Word: barbarae
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...fetus into a boy. Without such a signal, all human embryos would develop into girls. "I have all the genes for being male except this one, and my husband has all the genes for being female," marvels evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides, of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "The only difference is which genes got turned...
Birds do it. Bees do it. But dandelions don't. The prodigious spread of these winsome weeds underscores a little-appreciated biological fact. Contrary to human experience, sex is not essential to reproduction. "Quite the opposite," exclaims anthropologist John Tooby of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "From an engineer's standpoint, sexual reproduction is insane. It's like trying to build an automobile by randomly taking parts out of two older models and piecing them together to make a brand-new car." In the time that process takes, asexual organisms can often churn out multiple generations of clones...
...BARBARA BUSH: For grace and good humor that defused a frightening situation. Anyone who doubted that the President was all right was immediately reassured by Mrs. Bush's decision to stay at the dinner when he had to leave...
Despite persuasive evidence that U.S. Air Force pilot Charles Scharf died when his plane slammed into a Vietnamese mountainside, Barbara Scharf Lowerison remains convinced that her brother survived and is being held against his will in Asia. She has only fragmentary evidence to support her belief, like a fleeting glimpse of someone who might have been her brother in an old East German film about POWs, and a CIA report that lists him as a prisoner. "I know my brother's alive," she maintains...
...most upsetting call came three years ago. Lowerison returned from work to find a message on her telephone answering machine. After almost a minute of noise that might have been traffic or from an airport, a man was heard to mutter what sounds like the words "Help, Barbara" in the tone of someone perhaps drugged or in pain. To an outsider, the tape could easily seem like a cruel hoax. To Lowerison, it is a tormenting sign that her brother might be alive...