Word: bitter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Kremlin is still smarting from the failure of its campaign to prevent NATO from deploying new missiles in Europe. But Moscow's primary motive is to signal the U.S. that it will not do any business with the Reagan Administration. "You are dealing with a defiant and bitter Russian bear," says Dmitri Simes, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Everything they were trying to do internationally went wrong. They have now fallen back on a policy of assertive isolationism...
...violence began in Bhiwandi (pop. 300,000, two-thirds Muslim), a textile town 32 miles northeast of Bombay with a history of Hindu-Muslim enmity: bitter fighting between Hindu and Muslim extremists in 1970 left 150 people dead. Tensions began to rise again in Bhiwandi and other Maharashtra towns earlier this year. One specific incident came in late April when Bal Thackeray, leader of a militant, right-wing Hindu organization called Shiv Sena, gave a speech in which he reportedly maligned the Islamic faith. Muslims retaliated by garlanding a portrait of Thackeray with dirty sandals, an insult to Hindus. Next...
Odorless chemical stimulants were employed to activate the four basic tastes-bitter, salty, sweet and sour. The tests were both qualitative, meaning that I was asked to identify each taste at very low concentrations, and quantitative, meaning that I was asked to rate the intensity of different concentrations. During Bartoshuk's "whole-mouth" test, when I rinsed with the diluted solutions, I wore headphones and was asked to rate the strength of sound tones administered intermittently by Dr. Lawrence E. Marks, an auditory psychophysicist. This procedure, known as magnitude matching, is used as a form of control. Psychophysicists have...
...turned out to be a strong taster of the bitter stimuli phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and propylthiouracil (PROP). The ability or inability to taste these stimuli is genetic. To taste very weak concentrations, as I did, indicates that the subject is probably homozygous, or has two dominant genes for bitter tasting. People who perceive PTC/PROP mildly are likely to be heterozygous, meaning that they have one dominant and one recessive gene. Non-tasters of these bitter stimuli have two recessive genes. It was interesting to notice how the tastes literally "felt" as they were being washed over the tongue. Salt and sweet...
After such a long and bitter dispute, the climax was no surprise. American Conductor Lorin Maazel abruptly abrogated his contract as director of the Vienna State Opera and resigned effective Sept. 1. Said Austrian Minister of Education and Art Helmut Zilk, who oversees the opera company and had clashed repeatedly with Maazel during the conductor's 1½-year tenure: "I don't want to say anything bad about him, but he has no manners and is a megalomaniac." Observed Maazel: "Every three weeks we have another unprofessional statement from a minister who only goes to football games...