Word: doomsday
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...centerpiece of this doomsday vision is the idea that civilization—which he defines as “a way of life characterized by the growth of cities”—is inherently unsustainable because it requires an ever-expanding input of resources and involves the wholesale destruction of nature. All social, technological, and political efforts to alleviate environmental problems are futile; instead, we should prepare ourselves for the fallout by learning about nature, so as to live peacefully without the squalid human world, using only “what the land gives willingly...
...Memphis—the four top-ranked teams in the country—would all make it to the championship in San Antonio were fairly slim. Basketball Prospectus, which uses past performance to generate probabilities of future outcomes, estimated the chance of what they termed the “Doomsday Scenario” at 3.5% (smaller, incidentally, than the probability that a number one seed would be upset in the first round). However, that still made it the single most likely of the 65,536 possible combinations of Final Four teams...
LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY "Doomsday" vault holding millions of crop seeds opens...
...ensure that an agricultural doomsday never comes, Fowler and his colleagues have organized the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an international seed bank built into a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic. A Fort Knox for seeds, the vault will be a backup for the backups and will eventually be expanded to include genetic samples of every crop on the planet. The first shipments, from more than 36 African nations, arrived at the end of January, and there will be room for as many as 4.5 million samples once the facility opens Feb. 26. The specimens will be kept...
...That's quite a turnaround from the doomsday predictions made in the early '90s. It was less than two decades ago that the country's crime wizards were warning of a unprecedented, bloody spike as a super-predator generation - kids armed with equally menacing weapons and attitudes - inflamed gang and drug wars; murders hit over 2,000 in New York and nearly 1,000 in Chicago during the early 1990s. Many theories for the decline over the past decade and more have been floated; from the Freakonomics suggestion that legalizing abortion effectively wiped out a population of would-be criminals...