Word: specked
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Clearly, such an object would have caused far more cataclysmic damage than the Siberian explosion. But in recent years several scientists have proposed the existence of tiny black holes even smaller than a speck of dust. Some of these may have been formed in the so-called "big bang"-the great explosion that cosmologists believe marked the birth of the universe some 10 to 15 billion years ago. Others could be fragments from collisions between larger black holes...
Still other experts believe that certain physical abnormalities play an important role in producing a mass murderer. Among them: chromosome irregularities, hormonal imbalances and brain damage. Charles Whitman, for instance, was found to have a brain tumor. Another mass murderer, Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, suffered severe head injuries as a child. The psychiatrist who examined him prior to trial, Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, believes that he became a killer because of ensuing brain damage...
Ziporyn, who has since written a book on Speck and examined more than 300 other murderers, also contends that they seem "normal" until that "moment when the brakes go"-when the right combination of chemical, physical, psychic and social factors sends them out of control. "In a serial crime like Houston," Ziporyn says, "it's probably safe to say that after the first murder Corll saw it was easy to kill, and the rest of his victims were not people to him, they were like dolls...
Tiny bumps rose and flaked the paint away, speck by speck. Veteran Restorer Dino Dini, 61, called in a chemist from the University of Florence named Enzo Ferroni, who discovered that the crystal growth was caused by lime, or calcium carbonate, turning into calcium sulphate. It took a year to find an ammonia solution that would turn the crystals back into calcium carbonate again. Impregnating a postcard-size sheet of Japanese rice paper with the solution and backing the paper with wood pulp, Dini and an assistant pressed each little rice-paper block for five minutes on the surface...
Although the comet is now visible only as a speck of light in telescopes, solar radiation will boil off gases and dust from the nucleus as it approaches closer to the sun. In the "solar wind," the stream of electrically charged particles that continually emanate from the sun, the material from the nucleus should be swept into the characteristic comet's tail. As it reacts with the charged particles, the tail should begin to glow brightly-so brightly, in fact, that Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory believes that the comet could be visible to the naked...