Word: fatale
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...Achilles heel has always been liftoff, and the dangers posed by massive fuel load involved. Reentry has, of course, always been a difficult part of the space program. But this is, in fact, our first fatal accident on reentry. Apollo 13 is remembered as our most difficult ever reentry, but the ship and crew survived. The Soviets lost a crew on reentry in 1970 after an oxygen leak that caused the cosmonauts to suffocate on the way down. Reentry is a very difficult process, but the Russians mastered it in 1961 and we did the same a few years later...
Diabetes is another illness that doesn't go well with depression. It's well known that 10% of diabetic men and 20% of diabetic women also have depression--about twice the rate in the general population. It's natural to be depressed about having a chronic, potentially fatal illness, but that doesn't entirely explain the discrepancy. Moreover, depressed diabetics are much more likely than those without depression to suffer complications including heart disease, nerve damage and blindness. Somehow depression makes the body less responsive to insulin, the hormone that processes blood sugar--plausibly through the action of cortisol...
Imagine this scenario: terrorists release an airborne, antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax in a major European capital. Without vaccines or antitoxins to reduce fatalities, the public is largely unprotected. But the government quickly dispenses a new nasal spray that puts people's immune systems into overdrive, protecting them not only against anthrax but a whole range of pathogens, including many of the deadly bioterrorist agents that governments believe are most likely to be used. It sounds farfetched, but last week's ricin arrests in London show that the possibility of a bioterror attack is not fantasy. British Prime Minister Tony...
...prevailed in the first age of rock with tunes that exuded steam (Fever), defiance (I Am Woman) and blithe anhedonia (Is That All There Is?). It's amazing that she could caress a melody even though life kept swatting her: she endured an abusive stepmother, diabetes, angioplasty, a near-fatal fall and four busted marriages. "They weren't really weddings," she said, "just long costume parties." Now the party's over, and she's a ghost, a spectral voice, for a generation that surely will miss Peggy...
...lucid and cunning drama: ancient history (3rd century B.C.) refracted through a modern skeptic's sensibility. It views the birth of a nation through the murky motives of some of the first Emperor's potential assassins. For they are as duplicitous in their emotional lives as in their fatal politics...