Word: titan
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...life he was compared (often by himself) to an eagle, a titan, an ogre, a monster; to Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Cervantes. He wrote enormous, turbulent, dark novels, two of which (Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) in our own day have been turned, respectively, into a kitsch-book musical and a saccharine Disney film. Few read the originals, at least in English, though they are of course more disturbing and entertaining than their modern clones. He wrote 21 plays, which transformed the French theater, hoicking...
LONDON: Scientists with the European Space Agency say the picture is getting clearer: Titan, Saturn's moon, is just like Earth -- only colder. Data from the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), which is orbiting around Earth but looking at Saturn, indicates that not only is water rather plentiful on Titan, it may have been brought there by comets -- long theorized to be the way water came to Earth, allowing life to begin...
...Titan could indeed be the Walt Disney of the solar system," says TIME Science correspondent Jeffrey Kluger, "a cryogenic version of Earth waiting to be revived." And its time is coming. Six billion years from now, as the Sun expands outward in Elvis-like death throes and Earth and Mars have long been incinerated, Titan will enter its spring. Its surface temperature will creep above freezing, and life may indeed sprout -- giving the new organisms about 500 million years to evolve and achieve space travel before they, too, are engulfed in flames...
...Unfortunately, says Kluger, "that's long enough to evolve, but not nearly enough to get off Titan." Maybe we could drop off a probe, and leave instructions on the dashboard...
...gossipy literary circles of New York City, the half-life of an industry secret is generally the next lunch. That's why the announcement last week that German media titan Bertelsmann AG was buying Random House was doubly shocking. Hardly anyone knew that the venerable American publishing institution, a supposedly sacrosanct division of Advance Publications, was for sale. The estimated $1.4 billion deal was negotiated surreptitiously over four months. Indeed, many Random House staff members found out about it by reading the morning newspaper...