Word: dusting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
EVERY AUGUST, COMET SWIFT-TUTTLE LEAVES A spectacular calling card. The trail of dust it sheds on its journey around the sun intersects Earth's orbit and flares into the Perseid meteor shower. The comet itself last appeared in 1862, and based on the orbit calculated at that time, it should have showed up again between 1979 and 1983. It didn...
...eraser monitor. Most kids would have been horrified. Eraser monitors come in early, stay late, get all dusty with chalk, get razzed by classmates. But little Larry Zeiger thought the job was a promotion. Sitting out there on the playground, pounding erasers together and choking on chalk dust, he thought he was on his way at last...
...Macintosh computers. He had seen the company's rainbow- hued apple logo on the boxes and assumed they contained fresh produce. The irony was fitting: in the first few years after the 1983 entry of Apple into Japan's $7 billion personal-computer market, its Macintoshes, unsold, were gathering dust on the shelves of computer shops in Japan...
...report in Nature suggests that nature can help the process along. Ozone depletion was expected to be reasonably mild in 1991; instead, it was severe. That year also saw major eruptions by Mount Hudson in Chile and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Volcanoes release enormous amounts of dust. Dust, along with ice crystals, provides surfaces where ozone-destruction chemistry works most efficiently. Unfortunately, while the industrial world is phasing out CFCs before the turn of the century, other compounds are also ozone destroyers -- and volcano control is somewhat farther...
There were already several reasons to think the latter is true. For one thing, the existence of the belt and cloud are natural consequences of established theories about the birth of the solar system. According to such theories, the early sun, formed from a cloud of gas and dust, was surrounded by a disk-shaped nimbus made up of the leftovers. The newborn star's heat drove smaller particles and gases, including water vapor, out from the center. The heavier, metal-rich rock left behind condensed into asteroids and the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Much...