Word: triggers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...will spurn any Soviet offer to scrap significant numbers of missiles in the talks now under way in Geneva if the Soviets continue to insist that a halt to Star Wars research be included in any arms-control package. Such an impasse, warns one British official, could trigger "NATO's worst postwar crisis...
...Wolfe, a recent University of North Carolina law school graduate. "I can't remember a single business meeting in a long time where anybody's had a drink," says Warner LeRoy, owner of New York City's Maxwell's Plum. When someone orders a stiff one, "a mental trigger goes off with other executives at the table," says Jay Chiat, chairman of the Los Angeles-based Chiat/Day advertising firm. "It's not being judgmental; it's just that it's so much rarer...
...Rite of Spring. An adorable clutch of baby tricerotopses hatches from eggs; sloe-eyed brontosauruses wade in marshes; a bony-backed stegosaurus struggles for its life against the meat-eating Tyrannosaurus rex. But as the years flash by, the world mysteriously grows hotter and more violent: swamps evaporate, earthquakes trigger giant tidal waves, and the princely reptiles crawl across an encroaching desert to meet their certain doom...
...brains like tyrannosaurus may have simply been too massive to survive on land. How could their bulk have been lethal? According to one suggestion that many weekend athletes can identify with, the dinosaurs suffered from slipped disks, which left them unable to forage for food. Great heft could even trigger infertility. In 1946 a paleontologist concluded that because large animals do not shed excess heat as efficiently as small animals do, a temperature increase of just 2 degrees F could have baked the considerable testicles of a ten-ton male dinosaur enough to kill his sperm...
Sniffing a connection, Rampino and a Goddard colleague, Astrophysicist Richard Stothers, among others, proposed an ingenious way that the oscillating journey might trigger bombardments on earth. Whenever the sun passes through the Milky Way plane, they suggested, the swirls of dust it encounters would gravitationally disrupt the Oort cloud, a vast bubble of comets that scientists believe surrounds the solar system at a distance of up to 10 trillion miles from the sun. Like a lazy fruit picker shaking plums from a tree, the dust would send showers of comets falling toward the sun. Some comets would collide with...