Word: craft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vanishing culture: reviving an art that is already lost. The son of a Princeton physicist, Dyson, 38, was fascinated by 18th century accounts of Aleutian kayakers, who were said to have sustained speeds of 10 knots on the open ocean in their 15-ft. to 30-ft. craft, defying the apparent limits imposed by the length of the boat and human endurance. For two decades, Dyson, a self-taught boatbuilder, has worked to rediscover the technological secrets of these fabled vessels, or baidarkas, as Russian colonists called them...
...more than 5,000 years, Aleut Indians plied the islands off Alaska in craft made of animal skins and bone. Over time these craft diverged in design from other kayaks. They evolved curiously split bows, sterns that were wide at the top but V-shaped at the bottom, and bone joints that made the vessels 100 times as flexible as modern boats. The Aleuts became shaped to the demands of kayaking vast distances, developing huge upper bodies from relentless paddling and bowed legs that allowed them to sit confined for hours. By the time the Russians arrived in pursuit...
...only for a series of small satellites but also for two large space platforms that would wind up holding the majority of the earth-sensing equipment. These could not be launched before the end of the decade. Scientists objected that locking many of the instruments aboard just two craft would make the program inflexible. If new discoveries were made during the mission, how could the platforms be redesigned to accommodate unplanned research? Moreover, a Hubble-like glitch or catastrophic accident could wipe out a major portion of the project. Says Tom Donahue, a University of Michigan professor of planetary science...
...discovered the earth's radiation belt. It created the laser, the transistor, the microchip and the electronic computer, broke the genetic code and conjured up the miracle of recombinant DNA technology. It described the fundamental nature of matter, solved the mystery of the quasars and designed the robot craft that explored distant planets with spectacular success. And, as promised, it landed a man on the moon...
...routine coastal patrol last week, Panamanian police noticed two dozen shrimp boats clustered near the island of Cebaco, on the Pacific coast. Suspicious, officers boarded one of the craft and discovered two packages containing 15 kg of cocaine. For Nestor Castillo, police chief of Veraguas province, it was a distressingly familiar episode. "In the past year we are getting flooded with cocaine processed in Colombia," he says. "More than ever before...