Word: pluto
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...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...
...agent that could explain the apparent clockwork regularity of the celestial barrages. Some suggest that a companion star to the sun periodically comes close enough to nudge comets gravitationally out of their natural habitat--a cloud of comets that circles the sun far beyond the orbit of Pluto--sending them hurtling toward earth. Others assign that role to Planet X, while some insist that the slow, bobbing ride of the sun and its planets around the Milky Way galaxy is responsible. Whatever the details, declares Paleontologist J. John Sepkoski Jr. of the University of Chicago, the evidence for periodic mass...
...advantage over Nemesis as a promising candidate because astronomers have been predicting its existence since the late 19th century, first as the ninth planet and then as the tenth. Reason: its existence and gravitational pull might explain discrepancies in the movements of Neptune and Uranus. Even the discovery of Pluto in 1930 did not fulfill the gravitational force needed to justify Uranus' meanderings, and some astronomers have long thought that a tenth planet is somewhere out there. Astronomer Robert Harrington of the U.S. Naval Observatory has gone so far as to paint a description of the suspect...