Word: branched
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...myself stuck for a reply. It was difficult enough to conjure up the picture of Soviet generals -- hefty, beetle-browed men in bulky overcoats -- leaning over a map while the Air Marshal for Nuclear War Contingency Planning says, "Then we'll get Atlanta and take out all the Southeastern branch offices in one swoop." Even if that were the Russians' plan, how would Atlanta people know about it? A Chamber of Commerce mole in the Kremlin? Even if they knew about it, why would they boast about it? Who wants to be up toward the front in a queue awaiting...
...nation's capital now has its own government and mayor. congress and its members are much more sophisticated in handling a war and are far less likely to be pushed around by the executive branch. The vast military and civilian bureaucracies are now taken for granted, and many neighborhoods, once predominantly Black, have been taken over by young, upper-middle class professionals...
...cosmic rays. These highly energetic particles travel through space at close to the speed of light and can produce hazardous secondary radiation when they strike atoms in the aluminum walls of a spacecraft. During a single Mars mission, says Frank Sulzman, chief of NASA's space-medicine and biology branch, unprotected astronauts could receive an unacceptably high dose of radiation -- more than is now allowed workers in a lifetime on jobs that expose them to radioactivity...
...NASA's Ames Research Center in California, points out that there would be benefits of artificial gravity beyond the physiological ones. "Toilets would flush properly, things wouldn't float in the air, and just think of surgery in zero gravity," she muses. Malcolm Cohen, chief of the neuroscience branch at Ames, worries about the possible physiological effects of rotation. "Weightlessness is the devil we know," he says, "and we have some idea how to overcome its effects. But artificial gravity in space is a devil we don't know well." Still, he concludes, "it's certainly an option...
...lone dissenter was Justice Antonin Scalia, who took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent aloud. In a lengthy argument that contained an acid reference to "our former constitutional system," he suggested that even the slightest diminution of Executive power by Congress is unconstitutional. If the Executive Branch cannot be trusted to investigate itself, he asserted, the voters and not Congress should remedy the situation...