Word: concepts
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...Kyoto, whatever its drawbacks, did contain one breakthrough: an architecture that would have allowed countries to reduce emissions through a credit-trading system. The concept was pioneered by the President's father in his Clean Air Act, which cut acid rain in half by allowing U.S. utilities to trade sulfur dioxide credits. Today the system would permit the industrialized countries to trade carbon-emission credits (basically licenses to emit specific amounts of greenhouse gases) among one another and participating developing countries. Because climate change is a global problem, its solution is ideally suited to an international-trading regime. Such trading...
...equally unsettling implication is that the universe is pervaded with a strange sort of "antigravity," a concept originally proposed by and later abandoned by Einstein as the greatest blunder of his life. This force, which has lately been dubbed "dark energy," isn't just keeping the expansion from slowing down, it's making the universe fly apart faster and faster all the time, like a rocket ship with the throttle wide open...
...dogs also yield another key bit of information: they tell theorists how the universe is curved, in the Einsteinian sense. There's no way to convey this concept to a nonphysicist except by two-dimensional analogy (see How Does the Universe Curve? diagram). The surface of a sphere has what's called positive curvature; if you go far enough in one direction, you will never get to the edge but you will eventually return to your starting point. An infinitely large sheet of paper is flat and, because it is infinite, also edgeless. And a saddle that extends forever...
Going to the zoo used to mean gawking at giraffes and, if you were really lucky, peeking at a panda. But the newest concept in zoos aims to connect kids to nature by encouraging them to get down and dirty with it: in between their animal encounters, the kids can slosh in mud, explore caves and hunt for bugs. Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago, will open its play zoo this week, offering children (for a $2 fee; $4 for adults) the chance to dress up as lemurs as they swing alongside real ones, or build a house made of sticks...
...from Ford, "there was interest, but there was interest in a lot of shows." But after the sponsorship, "we got an order from the WB for 13 episodes." (Says network spokesman Paul McGuire: "The WB would not have gone forward with the show unless we liked and embraced the concept of the program.") There are longer-term pressures at work too. Digital video recorders like TiVo are making it easier for viewers to zap past ads. Commercial breaks--16 minutes or so of every TV hour--have stretched the limits of viewer tolerance. And this "clutter," plus the metastasizing...