Word: gifts
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...rational animal, Aristotle declared, but experiments have demonstrated that reason is not a gift of our species alone. Last December, researchers reported that monkeys were almost as good as college students at arithmetic (at least when the arithmetic involved adding dots on a screen). And our rationality is not a smooth machinelike intelligence but a complicated landscape of strengths and weaknesses. We're good at solving reasoning problems if they're presented as social puzzles. We don't do as well if the same problems are expressed in the abstract language of logic. A number of researchers argue that...
Another species of bird, the scrub jay, has challenged our supposedly unique gift of foresight. Scrub jays like to store food, and they remember thousands of different hiding places. Studies have shown that they make a special point of tucking food away when they expect they'll need it the next day. What makes the time-traveling and toolmaking of birds all the more impressive is that, unlike apes and monkeys, they don't share a close evolutionary history with us. They evolved these supposedly human features on a line parallel to the one we traveled--essentially developing the skills...
University President Drew G. Faust received the gift at an open meeting of the Undergraduate Council last night, where she fielded questions for over an hour as part of an ongoing effort to be visible to undergraduates...
...Soul-Searching Romney should have seen both losses coming. No matter how little money or press Huckabee received, he was tailored from the get-go to appeal to Iowa caucuses. They like down-to-earth, Bible-reading, unflashy dark horses: just ask Jimmy Carter. Huckabee's populism and gift for campaigning made him an irresistible choice for Iowa Republicans, and he brought remarkable numbers of Evangelicals out to vote. And when the crotchety, conservative New Hampshire Union Leader joined the elbow-patch-liberal Concord Monitor in endorsing McCain, Romney was on notice that his mansion on a New Hampshire lakefront...
...edokko, the natives of Tokyo, have a special gift: an ability to push the envelope, to innovate, to pioneer. That was certainly true of Shu Uemura, who went from being the only man in his Tokyo beauty school class to Hollywood makeup legend to international entrepreneur. In convention-worshiping Japan, he defied convention - and made his name and fortune by doing...