Word: birde
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...break, even for the downhearted. This summer won't be like that for most Americans. It will be an anxious four months as people watch the infrequent signals that may tell them how 2009 will end. It is a bit like Greek seers interpreting the flights of bird patterns for information about the future...
...editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Jesse Sheidlower has a bird's-eye view of how words do - or don't - make their way into the book that defines the English language. The past year has seen such additions as subprime and credit crunch. Those words had been around for quite some time, but it took a while for the OED to give them their own entries. "We're not going to just put in buzzwords," says Sheidlower. "We're not going to put in something that will go away three months from now." Which is perhaps...
...should we spend scarce medical resources swabbing the inside of pigs' nostrils, looking for viruses? Because new pathogens--including H5N1 bird flu, SARS, even HIV--incubated in animal populations before eventually crossing over to human beings. In the ecology of influenza, pigs are particularly key. They can be infected with avian, swine and human flu viruses, making them virological blenders. While it's still not clear exactly where the H1N1 virus originated or when it first infected humans, if we had half as clear a picture of the flu viruses circulating in pigs and other animals...
H1N1 has already jumped out of animals and established itself in people, so it's too late to contain it, but there are new viruses brewing all the time in the animal world. That includes H5N1 bird flu, which is simmering in Asia and Africa and could still mutate and trigger a pandemic. Globalization has made us especially vulnerable to new diseases--the right pathogen in the right place could spread around the world in 24 hours--but it also gives us the tools to form an effective defense. "The fact that the world is one continuous village now means...
...human-rights campaigner. But the 52-year-old Chinese artist has made the cause of documenting every child killed in last May's massive earthquake in Sichuan his own. Leveraging his position as one of the country's best-known artists - he had a hand in designing the Olympic Bird's Nest stadium and is the son of China's most prominent modern poet - Ai has managed to help keep the issue of why so many schools collapsed, killing thousands of students, alive...