Word: adaptive
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Screenwriter John Hunter makes the story of this latter-day Rip Van Winkle strangely touching; anyone struggling to adapt to the technologies of the 1980s is bound to admire his good-humored patience with the ways of the world he nev er made. Director Phillip Borsos has an unpretentious eye for natural beauty and an admirable restraint that forces neither the melodrama nor the elegy. And Richard Farnsworth, the former stuntman who was so fine in Comes a Horseman, gives another splendid performance here. Like the movie, he is slight but sturdy. Film and actor compel one to lean...
...week to allow for the natural accumulation of healing proteins called nerve growth factors. Then they implanted a pinhead-size lump of tissue that had been taken from the frontal cortex of normal rat embryos. The researchers used fetal cells because they are rich in growth factors and adapt easily to a new environment. Result of the operation: the brain-damaged rats were able to learn the maze in just 8½ days. While this is still slower than normal, says Stein, "the transplant was clearly producing some degree of functional recovery." Stein later found that new connections had grown...
...geishas, moon watching from the tatami) that was destroyed after 1945 by the trauma of Westernization, so that the New Japan ceased in some basic way to be Japanese. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Japanese do, and always have done, is much more subtle. They adapt what they need from other cultures. They seem always to be submitting-sometimes masochistically-to cultural colonizations, of which the American is only the most recent. But what they make of the acquired form is invariably Japanese...
...distant and unimportant to most Japanese architects; now it, and the homogeneous systems of environmental design it stood for, became an obsession with younger architects at Tokyo University. In 1954 Walter Gropius came to Japan to give a series of lectures, only to discover that an extraordinary loop of adaptation had taken place. What Gropius liked in Japan was its traditional architecture, epitomized by the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. The kind of modernism he stood for was heavily indebted to Japanese sources, transmitted to Germany nearly 50 years before by Frank Lloyd Wright, not just in details or quotations...
Though no quarter was given in the training, some sensible accommodation was made to cope with the differences between the sexes. To adapt to shorter limbs (Ride is 5 ft. 5 in.), shuttle seats were built so that they could slide like those in a car. Optional grooming aids were added to the personal kits of the astronauts (though Ride pointedly has not said whether she will wear lipstick or powder for the inevitable orbital TV shows). Included as well are tampons, linked together lest one drift off when the box is opened. The shuttle's single privy...