Word: polarizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THERE has not been a topic for such worried conversation since James Baldwin forecast the fire next time. Suburban matrons predict the melting of the polar icecaps followed by catastrophic floods. Busy executives and bearded hippies discuss the presence of DDT in the flesh of Antarctic penguins. All sorts of Americans utter new words like ecosystem and eutrophication. Pollution may soon replace the Viet Nam war as the nation's major issue of protest...
...interior. But, he added, "One cannot restrain the speculation that the gases might be of biological origin." If that is the case, he theorized, they may have been produced by organisms that found shelter in a relatively hospitable ( -94°F.) region near the edge of Mars' southern polar cap, where Mariner 7 concentrated its cameras and instruments. There, he said, they might have drawn water from the polar ice and protection from the sun's ultraviolet radiation under a cloud of carbon-dioxide particles...
...Martian photographs from as close as 111,400 miles. Far more stunning than the earlier series, these pictures brought out what seemed like cloud formations near the south pole, verified the presence of numerous craters, and revealed shadings in what had previously been thought to be an all-white polar cap. Leighton spotted at least two features that he thought might be "canals," although he speculated that they might have been caused by electronic noise...
...many characteristics that seemed fascinatingly similar to those of earth. The red planet turned out to have an atmosphere, albeit an extremely thin one. The tilt of its axis (about 24°) is approximately the same as the earth's, thus creating seasonal changes. Its huge white polar caps suggest the presence of ice, and therefore water-a prerequisite for life as human beings know it. It also has large dark areas that grow, like earthly vegetation, in spring and recede in autumn...
...Boston Lowells (his brother Abbott Lawrence was president of Harvard, his sister was Poet Amy), had plotted more than 700 canals at his Mars observatory in Arizona. He believed that the canals had been built by an advanced civilization desperately trying to tap moisture from polar ice to conserve its dwindling water supply...