5/11/2004:

Intermediate Word:  galena  (a) country round dance  (b) a mantilla   (c) type of napkin ring  (d) lead ore
Difficult Word: - verderer  (a) royal forester  (b) plant-brightening type of fertilizer  (c) a ripening agent  (d) artificially-aging chemical for copper and brass

Details Emerge in Robotic Plan to Service Hubble - Space.com  An astronomer-astronaut who has journeyed twice to work on the Hubble Space Telescope said Monday that NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe is conceptually sold on the idea of a robotic servicing mission. O'Keefe told lawmakers on April 21 that the robotic mission looked promising based on 26 responses to a call for ideas. A robot can definitely do the work, Grunsfeld said. A decision on a possible mission is expected by early June.

Dark matter detector limbers up  - BBC  The underground observatory is some 1,000m beneath the surface. The Earth's crust shields its germanium detectors from cosmic rays and the background particles they produce. A favoured theory is that the dark matter consists of Wimps (weakly interacting massive particles) about a thousand times more massive than a proton, one of the particles found in an atom's nucleus. This means that on the rare occasions a Wimp strikes an ordinary atom, the effect should be noticeable. While a detection has yet to occur, there is now a better idea of how much dark matter must exist