Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Walker said Temple is about a spirit which is all-encompassing and present on the earth, like the god in The color Purple, "but more so." Her new book seems to be a more explicit account of this spirit, which Lissie is responsible for describing...
...frequently prescribed drug of the stressed-out 1970s, F. Hoffmann-La Roche reached the peak of good health. Thanks largely to Valium and its sister sedative, Librium, the Swiss-based Hoffmann-La Roche became the No. 1 maker of prescription pharmaceuticals and one of the most profitable companies on earth. But lulled by the success of Valium, whose U.S. patent expired four years ago, the company failed to keep pace in the '80s with such aggressive rivals as U.S.-based Merck and Swiss neighbors Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. Symbolic of Hoffmann-La Roche's backward ways was the firm...
That could mean a direct hit or, more probably, another nerve-jangling near miss. But even if 1989FC never strikes earth, a similar asteroid is destined to do so eventually. It has happened so many times before, in fact, that the earth's surface would be as pockmarked as the moon's were it not for the cosmetic effects of erosion caused by the oceans and atmosphere. Half-mile asteroids are a dime a dozen in the solar system, and they run into the planet once every 100,000 years, on average. That means the next one could strike...
...extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The primary evidence, discovered by the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a geologist, is a layer of the element iridium laid down in sedimentary rock at about the time the giant reptiles disappeared. Iridium is rare on the earth's surface but more common in asteroids...
...avoid collisions with asteroids and comets? Perhaps. A nuclear warhead aimed right at a small asteroid could vaporize it, says Alan Harris, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But the warhead might also simply break the rock into pieces that would hit the earth anyway. A better plan, proposed by concerned scientists in the early 1980s, would be to use explosives to deflect an asteroid rather than destroy it. Properly positioned, a bomb could nudge a threatening object enough to make it miss the planet. The catch, says Harris, is that there would not be much...