Word: planetful
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...very things that qualified the men to go to the moon ... disqualified them to describe their journey with any lyricism." Perhaps Swigert has never heard of Antoine de St. Exupéry, the French aviator, explorer and writer, whose internationally loved fictional creation, the Little Prince is from the planet B612. Somehow I believe St. Exupéry would have fulfilled NASA's requirement "for pilots who were made of tough physical stuff" in spite of his many other talents. NASA should broaden its scope. Jeanette F. Huber, KINSALE, IRELAND...
That is true even of Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more during this recession than anyone else on the planet. The 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the Venetian Macao, was in 2007 and '08 the third richest person in the world, with - by his estimate - a net worth of $40 billion. By February of this year, he said he had lost $36.5 billion - more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. In the years before that slide, banks were...
...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...
...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...