Word: faraway
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...centuries, China has mined the faraway continent for its treasures. Zheng He himself loaded his ships with ambergris, elephant tusk and rhino horn. Despite Kenya's shoot-to-kill order for wildlife poachers, much of the ivory and rhino horn leaves Africa by air from its capital, Nairobi, or by sea from the nation's largest port, Mombasa. As much as 40% of the contraband ultimately ends up in China, where it is used for medicinal purposes and as a natural Viagra. "Little man eat rhino," says Zhu, in his best English, "little man become very...
...nearby golf course. Weekends bring barbecues or softball games. And in the evenings, residents watch satellite TV, the latest episode of Friends sometimes interrupted by the faint chatter of machine-gun fire?a sound that causes unease, but only a little, like a clap of thunder from a faraway rainstorm...
...ultimate fate of the cosmos too gloomy to contemplate, even at a few trillion years' remove? A lot of you got downright doleful at the faraway prospect. "Thank you for making me feel very, very small," griped a reader from Los Angeles. Even more despondent was a Californian from Castro Valley, who called our story "the most depressing thing I have ever read. It seems we are doomed no matter what we do. Pass the Prozac." A Houstonian was "extremely distraught to think of the universe as an infinitely large, charred nothing." But in Cincinnati, Ohio...
Aside from that detail, the Einstein connection made the idea of dark energy, or antigravity, seem somewhat less nutty when Schmidt and Perlmutter weighed in. Of course, some astrophysicists had lingering doubts. Maybe the observers didn't really have the supernovas' brightness right; perhaps the light from faraway stellar explosions was dimmed by some sort of dust. The unique properties of a cosmological constant, moreover, would make the universe slow down early on, then accelerate. That's because dark energy grows as a function of space. There wasn't much space in the young, small universe, so back then...
...EDWIN HUBBLE when: 1927 what he did: Discovered that faraway galaxies all seem to be flying away from Earth, which suggested that the universe was in fact expanding. In doing so, Hubble gave Einstein scientific license to abandon the cosmological constant, whose creation the brilliant physicist dubbed the greatest blunder of his career. In retrospect, it was an inspired guess that could have won him another Nobel Prize...