Word: faintly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...city of "verys," a place of extremes that demands and enforces toughness. In winter it is bitingly cold, with winds blowing down from Siberia; in summer, so hot that some choose to sleep in the streets. Simply negotiating the city is a task that is not for the faint of body. To cross busy roads, pedestrians must clamber up overpasses or, more frequently, descend into underground mazes that seethe with shops and exits. Thus a walk down three city blocks can become a ten-minute expedition that involves 92 steps down and 88 steps up, and leaves one feeling...
...needle nose pointed toward the runway below at the U.S. Navy's Fentress Air Field near Norfolk, Va. Engine open and screaming, gulping in the thick air, the Viper reached max speed of 264 ft. per sec. 20 ft. above the concrete and leveled out for its pass. A faint touch of aileron and the ship rolled on its back. The crowd gasped. Heads swung in unison as the jet knifed by, turned upright and spiraled vertically into the sun, which splintered its bright beams on the wings. As Top Gun slid his plane to a landing...
...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...
...galaxy was first located by its radio waves, then confirmed visually at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, appearing as a faint, fuzzy object. A computer-enhanced photograph shows the galaxy as a brightly colored, amoeba-shaped mass. Next, the scientists determined the distance of the 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...
...getting in line for trouble. Barbara Bush seems to have sensed this when she warned her husband not to let Nixon saddle him with the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. This was during the shake-up following Nixon's re-election in 1972, when Watergate was a faint underground rumble. Nixon, in the flush of victory, was going to do wonders, mainly by firing or demoting almost everyone in sight -- but not George Bush. "He'd do anything for the cause," Nixon privately told John Ehrlichman. The qualification for service in the second term was spelled out with ruthless...