Word: kins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After performing post-mortems on the carcasses (which had carefully been preserved for further study), Jones and his colleagues learned that 20 of the birds had excessively high concentrations of dieldrin, a chemical kin of DDT, in their livers and brains. But use of the lethal insecticide is sharply restricted in Britain, as it is in the U.S. and other countries. So how did the owls pick up the poison...
Foster kids need their real kin...
Though loving foster parents may seem to make up for the missing biological kin, Fanshel and Shinn explain, "on a deeper level, the abandonment by natural parents can impose a profound sense of loss, and the child's ease with himself can be markedly impaired." The authors concede that children who stay in foster care a long time have difficulty coping with a double set of parents. For this reason, some experts have recommended that foster parents be allowed to bar visits by real parents. But, warn Fanshel and Shinn, a "cavalier readiness" to drum natural parents...
While these ancient footprints shed fresh light on our nearer ancestors, Anthropologist Elwyn Simons, director of Duke University's primate center, revealed new findings on more distant kin. Most scientists agree that both man and ape descended from a common ancestor, a beast called Dryopithecus (meaning tree ape), which appeared in Africa some 20 million years ago. But who, or what, preceded it? As far back as 1963, Simons, then at Yale, began uncovering in the wind-scoured Fayum desert region, southwest of Cairo, bones of a likely candidate: a small, fox-sized, tree-inhabiting primate, which he dubbed Aegyptopithecus...
Each detective mauls each culprit. Simon takes it with world-weary stoicism, his eyes like stagnant pools. Jimmy cries like an abused child. Eventually, the tortured and the torturers seem more like kin than enemies. Playwright Babe skillfully evokes their dawning camaraderie. Where he goes wrong is in tagging on the murky moral that all men are brothers or, perhaps, unisexual...