Word: sputnik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Engineering has long been in a boom-and-bust cycle. In the late 1950s, after the first Sputnik was launched, it was a hot field. Then in the early 1970s, with the winding down of the Project Apollo space program and the Viet Nam War, and the cancellation of projects to build an American supersonic commercial airplane, engineers had a tough time finding work. Now glamorous new computer technologies as well as advances in other fields of applied science have made the profession popular once again...
Even the visionaries on Manhattan's Broadcasting Row slept soundly that autumn night in 1957 when the space age was born with the launching of Sputnik I. In those days CBS and NBC owned the U.S. television audience, with tiny ABC, known then as "the Almost Broadcasting Company," struggling to catch up. In the years that followed ABC closed the gap, but it is not simply a three-way rivalry any more. Proliferating communications satellites-the progeny of Sputnik-now offer an alternative method of linking up new networks, cheaper and more flexible than the long-distance telephone lines...
...Sputnik, but it is a surprise. Somehow one did not think of the Soviet Union as being full of women wearing smart suits, conducting complicated careers and wondering, of a lonely evening, where all the strong, decent and interesting men have gone. Certainly few would have guessed that the Soviets would be the first to turn out a thoroughly pleasing romantic comedy of the feminist persuasion. Next thing you know, someone will be trying to tell us the Japanese make better small cars than...
...preserve sales, textbook publishers are beating a none too stately retreat from evolution after giving it strong emphasis in the post-Sputnik editions of the 1960s, which aimed at more and better science teaching. To enter the lucrative Texas market, many biology textbook publishers now bow to a requirement by the state's school board and include a statement that evolution is clearly presented as theory rather than fact. More significant, according to Gerald Skoog, 45, professor of education at Tex as Tech University, textbooks now say less about evolution. Between 1974 and 1977, the section on Darwin...
...Sputnik I, a tiny dot of light moving across the autumn sky, did what nothing else had done for nearly 20 years: it scared Washington. The people who knew the implications, like Astronomer John Hagen, head of Project Vanguard, America's own unborn space probe, stayed up all night linking a hasty network of aerials to catch the faint beeps of the intruder that mocked the presumed U.S. technological superiority. Power and politics were never again the same in the capital. Sputnik signaled a new superpower on the prowl. Space, for the moment, was the area of contention...