Word: assayer
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...matter politely, memoirs are self-serving. Still, it's something of a shock to learn that Monty Roberts' enormously popular, enormously self-approving memoir The Man Who Listens to Horses may assay out as part fiction. Call it horse puckey for the soul, if charges by Monty's younger brother Larry and others close to the author's life are to be credited. By these accounts, backed up by TIME's reporting, the stirring tale with more than 800,000 copies in print--out this month in paperback--contains an embarrassing number of seeming untruths, some harmless, others outrageous...
...equipment used in the Harvard SETI project and who has served as one of Horowitz's research assistants since 1992, helped build computers that screen the frequencies and then "send you e-mail if it has a possibly right signal," Leigh says. This project was called Billion Channel Extraterrestrial Assay, or BETA and is the system still in operation today...
...hopping or being dragged up, although he is being carried financially by a vitamin company. He has a prosthesis, which has its advantages (no chance of frostbite) but takes 30% more energy to walk with. This is Whittaker's third assay on Everest. He was turned back once by an avalanche and once because he decided he was too slow. "No, I don't think I'm insane," says Whittaker, but adds this is his last summit attempt. And he's keeping his climb in perspective. "One of the things that really attracts me about mountaineering is its total pointlessness...
...alarmed at the monster that Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon Snyder and I created when we discovered the simple binding assay for drug receptors 25 years ago. Prozac and other antidepressant serotonin-receptor-active compounds may also cause cardiovascular problems in some susceptible people after long-term use, which has become common practice despite the lack of safety studies...
Each day, as the Earth turns, the BETA (for Billion-channel Extra-Terrestrial Assay) telescope sweeps a circular swath through the heavens, elevated at a slightly different fixed angle from the horizon with each successive turn. During each circuit it captures radio waves reaching Earth at frequencies between 1400 and 1720 megahertz--a broad but relatively "quiet" region of the radio spectrum. "In the 1960s we were looking in a few niches and hoping the extraterrestrials had put their jewels there," says astronomer Frank Drake, who launched the first SETI project in 1960. "They didn't. Now we are doing...