Word: solarized
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...summer and winter solstices), and signal the advent of a new season. Modern calendars ensure that there are no mistakes. But how did the pre-Columbian peoples foretell the seasons? Apparently, says a husband-and-wife scientific team, the Southwest's ancient inhabitants were skilled solar observers who used rock carvings to keep track of the sun's progress across the heavens...
...Southwest. Anthropologists have tended to view them as little more than ancient graffiti, but the Prestons saw a message. As sunlight filtered between two large rocks, it formed dagger-like beams that swept tantalizingly across the petroglyphs. At once the Prestons suspected that the carvings might be a little solar observatory...
...Soviets have been launching ocean-surveillance satellites at the rate of two or more a year. Their radars and other sensors are not run by electricity from solar panels or chemical fuel cells, the power sources used by American spy satellites like the Air Force's Big Bird. Instead, the Soviet satellites rely on a type of small, portable nuclear reactor called Topaz (after the gemstone), which uses as its fuel enriched uranium 235, the same highly radioactive material "burned" by nuclear power plants on the ground...
...wind and water have all been hailed as cheap, renewable and benign alternatives to oil, coal and nuclear plants. Now comes a warning from a bastion of environmentalism, the National Audubon Society, that even ecologically favored, so-called solar sources of energy can have serious drawbacks...
...Russell Peterson, Audubon Society president, sums it up, "Even with solar energy, there's no such thing as a free lunch...