Word: megatons
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...whether pioneers in 1876 really swore like the Sopranos, and the former Yale instructor quotes Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century The Miller's Tale, which used the same anatomical slur that Calamity Jane does (though, in Middle English, it started with a q). Milch says most of our high-megaton profanities are centuries old, and accounts of the West "are full of the testimony of people whose sensibilities have been scandalized by the resourcefulness of the human spirit in fitting so many obscenities in the most ordinary declarative sentence." This, he says, was the point: Deadwood, S.D., was outside...
...rock, estimated at the time to be about 100 ft. across, was on a direct collision course with Earth--specifically, somewhere in the northern hemisphere--and only days away. At that size, it would probably explode in the atmosphere a few miles up with the force of a one-megaton H-bomb, enough to wreak havoc on anything directly below...
...rare public statements, Khan has insisted he is a peaceful man opposed to nuclear proliferation. (He denied TIME's requests for an interview.) A former Musharraf aide says Khan's megaton ego--almost as much as U.S. charges that he ran a nuclear bazaar--persuaded Musharraf to force him into retirement. But Pakistani investigators remain leery of squeezing the national hero too tightly. Khan is a public icon, his hawkish face known to every schoolchild. Arresting him could trigger dangerous protest among Islamist extremists and senior military officers who feel Musharraf has already gone too far in appeasing the White...
...George W. Bush makes his counterstrike there is a nagging fear, particularly in Europe, that if he doesn?t get Osama bin Laden he?s going to blow up a quarter of the world trying. A well-defined war can be good for business - a spiraling game of high-megaton whack-a-mole will...
...asteroid about a third of a mile wide passed within 280,000 miles of Earth--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. It was the largest object ever observed to pass that close and, had it hit, would have caused an explosion in the 5,000-to-12,000-megaton range. What was particularly unnerving about this flyby is that the asteroid was discovered only four days before it hurtled past Earth. All the more reason for a detection system that will discover asteroids early, plot their paths and predict, many years in advance, whether they will eventually threaten Earth...