Word: dust
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the first human rides into space and reaches 80 miles up, he will hear alarming sounds: the sharp pings of cosmic dust particles hitting the skin of his capsule. Harvard Astronomer Professor Fred L. Whipple last week told an Air Force space conference at San Antonio that the earth is surrounded by a shallow but unexpectedly dense cloud of dust that can be detected only by the noise that it makes when it hits space vehicles equipped with listening devices...
...particles, said Whipple. are extremely small, averaging 300 billion to the ounce. They are thickest 80 miles up. Farther out in space the dust cloud thins quickly; it almost disappears at the distance of a few earth diameters (8,000 miles...
Whipple thinks that the earth's dust layer is the remains of comets, which bring fragile blobs of material from the outer fringes of the solar system. He suspects that when these cosmic puffballs pass through the Van Allen radiation belts that girdle the earth, they collect strong electric charges that make them pop. breaking them into microscopic dust particles that stay near the earth, perhaps following orbits like near-in satellites...
...planned to have the house spruced up as a surprise for her when she got back from the hospital. Forcing the bolt of the closet, he opened the door and fell back in horror. Huddled on the floor at his feet, under thick layers of cobwebs and dust, was the shriveled body of a woman, partly covered with a moth-eaten blanket and the decayed remnants of a blue dressing gown. The skull was bare of hair, the eye sockets were hollow, and the skin was parched to the color of dark leather and hard as rock. Beside the body...
Flow of Words. The author's heroine is shatteringly beautiful, amoral, narcotically charming, and men queue up to destroy themselves for her. Such a description might come from any dust jacket, but Novelist Ashton-Warner's portrait is all but unique. Germaine de Beauvais. a young Parisian concert pianist who exiles herself to New Zealand after the death of her husband, is a woman as convincingly evoked as Emma Bovary or Molly Bloom. The narrative is a first-person reverie; a stream of consciousness, then a torrent, then a willful, feminine shutting down of thought. Germaine is mirrored...