Word: mirrored
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first harsh light of revelation, news that the Hubble Space Telescope was flawed appeared to be an unmitigated disaster. Because the telescope's main light-focusing mirror had been precision ground to the wrong specifications, the U.S. had evidently spent $1.5 billion on an instrument that may never take the promised supersharp pictures of the heavens...
...best example of a shape-changing "active optics" mirror is the one in the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope in La Silla, Chile. Pistons attached to the thin mirror can flex it in and out until a star is as focused as possible. The NTT has already produced some of the sharpest images ever taken from the ground. A comparable system will be used in other projects, including the giant Keck Telescope under construction atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii...
Adaptive optics depends on taking starlight focused by a telescope's main mirrors and bouncing it off yet another mirror before studying the image. The additional mirror is made of a superflexible material -- plastic, in the Johns Hopkins device. A light sensor monitors a reference star within the telescope's field of view and looks for the shimmering caused by currents in the atmosphere. When the sensor detects disturbances, it sends signals to electrodes flanking the plastic mirror. The electrodes create electric fields that make the plastic bulge or dip, canceling out the flicker. Both the Hawaii and Johns Hopkins...
...entertain really rank loans. The government had this free ride for a long time. There were hardly any failures because bankers were not lending in such a way as to fail. And now, paradoxically, when the talk is of cutting back on deposit insurance, the banking system is a mirror image of the system...
...When adults lament the absence of "values," it is worth recalling that children are an honest conscience, the perfect mirror of a society's priorities and principles. A society whose values are entirely material is not likely to breed a generation of poets; anti-intellectualism and indifference to education do not inspire rocket scientists. With each passing day these arguments become more apparent, the needs more pressing. Where is the leader who will seize the opportunity to do what is both smart and worthy, and begin retuning policy to focus on children and intercept trouble before it breeds...