Word: feed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...withstood conditions of abject poverty in order to reign over a vast criminal network from the heartland of the Italian island. (A boss who flees his home turf with a suitcase of cash is, on the other hand, considered a failure and possible traitor.) Of course, power and money feed off each other: Provenzano, for one, never stopped working to acquire wealth for Cosa Nostra, even if he couldn't spend it himself. Despite the blows to its leadership, the organization still generates billions of dollars of annual turnover in extortion, public-works contracts and drug-trafficking...
Worse, what's killing the elephants is often ills they would never encounter in the wild. Obesity, for one: cage any healthy animal, feed it well and forbid it to move around too much, and it's likely to get fat. Cardiovascular disease is commonly reported among elephants, which, as in humans, can be a direct result of too many calories and too little exercise. What's more, baby elephants born in captivity are noticeably chubbier from the start than those born in the wild. That may be a result of the mothers weighing too much, but whatever the reason...
...that's so, it creates a whole new paradigm for the way people get sick and, more important, how to get them healthy. It may mean that an individual's well-being is the product not just of his behaviors and emotions but more of the way they feed into a larger social network. Think of it as health Facebook-style. "We have a collective identity as a population that transcends individual identity," says Christakis. "This superorganism has an anatomy, physiology, structure and function that we are trying to understand...
...farming on the ground for 10,000 years? Because as the world's population grows--from 6.8 billion now to as much as 9 billion by 2050--we could run out of productive soil and water. Most of the population growth will occur in cities that can't easily feed themselves. Add the fact that modern agriculture and everything associated with it--deforestation, chemical-laden fertilizers and carbon-emitting transportation--is a significant contributor to climate change, and suddenly vertical farming doesn't seem so magic beanstalk...
Despommier's plans are even grander. He has drawn up models for a 30-story, city-block-size vertical farm that would have transparent walls to maximize sunlight and would produce enough food for 50,000 people. "With about 160 of these buildings, you could feed all of New York," he says. His idea has intrigued architects, but Despommier concedes that it would cost hundreds of millions to build a full-scale skyscraper farm. That's the main drawback: construction and energy costs would probably make vertically raised food more costly than traditional crops. At least...