Word: waterous
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...Even Mayor's newest, smallest planets are unlikely to be pastoral places. All of them lie so close to their suns that they complete one orbit in 50 days or less - compared to the lazy, 365-day journey Earth makes - meaning that any water or incipient life on their surfaces would simply sizzle away. But HARPS is already sensitive enough to spot planets that are 100,000 times smaller than their parent star. Refinements both in HARPS itself and in the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes should make them able to spot smaller and smaller stellar wobbles. Those little...
...When the spring rains come, fertilizer from Midwestern farms drains into the Mississippi river system and down to Louisiana, where the agricultural sewage pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as fertilizer speeds the growth of plants on land, the chemicals enhance the rapid development of algae in the water. When the algae die and decompose, the process sucks all the oxygen out of the surrounding waters, leading to a hypoxic event - better known as a "dead zone." The water becomes as barren as the surface of the moon. What sea life that can flee the zone does so; what...
...Thorn, who lives along the rampaging Iowa River near a major dam in rural Iowa City, fears his home is destroyed. "I'm assuming it has at least eight feet of water," says Thorn, who voluntarily evacuated with his wife on June 7 when "water just started to lap at the door...
...compared to eastern Iowa (and to the 1993 flood). There's relief that the downtown area has largely been spared major damage, thanks to bolstered flood protection post-1993. But feverish attempts to bolster a levee near a neighborhood north of downtown ultimately failed. Watching televised scenes of water rushing over destroyed sandbags into streets where people live and work was not what my teenage son and I, among hundreds of volunteer sandbaggers in Des Moines, had hoped to see. But like many, we expect to help more as the water recedes and recovery begins...
...totally relaxed until the water gets down and we can actually see how much damage there is," says Andrew Stewart, a University of Iowa junior, who was among hundreds sandbagging in Iowa City, even though he's on crutches following recent surgery. With one-eighth of the campus affected by flooding, the university suspended this week's summer classes. "At some point, you're going to have to turn around and move all those sandbags and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of houses with debris. They'll be looking for volunteers. We're going...