Word: arounders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...small, brown, furry creature inside a cage in Princeton University's molecular-biology department looks for all the world like an ordinary mouse. It sniffs around, climbs the bars, burrows into wood shavings on the floor, eats, eliminates, sleeps. But put the animal through its paces in a testing lab, and it quickly becomes evident that this mouse is anything but ordinary. One after another, it knocks off a variety of tasks designed to test a rodent's mental capacities--and almost invariably learns more quickly, remembers what it learns for a longer time and adapts to changes...
...whole to include those with a range of needs and talents and predispositions, warts and all. "As someone who morally values diversity," says ethicist Elizabeth Bounds of Emory University's Candler School of Theology, "I find this frightening. We run the risk of shaping a much more homogeneous community around certain dominant values, a far more engineered community." What sort of lottery would decide who is to leap ahead, who is to be held back for an overall balance? At the moment, nature orchestrates our diversity. But human nature resists leaving so much to chance, if there is actually...
Pundits in our age of rapid misinformation will surely transmit the story as a claim that the gene for intelligence has been cloned and that a human smart pill for routine production of kiddie geniuses lies just around the millennial corner. None of this punditry, however, will bear any relationship to current realities or reasonable prospects for the short-term future. Even so, the mice studied by Tsien et al. could help us correct two common errors in our thinking about genetics and intelligence...
Chris Rock just got his butt whupped by a woman. It's midafternoon at the Chelsea Piers boxing facilities, and Rock is shooting a taped piece for his eponymous HBO talk show. The idea: Wouldn't it be funny if Rock went around New York City gyms looking for the next Great White Hope? The twist: he runs into female boxing champ Christy Martin, and in a staged fight, Rock gets knocked around the ring as if he's a shoe in a clothes dryer. Now Rock is seated on some bleachers, catching his breath. After a few minutes, Martin...
Rock quit school and, after a stint as a busboy at Red Lobster, launched a comedy career. He was a clueless 17-year-old, playing small clubs around New York like the Comic Strip, trying to read the crowd, trying to milk laughs, usually failing. He wasn't making much--the Comic Strip paid $7 a set during the week, $40 on weekends--but he was trying to get his name out there, trying to build a rep. His big joke was this: "Woman comes up to me, says she'll do anything for me, anything. So I say, 'Bitch...