Word: planet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tree of life, we often envision evolution working like a patient gardener, pruning species that don't quite fit, bit by bit. But that's not how extinction works in practice. Throughout our planet's history, mass extinction has occurred five times - most recently 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs finally died out - taking out vast amounts of life all at once, usually due to a catastrophic and sudden climatic change. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...year-old amateur astronomer, spied a massive black spot on Jupiter's surface. The Australian quickly e-mailed NASA, and scientists manning an infrared telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, confirmed his hunch: a fast-moving object--possibly a comet--had apparently smashed into the solar system's largest planet, leaving a nearly Earth-size "scar" in its atmosphere. The collision came almost exactly 15 years after a comet last hit Jupiter...
...echoes of the astronomical work of William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, through Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner ("the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward") and into Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": "Then I felt like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into...
Ballooning wouldn't be revived in earnest for decades. But it had permanently changed the way people thought about the planet. "It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above," Holmes writes, "but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature." Shelley must surely have been among the first to imagine the earth as it would be seen by astronauts a century and a half later...
...Kaisei - the word means "ocean planet" in Japanese - will experiment with ways to clean up the debris without harming marine life in and around the vortex. People will be able to observe the progress of the mission from the project's website, which should offer one of the first up-close views of the biggest trash heap in the world...