Word: underground
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...away on Saturday, and two people were arrested in connection with the case. So many shocking stories, so suddenly - a genuine crime wave or media hysteria? Or is it that in a time of lurking new risks over which people feel largely powerless - terrorist cells in the suburbs, underground Iraqi bioweapons labs - a fixation on solvable, specific mysteries is strangely soothing? The public may not yet have made much of a difference capturing terrorists, but thanks to mass alerts that deputized thousands of citizens at a stroke, it has succeeded in bringing home a child or two. At least...
...oldest, best-known bath in Tokyo is the Azabu Juban Onsen, a real hot spring spouting from 500 m underground. This is an old-fashioned, no-frills establishment; you get a thin tenugui, or washcloth, upon admittance and nothing else. The locker room is grotty and the bath tiles stained. But aficionados travel from across the country to partake of the brownish waters, whose minerals are said to ease arthritis and other ailments. On weekends, bathers pack the large hall to lounge and eat noodles. Despite the grungy surroundings, it's an authentic taste of true onsen, or hot spring...
...plant produces steam by burning oil and is primarily used for heating Harvard’s buildings. The steam is distributed throughout the campus by a series of underground tunnels...
Finally, there's a cosmic dimension to these bugs. So-called exobiologists and astrobiologists, who speculate about life beyond Earth, have long assumed that liquid water is a minimum requirement for existence. But if that water can range from frigid to boiling, and if burial underground isn't a problem, then it's not crazy to think that life exists in the permafrost beneath the surface of Mars, or in the ice-capped ocean that may encircle Jupiter's moon Europa, or in the seas that may exist on Saturn's moon Titan. Indeed, NASA considers extremophiles so relevant...
...indeed, life began to turn up just about everywhere scientists looked. Geologists had been arguing since the 1920s, in fact, that chemical contaminants found in crude oil suggested that some sort of life was thriving underground. They weren't taken seriously until the 1980s, though, when Department of Energy scientists realized that if subsurface microbes really did exist, they might play a key role in regulating the purity of groundwater. So they began digging boreholes at DOE sites in South Carolina and Washington State...