Word: planeteers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hands. Debbie's pompous husband (Stephen Collins) to Skippy: "What are you doing with my wife's gun in your pants?" My New Gun's dramatic tension arises both * from the eccentricity of the performers -- except for the sweetly befuddled Lane, the only human on this planet -- and from the audience's familiarity with so many other movies where guns go off all the time. It has the assured, affectless style of Twin Peaks remade as a sitcom...
...scientists search for the next planet, the "top quark" and more effective vaccines, they often need also to search for new words to describe their findings. And while some of their etymological innovations, like "DNA," are incorporated into daily usage, most are as incomprehensible to the non-Ph.D today as they were the day they were coined...
EVERY AUGUST THE EARTH PASSES THROUGH THE orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle. If the comet ever happened to be there, the 10-km-wide (6-mile) chunk of ice and rock could slam into the planet, carving an enormous crater, generating tidal waves and throwing up a worldwide pall of dust that could block sunlight for months. Plants would be largely wiped out, and so would many species that ultimately depend on plants for food -- including, perhaps, the human race. Just such a disaster, many scientists believe, killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A smaller strike...
...Luckily, planet and comet have never been in the same place at the same time. The only visible effect of the crossed paths is the annual Perseid meteor shower, caused when lingering comet dust burns up in the earth's atmosphere. But humanity may not be so lucky for long: there is a chance that the next time Swift-Tuttle comes around, probably in the year 2126, it will fall to earth. The odds are small -- 10,000 to 1 against -- according to the International Astronomical Union's Brian Marsden. But the downside is so great that Marsden has urged...
...such a shallow angle that the floors of some craters are permanently in shadow. With no atmosphere to move heat around, the temperature in these spots is far below zero. Any ice that condensed as frost in the craters billions of years ago when water boiled on the planet's surface as it formed would still be around today -- and evidently...