Word: shower
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...Taking a shower may be a waste in the desert but not in a city. Blowing up a $16 million rocket to get to the moon may seem wasteful to some-but it scarcely is, in view of what space exploration contributes to science and the economy, not to say the human spirit. War is undoubtedly wasteful, not only in matériel but also in the irretrievable waste of lost lives. Yet even here, it is a question of values-most American wars have been fought for human causes and values that its citizens considered no waste, whether...
Astronomers are hoping for a spectacle reminiscent of 1833, when about 10,000 meteors per hour were visible over the eastern U.S. at the peak of the shower. That year, awed viewers, aroused from sleep by the bright flashes, described shooting stars "falling from the sky like snowflakes." Many thought that the end of the world had come...
...earth circles the sun, it cuts through 1866 I's trail every November slicing into the thin stream of widely dispersed debris that produces the Leonid showers. In 1833, the earth's course took it through the middle of the main cluster of Leonids that follow closely behind the parent comet; it encountered a vastly larger number of meteoroids than usual. Just 33 years later, in November 1866, there was another fiery but less spectacular shower; the main cluster orbiting the sun once every 33¼ years was still three months away...
According to Owen J. Gingerich, lecturer on Astronomy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, the shooting stars could start falling by 11 p.m. tonight, with the spectacular shower, if it occurs, coming between 2 a.m. and dawn
...unusual at the last two predicted returns. They concluded that the swarm had been de- flected slightly by the gravitational pulls of Jupiter and Saturn. No one knows if the orbit has now been shifted back. The only indication that it might have is that the regular yearly meteor shower has been steadily increasing for the last three years...