Word: east
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sunspots tend to travel in pairs or groups of opposite polarity, like the ends of horseshoe magnets poking through the solar surface. During one eleven- year cycle, as the blemishes traverse the face of the sun in an east-west direction, the leading spots of each group in the northern hemisphere will generally have positive polarity, the trailing spots negative. In the southern hemisphere, the leading spots will be negative. During the next cycle, the hemisphere polarities will reverse. On average, then, 22 years will pass between solar maximums of the same sunspot polarity. This suggests to many astronomers that...
...weather? Two scientists suspect it may. Karin Labitzke of Berlin's Free University and NCAR's Van Loon have discovered a relationship between the solar cycle and the stratospheric winds over the tropics. During a 28-month period, these winds reverse direction, blowing half the time from the east, the other half from the west, a phenomenon meteorologists call the QBO, or quasi-biennial oscillation. Depending on the direction of the QBO flow, Labitzke and Van Loon found, solar maximums and minimums seem linked to changes in air pressure, temperatures, the number of storms and perhaps even the size...
...news conference shortly before he left, Gorbachev responded somewhat evasively to a question about the Berlin Wall, calling it "no great problem." He repeated the standard East German position that the Wall could be torn down when the conditions that created it have disappeared. But even if Gorbachev were open to discussion on that matter, he would face certain resistance from East Germany, which opposes most of his liberal reforms. One measure of Gorbachev's standing in East Berlin: press coverage of his trip was consistently minimal...
...example, when he needed insights on Hong Kong for his 1977 novel The Honourable Schoolboy, Le Carre devoted days to conversations with TIME Hong Kong correspondent Bing Wong. For The Little Drummer Girl (1983), set partially in the Middle East, Le Carre got useful background from Abu Said Abu Rish, a Palestinian journalist who at the time was office manager of TIME's Beirut bureau. Le Carre still treasures an unusual gift that Abu Said gave him -- a sword that once belonged to the Palestinian's father. "Have you ever tried to take a sword through security in the Middle...
...rare sight in the African wilderness. In the past 20 years, the black rhino population has plummeted from 65,000 to fewer than 4,000. Rhinos are headed down the trail to extinction because poachers hunt them for their horns. Most rhino horn is smuggled to the Middle East and Asia, where it is carved into dagger handles or ground into folk medicines. Conservationists hope that if African governments lose the battle to protect their rhinos, a stockpile of rhinos in America may someday be used to repopulate African game parks...