Word: idea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...researchers Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan adapt an earlier idea for dispersing liquids and powders in a spray. Result: the aerosol...
...goal was truly in sight, and who got there first was largely a matter of speed--Salk's forte--and luck. "Salk was strictly a kitchen chemist," Sabin used to gripe. "He never had an original idea in his life." But imaginative people perennially underrate efficient ones, and at the time, the kitchen chemist--who prepared his vaccine by marinating the virus in formalin--was just what the doctor ordered...
...this Swiss-born psychiatrist, death was medicine's dirty secret. American doctors, she learned early on, rarely discussed the subject with the terminally ill, and the idea of administering pain killers or letting patients die at home or with their families around them was almost unheard of. Determined to overthrow this taboo, she interviewed hundreds of dying patients, sometimes in the presence of startled medical students. Her best-selling 1969 book, On Death and Dying, detailed her now popularly accepted conclusions. The dying, she wrote, go through five psychological stages: denial ("No, it won't happen"), anger ("Why me?"), bargaining...
...idea that a comet or asteroid might be bearing down on Earth--as in Deep Impact and Armageddon--can be traced to this crusading geologist. Probing Arizona's Meteor Crater in 1956, Shoemaker found a form of quartz that is created only by tremendous impacts. Finding the same telltale mineral in other craters, he concluded that they had been formed not by volcanoes, as most scientists thought, but by large objects hitting Earth. It was only a matter of time, he said, before Earth would be struck again. So he launched the first organized search for big incoming objects, recruiting...
...must we enter the new century in a state of ignorance? There is no shame in that. All previous centuries have been justly proud of their achievements, yet those have been found, in retrospect, to be deficient. We must learn to be patient. We should also discard the idea that scientific inquiry will ever be complete. What we know so far is that each question answered merely spawns another. Why should it not be like that for the rest of time...