Word: planetful
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...comes to asteroids' wreaking disaster on Earth, the real question is not if, but when. Two hundred or so large craters and a geological record stretching over billions of years provide ample evidence that, time and again, explosive impacts by asteroids or comets have devastated large parts of the planet, wiped out species and threatened the very existence of terrestrial life. Astronomers are all too aware that more large hulks are out there, hurtling through space, some of them ultimately destined to collide with Earth...
With more money, we could do better in the next century--but only a little. If we sent an astronaut to the planet Mercury and she lived there for 30 years before returning, she would be about 22 seconds younger than if she had stayed on Earth. Clocks on Mercury tick more slowly than those on Earth because Mercury circles the sun at a faster speed (and also because Mercury is deeper in the sun's gravitational field; gravity affects clocks much as velocity does). Astronauts traveling away from Earth to a distance of 0.1 light years and returning...
...that every living thing on Earth, from the tiniest bacterium on the ocean floor to the highest albatross that ever flew in the sky, arose as the magnificently diversified evolutionary outcome of one single experiment performed by nature, one origin of life in the early history of one particular planet...
...might also argue that since our immense universe contains gazillions of galaxies filled with appropriate stars and planets, and since life did emerge on the one and only planet we really know, how can we deny that a sizable proportion of these other planets must also contain life? Yet a logical fallacy dooms this common argument because either alternative can be reconciled with the positive result that I must obtain for the only place I can sample--our Earth. For if all appropriate planets generate some form of life, then I should not be surprised that I have found living...
...world, and that's how they're spreading today, hitchhiking on trains, planes, automobiles--even up the trousers of unknowing tourists. In Taiwan, for example, where it would have been a curiosity only 30 years ago, the German cockroach is happily entrenched. "The last living thing on the planet," says entomologist Roger Gold of Texas A&M University, "will be a roach eating a lichen on a rock...