Word: beginnings
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Egyptian human rights activists have spent years searching for evidence of the torture of detainees in police stations, detention centers and prisons, but few were prepared for such evidence to begin arriving in the form of a graphic cell-phone video. Even more shocking was the fact that the graphic recording of a man writhing in agony, begging for mercy as he is sodomized with a cane and verbally abused by men identified in an official investigation as police officers, is believed to have been disseminated by those same officers in a bid to humiliate the victim and intimidate...
What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes...
...cortisol levels did not jump significantly. Experience had taught them that the situation wasn't that bad. Seven of the men, however, exhibited cortisol spikes every bit as high on the fourth day as the first. Only by the fifth day did their stress reaction begin to disappear...
...believes that the hippocampus, a finger-size structure located deep in the brain, is at least partially responsible. It turns out that the hippocampus, which helps you form new memories and retrieve old ones, is particularly sensitive to the amount of cortisol flooding your cerebrum. So when cortisol levels begin to rise, the hippocampus sends a set of signals that help shut down the cortisol cascade...
...next step came as the spread of communications technologies, improved transportation networks and freer international trade enabled trading companies to begin sourcing supplies and products from Korea, Indonesia, India--wherever they could get the best price and quality. Victor Fung, Li & Fung's group chairman, says his firm had hit on the "idea that you can take work apart and allocate it to other parts of the world. We took the whole thing and disaggregated...