Word: sharp
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Delaney-Smith has cause to think her team can win. The Crimson returns all but two players--All-Ivy first-team forward Laela Sturdy and sharp-shooting guard Courtney Egelhoff--and adds four new players, giving the tallest team in the Ivy League more quickness and depth from a squad (16-10, 9-5 Ivy) that tied for second in the conference last year...
...Singapore Airlines Flight 006 made the sharp turn onto the runway at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in the middle of a punishing storm on Oct. 31, John Diaz settled comfortably into his first-class seat in the Boeing 747, ready for takeoff. But Flight 006 had turned onto the wrong runway, and suddenly Diaz and the 178 other people on board slammed to earth as the 747 erupted into a giant, terrifying fireball, breaking into three large jagged pieces. Flight 006 ended its last journey 8,000 ft. from where it began, a burning, cracked hulk...
...right. The Hubble's forte is taking brilliantly sharp pictures. But the real meat of astronomical discovery comes not so much in pretty photos of celestial objects but in the detailed analysis of their light. By smearing that light into a spectrum--the rainbow of its component colors--scientists can identify the chemical makeup of a star or galaxy, how far away it is and how fast it's rotating, among other data. If the image of a star is going to be smeared anyway, sharp pictures don't matter much, so ground-based telescopes are at no disadvantage...
Still, U.S.-based telescopes remain ahead on several fronts, including the detwinkling of starlight. The technology that does this is called adaptive optics, and it was originally developed in secrecy by the Department of Defense to help military snoops take sharp pictures of Soviet spy satellites. Largely declassified in the 1980s, it's now being adapted for major telescopes everywhere. The idea is straightforward: stars and galaxies twinkle and shimmer because turbulent pockets of air act as weak, light-distorting lenses (heat rising from a car's hood or an asphalt parking lot causes a similar effect). With adaptive optics...
...Watch out. They'll make you sharp, but they'll make you narrow," Nader warned HLS students last month...