over the centuries it has become a meeting place for the city. The mosque's courtyard - an inadequate term for this vast plaza of glittering marble - is alive with afternoon strollers and gossiping families. When you're done people-watching, track down one of the mosque's great curiosities: a shrine that purportedly holds the head of John the Baptist...
...swimming of a single jellyfish generates barely a ripple in the world's vast oceans. But what about a bloom of thousands of the creatures? Moving together, could they contribute to the large-scale mixing of ocean waters - the way the winds and tides do - as some scientist have long conjectured...
...quarter century. Now in the twilight of their hegemony, with this crisis and the necessary reshaping of America, the boomers have their last best shot at helping to straighten out the mess they helped make. In their empty-nested years, for instance, perhaps they can channel some of the vast energies and micromanagement they lavished on their children to pro-social enterprises and volunteer work...