Word: predictive
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first time in eons, the Red Sox have actually been predicted to do well by people who live outside the Greater Boston area. Some brazen souls, including the editors of Sports Illustrated, have gone so far as to predict a World Series championship is in store for the Sox squad...
...explosion in the 5,000-to-12,000-megaton range. What was particularly unnerving about this flyby is that the asteroid was discovered only four days before it hurtled past Earth. All the more reason for a detection system that will discover asteroids early, plot their paths and predict, many years in advance, whether they will eventually threaten Earth...
...trillions of synapses. No scientific problem compares to it. (The Human Genome Project, which is trying to read a long molecular sentence composed of billions of letters, is simple by comparison.) Cognitive neuroscience is arming so many brilliant minds with such high technology that it would be foolish to predict that we will never understand how the brain gives rise to the mind. But the problem is so hard that it would be just as foolish to predict that we will...
...constitute only 1% to 10% of the matter in the universe. The rest is invisible; it emits no light. Nobody yet knows what this dark matter is. One possibility is that it's made of WIMP--weakly interacting massive particles. Until the dark matter is identified and tallied, predicting the future of the universe on the basis of what we can see will be as uncertain as trying to predict an election by polling a few golfers down at the country club...
...when scientists harbored an almost naive faith in the ability of modern technology to end droughts, banish hail and improve meteorological conditions in countless other ways. At one point, pioneering chemist Irving Langmuir suggested that it would prove easier to change the weather to our liking than to predict its duplicitous twists and turns. The great mathematician John von Neumann even calculated what mounting an effective weather-modification effort would cost the U.S.--about as much as building the railroads, he figured, and worth incalculably more...