Word: titanic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last place Carly Fiorina expected to be last Wednesday was home. A hard-driving, jet-setting business titan, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard had a packed calendar that week, including a meeting with President Bush. She had recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where she always loomed large, even at an event stuffed with corporate Pooh-Bahs and heads of state. Now, holed up in her Los Altos Hills, Calif., home and protected by three security guards, she fielded e-mails from well-wishers and contemplated her next career move--just like so many other cashiered Silicon...
...spin off or sell a string of businesses - including Meats Europe, its packaged-meat division that houses the Aoste brand - worth around 40% of the firm's revenues. Investors liked the slimmed-down look; shares climbed 4% on the news. Where does that leave rival Unilever? The Anglo-Dutch titan last week announced a 36% slide in pretax profits for 2004. "They need to re-establish a little bit of momentum" before trimming fat, says Andrew Wood of U.S. investment-research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. But don't expect major weight gain. Unilever first needs "to sort its own problems...
...space community had good scientific reason to want to visit Titan. Larger than Mercury and Pluto, it is dense with organic chemicals, just the kind of prebiotic broth believed to have given rise to life on Earth, though Titan's bitter cold would have flash-frozen any biological processes before they got started. "Titan is so cold that the water is frozen out, whereas here it's liquid," says Jonathan Lunine, a mission scientist. "But that's why it's probably such a good snapshot of early Earth...
...find out, the 9-ft., 700-lb. Huygens hitched a ride aboard the 6-ton, 22-ft. Cassini orbiter, which reached the Saturnian system last summer. On Christmas Eve, Cassini lobbed Huygens toward Titan, and on Jan. 14 the probe reached the moon, slamming into its atmosphere at 13,000 m.p.h. Throughout a 147-min. parachute descent, Huygens took pictures and sniffed the air. After it landed, it switched on the remainder of its six instruments. What it saw was not very welcoming...
...Titan is a chemical cousin of Earth, it's an Earth gone terribly wrong. The surface is etched with riverbeds and shorelines carved by the methane rains. The ground seems to be a thin, frozen crust over a smoother, softer layer. "Kind of a creme brulee consistency," says John Zarnecki, a principal science investigator. The atmosphere produces plenty of wind and weather, and there is even a flicker of a greenhouse effect, but with sunlight a thousand times dimmer than on Earth, it doesn't amount to much...