Word: suns
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...sun slides behind a verdant neem tree and the scorching heat of the late afternoon eases a few degrees, the last ferry pulls away from the bank of the River Gambia. Normally, the rusting blue barge would be packed with people and vehicles, while the road that runs up to the river would teem with taxis and trucks, traders shouting for business and farmers herding cows and donkeys. But this afternoon, the Gambian port of Farafenni is a ghost town. Bereft of customers, traders are closing their shops, pulling down corrugated shutters and tugging on the padlocks to make sure...
...urge the Harvard team to reconsider playing these games.My story is just one of the many stories of how this issue affects UND’s American Indian students. I grew up immersed in the Dakota/Lakota culture, attending traditional ceremonies such as the Inipi (sweat lodge), Wiyang Wacipi (sun dance), and the Hanbleceya (vision quest). My family has a rich, proud history. We are descendants of Gall and Rocky Buttes. These were women and men who fought along side Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.Today, debilitating diseases such as diabetes, alcoholism, heart...
...doesn't stop there. What do you call all the other planetlike objects that have lately been discovered orbiting around our sun, tiny worlds with names like Sedna, Quaoar and 2004 DW? Part of the problem is that there is no precise scientific definition of the word planet. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is trying to hammer one out, but the decision is proving more difficult than anyone thought. An apparent consensus, reached just weeks ago, seems to have fallen apart. "The current state," admits Brian Marsden, director of the IAU's Minor Planet Center at Harvard, "is rather confusing...
...wonder. The solar system most of us studied in school was a deceptively simple place. There were the sun, a few asteroids and comets and, as of 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh spotted Pluto on a telescopic photograph, nine planets. Memorizing those nine names has long been a childhood rite of passage, up there with learning to tie your shoes. Yes, Pluto was always an oddball: not only is it tiny (two-thirds the size of our moon), but it has a weird, elongated orbit that is tilted at a sharp angle to the plane the other planets inhabit. Still...
...when astronomers started thinking about where comets actually came from, they realized that there was an enormous cloud of icy chunks, named the Oort Cloud (after the Dutch astronomer who proposed it), orbiting invisibly tens of trillions of miles from the sun. A second group of comets, according to Gerard Kuiper (a Dutch American), must come from closer in, falling sunward from the disk-shaped cloud of icy chunks just beyond Neptune that bears his name. Sure enough, when astronomers trained their telescopes on the Kuiper Belt 15 years ago, they started finding all sorts of objects. In the past...