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President Reagan raised skeptical eyebrows back in 1986 when he rhapsodized about plans to build the Orient Express, a hypersonic jet that could take off from a New York airport and reach Tokyo in two hours by taking a side trip into orbit. It turns out that while space fan DAN QUAYLE has doggedly pursued the plans -- with marginal success so far--the former Soviet Union had plowed ahead of the U.S. Soviet scientists successfully tested an engine for a space plane last year. The Pentagon might consider placing a few help-wanted ads in Yeltsin country...
Without question, these recent additions to the scientific tool kit hold tremendous practical promise. A more accurate atomic clock, for instance, is not just a curiosity. "If we can put better clocks into orbit," notes William Phillips, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, "we might improve the global positioning system enough to land airplanes in pea-soup fog." Even now it is not difficult to imagine that STMs might be employed by the semiconductor industry to produce minuscule electronic devices, that optical tweezers might be used by surgeons to correct defects in a single cell...
...most stunning image is of Venus' second tallest mountain, Maat Mons, which rises 8 km (5 miles). Most of the planet's many peaks, including 9.5-km- (6-mile-) high Maxwell Montes, look bright in the radar pictures Magellan takes from its orbit above the perpetual cloud cover. That means they are strong reflectors of radar waves. But Maat Mons is dark; like the Stealth bomber, it absorbs much of the radar falling...
These potentially explosive changes, all happening beyond the orbit of Washington policymakers, include...
...popular explanation postulates a major role for a mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter. Astronomers have learned about dark matter through indirect evidence: galaxies spin and orbit one another faster than the laws of physics allow, unless one presumes the presence of invisible matter that provides the extra gravity to hold things together. The extra gravity of dark matter could also have helped the galaxies grow faster out of the smoothness of the early universe. Even this explanation, however, does not sufficiently account for recent observations. "It is clear that there is something profoundly wrong with our theories," says Harvard...