Word: basic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...need. Do you a) start counting goats; b) get out of bed and read; or c) take a sleeping pill? If you picked reading, your restless nights may soon be over. According to a report in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association, adopting a few basic habits--like limiting the amount of time you spend in bed--works better than pills or goats in controlling chronic insomnia...
...latest in a series of sleep experiments stretching back 50 years. Much remains mysterious. Despite thousands of hours measuring the brain waves of unconscious subjects, monitoring their breathing and noting the effects of sleep deprivation, scientists still don't know the answers to some of the most basic questions, like why we need to sleep in the first place. That hasn't stopped some wild ideas from gaining popularity. In December, Pocket Books paid a whopping $200,000 advance for a yet-to-be published book that claims you can lose weight by sleeping longer. (Darn! Why didn...
Virtually all computers today, from $10 million supercomputers to the tiny chips that power cell phones and Furbies, have one thing in common: they are all "Von Neumann machines," variations on the basic computer architecture that John von Neumann, building on the work of Alan Turing, laid out in the 1940s. Men have become famous for less. But in the lifetime of this Hungarian-born mathematician who had his hand in everything from quantum physics to U.S. policy during the cold war, the Von Neumann machine was almost the least of his accomplishments...
...scientists found Seed's sound bites credible, yet his proclamations laid out a soul-shivering truth. Medicine has a strong impetus (if not temptation) to use this technology--for basic research, for new therapies, to provide solutions to infertility or to "replace" a dying loved one. But medicine is also bound by the traditional precept to do no harm, and so it takes on added challenges--such as whether clones will die young because of their older DNA or whether they will suffer the environmental mutations picked up during the life of their adult parent...
...figure out just how. Fooling around with the arithmetic of propulsion, he calculated the energy-to-weight ratio of various fuels. Fooling around with airtight chambers, he found that a rocket could indeed fly in a vacuum, thanks to Newton's laws of action and reaction. Fooling around with basic chemistry, he learned, most important, that if he hoped to launch a missile very far, he could never do it with the poor black powder that had long been the stuff of rocketry. Instead, he would need something with real propulsive oomph--a liquid like kerosene or liquid hydrogen, mixed...