Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Instead the ancient Douglas headed north over the Gulf of Mexico, flying through the night with no approved flight plan or warning lights and maintaining radio silence. Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) picked it up on radar as it flew low into dense fog over Louisiana. The foreign invaders might have escaped detection altogether but for the fact that their plane lost power and crash-landed in the trees near Farmerville, just south of the Arkansas-Louisiana border...
Time and again the World Health Organization has declared smallpox extinct, only to have the ancient scourge reappear like a genie from a virologist's flask. Although the last known case of smallpox occurred in Somalia last October, the disease has not died out. An Englishwoman working at the University of Birmingham Medical School contracted it, presumably from virus escaping from a lab on a floor below. Before the case was diagnosed, a co-worker flew off to North Dakota on a holiday, thereby extending the smallpox alert...
There would be some benefits, to be sure. Heavier rainfall would possibly restore Africa's extremely dry Sahel, the Sahara and the Arabian desert to their ancient fertility and make vast tracts in Siberia and Canada suitable for growing cereal grains. But the rich wheat and corn belt in the central U.S. would probably become too dry for these crops. Hundreds of millions of people might suffer from these dislocations...
...revived the glory of ancient Rome was born in 1720 in the village of Mogliano about ten miles inland from Venice. His father was a stonemason, his uncle an architect and civil engineer who worked on the huge sea walls that protect Venice's lagoon. It was an image of massiveness that was to inspire Piranesi. From the busy Venetian theaters, he learned the art of stage design, which in those times ran to imposing fixed backdrops where ornate buildings receded in dramatic chiaroscuro. At 20, Piranesi landed a job in Rome as a junior draftsman in the retinue...
...zeal, Piranesi turned archaeologist. He measured, calculated, chipped off encrustations and mold from fallen columns. He sketched indefatigably, on occasion even having himself suspended in a rope sling to get the vantage point he wanted. In his etchings, Piranesi embellished and sometimes even reconstructed the ancient structures. He gave the ruins themselves infusions of light, spared no climbing vine or sprouting bush. He often filled his foregrounds with bustling groups of peddlers, fish wives and beggars, whose vitality contrasts with the crumbling architecture...