Word: clouds
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...John Cloud. With reporting by Edward Barnes
...silence on the behavior of gravitation at very short distances. The final theory will let us answer the deepest questions of cosmology: Was there a beginning to the present expansion of the universe? What determined the conditions at the beginning? And is what we call our universe, the expanding cloud of matter and radiation extending billions of light-years in all directions, really all there is, or is it only one part of a much larger universe in which the expansion we see is just a local episode...
...start of the 21st century, alas, all that remains of these happy visions are a few scattered cloud-seeding programs, whose modest successes, while real, have proved less than earthshaking. In fact, yesterday's sunny hopes that we could somehow change the weather for the better have given way to the gloomy knowledge that we are only making things worse. It is now clear that what the world's cleverest scientists could not achieve by design, ordinary people are on the verge of accomplishing by accident. Human beings not only have the ability to alter weather patterns on local, regional...
This creates an additional conundrum. Because a polluted cloud does not rain itself out, notes University of Colorado atmospheric scientist Brian Toon, it tends to grow larger and last longer, providing a shiny white surface that bounces sunlight out to space. Indeed, one reason the earth has not yet warmed up as much as many anticipated may be due to the tug-of-war between industrial aerosols like sulfuric acid (which reflect heat) and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (which trap it). Ironically, then, the cost of reducing one kind of pollution may come at the price of intensifying...
Even the best Bose condensate is a modest thing--measuring about one-tenth of a millimeter across--but the little cloud could help science take big steps. Particles frozen so rigidly in place are easy to observe and manipulate, providing a clearer than ever look at how things behave at the subatomic, or quantum, state. Down the line, such precise control may make it easier to design better atomic clocks or fabricate submicroscopic nanocomponents and other vanishingly tiny machines. Absolute zero might be an impossibility, but for scientists who have spent their careers trying to drive the thermometer down...