Twenty miles outside the small town of Taos, New Mexico, the dry, flat landscape is interrupted momentarily by a small brown-colored dome that appears amid the low, desert scrub.

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In March 1999, Piccard was on the final leg of an around-the-world journey by hot air balloon the first-ever nonstop flight of its kind when his Breitling Orbiter 3 swept low over the Egyptian desert and skidded to a halt on the corrugated plains.

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Exposure to extreme cold: the Antarctic Plateau, which will be crossed, is the world's largest and coldest desert with extremely low humidity and the expedition will involve prolonged periods of exposure to extreme cold below -70C.

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Blowing dust forced the California Highway Patrol to close state Route 14 in the high desert Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles due to low visibility.

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While the low water use and cost of PV will appeal in the desert kingdom, the fact that solar will be displacing power generated from oil means that even CSP based power will produce cost reductions.

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Mr. Loughner spent his adolescence just north of Tucson, in a community where a flat carpet of strip malls and low subdivisions dissolves at its fringes into dirt roads and rolling, saguaro-spiked desert.

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Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.

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This time there's hope he'll create a revival on the dreary north end of the Strip, where the Desert Inn is located, a no-man's-land of aging dowagers and low-roller joints.

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