Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...includes all creative types--are naturally predisposed to believe in the power of ideas, particularly their own, so the tendency to overrate their impact is not surprising. And nuclear war is the ideal intellectual stomping ground to let loose pent-up speculative urges. It's a problem of literally earth-shattering import, it's endlessly debatable, and best of all it's completely hypothetical. No one every fought and nuclear war, or even came all that close to fighting one, so experts can only guess and guess again about the issue. And once you've mastered the lingo of kilotonnage...
...charted indefinitely backward, they would eventually converge on a small group of ancients who were ancestors of us all. Now biologists suggest in a report to Nature that a single female living between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago in Africa was an ancestor of everyone on the earth today. Inevitably -- and to the probable delight of creationists -- many scientists are calling...
...mysterious arcs, each four to seven times as long as the diameter of the Milky Way, curve around clusters of galaxies that lie some 3 billion light- years* from earth. Astronomers Vahe Petrosian of Stanford University and Roger Lynds of Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory, who discovered the arcs, believe each consists of some 100 billion stars but cannot explain the shape. "What gives us a headache," says Petrosian, "is that they are so, so perfect...
...studies of very dim, faraway galaxies and quasars. Last spring Spinrad and his team first pinpointed 3C 326.1's position with New Mexico's Very Large Array radio telescopes; then they aimed powerful optical telescopes at the spot and discovered a glowing object about 12 billion light- years from earth. Later analysis of light from 3C 326.1 revealed that it was a newborn galaxy, three times as long as the diameter of the Milky Way. At the time the light viewed by Spinrad left 3C 326.1, which was 12 billion years ago, the new galaxy was forming sun-size stars...
...crawled out of the basement and thought hewas the last boy on earth. His entire city hadbeen blown away. He told me that unless we canreverse the arms race, this will inevitably happento America as well--that some American will comeout of his basement and find his city blown away...