Word: setting
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...knack for academic decorum (administrators at the museum wish the rubber stamp could say, I DON'T GIVE A DARN WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS). He disdains intellectual showboating, describing his own tyrannosaurus as a "media specimen," valuable mainly because it will bring the fang-and-claw set into the museum to see really important stuff, like duckbills tending their offspring. His manner is casual and laconic, which fits with the scraggly beard, the sneakers and the bush hat. But when a volunteer presents some fossils he has gathered, Horner handles them attentively. Then he peers from under his domed brow...
Growing up in Shelby, Mont., Horner collected his first dinosaur fossil at the age of eight, and he set out in high school to become either a paleontologist or the next Wernher Von Braun. His schoolwork was wretched, but he excelled at science projects. One, presented to a small group of bored adults at the local airport, was an experiment to track the flight of a homemade rocket. It went up 15,000 ft. at a velocity of 800 m.p.h., and the memory of his gaping elders still gratifies Horner, who scraped through high school with a D average...
...final episode, a lovely pastoral set in a village of water mills, a 103-year-old man explains the secret of longevity to the figure (Akira Terao) who is Kurosawa's surrogate in six of these tales. In essence, he tells him to live in harmony with nature, avoiding the tempting conveniences of technology. But the night is so dark without electricity, the young man complains. "It's supposed to be dark," says the old fellow, who is last seen benignly dancing in a funeral procession...
...monitoring huge detectors for signs of these fleeting visitors from the sun. But so far, the results have been both disappointing and intriguing: the experiments have detected far fewer neutrinos than solar models predicted. Scientists were especially baffled by a recent report from a Soviet-American research team that set up a detector to monitor neutrinos emitted by the fusion of hydrogen atoms, the sun's main reaction. After four months of operation near the Soviet town of Baksan, the experiment has yet to turn up a single solar neutrino...
...some extent, the press, chastened by public hostility, is less - confrontational about American military policy than it used to be. In addition, reporters face systematic constraints on their efforts to cover U.S. military operations that they would never have tolerated in Vietnam. Partly to blame is the pool system, set up after the Grenada invasion, in which a small group of correspondents, under the Pentagon's rules, is permitted to cover the initial stage of any military action involving U.S. troops. Every time the pool has been called up to report on a real crisis, its work has been severely...