Word: bonding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when he was 30, Linus Pauling knew he was the world's best chemist. Ten years later his peers agreed. By then, The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939) was already on its way to becoming the most influential chemistry book of the century. His biggest biological success came from his 1951 proposal of the alpha-helical fold for protein molecules, which everybody else thought were too large and complex to study. His findings were quickly verified, and Linus' confidence was never higher...
...Horace Freeland Judson observed in The Eighth Day of Creation, this sort of synergy is, above all, what Rosalind Franklin lacked. Working in a largely male field in an age when women weren't allowed in the faculty coffee room, she had no one to bond with--no supportive critic whose knowledge matched her gaps, whose gaps her knowledge matched...
What good is a brilliantly intense, tightly focused beam of light? It can make a dandy weapon or torture device, as Sean Connery found to his dismay in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But while laser weaponry never really took off, lasers certainly did. Today they are used for, among other things, dentists' drills and delicate eye surgery, recording and playing back compact discs, measuring the distance to the moon, creating and viewing holograms, industrial cutting and welding, sending voices and data through the air and down optical fibers, surveying roads and building sites, generating energy in controlled-nuclear-fusion...
...sense, a plan file is like a calling card, announcing your position and social status to whoever wants to call on you. Since anyone can finger your account, a plan file is theoretically written for everyone to read. But at the same time, the text establishes an intimate bond between author and reader. To finger someone's account means expressing interest in that person, however benign, and the plan file must by its very nature take that attraction into account...
...wars, it has been said, are civil wars. The boundaries of nations ever in flux, "are nothing to the bond of common humanity. The war in Kosovo will not depend on the guiding hand of NATO advisers, nor on the technological might its militaries have in store, nor even upon the realpolitik or game theoretic calculations of foreign policy advisors. It will be fought and decided, as war has always been fought and decided: town by town, hill by hill and house by house...