Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9412050011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Astronauts made flabby and wobbly by months on the Russian space station will be able to put their feet up on their trip home next year aboard space shuttle Atlantis.
Atlantis' astronauts Friday installed a platform on the shuttle to accommodate recliners.
Atlantis' next flight after its current 11-day mission is a docking with Russia's orbiting outpost Mir in June. The shuttle will take home two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Norman Thagard, who will ride a Russian rocket to the station in March.
Thagard and his Russian crewmates will need to lie down aboard Atlantis during the jarring trip back to Earth. They'll be too weak to sit up after three months aboard Mir.
Muscles become flabby during long periods of weightlessness, and the sudden encounter with gravity sometimes makes astronauts dizzy.
Shuttle astronauts always sit upright on the ride home, strapped in their seats. But then again, they've never spent more than 15 days in orbit at a time.
- Associated Press
8-legged black biter not the right vintage
WASHINGTON - It's hard to know who was more frightened: the 17-year-old Rockville, Md., resident eating unwashed grapes out of a bag, the mother who heard her scream, or their unwanted visitor.
Sheila Laws said she bought some seedless red grapes at a supermarket last week, dumped them in a bag and put them in the refrigerator, unwashed. Her daughter, Katina Carwile, took them out and was munching on them for a few minutes before she discovered a black widow spider in the bag. Naturally, she reacted.
``I went digging through the bag and I found it,'' Sheila Laws said. ``It was very, very, very black.''
Black widows have begun to turn up occasionally in grape supplies as growers cut back on pesticides, which has meant more insects for the spiders to feast on. A grape industry spokeswoman said growers are trying to deal with the problem.
Laws used salad tongs to put the spider in an empty mayonnaise jar and noticed the red hourglass shape on its abdomen. She took the specimen to the Brookside Nature Center in Rockville, which confirmed her suspicion that it was a black widow, one of the most poisonous spiders found in North America.
- The Washington Post
Mies Van der Rohe room will be razed
CHICAGO - Chicago is about to see less and not more of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's work.
The only existing interior by the architect - a room at the city's Arts Club with a white steel staircase that seems to float as it zigzags upward - is going to be torn down in the spring to make way for a Blockbuster Video store.
The city Commission on Chicago Landmarks probably sounded the death knell for the room when it voted against putting it on its list of historic landmarks.
The vote last month helped clear the way for developer John Buck to raze the space along with the rest of the nondescript block of Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Buck's plans also call for a movie theater on the site.
- Associated Press
by CNB