Word: slingshot
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...commandos vs. one Palestinian--the woman, reincarnated as a Ninja babe. When the marksmen fire their Uzis at her, she twirls skyward, the bullets harmlessly haloing her head. She disarms two of the men with flying darts, evaporates two more with grenades, does in the fifth Goliath with her slingshot and destroys an Israeli helicopter with a metal boomerang shaped like the state of Palestine. Ninja! Gotcha! Intifadeh...
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...close-up orbit just 10 million miles from the solar fires--closer than little Mercury orbits our own sun. All told, astronomers have found about 90 big planets circling many other stars, either clinging close to their parent's skirt or whipping in and out in irregular, slingshot-like orbits--including what seems to be another planet closely orbiting 55 Cancri...
...terraforming (as scientists call it) a neighboring world is not the only exit strategy. Donald Korycansky of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his collaborators suggest that Earth could be edged out of harm's way with a gravitational slingshot, a trick long used to boost the speed of planetary probes. Earth would be the spacecraft, grabbing orbital energy from a passing asteroid. That would increase Earth's speed and enlarge its orbit. Repeated every few thousand years, Korycansky & Co. reckon, such flybys could stretch Earth's habitable lifetime by billions of years...