Word: minimum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Baseball's argument is that betting on one's own team corrupts the game. At minimum, it puts the bettor in touch with -- and all too likely in debt to -- gamblers, who may well want to pervert competition for their own ends. At worst, it gives the bettor a financial stake in trying harder to win some games, those on which he has money riding, than others. But to many people this stern morality is as outdated as the 70-year-old scandal that prompted it. In 1919 eight members of the Chicago White Sox were charged with taking money...
Analyzing tree-ring data from 5,000-year-old living bristlecone pines and even older dead ones, Eddy reported in 1976 that their carbon-14 content seemed to vary in rhythm with sunspot numbers. When sunspots were rare, as they were during the Maunder minimum, the amount of carbon 14 in the tree rings increased markedly; when they were numerous, the amount decreased. The explanation: during the sun's more active periods, its magnetic field, which ordinarily deflects some cosmic rays away from the earth, expands and becomes an even greater barrier to the rays. As a result, less carbon...
...tree-ring data revealed other 50-to-100-year intervals in the past when carbon-14 production was high and the sun apparently quiescent. But did this mean that all of these periods were times of extreme cold? Many scientists doubted it, suggesting that the correlation between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age might be nothing more than sheer coincidence. Changes in solar cyclic activity, the doubters argued, were not necessarily accompanied by variations in the sun's output of heat and light and probably did not affect terrestrial weather and climate...
...about the structure of the sun. Although still in its infancy, the new science has already led to several discoveries. Says NSO's Harvey: "It looks as if the frequencies of the oscillating waves vary with the solar cycle: they decreased a bit as the sun went toward solar minimum. Now we expect them to increase again...
...after Bush's veto, House Democrats attempted to override the President's decision. But the tally -- 247 to 178 -- fell 34 votes short of the two-thirds needed for approval. A solution to the deadlock may lie in a House proposal to combine a smaller increase in the minimum wage with new tax breaks for low-income workers, an approach that Bush supports. The House plan, proposed by Wisconsin Republican Thomas Petri, would expand the earned-income tax credit. The tax rule allows poor working families to take special deductions of as much as $874 a year; Petri has suggested...