Word: thicknesses
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...deal worth millions, the kind of high-finance finagling that usually takes place in the plush penthouse suites of office towers or aboard private Learjets. In such transactions, aides with bulging briefcases and thick black books usually dance attendance near by, ready to proffer, at a nod from the principals, relevant statistics and legal interpretations. But the deal under discussion did not involve a merger or a stock swap but a swap of a different kind:, a trade for a relief pitcher, a third baseman and young outfielder. And, because baseball men are true to the traditions of their anachronistic...
...academic skepticism is thick. The Carter people scoff; they tried the same thing and failed. Conventional wisdom suggests that Government is too complex these days for Cabinet officers to have true authority. The problems, say the experts, cut through several departments and agencies and only the White House can arbitrate them. In that environment, Presidents turn to the men nearest them. Aides become, in effect, Cabinet members...
...craft considerably larger and more powerful than the NASA space shuttle. Looking like great Erector Sets, the structures, about six miles long and three miles wide, would be made of long thin beams actually manufactured in space out of rolls of aluminum or carbon-fiber strips about as thick as the wall of a beer can. In the weightlessness of orbit, nothing stronger would be needed...
...that two recent quakes were warnings from an angry deity. Today, scientists prefer another explanation, an all-encompassing view of the earth known as the theory of plate tectonics. It holds that the planet's surface consists of a dozen or so restless plates, each about 70 miles thick. Their movements explain volcanoes, the rise of mountains and the drift of continents. They account for quakes as well, most of which seem to occur where the great plates meet-at the so-called Ring of Fire, for instance, the tremor-and volcano-prone region that rims the Pacific Ocean...
Near Golden, Colo., at the Department of Energy's Rocky Flats plant, a technician pushes a red button marked REQUEST TRANSFER. Behind a 10-in.-thick concrete wall, a pair of claws reaches out to grasp a stainless steel container filled with pink powder, then lifts it into a furnace where it is baked at 950° F until it turns into a nondescript gray button three inches in diameter. Such a button could be worth $100,000, for the job of this robot, which goes into regular operation in a few months, is transporting reprocessed plutonium...