Word: germanically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...your mind does indeed grow more agile as you age, one of the things that may help it do so is the amount of glue you carry around in your brain--glia (Greek for glue) being what the 19th century German anatomists called it. Only about half the mass of the brain is composed of gray matter, or nerve cells; the rest is white matter, the connecting tissue that, in a sense, glues it all together. Much of that white matter is made of conductive nerve strands, and covering each fine wire is a fatty sheath of myelin that keeps...
...lenses in the Hubble telescope, which was already in orbit. An expert in optics suggested that tiny inversely distorted mirrors could correct the images, but nobody could figure out how to fit them into the hard-to-reach space inside. Then engineer Jim Crocker, taking a shower in a German hotel, noticed the European-style showerhead mounted on adjustable rods. He realized the Hubble's little mirrors could be extended into the telescope by mounting them on similar folding arms. And this flash was the key to fixing the problem...
...down. Chances are you'll hear it a lot in the future. A marriage of the Greek words noos, for "mind," and tropein, for "toward," it refers to drugs that enhance mental performance?popularly known as smart drugs. Nootropes aren't new. Amphetamines, first synthesized by a German chemist in 1887 and used in over-the-counter inhalers by the 1920s, were doled out generously during World War II to Allied and German troops to keep them alert. Military pilots still take dextroamphetamine, or go pills, to stay in fighting form on long missions. But in the post-Viagra...
...DIED. URBANO LAZZARO, 81, Italian Communist resistance fighter credited with arresting Mussolini as the Fascist dictator tried to flee Italy in the final days of World War II; in Vercelli, Italy. As the Nazis retreated in April 1945, Lazzaro spotted Mussolini disguised as a German soldier in a convoy that he and fellow partisan fighters had stopped on a road near the village of Dongo. Mussolini was executed the next...
...asking: Are we being too cautious?" It remains to be seen whether this round of dealmaking will be more successful than the last one, when many firms got caught up in merger frenzy and ended up overpaying for sometimes dubious assets. Several of Europe's biggest companies succumbed, including German automaker DaimlerChrysler, which only recently unwound a costly investment in Japan's Mitsubishi Motors, and France's Vivendi Universal, which briefly teetered close to bankruptcy in 2002 after a huge acquisition binge by its former ceo Jean-Marie Messier. Morgan Stanley's Pereira contends that the latest activity is fundamentally...