Word: arid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Violence is not new to East Timor, an arid territory about the size of Connecticut. Colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century for its sandalwood, and predominantly Catholic, it was invaded by Indonesian troops in December 1975 with the tacit consent of President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Jakarta's forces met bitter resistance--some 200,000 East Timorese died as a result of the occupation, and Indonesia's annexation of East Timor was never recognized...
More than 75 years of digging in the ancient, arid sediments of East Africa has told scientists a great deal about the long evolutionary trail that led to modern human beings. They know about Lucy, the upright-walking proto-human australopithecine that strode the continent some 3.2 million years ago; about Homo habilis, the first known human species, which was making and using stone tools in the same region by 1.2 million years later; about Homo erectus, which emerged from Africa soon thereafter and spread across the world...
...three discoveries relate to one another. The new species, for example, which the researchers call Australopithecus garhi (garhi means surprise in the Afar language), was identified on the basis of a fragmentary skull with a complete upper jaw full of unusually large teeth that was excavated from the arid, rocky ground of Ethiopia's Middle Awash region near the village of Bouri. When the paleontologists looked closely at the skull, they were shocked. The combination of teeth and bones clearly came from a species more primitive than the earliest humans yet more modern than known australopithecines. That means it could...
...Sketchy sketches in that black shoebox they call the Loeb Experimental Theatre? We're all about that. Overdirected, psychological manipulation? Spun wheels and poked emotional buttons? Spontaneous activation of our arid tear ducts? Precisely our kettle of tea! Not to mention the kicklines of beautiful storm troopers. We're so there. Already...
...long before, Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., had published an arid little paper on an outrageous topic, rocket travel. Unlike most of his colleagues, Goddard believed rocketry was a viable technology, and his paper, primly titled "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," was designed to prove it. For the lay reader, there wasn't much in the writing to excite interest, but at the end, the buttoned-up professor unbuttoned a bit. If you used his technology to build a rocket big enough, he argued, and if you primed it with fuel that was powerful...