Word: grails
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...claim was so spectacular that it was difficult to believe. News reports suggested that scientists might have achieved the world's first controlled, energy-yielding nuclear-fusion reaction -- a Holy Grail of physics for nearly 40 years. Moreover, the event had not occurred in one of the great national laboratories; it was the work of a pair of chemists operating on a shoestring budget and using little more than a test tube, a pencil-thin strip of metal and a car battery. Even more incredible was the assertion that this humble apparatus, fueled with a form of hydrogen found...
Although scientists share many of these concerns, the concept of deciphering the human genome sends most of them into paroxysms of rapture. "It's the Holy Grail of biology," says Harvard biologist and Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert. "This information will usher in the Golden Age of molecular medicine," says Mark Pearson, Du Pont's director of molecular biology. Predicts George Cahill, a vice president at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute: "It's going to tell us everything. Evolution, disease, everything will be based on what's in that magnificent tape called...
...drive to put a U.S. woman on Everest had been something between grail and financing gimmick for at least a decade. Everything -- gender, nationalism, internationalism, ever more dangerous routes, climbing solo and without oxygen, and climbing quickly with little equipment, "Alpine style" -- is a gimmick to Himalayan climbers, whose hobby is absurdly expensive. The most strenuous effort is not on the wind-racked ridges above Camp 4; it is in corporate conference rooms, where idlers with powerful legs try to persuade achievers in powerful suits to pay for their vacations...
...Strategic stability is the holy grail to defense planners," says former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Hopes of achieving national military superiority disappeared in the radioactive clouds over Hiroshima; today nuclear deterrence is built on the shaky assurance that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union could absorb an attack and still devastate its enemy in response. By this logic, a first strike would never be attempted...
...foursomes, the margin of victory will hang on fine points: how well a group conveys the mood and emotion of a song and how precisely its singers blend their four notes to produce a fifth, wholly new harmonic. That high, ringing fifth tone -- the overtone, or "bird" -- is the grail that every barbershop quartet strives...