Word: solarization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...owners of electronic pagers last May, when 45 million of the units across North America suddenly flickered and died. The blackout was caused not by some routine equipment failure but by a massive storm on the surface of the sun that shorted out an Earth-orbiting communications satellite. Such solar typhoons are not uncommon, and the damage they do can be considerable. Last week NASA announced that it may now be possible to predict the storms and take action to limit their impact...
...most violent type of solar eruption is known as a coronal mass ejection, a vast bubble of gas that bursts from the sun and releases a wave of charged particles into space. Slamming into Earth's atmosphere, CME discharges have been known to fry satellites, bathe airplanes with radiation and black out entire cities...
...have paid special attention to great, S-shaped twists of plasma called sigmoids that they now believe are an early stage of CME formation. Find a sigmoid, and within a few days you'll probably see an explosion. Since it takes an additional four days for the solar tsunami to reach Earth, you can double today's early-warning time...
...residents became as diverse as the bounty of their vegetable patches. A bond salesman who had never gardened before started raising onions, broccoli, cauliflower, parsley, snow peas, chard and kale. Near him is a physics professor who once specialized in nuclear energy and now prefers the solar kind. There are schoolteachers and state-government employees (Sacramento is 15 miles away), young couples and retirees. Although the houses grew as large as 3,000 sq. ft., Corbett built several 1,000-sq.-ft. units for low-income residents...
...enthusiasm for solar energy ebbed in the '80s after President Reagan ended tax credits for alternative power sources. Judy Corbett, who had been appointed to California's Solar Cal Council by Governor Jerry Brown, suddenly found herself without a job when his successor, George Deukmejian, pulled the plug on the agency. So she set up a nonprofit organization called the Local Government Commission to help educate officials on ways to deal with social and environmental problems. "It was clear to me that without mayors and city council managers and supervisors undertaking the lead in making things change, Village Homes could...