Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unfortunately, as Columbia University's Dr. Harold Neu observed in the journal Science, "bacteria are cleverer than men." Just as they have adapted to nearly every environmental niche on the planet, they have now begun adjusting to a world laced with antibiotics. It didn't take long. Just a year or two after penicillin went into widespread use, the first resistant strain of staph appeared. As other antibiotics came along, microbes found ways to resist them as well, through changes in genetic makeup. In some cases, for example, the bacteria gained the ability to manufacture an enzyme that destroys...
...Charles River is the happenin-est swimmin' hole on the planet. Love that dirty water...
Images can lead not only to erroneous comparisons but to misapprehensions of scale. Because of its great distance from the observers, Jupiter fit neatly within the frames of the zillions of photographs taken of it last week. Some of them seemed serenely beautiful, showing small reddish blossoms dotting the planet's darker surface. The information that one of these was a fireball larger than the earth could not be conveyed visually. It had to be explained in words, and even then the mind resisted the preposterous notion that that was what it had seen...
...Shoemaker decided nearly two decades ago to use a small but powerful telescope to look for comets and asteroids headed this way. Five years ago, a member of Shoemaker's team saw a chunk of rock perhaps a third of a mile across that had just zipped by the planet at a distance of only 450,000 miles. There are about 2,000 large bodies that cross the orbit of Earth and could, in theory, hit us. That is why Shoemaker and his colleagues have for years been urging a stepped- up program to search for Earth-crossing comets...
Boston-born, Theroux in 1985 became an "accidental resident" of the city he calls "a whole flat planet with a Venusian veil of smog" after having spent ten years in the Middle East. He bought a tiny condominium in unfashionable Long Beach, best known as the final berth of the retired liner Queen Mary and as a popular haven for lesbians. The many bars where the ladies hang out, Theroux writes, "could be spotted by the combination of women waiting in line to get in and mystified sailors (from the local naval base) watching warily from across the street...