Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Until recently the idea of studying twisters in the field would have struck most people as foolhardy. After all, these monsters of the atmosphere are as unpredictable as sharks, and considerably more dangerous. Just ask the 12,000 residents of Beatrice, Nebraska, whose town was vandalized by a big tornado last week. Or ask Sheriff Donnie Joe Yancey of Izard County, Arkansas, who tangled with the funnel that rampaged through his section of the state last month, killing seven people and injuring 30 more. Yancey was preparing to get out of his jeep, he recalls, when "it got real dark...
...movie, Dorothy is packed with golf ball-size radio transmitters that are supposed to fly up into the vortex and relay data to ground-based computers. The idea is not all that farfetched, according to real-life storm chasers (some of whom acted as scientific consultants on the film). They speculate, though, that most of the flying transmitters would be blown away from the vortex or destroyed by debris. Over the years, researchers have proposed all sorts of zany schemes for getting instruments into a tornado's heart, including blasting at the twister with instrumented rockets and probing it with...
Before VORTEX, scientists had a general idea of how tornadoes come to be. They knew, for example, that big twisters are most likely to be generated by what are termed supercell storms--towering cloud structures that sometimes top out at 65,000 ft. and concentrate energy in dangerous ways. Supercells typically form in spring as warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico flows north and pushes through colder, dryer layers of air. As it rises, this upwelling of warm air begins to cool, and the moisture it contains condenses first into cloud droplets and then into rain. At that...
That is something everybody is thinking about these days, from the PC makers to the folks championing the idea of a $500 "network computer." But when it comes to rapid deployment of high-powered computer technology, nobody has a better track record than the video-game companies. Nintendo won't say anything about its Internet plans right now except to wink and say, as Lincoln does, that it "will be making announcements in the near future." But it's not hard to imagine tens of millions of Americans a few years from now surfing the World Wide Web through their...
...Sports has left a sizable imprint on televised sports with innovative gimmicks, over-the-top commentary and a philosophy of fun with games. Started from scratch when Rupert Murdoch landed an N.F.L. television contract in 1993, Fox Sports has made imitators out of skeptics. But then the whole idea of a fourth network was once considered impossible...