Word: breakthrough
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When it was approved in 2000 as an alternative to surgical abortion, RU 486 was hailed by women's groups as the greatest breakthrough since the Pill. But after the deaths of three women who had taken the drug to terminate unwanted pregnancies, the FDA issued a black-box warning about the risk of death from bacterial infections and other complications. The pill's supporters insist that when properly used, RU 486 is no riskier than a surgical abortion and considerably safer than carrying a pregnancy to term...
Even when the rare communication breakthrough does occur the results are often mediocre at best. One can’t be sure if that football player just enthusiastically gave the “hey what’s up?” nod or if he was just rocking out to Hillary Duff. Similarly, it is hard to tell whether that cute studious freshman girl is expressing her anger about the party last night or if she just has an affinity for the band Disturbed...
...late summer's rays of hope have since been clouded, by a series of setbacks that appear to have reversed progress on every front. The most recent apparent breakthrough had come on November 10, when the government pledged to end its aerial bombardment of suspected rebel redoubts, the rebels promised to disclose their troop locations and both sides renewed their assurances of unfettered access to aid workers. Just two weeks later, in this dusty trading town precariously situated between government, rebel and janjaweed strongholds, those tentative steps toward d?tente collapsed, plunging Darfur into a new round of violence...
...Jenkins' world suddenly began to brighten two years ago. The breakthrough was Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (the son and successor of Kim Il Sung) in Pyongyang. Kim confirmed Japan's long-held suspicion that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese citizens and forcing them to teach at its spy schools. Soga, Jenkins' wife, was acknowledged to be among the abductees. After the summit, she and the four others Pyongyang said were still alive returned to Japan for what was meant to be a 10-day visit. They never went back...
...optical trap. This has been a hot area of scientific inquiry at least since 1986, when Bell Labs invented one. (Grier had done a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs.) Back then, Bell Labs scientists invented a single-beam "optical tweezers" that trapped just one substance. That was a monumental breakthrough, but scientists began to ponder traps that could catch multiple substances and move them from one point to another. Since their plastic fantastic moment gave Grier and Dufresne 16 separate optical traps, that was enough for the University of Chicago to eventually showcase the duo to Lewis Gruber, a biotech...