Word: blanked
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...Harvard psychologist didn't look like a rock star, he would still play to packed houses on the lecture circuit. He has something rare among top-tier scholars, an ability to convey complex ideas with clarity, flair and wit. That's one reason his books--most recently, The Blank Slate--make best-seller lists even as they make waves in academia. The other reason is those waves in academia. Pinker is on the forefront of an intellectual sea change...
Decades of social-science dogma depicted the human mind as having few built-in features--kind of like a computer with no programs, a blank slate. Pinker, along with others in the young field of evolutionary psychology, disagrees. For starters, he argued in The Language Instinct, we have a genetically based word processor, engineered by natural selection. Among the other legacies of natural selection, say the new Darwinians, are such impulses as jealousy and vengefulness. So Pinker draws fire from those who ascribe all ills to the corruption of pristine souls. But evolutionary psychology has a brighter side: love...
...century, it seems, an eminent Harvard psychologist crystallizes an intellectual era. Near the end of the 19th century, William James, writing in Darwin's wake, stressed how naturally functional the mind is. In the mid--20th century, after a pendulum swing, B.F. Skinner depicted the mind as a blank slate. Now the pendulum is swinging again. Harvard, which lured Pinker from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, seems poised to keep its tradition alive. --BY ROBERT WRIGHT, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
...parents but perfect copies of the women who donated the DNA. That, however, is not what Hwang and Moon wanted. "We will never try to produce cloned human beings," Hwang said. What they do want to produce--and, in fact, did--is embryonic stem cells, the biological blank slates that develop into all the body's tissues. Thanks to stem-cell technology, people could become their own tissue donors with pristine, unrejectable cells at the ready to repair damage done by, say, Alzheimer's disease or spinal-cord injury. Stem-cell research in the U.S. has been hamstrung since...
...address those problems, Alpine Electronics developed PulseTouch, a screen that vibrates under your finger, changing the sensation with low-voltage impulses under the screen's plastic skin as you move. The result is virtual topography. Since the sensations vary, depending on whether you're touching an icon or a blank area, you can finger through options without taking your eyes off the road. Alpine's first PulseTouch product is the IVA-D300 in-dash DVD player and receiver ($1,500), left, whose 7-in. screen can display navigation, music options or DVDs. The videos won't play unless...