Word: darkness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Every night at 11 p.m., the village of Dörentrup in central Germany is thrown into total darkness. Strapped for cash for the past few years, the local council has taken to switching off all the streetlights. But while the scheme saves money, it left residents like Dieter Grote and his wife worrying about their children coming home in the dark. "My wife has all the good ideas," says Grote, who runs an advertising agency. "I discussed the problem with her and we thought it must be possible to have the lights available on demand." Grote got in touch...
...Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown fat helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells' power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy. When they're switched off, animals don't get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn...
...down we don’t see any of the dark brown squirrels with flatter heads and extra fluffy tails, or the foot-long worms. The buzzing of cicadas, the whirring and warbles of birds fade, too. Only a single neon blue-tailed lizard darts across the path...
...doesn't matter to me, or I to the filmmakers; my G.I. tract, in fact the communal contumely of critics, is irrelevant to box-office performance. G.I. Joe could be a Transformers-size hit, or it could be another The Golden Compass, the first episode of the His Dark Materials novels; that film cost $180 million and helped drive New Line Cinema out of business. Who knows? Nearly 30 years ago, director Robert Benton mused on a famous flop of the day. "When Steven Spielberg made 1941," Benton said, "he probably thought there...
...relief over the jobless figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday morning - 247,000 jobs were lost in July, far fewer than economists had expected - a dark problem lurks in the numbers: dangerously high levels of long-term unemployment in America. Unlike recent recessions, the current economic crisis has been characterized by skyrocketing numbers of those out of work for three, six or more months at a time. Economists worry that the shock of the past year's financial crisis may have driven the U.S. into a period of permanently high unemployment similar to what Europe has suffered...