Word: plumes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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About five hours north of Yosemite is Virginia City, Nev., where Samuel Clemens adopted his nom de plume. The conventional wisdom is that "Mark Twain" comes from the riverman's term for water two fathoms deep. Joe Curtis, owner of Mark Twain's Bookstore, offers an alternative theory. Clemens used to order his whiskey two shots at a time in Virginia City, telling the bartender to put it on his tab: "Mark me for twain [two]." Twain wrote for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in the early 1860s, chronicling the town's gold- and silver-fueled rise. His recollections...
...Attention Deficit Answer Book (Plume), Dr. Alan Wachtel writes that even when medication is warranted, Ritalin is not necessarily the best choice. Also, says Wachtel, there are "behavioral techniques" and "psychological interventions" to employ. In January, Norton will be publishing Ritalin Nation. The author, Richard DeGrandpre, argues that the demand for the drug is an unfortunate result of our speeded-up society. "We're not just moving through our lives faster," he writes. "We're also acquiring a heightened need for speed...
...after 7 a.m. last Wednesday at a hidden site in central Iran, but the secret lasted about as long as a puddle of water in the scorched Iranian desert. Although technicians had tried to camouflage preparations for the missile test, U.S. spy satellites easily picked up the bright white plume as the rocket soared to an arid region in southeast Iran. Within an hour, the CIA's operations center phoned the White House situation room. Shahab-3 (Farsi for "shooting star") had taken to the air with an 800-mile range--enough to deliver conventional bombs, or someday nuclear warheads...
...testing a remote gas sensor that can read a volcano's emissions from a plane flying nearby or even a car driving past at a distance of as much as 20 miles. The instrument works by detecting changes in the infrared energy caused by different gases in the volcanic plume. Says Williams: "Volcanoes give gaseous signals of approaching eruptions. This gives us the lead time we need to get people educated and not terrorized...
...opening days. Chemical-weapons alarms sounded in U.S., British and French units at the same time. Tuite's correlation of the detections and of satellite weather photographs taken at the time suggests that the tons of nerve agent atomized in the allied strikes rose in a huge thermal plume that became stuck behind a stationary weather front. He argues that this invisible cloud drifted south over the entire theater, gently sprinkling the soldiers with a poisonous rain. The Pentagon has disputed his theory, arguing any fallout was too low to harm U.S. troops. But some outsiders ask how the Pentagon...