Word: flushing
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Space Scientist Carol Stoker, at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, points out that there would be benefits of artificial gravity beyond the physiological ones. "Toilets would flush properly, things wouldn't float in the air, and just think of surgery in zero gravity," she muses. Malcolm Cohen, chief of the neuroscience branch at Ames, worries about the possible physiological effects of rotation. "Weightlessness is the devil we know," he says, "and we have some idea how to overcome its effects. But artificial gravity in space is a devil we don't know well." Still, he concludes...
Mama sits in her humble Guatemalan home and spins tales of a promised land she has seen only in the pages of Good Housekeeping. In America, she tells her daughter Rosa, you will find money, cars, TV, even indoor plumbing. "You flush it, and everything vanishes!" And so in Gregory Nava's 1983 film El Norte, Rosa and her brother Enrique embark on a perilous pilgrimage toward the golden north. When they eventually reach California, they do find honest work and small incomes -- the money dreams can buy. But it is a rasping irony to possess so little when surrounded...
...believe the region would have sufficient water if only profligate cities like Newport Beach, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz., made do with fewer swimming pools and car washes. Rather than match supply to demand by steeply raising water rates, most political leaders merely exhort residents to take shorter showers and flush toilets less often. Los Angeles will soon spend $600,000 broadcasting such bromides...
...baby boomers get much of the attention, because they accounted for half of the record $17.5 billion that was spent last year on things horticultural. Once they have poured all the money they can into their homes, cash-flush yuppies have found that a garden can soak up limitless discretionary income. After seeds and dirt, there are goatskin gloves and Garden Weasels, wide- throated anvil pruners from Rolcut of England, not to mention $15,000 for a Sargent weeping hemlock tree. The yuppies quickly master the rituals and floral lore, swap compost recipes at dinner parties. Mulching has become elevator...
...fear of reprisals back home. Five minutes before curtain, a hush falls over the backstage. They gather for a nightly ritual, heads bent in prayer. Soft voices rise and fall in a Zulu chant. In the corridor, band members stop short and bow their heads. The doorman, a flush-cheeked Irishman, respectfully removes his cap. "I've never seen this kind of dedication," he murmurs...