Word: terrain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tecate mountains of southwestern California, with their commanding view of nearby Mexico. The afternoon was hazy, and the hills were the colors of camouflage. Taking up his position, McPartland trained his binoculars south. He had pairs of agents deployed strategically over a couple of miles of the surrounding terrain. They would lie in wait until the walkers appeared, usually around dusk. As 6:30 p.m. came and went and all was still quiet, McPartland muttered, "Well, if they're not crossing here, where are they crossing?" Minutes later, he added, "I suppose I should be happy that it's quiet...
Among this urban detritus, something else is moving. It looks like another trash cube--but with binocular eyes, forklift plates for arms and Caterpillar tracks to navigate the rough terrain. The thing is called a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class--WALL?E--and its job is to clean up the mess of consumerism run amok. It's also apparently the last of its kind still functioning...
Protecting historically important sites is more than academic, says historian Wayne Bodle, a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who helped identify the Pawlings Farm site as historically significant in the late 1970s. "Actually seeing the terrain and getting a sense of what it looks like does make a difference," he says. If historical sites are developed, "you could still reconstruct the narrative... but it would be pretty disorienting to try to explain it to people...
...prompted many an outlandish innovation. A Cambodian newspaper once proposed bringing over British cattle suffering from mad cow disease to roam the countryside setting off an estimated 11 million mines buried there. More conventional approaches to demining all have their flaws. Armored mine-clearance vehicles only operate on flat terrain; metal detectors are terribly inefficient because they pick up all the non-lethal bits of metal in the ground; dogs can smell the explosive in a land mine, but tend to get bored and run the risk of getting themselves blown...
...What's left is believed to be concentrated at the poles. Phoenix will soon begin digging for it, extending an 8 ft. (2.35 m) robotic arm outfitted with a movable scoop. First, however, scientists will use landing-site images to build a virtual 3-D computer map of the terrain so they can operate the arm from Earth. "The arm itself is kind of dumb," said Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "It doesn't even know where the surface...