Word: earths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...technicality. It's not just the obvious differences--language, civilization, technology--that set us apart. Even basic biology suggests that humanity has special status. Virtually every other type of animal comes in multiple varieties: dozens of species of monkeys, antelopes, whales and hawks walk, swim or fly the earth, to say nothing of beetles, whose hundreds of thousands of species inspired biologist J.B.S. Haldane's famous quip that God must have had "an inordinate fondness" for them. Even our closest kin, the great apes, fall into four species, divided into several subspecies...
Second, evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth's revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a "fact." (Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact"can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent...
...quake sought out not only weaknesses in the earth, but also ? with vicious accuracy ? strengths and weaknesses in Turkish society," says TIME Istanbul reporter Andrew Finkel. If anything good has come of the disaster, it?s been the human solidarity both within Turkey and from abroad. Turkish rescue teams have worked alongside those sent by such old enemies as Greece and Russia, and even where the Turkish state?s own response had been inadequate, local communities rose to the challenge. "There?s still a strong sense of community in Turkey," says Finkel. "It was neighbors, not civil defense units...
Closing in at 42,500 m.p.h., one of the largest and most complex spacecraft ever built will pass only 725 miles from Earth Tuesday on its way to a 2004 rendezvous with Saturn, its spectacular rings and its giant moon, Titan. The ship is Cassini, and while it's an object of pride for space scientists, it's an object of fear for antinuclear activists. Weighing in at around six tons at its launch in October 1997, Cassini lacked the rocket power to fly directly out to Saturn, which is on average 800 million miles from Earth. Instead it headed...
...Tuesday's approach that frightens the activists. Should Cassini pass too close to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, they warn, radioactive plutonium in the generators that provide the craft's electricity could cause millions of cancer deaths. Most scientists and doctors scoff at such claims. Any plutonium vaporized in an accident, they explain, would be so diluted in the atmosphere that it would pose no real threat to most people. Still, activists say, had Cassini been equipped with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted. But Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth...