Word: greates
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...jump in the number of sunspots and flares, giant loops of incandescent gases, called prominences, proliferate, shooting tens of thousands of miles above the solar surface, sometimes hanging suspended for months. The solar corona, the halo around the sun visible during total eclipses, becomes fuller and brighter; great blobs of the corona, containing billions of tons of hot gas, occasionally burst free, shooting into space at speeds as high as 2 million m.p.h. And the earth's upper atmosphere, pummeled by solar particles, is laced by electrical currents of as much as a million amperes. These in turn create powerful...
...great flares of March were not isolated events. Nine other major outbursts and hundreds of smaller ones were recorded during the two weeks it took for the sunspot region to rotate out of view. In the months since, as the sun moves erratically toward its maximum, several flares have been observed every...
...from the beginning, people worshiped the sun as the beneficent provider of light and life, and as a god, called Ra by the Egyptians, Helios by the Greeks and Sol by the Romans. To the Aztecs, the sun god was Huitzilopochtli, whom they nourished with human sacrifices. Egypt's great pyramids at Giza were built with their sides aligned with the rising sun at the vernal equinox, and the temple complex at Karnak was dedicated to Ra. The ancient circle at Stonehenge, in England, was apparently constructed so that the sun would rise over one of the great stones...
From the beginnings of history and literature, human beings have also invoked the sun. In rejecting peace offers from Darius before the battle of Gaugamela, Alexander the Great explained, "Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor earth two masters." And in 1911, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, speaking of his nation, declared, "No one can dispute with us the place in the sun that...
...because the inability to relinquish the past can produce such horror that memory -- what place, what price, what power to give it -- is a central question in the great historical transition from dictatorship to democracy. All the new Latin democracies, for example, are emerging from periods of brutal dictatorship. What to do with this past? Uruguay chose, by referendum, a forgetting. It voted to let the brutalities of military rule be bygone. Argentina did the opposite. It prosecuted those who gave the orders for torture and execution. The Argentine experience, however, with its semiannual military revolts and its reversion...