Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sport has always been one of the primary means of civilizing the human animal, of inculcating the character traits a society desires. Wellington in his famous aphorism insisted that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. The lessons learned on the playing field are among the most basic: the setting of goals and joining with others to achieve them; an understanding of and respect for rules; the persistence to hone ability into skill, prowess into perfection. In games, children learn that success is possible and that failure can be overcome. Championships...
...research physiologist at the University of California's Institute of Environmental Stress, found that prepubertal girls are precisely the same as boys in cardio-respiratory (heart-lung) endurance capacity. Parents who worry about their young daughters overtaxing tender hearts while turning a fast 440 should realize that the human machine is designed to shut down -through leg cramps, side stitches, and dizziness-if the strain is too severe...
Lying astride the equator in the Pacific Ocean some 600 miles off the coast of South America, the Galápagos Islands are a fabled natural wonderland-of giant tortoises, dragonlike iguanas and birds so fearless that they ignore the approach of a human. Old Spanish explorers called them Las Islas Encantadas (the bewitched or enchanted islands). It was here, among the exotic flora and fauna of the isolated islands, notably their startlingly varied finches, that the young Charles Darwin found the key evidence for his theory of evolution. Yet these unique biological enclaves, long despoiled by pirates and passing...
Other creatures on the islands do not always take so kindly to human intrusion. When we moved toward a well-worn rock that had long ago been staked out by sea lions, a huge bull came huffing toward us and made it all too plain that he wanted us off his favorite perch. Our retreat was a prudent move; a few weeks earlier, a German tourist who insisted on holding his ground lost a leg to another enraged bull. The visitors can also inflict damage, even when they have the best of intentions. Biologists on Santa Cruz...
Doctors play a guessing game about which drugs to use in combatting cancer. One problem is human individuality-what helps one person may fail to help another. In the search for the proper medicine, doctors must often subject a patient to a sequence of powerful drugs, many of which turn out to be ineffective against the malignant cells. Now a simple technique promises a means of testing the effectiveness of drugs in a specific case of cancer-without having to administer them to the patient...