Word: dimness
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...subject to supermajority requirements in the Senate–67 votes for an amendment, and 60 to break a filibuster on public financing–where minority leader Mitch McConnell has been a staunch opponent of all campaign finance reform efforts, and so chances are dim. Same for Ackerman and Wu’s bill, the cost of which should alienate swing Republicans. Van Hollen and Schumer’s and Ackerman and Ayres’ more modest suggestions could attract more support, though it’s always safer to bet that Congress will find an excuse...
...immediately likeable, the few songs which do fall flat tumble headfirst. Track two, “Keep You Beautiful,” is a disappointing departure from the more audacious tracks. The weak drum beats and timid, painfully repetitive guitar loops invoke a stupor perhaps appropriate to some hazy, dim-lit lounge, but they fail to sustain the energy of the opener. “Keep You Beautiful” also lacks the diversity of the album’s better tracks; while a vibraphone and triangle rescue it from complete monotony, the song pales in comparison to the assortment...
...just as the software is only as good as its code and the hardware it lives in, it's also only as good as the light it's got to work with. As HP noted in its blog post, the lighting in the YouTube video was dim, and, the company said, there wasn't enough contrast to pick up the facial shadows the computer needed for seeing. (An overlit person with a fair complexion might have had the same problem.) A better camera wouldn't necessarily have guaranteed a better result, because there's another bottleneck: computing power. The constant...
...extraordinary may be too understated a descriptor for the discovery reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature: an international team led by Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau has spotted a "super-Earth," a planet 2.7 times bigger than Earth, circling a dim red star called GJ 1214, just 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. "It's spectacular," says Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who is the world's most prolific planet hunter and is credited with discovering 70 of the first 100 exoplanets. "It's a top-of-the-top discovery in the quest for Earth...
...Planet hunters usually focus their attention on Sun-like stars - that is, large and hot - on the assumption that if you're looking for life, you should look in a place that is as similar to our solar system as possible. Charbonneau, however, focused on about 2,000 small, dim, red stars known as M-dwarfs, nearby Earth. M-dwarfs are much more numerous than Sun-like stars; of the 300 stars closest to Earth, says Charbonneau, 220 or so are M-dwarfs. They're also much cooler than Sun-like stars, so their habitable zones are close...