Word: descente
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Easter Islanders overtaxed their tiny home's unusually fragile ecosystem. Once they chopped down all the palms, they couldn't make canoes to go fishing in, and soil erosion devastated any attempts at agriculture. "The further consequences," Diamond observes dispassionately, "start with starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism." You can imagine where they end. Diamond interprets the Easter Island statues as increasingly desperate pleas for help from powerful ancestors...
...Just two days before the tsunami, the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn received instructions from this frail little species three planetary orbits away, and proceeded to detach and launch its Huygens probe to fly suicidally down to the giant moon Titan--measuring, sensing, learning and teaching through its final descent. All for one purpose: to satisfy the hunger for knowledge of a species three-quarters of a billion miles away...
...Huygens hitched a ride aboard the 6-ton, 22-ft. Cassini orbiter, which reached the Saturnian system last summer. On Christmas Eve, Cassini lobbed Huygens toward Titan, and on Jan. 14 the probe reached the moon, slamming into its atmosphere at 13,000 m.p.h. Throughout a 147-min. parachute descent, Huygens took pictures and sniffed the air. After it landed, it switched on the remainder of its six instruments. What it saw was not very welcoming...
...even worse. Exam-burdened students familiar with the punishments of cold, white, unforgiving academics spent hours becoming acquainted with the trials of cold, white, unforgiving precipitation. Irish-literature students’ souls swooned slowly as they heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead...
Just two days before the tsunami, the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn received instructions from this frail little species three planetary orbits away, and proceeded to detach and launch its Huygens probe to fly suicidally down to the giant moon Titan--measuring, sensing, learning and teaching through its final descent. All for one purpose: to satisfy the hunger for knowledge of a species three-quarters of a billion miles away...