Word: birthed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Chicago pediatric neurologist Dr. Peter Huttenlocher has chronicled this extraordinary epoch in brain development by autopsying the brains of infants and young children who have died unexpectedly. The number of synapses in one layer of the visual cortex, Huttenlocher reports, rises from around 2,500 per neuron at birth to as many as 18,000 about six months later. Other regions of the cortex score similarly spectacular increases but on slightly different schedules. And while these microscopic connections between nerve fibers continue to form throughout life, they reach their highest average densities (15,000 synapses per neuron) at around...
...abruptly. There appears to be a series of windows for developing language. The window for acquiring syntax may close as early as five or six years of age, while the window for adding new words may never close. The ability to learn a second language is highest between birth and the age of six, then undergoes a steady and inexorable decline. Many adults still manage to learn new languages, but usually only after great struggle...
...Vermont someone from the state's Success by Six program first visits a home within two weeks of a baby's birth. "That gets us in the door at age zero instead of age five, so we can assess what families need," Governor Howard Dean points out. Visits may continue for up to three years. "It is so inexpensive," says Dean, "to take care of children relative to the other things we do, such as build jails and put up expensive social-service networks for runaway youth...
...announce the creation of a new organization to take his anti-affirmative-action show on the road--in honor of the slain civil rights leader. "Dr. King personifies the quest for a color-blind society," Connerly explains, "and I felt that it would be a great symbol to give birth to an organization that wants the nation to resume that journey on the birthday of the man who symbolizes it." Connerly claims he has the support of "a lot of people, black and white, who marched with Dr. King, who now say they really don't agree with the direction...
Tiepolo's world is best experienced in his native Venice, because so many of his large-scale murals and ceiling paintings are there. But this month New York City museums have a veritable festa of Tiepolo's movable work, commemorating the 300th anniversary of his birth. Drawings by him and his disciples--including his sons Domenico and Lorenzo--are on view at the Pierpont Morgan Library, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a show of 80 of his paintings and oil sketches and 33 of his mysterious and brilliantly inventive etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi di Fantasia...