Word: traces
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...passed a measure requiring detailed disclosure of campaign contributions and spending. But the law's conflict-of-interest provisions, which forbid many practices that give the appearance of quid pro quo fund raising, apply only to local officials, not to state legislators. The disclosure rules, moreover, enable politicians to trace the source of their opponents' funding and seek parity...
...while such run-ups are easy to spot, the source of possible leaks is devilishly hard to trace. Any of the dozens of lawyers, bankers and investment advisers who work on deals can pass information along to colleagues, friends and relatives. A secretary who types a prospectus or contract can do the same. It may thus be virtually impossible to keep news from seeping out once a raider begins lining up financing for a deal, or two firms start talking merger...
...next big breakthrough came in 1950, when Fred Whipple, a Harvard astronomer, proffered a detailed model for the anatomy of a comet. In a delightfully evocative phrase, Whipple declared that comets are "dirty snowballs," dark conglomerates of mostly frozen water stippled with rocky fragments, dust particles and trace elements. As one of these snowballs swoops toward the sun, said Whipple, solar radiation begins to vaporize ice and frozen gases on the comet's sunward surface by a process called sublimation. The gases, carrying dust with them, form a light-reflecting coma that makes the comet visible from earth...
...spectra of light emitted from molecules broken down in the gaseous coma, scientists have estimated that a comet's nucleus consists of two-thirds water, one-fifth dust (particles averaging one-thousandth the width of a pinhead) and the rest a mixture of methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide and trace elements...
...several incarnations in many languages, but Art Historian Jean-Paul Bouillon presents the movement under its best-known name in Art Nouveau (Rizzoli; 247 pages; $60). Some 350 illustrations, 125 of them in color, trace its genealogy from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, a journey that manages to bridge 19th century formalism and Bauhaus severity. Although Tiffany's lamps and Gaudi's facades are archetypal examples of art nouveau, the author widens artistic horizons, and readers' eyes, by demonstrating that fine artists from Whistler to Picasso were influenced by its rhythmic, serpentine style...