Word: chunk
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With running taking up an enormous chunk of her time, Martin has worked hard to provide a balance between school and running...
Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier has fallen on hard times. Following his 1986 flight from Haiti to the French Riviera, he installed his shopaholic wife Michele and their children in a palatial home near Cannes. Two years ago, Mme. Duvalier divorced him, taking the children and a large chunk of the assets. Duvalier quickly ran through his remaining funds -- once estimated at $400 million -- and now lives with his mother Simone, 80, in a scruffy villa with no telephone (cut off for unpaid bills) and a broken wire fence surrounding an unkempt garden. Last week he disappeared for parts unknown...
Imagine that one of Shoemaker-Levy 9's bigger pieces -- a mile or two in diameter -- is streaking in at 130,000 m.p.h., except that the target is not Jupiter but Earth. The mammoth chunk of rock and ice tears through the atmosphere and smashes into the ground with the force of 6 million H-bombs, gouging out a crater the size of Rhode Island and throwing so much pulverized real estate into the stratosphere that the sun is blocked for months and Earth goes into a worldwide deep freeze. If the comet hits an ocean, a pall of dust...
...dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Realizing that a deadly collision could happen again, astronomer Eugene Shoemaker decided nearly two decades ago to use a small but powerful telescope to look for comets and asteroids headed this way. Five years ago, a member of Shoemaker's team saw a chunk of rock perhaps a third of a mile across that had just zipped by the planet at a distance of only 450,000 miles. There are about 2,000 large bodies that cross the orbit of Earth and could, in theory, hit us. That is why Shoemaker and his colleagues have...
...moon. Despite scientists' sober warnings that the Great Comet Crash of 1994 might be an uneventful dud, the first chunk plowed into Jupiter's atmosphere with the force of perhaps 10 million hydrogen bombs, lofting a mushroom cloud of hot gas nearly 1,000 miles out into space and leaving a dark scar on the planet's familiar, brightly colored clouds. The assembled astronomers looked at the video screen for a second in silent disbelief -- then began cheering and toasting one another with swigs from champagne bottles. Said Hammel: "This is the kind of stuff I've been dreaming about...