Word: cosmic
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Genesis, a mission run by NASA'S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was launched in August 2001 to solve a cosmic conundrum. Although the sun and the flood of particles it radiates make up 99% of all the matter in the solar system, earthlings have never been able to grab hold of much of that so-called solar wind, beyond a tiny bit collected by several of the Apollo missions. Earth's magnetic field causes the stream of hydrogen, helium and other elements the sun gives off to flow around our world like river water around a rock...
...SCIENCE SPACE: The Genesis spacecraft may yield cosmic treasure...
...makes a certain kind of cosmic sense that a writer of fantastical literature should come from a relatively mundane background. Clarke, the daughter of a Methodist minister, was born in Nottingham, went to Cambridge and then took a series of publishing jobs in London. The first glimmers of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell came to her during a year she spent teaching English in Bilbao, Spain. "I had a kind of waking dream," Clarke remembers, "about a man in 18th century clothes in a place rather like Venice, talking to some English tourists. And I felt strongly that he had some...
Even to astronomers, Mercury is a cosmic oddity. It spins so slowly and scoots around the sun so fast that a Mercury year--just 88 Earth days--is half as long as a Mercury day. On the planet's illuminated side--where the sun looks three times as big as it does from Earth and is 11 times as bright--temperatures climb to 840°F. When that side rotates into darkness, the thermometer plunges to --300°F. Eons of this rotisserie roll have cooked Mercury down to a nub with a metal core that represents three-quarters...
...take (the platypus) for granted, because if you push it, it's likely to vanish.'" But the threat is much broader than that. In Australia, 44% of distinct mammalian groups have disappeared during the last 23 million years. Only a tiny fraction of that is man's fault: cosmic and natural forces (meteorites, volcanic eruptions, climatic changes) are adept at causing extinctions on their own. Nonetheless, Archer argues, the planet is on the cusp of another great extinction event - "and it's one we're precipitating . . . it's the first time in the history of the earth...