Word: andromeda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...supernova visible to the naked eye should occur in or near the Milky Way galaxy four times every thousand years or so. But from 1604 to 1987, none were recorded. (The supernova of 1885, just on the threshold of visibility in the night sky, took place in the Andromeda galaxy, 2.2 million light-years away.) To be sure, many stars flared up during this interval. But astronomers now know they were not supernovas but nearby novas. These are shorter-lived events, caused by the sudden explosion of gases in a class of stars known as white dwarfs, that release only...
...software companies in adapting their novels to "interactive fiction," an electronic form of literature that transforms the reader into an active participant in the plot. A version of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is available in interactive form on a floppy disk (Telarium; $39.95). Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) has actually created a software work from scratch: Amazon (Telarium; $39.95), which transports the player and a sidekick parrot named Paco into the jungles of South America in search of a lost city and hidden emeralds. Infocom, the Cambridge-based software company that pioneered interactive fiction...
...Curse of Eve" consists mostly of an endless list of unsavory female characters of various types--from Lady Macbeth and the Furies to "Andromeda chained to her rock." Women in male literature through the ages, she suggests, are seen predominantly as natural forces, parts of the landscape through which the adventurer travels, forces of unthinking good or inhuman, automatic evil...
...comes a new book that promises to help owners integrate computers into their lives intellectually, emotionally and practically: Electronic Life (Knopf; 211 pages; $12.95). Author Michael Crichton is no self-anointed microprocessor guru but the Harvard Medical School graduate turned bestselling author (The Andromeda Strain) and movie director (Coma, The Great Train Robbery). It turns out that Crichton is also a computer expert of sorts. He wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1963 on a mainframe and has since created a computer adventure game and designed software programs for cost analysis and shooting-schedule planning in the movie business...
...outbreak of an epidemic* can provoke a primal panic by raising the specter of a rampant "Andromeda strain." Indeed, perhaps the most severe side effect of AIDS has been the largely unwarranted hysteria that has accompanied the syndrome (see following story). In order to allay fears that AIDS is widely contagious, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler last week visited the Warren Magnuson Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., where she shook hands with AIDS victims and sat at their bedsides. Said Heckler: "What's just as bad as the disease is the fear of the disease. The fear...