Word: hit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Dorrington started with a five-run deficit. And his counterpart, Army hurler Shannon Smith, pitched no-hit ball through six and two-thirds innings...
Smith shut out the Harvard bats until the final out of the game, but then McConaghy managed to sneak in a hit to right field...
Then there are the really big asteroids -- masses of rock and iron five or ten miles across that hit every 10 million to 100 million years. The half- milers are bad enough, but these giant ones pose a threat to the entire planet. It was such an asteroid (or an equivalent-size comet) that many scientists believe caused the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The primary evidence, discovered by the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a geologist, is a layer of the element iridium laid down in sedimentary rock at about the time...
...enormous chunk of space rock hit the planet, the Alvarezes theorized, it would have largely disintegrated, casting a pall of iridium-rich dust and other debris over the world that could have lasted for months. Deprived of sunlight by this all-natural version of "nuclear winter," plants -- and the animals that fed on them -- would have died in droves. And when the dust finally settled, the iridium it contained would have formed just such a layer as the Alvarezes found...
...there any way to avoid collisions with asteroids and comets? Perhaps. A nuclear warhead aimed right at a small asteroid could vaporize it, says Alan Harris, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But the warhead might also simply break the rock into pieces that would hit the earth anyway. A better plan, proposed by concerned scientists in the early 1980s, would be to use explosives to deflect an asteroid rather than destroy it. Properly positioned, a bomb could nudge a threatening object enough to make it miss the planet. The catch, says Harris, is that there...