Word: amoebas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that serves as the tour's home base, people are after him, begging for autographs (Baldwin obliges) and introducing their wannabe-actor friends (Baldwin is polite). It could be worse. He could be younger brother Billy, who is along for the tour and is the center of a permanent amoeba of giggling girls. But it could be better. He could be older sister Beth, who sits unnoticed amid her famous brothers. "They have sisters?" asks someone in the crowd. "We're known as Nothing and Nobody," jokes Beth about herself and sister Jane...
What guides an axon on its incredible voyage is a "growth cone," a creepy, crawly sprout that looks something like an amoeba. Scientists have known about growth cones since the turn of the century. What they didn't know until recently was that growth cones come equipped with the molecular equivalent of sonar and radar. Just as instruments in a submarine or airplane scan the environment for signals, so molecules arrayed on the surface of growth cones search their surroundings for the presence of certain proteins. Some of these proteins, it turns out, are attractants that pull the growth cones...
...given right of American corporations to expend most of their energy breaking up and coming back together. This is, after all, the fabulous free-market dynamic that generates so much wealth for the executives involved, a process that must be taught in leading graduate schools of business as the Amoeba Principle...
...worried about the possibility that because of the Amoeba Principle, all the companies that came into being after the breakup of AT&T in 1984 may remerge, coagulating into some gigantic snarl of cables and wires. If that happens, I assume, the television commercials that were designed to make those diverse companies distinctive will simply meld together for a while, so that Candice Bergen will discuss the Yellow Pages with James Earl Jones in the voice of Dick Cavett...
...stand," my wife said one morning. True. Arguing that Random House's response to her manuscript should have been to send over a couple of the gnomes it keeps in the basement to write the books celebrities sign, she described the writing process as "a living amoeba...