Word: interstellar
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...might indicate intelligent life in the universe, and ClimatePrediction.net, which tests the accuracy of global climate models, have long tapped volunteers' home computers to help process data. The difference between these projects and Galaxy Zoo - and its inspiration, Stardust@home, which asks volunteers to search electron-microscope images for interstellar dust particles collected in space - is that the latter two interface with not the volunteer's PC but with his or her mind...
...joke term engineers have used for decades to describe any needed material that is rare, costly or difficult to obtain. For Cameron, the specificity of unobtainium is not important, and despite Fox's objections, he never explains in the movie what makes unobtainium worth the trouble of interstellar travel. But the answer to that mystery is that the substance's room-temperature superconducting properties make it the key to cheap power generation back on Earth, where all the oil has run out. Unobtainium is crucial to running ships like the ISV Venture Star, which delivers humans to Pandora. The irony...
...both questions.But should we care? People believe in crazy things. In a 2004 poll, 34 percent of Americans stated that they believed in ghosts and 24 percent in witches. Dennis Kucinich, in the 2007 Democratic debate, stated that he saw a UFO , which makes him a possible interstellar Manchurian Candidate. So why do dinosaurs matter?Dinosaurs matter because to believe that dinosaurs walked with man, an individual must stubbornly cling to a belief despite all available evidence against it. The young-earth creationist mindset is dogmatic and anti-empirical—which is a very dangerous thing to have...
There is a dancing, dazzling siren seductress at the heart of this book and of all books like it, and it is not Sally (or Sybil or Sylvia) but madness itself. When Sally turns manic, it's as if some interstellar alien god is speaking through her, and you hang on to its every word. As a person, you want her to get better, but as a reader, you can't get enough of the crazy. ("Mania is a glutton for attention," says Dr. Lensing, Sally's gifted therapist. "It craves thrills, action, it wants to keep thriving, it will...
Ulysses also tracked interstellar dust particles all the way from the sun to Earth, and in so doing helped map the planet's magnetic fields. The big surprise came when Ulysses stumbled on the tails of two comets and found that those feathery streams were more than 93 million miles (150 million km) in length. That's about the distance from the sun to Earth. "Totally unexpected," JPL project scientist Ed Smith says simply...