Word: cometed
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...apartment, Mader dispatched Caribbean Bureau Chief Bernard Diederich to Colombia, then quickly ascertained that TIME's Tom Quinn, who works out of Bogotá, was already on the story. As the death toll mounted, Mader decided to send Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, who was covering Halley's comet, to Bogotá to join the TIME team. Unlike Mexico City immediately after its earthquake, Bogotá had a functioning airport and telex and telephone lines were intact. Still, to get to the Nevado del Ruiz area, Diederich had to hitch a ride on a Colombian helicopter carrying fuel to the disaster...
...same diffuse blob with his naked eyes. Meanwhile, Edberg sketched the position of the dim light and compared his drawing with the magnified view of the object provided by his binoculars. Sure enough, there it was. The two men had made the first unaided sighting of Halley's comet since the celebrated phenomenon's previous visit, 76 years ago. Joked Morris: "We jumped around and gave a few yells into the night air for the coyotes to hear...
...spent millions of years in Darwinian limbo. As long as dinosaurs roamed the earth, our distant ancestors never got to be much more than cringing, shrewlike creatures that slinked out at night to nibble timorously on plants and insects when the terrible lizards were asleep. Only when a rogue comet wiped the dinosaurs out, went the story, did mammals begin to earn a little evolutionary respect...
...blank space that Brown reported in the 1st century astronomical accounts where there should have been notice of Jesus' star has not prevented thousands of enthusiasts from attempting to locate it retroactively. Supernovas, comets and planetary conjunctions have all had their day. No less an eminence weighed in than the astronomer Johannes Kepler, whose laws first accurately plotted the planets' revolutions around the sun. He noted that a triple conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, which he observed in 1604, could produce an appropriate extended effect. Moreover, he calculated that it recurs every 805 years, which means that it came...
DIED. FRED WHIPPLE, 97, inventor and rocket scientist whose "dirty snowball" theory made it easier to track comets; in Cambridge, Mass. Whipple correctly proposed that the core of a comet consists of ice, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide, and that its tail is formed by particles that break off from the mass as it approaches the sun. Over seven decades at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Whipple also discovered that the source of meteors is not far-flung stars but Earth's solar system. Anticipating space flight, he invented in 1946 a thin outer skin of metal known...