Word: craniums
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Beneath a translucent scalp, the plates of Gertrude Dhlamini's cranium etch a geography of pain. Her illness is obvious in the thin, stretched skin under which veins throb with the shingles that have blinded her left eye and scarred that side of her face. At 39, she looks 70. The agonizing thrush, a kind of fungus, that paralyzed her throat has ebbed enough to enable her to swallow a spoon or two of warm gruel, but most of the nourishment flows away in constant diarrhea. She struggles to keep her hand from scratching restlessly at the scaly rash flushing...
...labeled as Businessmen, the drama queens as Performers and the loudmouths as Politicians. In some cases, the similarities were even more striking. My close friend, the Mastermind, fits the profile not only as a "schemer" and "plotter," but even her forehead bears a strange resemblance to the rather large cranium possessed by the Mastermind on the Web site...
...tell you, it's hard to keep a stiff upper lip these days. First my high-tech dot-com portfolio plummets. Then it turns out that my beloved cell phone may be zapping my delicate cranium with radioactive waves. And now, to top it all off, the Prozac that keeps me from murdering my coworkers is under attack, this time by recently unemployed talk therapists. It's as if everything that seemed so promising way back in the '90s has suddenly been tainted by doubt...
...behind this childhood disease. A close cousin of herpes simplex, which causes cold sores, varicella-zoster can be beaten back by the immune system but never eradicated. Like a bandit pursued by a posse, it retreats to a safe haven--bundles of nerve cells in the spinal cord or cranium. There varicella-zoster lies dormant, usually for decades...
...though it didn't get its better brain by coming from another world. It was engineered by scientists at Princeton, M.I.T. and Washington University, who cleverly altered its DNA--or, more precisely, that of its genetic forebears--in ways that changed the reactions between neurons deep within its tiny cranium. The result, say its creators, is a strain of mouse (which they nicknamed "Doogie," after the precocious lead character of the old TV show Doogie Howser, M.D.) that is smarter than his dim-witted cousins. Not only that, the scientists wrote in last week's issue of the journal Nature...