Word: scientist
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Among the various astronomers who considered and promptly rejected the galactic carrousel notion was California's Muller, a scientist obsessed by periodicity. If a familiar cosmic mechanism could not account for the cyclic nature of extinctions, he decided, something completely different would have to do. During Christmas break in 1983, Muller and fellow Astronomers Marc Davis of Berkeley and Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton were brainstorming about stars and periodicity, when Muller noted that more than half the stars in the galaxy are thought to be binaries (pairs of stars that orbit a common center...
Early this year, another scientist joined the Nemesis hunting party. Armand Delsemme, a Belgian-born astrophysicist at the University of Toledo in Ohio, announced that he had just about zeroed in on the best place for Muller or Chester to look for the death star. He has plotted the paths of 126 comets and discovered to his great surprise that they journey around the sun in oddly skewed orbits. Some very powerful object must be out there gravitationally directing the flow of traffic, he says, and that object could be Nemesis...
Type Ts, says Farley, are invariably high-energy people, some of whom find excitement in mental exercise. Scientist Crick, he points out, was a successful physicist who switched in mid-career to biology, where he won honors for his work with DNA. Sometimes, Farley believes, the energy goes awry: Belushi, a creative entertainer, sought stimulation in drugs, turning from a T-plus into a T-minus. Says Farley: "I can't predict whether the Type T will become a Dillinger or a Crick, but if you can interest them early and work with them, you can push them toward...
...they might, computer scientists seemed unable to overcome these deficiencies--until Victor Zue came along. Zue is a Chinese-born M.I.T. scientist who decided to teach himself to read spectrograms (computer-enhanced versions of the electrical wave forms of speech) as if they were words. This was no easy task. While spectrograms made by one person repeating the same word look alike, those made by another differ considerably. Zue discovered, however, that no matter how unlike spectrograms appear, they all have certain features in common. For example, the s in stop will appear as a dark rectangular wedge, no matter...
...over its MIC plant at Institute, W. Va., which was closed down immediately after the Bhopal tragedy. Conducting a press tour of the facility, it showed off the results of a $5 million program to improve safety measures. Some environmentalists were not entirely reassured. Says A. Karim Ahmed, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City: "It remains to be seen whether they learned the lesson of Bhopal...