Word: distantly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While these ancient footprints shed fresh light on our nearer ancestors, Anthropologist Elwyn Simons, director of Duke University's primate center, revealed new findings on more distant kin. Most scientists agree that both man and ape descended from a common ancestor, a beast called Dryopithecus (meaning tree ape), which appeared in Africa some 20 million years ago. But who, or what, preceded it? As far back as 1963, Simons, then at Yale, began uncovering in the wind-scoured Fayum desert region, southwest of Cairo, bones of a likely candidate: a small, fox-sized, tree-inhabiting primate, which he dubbed Aegyptopithecus...
...history of the Gibbsians' lesser godhead, Schutt, is better known. A distant relative of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, Schutt was the founder of the Gibbs Historical Society, a front organization for the Gibbsians. Portraits of Schutt's head are displayed everywhere on February 21--"Gibbs Day"--sometimes adorned with the traditional tie and lab coat of the lesser godhead...
...beauty, Garbo had a curious androgyny, and carried with her an invisible sign that said "Look, but don't touch." Leigh was unmistakably feminine, but she also seemed distant, as if she were covered by glass, like any other priceless work of art. Pagett, by contrast, is both sensuous and voluptuous, a creature of fire and earth. Her face is marked, as Tolstoy said of Anna, by a "persistent animation." Compared with her predecessors, her features are less than ideal: her eyes have a slight goldfish bulge, her lips are too full, and her cheekbones are uncommonly high...
Finally, while parts of the fault appear to be jammed, recent work by Caltech scientists-using ultraprecise radio telescopes as measuring instruments and signals from distant quasars (see following story) as benchmarks-shows that there has been relative motion of up to 20 cm. (8 in.) in only three years between the opposing plates just south of the San Gabriel mountains. That motion, which may be rapid by San Andreas standards, also mystifies the researchers. Says Caltech's Peter MacDoran, who has been directing these measurements. "What we need is a nice, big nondestructive earthquake that we can intensely...
...Astronomer Joseph S. Miller, using the Lick Observatory's powerful 120-in. (3-meter) telescope near San Jose, Calif., has produced powerful new evidence to support the "distant" quasar argument. Expanding on earlier work at the Hale Observatories by Beverley Oke and James Gunn with the 200-in. (5-meter) Palomar telescope, he and two colleagues studied one of the so-called BL Lacertae objects, which until the late 1960s were thought to be ordinary variable stars, but now are known to resemble quasars...