Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...resonant symbol: of the unknowable and chaotic universe everyone inhabits; of the unknowable and chaotic inner life that inhabits everyone. Those images in which man's pretensions to power, to mastery over self and fate, are trivialized, swallowed up in the vastness of the Indian earth and sky, are careful, conscious efforts to express the film's theme visually without stating it flatly, in words...
...should not fly. Its stubby wings angle forward, putting them under immense stress. Indeed, it is so unstable that no pilot can react fast enough to keep it from dropping out of the sky. Yet the X-29A flew precisely as planned last Friday in its first test flight from California's Edwards Air Force Base. Pilot Chuck Sewell kept the X-29A aloft at 15,000 ft. for nearly an hour, maintaining a relatively slow speed of 270 m.p.h. His secret: three built-in computers checked all flight-control surfaces 40 times a second, automatically making adjustments...
Livermore calculations buttress Teller's theories. In one computer simulation of a detonation of a single-megaton explosion, Physicist Joyce Penner, who heads the laboratory's study of nuclear smoke, found that a column did indeed rise six miles into the sky, but that half the smoke dropped quickly into the troposphere. The 50% that remained aloft, Penner estimated, contained nearly three times the condensation needed to produce rain. This finding suggested that even smoke in the stratosphere, beyond the reaches of normal weather patterns, would create its own storm and fall back to earth...
...more than a matter of semantics. Scientists have long suspected that the universe is teeming with distant planets, some of which might support life. Some astronomers have inferred the presence of planet-like bodies by measuring the wobble in the path of certain stars as they travel across the sky; they suggest that the tug of another object's gravity might cause a disturbance in the star's movement. The Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1983 detected around a few stars great disks of dust and debris that are thought to be spawning grounds for new planets. The fact...
...leader, the U.S. has 219 operating oil refineries, more than any other country. It is crisscrossed by 250,000 miles of oil pipelines and 1.3 million miles of natural gas conduits. Sometimes refineries and storage tanks are clumped together like rusting armadas of iron behemoths, belching smoke into the sky. Along the New Jersey Turnpike, near the towns of Linden and Carteret, many oil storage tanks are higher than a ten-story apartment building. Should a plane from nearby Newark International Airport crash into that complex, the resulting fireball could engulf one of the most heavily populated areas...