Word: oxygenating
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ignored. 2061 occasionally offers a challenging sci-fi aphorism -- "Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation" -- but by now the mix of imagination and anachronism is wearing as thin as the oxygen layer on Mars...
Dinosaurs, it seems, may have breathed easier than we do. Indeed, at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Phoenix last week, two scientists stunned colleagues by reporting that 80 million years ago, the earth's atmosphere contained about 50% more oxygen than it does now. Geochemists Gary Landis of the U.S. Geological Survey and Robert Berner of Yale reached their startling conclusion after analyzing tiny air bubbles trapped in bits of amber, the aged and solidified resin of coniferous trees. They placed the amber inside a vacuum chamber, then cracked it to let the ancient air escape...
Berner quickly dismisses speculation that a change in the oxygen supply had anything to do with the extinction of dinosaurs. "It was a very slow change, over millions of years," he observes. "And most organisms easily adapt." Next comes testing bubbles in 300 million-year-old amber...
...isolated border crossings and potentially murderous guards. He can explain how to construct a remote-control detonator and how to gauge the damage of a terrorist blast by sight alone: "White smoke meant a very large explosion. A bomb that detonated so powerfully and quickly that it sucked the oxygen out of the air, leaving a white plume of smoke." The author also occasionally strains a little too hard to keep pulses racing. Hearts pound in chests "like a hammer against an anvil." Women have a habit of showing up not simply undressed but "completely naked...
Dawn was just breaking over the Kuwaiti coast last Friday when the sleek missile came hurtling over the horizon. A crewman aboard the Sea Isle City, a Kuwaiti-owned tanker flying the U.S. flag, peered out the window of the bridge and saw it coming. "It looked like an oxygen tank and was smoking in the rear," he recalled later. "I told the captain 'Look!,' but it was too late." Seconds later the missile slammed into the ship. The warhead exploded in the officers' quarters of the vessel, which two days earlier had left behind its escort of U.S. warships...