Word: ironically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...groaner's moan to Dixieland jazz, is a highly exportable commodity. So the State Department has learned from its new international disc jockey, Martin Block, whose weekly half-hour of music and informal chatter has become the Voice of America's most popular program. Even behind the Iron Curtain, where Communists are furiously attacking "decadent American music," thousands of recalcitrant Slavs continue to carry a torch for Dinah Shore or Gene Autry, Benny Goodman or Lena Home. Last week the Czech government skirmished with some of these incorrigibles and came off badly scorched...
...primeval dust cloud around the sun. First materials to "precipitate" from the cloud were light stony silicates, which formed the cores of the earth and moon. But the earth's core was bigger than the moon's, and it attracted much more of the heavy iron which precipitated later from the dust cloud. For this reason, says Urey, the moon is lighter, volume for volume, than the earth...
After the iron had precipitated, the earth was a solid, fairly cool but basically unstable object. In its center was a ball of comparatively light rock. Around the rock was a thick layer of mixed iron and stone. Then came a very thin layer of stone. The whole great ball was smooth and symmetrical, with no land. Deep ocean covered the whole surface...
Divided Land. But while life was evolving, the earth was heating up because of the radioactivity of its stony ingredients. The stony core got hotter and so did the stone-iron mixture. Eventually the outer mixture got soft enough for the iron to trickle down toward the center. Its "fall" of several thousand miles made the earth's middle layers even hotter...
Then, says Urey, the light stone core began to float up through the iron like a tennis ball through molasses. As it approached the surface, land appeared for the first time; the oceans were crowded to one side, as on the third day of biblical creation.* For a while the earth had only a single continent (Pangea), but the continuing rise of the core material and its spreading out near the surface broke Pangea into chunks and carried them apart. His theory, says Urey, accounts for the remarkable fact, first pointed out by Alfred Wegener in his theory of continental...