Word: planetful
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Astronomers have found more than 150 planets orbiting distant stars, but they?ve all been so much bigger than Earth that they?re totally inhospitable to life. But now, with a little help from Albert Einstein, they?ve spotted a world that is by far the smallest ever found- albeit still about 5.5 times the mass of our home planet- which means that many more, even smaller planets, could be discovered reasonably soon...
...wants to blow up the company's hierarchical traditions, trim the ranks of bureaucrats and encourage a climate of risk taking. He will go out on a limb with bolder car designs (in fact, one new model is called the Edge). And he will gamble that saving the planet from the car industry is the biggest long-term priority of all, so he will pour billions of dollars into eco-friendly factories and cars. Most notably, the company will dramatically increase production of its hybrid gas-electric models, promising to produce 250,000 a year by 2010, a tenfold increase...
...fundamental goal of Medicare Part D is hard to argue with. Medicare has no drug benefit; Part D provides one. When Medicare was established in 1965 as a Great Society health-care program for seniors, prescription drugs were a minor planet in the universe of medical treatment. They now account for 11% of every health-care dollar spent. But more than a quarter of the 42 million people on Medicare had no drug coverage at all last year...
...Given that a debate has been raging for the past few years over whether Pluto is even a planet, it might be tempting to wonder "why bother?" In fact, though, the debate underscores why it's an even more important mission than anyone might have imagined just a couple of decades ago. Back then, Pluto was considered a sort of one-of-a-kind oddball, a big chunk of mostly ice, very different from the rocky inner planets (like Earth) or the gassy outer ones (like Jupiter...
...especially big-and not even the biggest-of a giant swarm of icy bodies, known collectively as the Kuiper Belt, which orbits the Sun out beyond Neptune. If it's just one among many, it either has to be downgraded from its original status as a full-fledged planet, or at least a handful of other big Kuiper Belt objects have to be added to the list. But in any case, these lumps of ice haven't melted since the origin of the Solar System some 4.4 billion years ago, and so, unlike the closer planets, they are a geochemical...