Word: planet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shoemakers chart the asteroids' travels, astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., hunt for another elusive creature of the night: the legendary tenth planet, or Planet X. They comb through the tangled statistics and images transmitted in 1983 from the now defunct orbiting Infrared Astronomical Satellite (I.R.A.S.), struggling to find a single pinpoint source of radiation that over a six-month period has shifted in a particular pattern among the fixed stars, as only a nearby planet can do. Says Daniel Whitmire, a University of Southwestern Louisiana astrophysicist who is involved in the search: "There...
...part of the controversy and ferment that have been bubbling through the scientific community since the rise of a spectacular new theory that attempts to explain the mass extinctions--most notably the one in which the dinosaurs perished--that have punctuated the history of life on this planet. Every 26 million years or so, the theory holds, a rain of comets that lasts hundreds or thousands of centuries bombards the earth. The impact of some of the larger comets spews enough debris into the atmosphere to block the sun for months. As the skies darken, temperatures on the ground plummet...
...Black Harvardians you are definitely at an intellectual center of the planet, renowned since 1636. It is important to know its history and to view yourselves as one more of an endless line of marching men and women who are marked by the singular characteristic of an intense capacity to explore that great enigma, Verities. You are surrounded by positive symbols of gigantic intellectual and moral accomplishment. The challenge to the mind and will is to immerse yourself in, and identify boldly with, the positive aspects of those symbols. Never let the ever-present negatives of this world define your...
...Dent awoke one morning in his modest home west of London to learn from a visiting extraterrestrial that the earth was about to be demolished. It had to make way for a hyperspace bypass. What happened next is too horrible to recount, but several hundred thousand inhabitants of the planet earth are familiar with the tale. That is a conservative estimate of the audience for Douglas Adams' 1979 luna tic masterpiece, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a 1980 sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and a 1982 sequel, Life, the Universe and Everything. The Hitchhiker...
Fish chronicles the return of the shy, self-effacing Dent to his home planet after a successful demolition-eve escape. He has spent the intervening eight years hitching rides on passing spacecraft, snacking at duty-free shops on distant planets and encountering such diverse creatures as a lost tribe of ballpoint pens mislaid by former owners, and a race of marketing executives who, despite 573 committee meetings, have still not discovered the wheel ("All right, Mr. Wiseguy . . . you tell us what color it should be"). To Dent's surprise, earth has somehow escaped destruction, but all the dol phins have...