Word: asteroidal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mile-wide crater on Mars. And the names Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Caliban and Sycorax for five moons of Uranus make sense, since the planet's other moons are mostly named for characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Even a moonlet called Petit-Prince is defensible, since it orbits the asteroid Eugenia--and the son of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III had that rather literal name...
Other names are noteworthy simply for their romanticism. Craters that dot the asteroid Eros include Cupid, Lolita and, somewhat oddly, Don Quixote. But some make no apparent sense at all. Craters on the asteroid Gaspra are named in honor of natural springs (Saratoga, Baden-Baden), and those on the dark asteroid Mathilde honor--no kidding--major coal seams, such as the Lorraine in France. Given this list of increasingly wacky categories, the IAU may want to consider one more honoree when it meets to ratify names three years from now: Alex Trebek, host of TV's Jeopardy! --By Michael...
...animation with real, albeit digitally enhanced, live-action backgrounds filmed in such bizarre sites as the Mojave Desert. The plot is typical and uncreative, yet sounds somewhat fantastic: a dinosaur gets separated from its family as an egg and is raised a by a group of lemur monkeys. The asteroid that supposedly wipes out the dinosaurs hits earth, and the dinosaur, who has been reunited with his kind, acts like a sort of Dino-Moses who saves the day with canny primate-know-how. Although there are voice-overs for the animals in the movie, it is not a musical...
...their existence to assert any generality rather than an explanation for a singular circumstance? For specific events of history--the rise, domination and extinction of dinosaurs, for example--we seek no such generality, and specific narrations for bounded events supply the explanations we seek. Thus a particular asteroid, striking the earth 65 million years ago and leaving evidence of its impact off the Yucatan Peninsula, probably triggered a global extinction that sealed the fate of dinosaurs and many other creatures. In developing such evidence, we have explained a unique historical event, but we have not discovered a general...
WILL WE LIVE ON MARS? WILL WE TRAVEL TO THE STARS? WILL WE TRAVEL BACK (OR FORWARD) IN TIME? WILL SOMEONE BUILD A PERPETUAL-MOTION MACHINE? WILL WE MEET E.T.? WILL A KILLER ASTEROID HIT THE EARTH? HOW WILL THE UNIVERSE END? WILL WE DISCOVER ANOTHER UNIVERSE? WILL THE MIND FIGURE OUT HOW THE BRAIN WORKS? WILL WE HAVE A FINAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING? WILL WE FIGURE OUT HOW LIFE BEGAN? WILL WE CLONE A DINOSAUR? WILL WE KEEP EVOLVING? WILL ANYONE EVER RUN A 3-MINUTE MILE? WILL WE CONTROL THE WEATHER? CAN WE SAVE CALIFORNIA? WILL WE EVER...