Word: vapor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then, shortly before his trial was to begin in January 1981, Philadelphia's own philosopher king simply vanished into the vapor of his grandiose mutterings...
...Moon come to be? Prevailing wisdom has it that 4.5 billion years ago, a collision between the Earth and an object larger than Mars tossed immense quantities of vapor and debris into orbit around our planet. Eventually, the gas and rock formed a disk of dust which cooled and clumped together to form the moon. That theory received a major boost Thursday thanks to a study published in the journal Nature. Using computer simulations, University of Colorado scientists showed how a single moon can grow in this fashion. The researchers conducted 27 simulations which tracked up to 2,700 objects...
...think, are among the first "modern" beauties in painting. Not wardrobes of flesh like Rubens' goddesses, not pneumatic dolls like Boucher's nymphs, they are (relatively) slender, blond to redhead, and have the minxy arrogance and perfectly toned skin of runway models, inaccessible, gazing down from their nests of vapor in the blue-rinsed sky above. In Tiepolo, the women always seem to be running the show; his emblematic heroes like Rinaldo, by comparison, look almost effeminate...
Tiepolo loved such ironies and reversals; they were part of the code of his imagination. Out of the traditions of Venetian painting, he taught himself to be one of the most audacious space composers in the history of art, capable of dissolving a solid ceiling into light and vapor. But the distanced, self-aware theatrics of his style--his parade of visual language as a source of delight--make him look modern, even though there isn't an artist today who could begin to rival that virtuosity...
Cornell University researchers David Lee, Robert Richardson and Douglas Osheroff made their Nobel-winning discovery in 1972. They were working with helium-3, a rare isotope of the common gas, looking for a "phase transition," analogous to the changes in water when it turns from vapor to liquid and from liquid to ice. They had cooled a sample to within two one-thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (-459.67[degrees] F), the temperature at which atomic motion ceases...