Word: titanics
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...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...
There could be rain in the forecast on Titan--huge torrents of it, swelling rivers and filling seas. But nothing's likely to grow on the surface of that distant moon of Saturn. The temperature averages a brisk -290 degrees F, and the rain is not water but liquid methane. Those are just some of the findings of the remarkable Huygens spacecraft, which landed on Titan two weeks ago. The probe took seven years to fly to the Saturnian system and lived, as planned, for only 70 min. on Titan's plains. But the data it radioed home...
...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...