Word: big
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Supply is still the big problem in the North, where everything has to be moved in during the brief (four-to 16-week) shipping season or hauled in expensively by air freight. A housewife in a remote R.C.M.P. station on Baffin Island once watched the midwinter supply plane safely parachute twelve packets to the ground; the 13th smashed heavily when the parachute failed to open. Said she to her husband: "What do you bet that was my china...
...solid-propellant missile. Shifting sound levels could vary the thrust to give the rocket better maneuvering capabilities; fuel might also be compounded that does not burn at all unless the rocket's cavity is filled with powerful sound, thus accomplishing total cutoff with the whistle. The big spaceships that NASA plans to toss into space will use clusters of rocket engines. If they are solid fueled and equipped with whistles, they could be used to steer the ship; a slight reduction of sound level in one of the outside engines would make the whole ship veer in its direction...
...bird ever had a rougher time from oölogists than the osprey. The great hawk is fascinating enough in life, with its striking black-and-white plumage, 5-ft. wing span and spectacular 100-ft. plunges into the water after fish. But the eggs are truly remarkable: as big as hens' eggs, and speckled in a kaleidoscope of purple, orange, red, lilac, buff, chestnut, violet and black. After the turn of the century, osprey eggs were so much in demand that a set of three brought up to $140-and the bird...
...until the middle of June, when the young were safely hatched, did Waterston tell his proud secret. By then the young birds were almost as big as squabs on their diet of a pound of fish daily, and the written record of their family life filled 1,250 pages. Next year, if all goes well, there will be more osprey families on bonny Scotland's barbed-wire braes...
When U.S. rocket engineers talk about the bright possibilities of solid-fuel rockets, they always have to pause over one big requirement: how to control the fuel's burning rate. A current system is to shape the charge, measure the ingredients-and hope. This week Acoustica Associates, Inc. of Plainview, N.Y. announced an initial $85,188 contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to explore a radical new control that is as exciting as it is simple. The company thinks that it can handle solid fuels by filling the rocket with sound-plain, ordinary noise...