Word: haling
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Anecdotal evidence suggests that learning a language may get harder with age. Hale, who knew some Spanish, found himself outdistanced by his 11-year-old son, who "could take phrases and repeat them back better." Laments Ed Blumenstock, 57, a California ob-gyn: "I hoped that six weeks of classes would be enough, but it's not. I can't have a real conversation without murdering the language...
...nearly a half-century, starting in 1949, the world's most powerful research-quality telescope was the Hale, on Palomar Mountain, in California. Its mirror, 5 m (17 ft.) in diameter, focused more faint starlight than anything else on the planet. But in the past few years, the Hale has been humbled. Here on Mauna Kea alone sit the Subaru telescope (no relation to the car), with a mirror more than 8 m (27 ft.) across; the Gemini North telescope, also topping 8 m; and the kings of the mountain, the twin Keck telescopes, whose light-gathering surfaces...
That's not all. While each of these instruments trumps the Hale in light-gathering power, many are poised to outshine even the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been delivering astonishing snapshots of deepest space since it was refurbished in 1993. The orbiting observatory's nearly 2.5-m (8-ft.) mirror isn't all that powerful, but since it floats above Earth's constantly roiling atmosphere, the Hubble has been unrivaled in the sharpness of its images. No more. Using an ingenious technological trick to eliminate atmospheric blur, most of the new telescopes will soon achieve Hubble-quality focus...
...also been a long time coming. Impressive as the Hale telescope was for its day, it represented a technological dead end. The Hale, like its smaller predecessors, was powered by a mirror that's essentially a huge hockey puck of glass ground into a concave, light-focusing curve on one face and coated with reflective metal. To keep from sagging under its own weight and distorting the curve, the mirror had to be a bulky 26 in. thick, and it weighed 20 tons. That enormous heft called for an even more massive support structure to hold the whole thing...
...control, act as one. And in Europe, design teams came up with yet another idea, the exact opposite of Angel's: instead of making the mirror hollow to save weight, let it be thin--about 8 in. thick for an 8-m mirror, in contrast to the 5-m Hale's 26 in.--and counteract the resulting floppiness with computer-controlled supports that continually readjust its shape...