Word: femur
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...teenage soldiers at the checkpoint call their outpost 25 miles outside Monrovia the God Bless You Gate--because, says Sergeant Kofa Mailer, 17, "when you pass by this gate, God bless you." The gate is made from a long reed and festooned with human bones. A femur hangs beside a pelvis and near a piece of a vertebra. The guards at the God Bless You Gate are members of a Small Boys Unit, government-employed child soldiers. They say they are generals, lieutenants and sergeants, but even with their AK-47s, they look more like schoolchildren. Their leader, General James...
...that it had human features." Laci's remains, discovered by another dog walker the next morning, were partial and mostly skeletal. The state of the bodies posed a challenge to forensic scientists, who managed to extract DNA from Laci's tibia, or shinbone, and her baby's femur, or thighbone. They compared it with DNA in cheek swabs from Laci's parents and a blood smear from Scott, which authorities said was obtained under a search warrant...
Still, such talk may underestimate John Paul's ability to bounce back, as he did after a 1981 assassination attempt, colon-cancer surgery in 1992 and a broken femur in 1994. The next tests of his health will come outside of Rome. The Pope has scheduled a series of foreign trips in the coming months, including a 10-day visit in late July to Canada, Mexico and Guatemala. If he goes ahead with his travels, John Paul may bring along a wheelchair, a prospect that apparently doesn't shame the first Pope to be photographed in a hospital bed. More...
...GREAT WHITE Scott Yerby never saw the great white shark before it attacked him as he surfed off Clam Beach near Eureka, Calif. "This thing jumped me--it had enough force to lift me right out of the water. It was on my leg, I could see my femur, there was blood in the water--I knew then it was pretty serious," says Yerby, who was 29 at the time of the August 1997 attack. He hit the shark on the nose (the prescribed last-ditch defense, along with ripping at its gills), managed to get back on his board...
Changes also had to take place in the femur, or thighbone. For example, the femoral neck--the bent portion at the top of the bone--is broader in humans than it is in apes, which improves balance. The human knee is specialized for walking upright too: to compensate for the thighbone's being at an angle, there's a lump, or groove, at the end of the femur that prevents the patella from sliding off the joint. "A chimp doesn't have this groove because there is no angulation between the hip and the knee," Lovejoy says. "This change says...