Word: misshapen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hardware and grand engineering projects rather than ideas, as if NASA's only constituency were the aerospace industry, has retarded rather than advanced the agency's true mission of exploring the universe. Such genuine marvels as the Hubble Space Telescope (which has returned spectacular results despite a slightly misshapen mirror), the Galileo spacecraft now on its way to Jupiter and the COBE satellite, which last year revealed details of the origin of the universe, have had to operate in the shadows, delayed and beggared by NASA's other concerns...
...standard Moscow taxicab sifts through traffic along the city's Boulevard Ring road on a mild, hazy winter's afternoon. The windows are coated with a viscous film of mud and grit, residue of city snow turned to slush. Wipers, old and misshapen, scrape slowly across the windshield, clearing just enough space for the driver to spot a stout old man waving his hand from the curb. He pulls over. A few words are spoken, an agreement reached. The man and his wife, both wearing dingy overcoats, fur hats and rubber boots, clamber...
Hellbent to harvest a crop they did not plant, the loggers leave behind a battlefield strewn with war's spoils: misshapen logs and stumps, distorted and twisted beyond belief--the grotesque deformities of wooden corpses...
...Angel swung by a Tucson pottery shop to pick up some firebricks for a backyard kiln. Then he purchased some glass ovenware at a nearby hardware store. A few days later, he materialized in a graduate student's doorway, brandishing a couple of Pyrex custard dishes melted to a misshapen blob. "We can make telescope mirrors out of this!" Angel exclaimed. Thus began a monumental and quixotic effort to reinvent the central light-gathering surface of the telescope, from its initial design to its final polishing...
...from those who came to know of its side effects. Marketed as a tranquilizer, thalidomide turned out to be one of the most potent causes of birth defects ever found. Babies born to women who took it during early pregnancy were born with terrible deformities, including missing or seriously misshapen limbs...