Word: carbonization
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...insistent patter of a HealthWatch Model 9000 alarm clock. "Today is Monday, and the time is 6 a.m.," the little box chirps. Angela stares at its smooth, blue face long enough for the embedded microlaser to scan the back of her eye. "Ocular pressure, blood pressure and carbon-dioxide levels normal," the alarm clock reports. "But you are dehydrated. I'll signal the refrigerator to fix you an electrolyte cocktail...
...question is more important than the literal, but the literal is irresistibly short: No, unfortunately not. Humans will have at our disposal as much gasoline as we can burn in the 21st century. Nor are we likely to run out of heating oil, coal or natural gas, the other carbon-based fuels that have powered industrial civilization for 200 years...
...Will we run out of gas?"--a question we began asking during the oil shocks of the 1970s--is now the wrong question. The earth's supply of carbon-based fuels will last a long time. But if humans burn anywhere near that much carbon, we'll burn up the planet, or at least our place...
...falling on the earth, the laws of physics decree that the planet has to radiate the same amount of energy back into space to keep the books balanced. The earth does this by sending infrared radiation out through the atmosphere, where an array of molecules (the best known is carbon dioxide) form a kind of blanket, holding outgoing radiation for a while and warming the surface. The molecules are similar to the glass in a greenhouse, which is why the warming process is called the greenhouse effect...
...While many find fault with this hypothesis - the skull is a lone example and does not contain the correct matter for carbon-dating - anthropologists around the world agree that decisive evidence of the skull's geographic ancestry will be produced by testing its DNA and comparing it to that of other Negroid peoples, such as Australian aborigines and Africans. The remains of the woman who's spawning the debate, nicknamed Luzia, were found in 1975 outside Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third largest city, and were in storage in a Rio museum for a quarter of a century. That sound...