Word: pioneers
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...breeder is a monster," says David Comey, environmental director for Chicago's Businessmen in the Public Interest. Nuclear Pioneer George Weil agrees, calling the breeder concept "dangerous and unproved." Some objections focus on the use of liquid sodium (a tricky substance that explodes on contact with water and burns in air) as a cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years...
When Astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan conceived the idea of attaching a drawing of a nude man and woman to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, their motive was purely scientific. They wanted any extraterrestrial beings who might some day intercept the craft to know what kind of race had sent it. Since the March launch, however, the two scientists have discovered that the drawing is more than a message to outer space. "We didn't realize it," says Drake, "but it turns out to be a cleverly disguised Rorschach inkblot test...
...Rorschach, people reveal their emotional conflicts by describing what they think they see in indeterminate shapes. Similarly, critics of the Pioneer 10 drawing saw considerably more than Drake and Sagan intended to convey, thus suggesting something about their own inner preoccupations...
Petitions against more than 100 stations are pending with the FCC, the biggest number the overworked commission has ever had. The complaints vary, but they center mostly on allegations of inadequate programming for minorities or discrimination in hiring or promotions. The United Church of Christ, a pioneer in seeking better treatment of minorities by broadcasters, currently has seven complaints awaiting action by the FCC. They charge discriminatory policies by stations from Bakersfield, Calif., to Syracuse...
...nuns have abandoned their orders to form "noncanonical" experimental communities outside the reach of church authority. But they do not consider themselves "ex-nuns." A free-form, geographically dispersed group (32 states, Canada and England) called Sisters for a Christian Community (S.F.C.C.) was founded in 1970 to "experiment and pioneer new forms of religious life for the 21st century." Essential to the undertaking, says Founding Sister Lillanna Kopp of Portland, Ore., is the elimination of the bureaucratic, authoritarian structures that have driven American nuns out of traditional religious orders by the tens of thousands since the Vatican Council closed...