Word: aridity
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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...
...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...
...irresistible personality, a man both weak and strong, a savior rejected, a brother reproved, a prophet both happily and unhappily caught up in the whirlwind of God. The modern search for Moses is like a climb up Mount Sinai. It is a bracing ascent over starkly arid terrain, the ancient volcanic rock giving way to deep chasms, full of darkness and danger. But the view can be spectacular: the light splaying in many hues at sunrise as the visitor reaches the spot where the Bible says Moses received the word of the Lord. The venerated images rush to mind...
...hidden site in central Iran, but the secret lasted about as long as a puddle of water in the scorched Iranian desert. Although technicians had tried to camouflage preparations for the missile test, U.S. spy satellites easily picked up the bright white plume as the rocket soared to an arid region in southeast Iran. Within an hour, the CIA's operations center phoned the White House situation room. Shahab-3 (Farsi for "shooting star") had taken to the air with an 800-mile range--enough to deliver conventional bombs, or someday nuclear warheads, to Israel, Saudi Arabia, southern Russia...