Word: pluto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...remarkable Voyager 2 space probe is finally approaching its last port of call. Having made historic flybys of Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981 and Uranus in 1986, it is poised for an Aug. 24 rendezvous with Neptune, the most distant of the giant planets. (It will not encounter Pluto, whose bizarre orbit now places it closer to the sun than Neptune is.) Voyager's aging cameras and electronic sensors are somewhat impaired, and the probe is so distant that its signals take four hours to travel to earth. Still, scientists expect mounds of fresh data and some...
Rather than merely preserving Disney as a dusty institution, though, Eisner and company have reanimated its fantasy factory with their own ideas. Such characters as Mickey, Donald and Pluto are now being joined by the likes of Roger Rabbit, Webbigail VanderQuack and Georgette the poodle. From movies to theme parks to television to retail products, Disney is the hottest all-around entertainment maker in America. And maybe beyond: the most popular children's TV program in China, seen by nearly 200 million viewers each Sunday evening, is the 1 1/2-year-old Mickey and Donald Show...
...this rock and a hard place, British-born Physicist Freeman Dyson makes a spirited stand for optimism. Will our species end in fire or ice? Fire, the author concedes, would pose a difficult problem, but man might be able to overcome ice: "It is easier to keep warm on Pluto than to keep cool on Venus." Will we blow ourselves up? Probably not: "We shall abolish nuclear weapons, not by a sudden outburst of peace and goodwill but by a slow process of erosion. The weapons will be abolished as the missions for which they were designed come to seem...
...many atoms, particularly those of metallic conductors, the outer shell has a number of empty slots, and the electrons that it does contain are not bound as tightly to it as those in the inner shells. Just as the sun's gravitational pull is weaker on distant Pluto than on nearby Mercury, the hold of an atomic nucleus is also weaker on electrons in the outermost layers...
...novel. Bradbury calls it Death Is a Lone- ly Business, and he dedicates the work to such masters of the form as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are about as close to this beachfront vaudeville as Mars and Saturn are to Pluto (the Disney dog, not the planet). It hardly matters. All of the productions, from Something Wicked This Way Comes to The Martian Chronicles, are portions sawed from a long plank called Bradbury. Brief or full length, they bear the characteristic fine grain, knots, splinters and warps...