Word: fragmentism
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While NASA studied Magellan's images, another space explorer made history last week. Moving out beyond Mars, Galileo became the first spacecraft to have a close encounter with an asteroid. But pictures of the mysterious planetary fragment, called Gaspra, are unavailable because Galileo's main antenna for sending out images is frozen in the wrong position. Not until 1992, when Galileo swings back by Earth, can smaller antennas on the craft successfully transmit the missing pictures. The frustrating delay makes scientists all the more grateful for Magellan's reliable -- and revealing -- signals from Venus...
...good dramatist defines a theme, shapes a story to illumine it and moves clearly and logically toward an emotionally satisfying conclusion. A great dramatist can make quicksilver leaps from theme to theme, fragment a story into seemingly disparate shards and play games with character and chronology, yet achieve a conclusion that is even more emotionally satisfying because of the sense of surprise and revelation in how it all comes together. For more than three decades, in such works as Aristocrats and Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Ireland's Brian Friel has been a good dramatist. In Dancing at Lughnasa, which opened...
...tiny fragment sifted from the tons of debris that rained down over Lockerbie, Scotland, may at last reveal who blew up PAN AM 103. While both Syrian and Palestinian terrorists have been suspected of planting the bomb, the focus has shifted to the Libyan intelligence service. Scottish police, baffled by a fingernail-size bit of electronic circuitry from the wreckage, shipped it off to Washington. When FBI lab analysts compared the shard with the printed-circuit boards of two unexploded bombs taken from Libyan agents in Africa, it was a match. FBI agents and Scottish investigators tracked the timers...
...idea that would revolutionize biology flashed into the mind of a hippie- holdout biochemist during a midnight drive in 1983. While winding through the mountains of Northern California, Kary Mullis envisioned a way of easily copying a single fragment of DNA in a chain reaction that so surprised him, he pulled his Honda Civic off the road to admire the view in his mind...
...advancing technology. When the sharecroppers were replaced by mechanical cotton pickers and tractors after 1940, the Delta blacks joined the 5 million Southern rural blacks who fled to the cities of the South, West and North, bringing to urban culture their broken hearts in a tragic search for a fragment of dignity and security. That migration, one of the largest such internal movements of people in history, transformed America. The blacks who stayed behind suffered from abject poverty and near starvation. When Bobby Kennedy visited the Delta in the spring of 1967, he was shocked by the conditions...