Word: planetful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...does best is protect the power and privileges of its elite. The means to that end are terror and bureaucracy. The result is chronic inefficiency, an unhappy, unproductive citizenry, and a country severely hobbled as it tries to participate, to say nothing of compete, in the life of the planet. Therefore, despite their internationalist pretensions, Marxist states end up with fortress economies under self-imposed siege. But in an interdependent world well into the Third Industrial Revolution, as the latest explosive advances in technology and communications are sometimes known, autarky and isolation are no longer an option. Just...
Lester Brown has renewed his earlier predictions that world population is reaching the limit of what the planet's land can support. Per capita food production is already declining, he points out, in Africa and South America. Ethiopia has suffered its tragic famines, Brown contends, partly because the country's population has outstripped the productive capacity of its fields. But World Bank analysts disagree, arguing that Ethiopia's agricultural failures stem more from the policies of the recently ousted Mengistu regime, which paid farmers rock-bottom prices and created no incentive to conserve resources...
...David Black, director of Houston's Lunar and Planetary Institute, the history of astronomy is "littered with the bones of claimed detections." Lyne admits that other phenomena might be causing the observed deviations in the radio waves, but "the most likely interpretation," he maintains, "is that there is a planet there." Many other experts think Lyne is right. "Now that we see it," said Ramesh Narayan, a Harvard astronomer, "it is up to us to explain how it could happen...
Lyne's work provides no answer to the most tantalizing question in astronomy: Is there life on other planets? In this case, life would be difficult on a planet whose sun is a relatively tiny, dim pulsar. Astronomer Black figures that in about 10 years, telescopic instruments may be sophisticated enough to focus on the planet itself, rather than just the pulsar. Even if no Klingons are immediately found, the knowledge gained from examining the distant planet will make it easier to explore the countless other worlds waiting to be discovered...
SCIENCE How some radio pulses may reveal a planet...