Word: mountainous
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Most of the language schools are in the pre-Columbian city of Quito, although a score have opened in Cuenca, a mountain community 35 minutes by air to the south. Nearly half the language students are more than 40 years old, with as many from Europe as the U.S. They study Spanish to prepare for travel, to scout retirement sites--or just to learn something new. They are attracted by Ecuador's diverse cultures and spectacular topography. Off-hours, the adventuresome can trek in the nearby Andes...
...haven't been invited to Bush's ranch the way my mother was to Johnson's, but after covering John McCain in the primaries, I spent a weekend with a colleague and our wives at McCain's mountain cabin. The stories and insights and blunt talk crackled like fireworks. As we left, I had an urge that I still can't shake. I thought, "I've gotta tell Mom about this...
These questions and more have tantalized astronomers for decades--and Mauna Kea is one of the few places where answers may finally be found. The mountain is dotted with white and silver observatory domes, sprouting like oversize mushrooms from the barren, rocky rubble that was once molten lava and, much later, a holy place of the native Hawaiian people. And although it's not obvious to the casual visitor, these domes conceal stargazing machines of unprecedented power...
...nearly a half-century, starting in 1949, the world's most powerful research-quality telescope was the Hale, on Palomar Mountain, in California. Its mirror, 5 m (17 ft.) in diameter, focused more faint starlight than anything else on the planet. But in the past few years, the Hale has been humbled. Here on Mauna Kea alone sit the Subaru telescope (no relation to the car), with a mirror more than 8 m (27 ft.) across; the Gemini North telescope, also topping 8 m; and the kings of the mountain, the twin Keck telescopes, whose light-gathering surfaces...
...plates--the standard recording medium since the turn of the 20th century--every telescope on Earth saw its power boosted a hundredfold essentially overnight. That kept the scientists happy only for a while, however, and everyone agreed that telescopes needed some sort of radical new design. Unfortunately, says Matt Mountain, director of the Gemini Observatory, "nobody knew how to make the conceptual leap...