Word: earth's
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...astronomer, spied a massive black spot on Jupiter's surface. The Australian quickly e-mailed NASA, and scientists manning an infrared telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, confirmed his hunch: a fast-moving object--possibly a comet--had apparently smashed into the solar system's largest planet, leaving a nearly Earth-size "scar" in its atmosphere. The collision came almost exactly 15 years after a comet last hit Jupiter...
...earnest for decades. But it had permanently changed the way people thought about the planet. "It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above," Holmes writes, "but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature." Shelley must surely have been among the first to imagine the earth as it would be seen by astronauts a century and a half later...
...However, great nations can shrivel and empires do come to an end. And America in 2009 also looks as if it could rhyme, uncomfortably, with Great Britain circa 1909. A hundred years ago, the British were coming off a proud century as the most important nation on earth. But during the 30 years between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, the United States emerged as the unequivocal world leader, and Britain became an admirable also-ran. Applying that template to the 21st century, China would be the new us - feverish with individual...
...separate public buses for men and women on routes serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Recently Jerusalem has seen weekly protests over a municipal decision to open a parking lot on the Sabbath. Last year, a former Health Minister from the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party blamed a series of small earth tremors on the rise of homosexual activity. Earlier, Shas had led religious opposition to gay couples' being granted the right to adopt children...
...away in closets or buried in the desert sands - have been preserved, in large part, by Timbuktu's isolation from the rest of the world. Landing in this blisteringly hot Malian town in the southwestern corner of the Sahara feels a little like arriving at the end of the earth. Dirt tracks melt into the featureless desert sands. Chickens peck in the shade between mud-walled houses. Little wonder that Timbuktu is a byword for remoteness. (Read: "Out of Africa: Saharan Solar Energy...