Word: finger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When most physicians got their training, they were taught that the adult brain is rigid, that its nerve cells, or neurons, could never regenerate themselves. If you nick your finger with a knife, the cut will heal in a few days because your skin has the ability to generate new cells. But when something bad happens to the brain, it doesn't repair itself. Why's that? "The brain is not plastic," says Snyder. "It doesn't make new cells. You are born with more brain cells than you need, and you lose them progressively and get dumber and dumber...
From about 2.5 million B.C. to, say, 100 years ago, the system worked fine. Only a tiny percentage of humans had unlimited access to food and no need to lift a finger on their own behalf. What happened to them? Picture Henry VIII. But over the past century or so, most Americans have been living like kings. Thanks to increasingly high-tech farming methods, the fatty foods we crave have become plentiful and cheap in the U.S. and other developed nations. At the same time (thanks again to technology), physical exertion is no longer a part of most people...
...planet as a whole. China has become the world's second largest producer of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and it will be No. 1 by 2020 if it triples coal consumption as planned. But the U.S., the other environmental superpower, has no right to point a finger. Americans lead the world in greenhouse-gas production, mainly because of their ever tightening addiction to the car, the source of almost 40% of U.S. emissions...
...many of whom are demoted to ornamental, cardboard cut-out status in the three-hour world of the theatre. There's Amos Force (Keith Perry), the conservative Yankee who will do whatever it takes to see the Irish mayor lose; Francis Jr. (John P. Arnold), the mayor's playboy, finger-snapping son; obsequious, bumbling Ditto (Paul Kerry), the mayor's would-be right-hand man, and so on, and so on. Though there is some fine acting in the mix, none of these characters is on stage long enough to provide more than a suggestion of local color. Indeed, since...
...first some background. Willis might be America's most musically unsophisticated rock musician. By punching a single pre-programmed rock track on his Tecnics H-100 keyboard and then changing chords with one finger, he sets up background noise for his uniformly structured songs, of which he has written at least 700. He's released 20 or 30 albums since 1994, most of them self-produced, though some appear on Jello Biafra's record label, Alternative Tentacles...