Word: earthly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ignored provision of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 permits on national forest land only when it is the optimum cutting method. This, says Stewartt, is really "a mining operation, a one-time extraction of resources." Valley walls too steep to walk on have been scraped to bare earth. Acreage bulldozed for shopping malls looks like this. Until these ravaged uplands reseed themselves -- which on the steepest slopes simply may not happen -- erosion is inevitable, and the most reliable yield, says Forester Morrison in disgust, will be "sustained sediment" in the streams that drain them. We head eastward...
...astronomers, remote galaxies are cosmic Rosetta stones. Because their faint glimmers of light take billions of years to reach earth, these galaxies -- conglomerations of stars, dust, gas and, perhaps, planets -- offer a unique glimpse far back into time and provide clues to the age of the universe. As Physicist Stephen Hawking has observed: "When we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past." In those galactic outer reaches, too, lies hidden the answer to a tantalizing mystery: How soon after the cataclysmic fireball of the big bang, from which the universe presumably emerged...
...answering that question with the announcement that it has discovered the most distant galaxy yet seen by man. Designated 4C41.17, the galaxy is located some 15 billion light-years away (a single light-year is equal to approximately 6 trillion miles) -- about 90% of the distance from the earth to the visible limits of the universe...
...galaxy by taking an optical spectrum that revealed what one team member, Kenneth Chambers of Johns Hopkins University, calls cosmic fingerprints -- emission lines with sharp features characteristic of hydrogen and carbon. In distant galaxies, these lines occur at much redder wavelengths than those emitted by the same elements on earth; this so-called red shift, believed to be caused by the expansion of the universe, is what astronomers use to measure distance...
Government funding officials are considering the closure of one-third of all university physics and chemistry departments. Six philosophy departments and seven earth-science departments are shutting down. The University of Edinburgh's top Soviet military expert is barely hanging on, having accepted an annual pay cut from $42,750 to $10,260 -- and the assurance that he can keep his research collection there. "The university is short $6 million," he says. "Someone...