Word: labs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...made into a PBS series that he narrated through his voice synthesizer (he has ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease). He's best known for devising theories of the Big Bang and black holes based on Einstein's work. We e-mailed Hawking at his Cambridge lab earlier this year to convince him of the importance of explaining Einstein at the end of his century...
...start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth of the germs. His serendipitous discovery would eventually save more lives than were lost in all the century's wars combined...
...crowning glory, perhaps the most beautiful theory in all of science, was the general theory of relativity, published in 1916. Like the special theory, it was based on a thought experiment: imagine being in an enclosed lab accelerating through space. The effects you'd feel would be no different from the experience of gravity. Gravity, he figured, is a warping of space-time. Just as Einstein's earlier work paved the way to harnessing the smallest subatomic forces, the general theory opened up an understanding of the largest of all things, from the formative Big Bang of the universe...
...example, he said, many users keep a list of favorite Internet links--called bookmarks--on their personal machines. But they can't access these bookmarks when they move to a different machine in a computer lab or at a kiosk...
...referred to "a lone British researcher who claimed--somewhat dubiously--that g.m. [genetically modified] potatoes damaged his lab rats." Given the lack of research into the effects of g.m. foods, doesn't it seem odd that the British government would not try to determine whether the g.m. potatoes did or did not damage internal organs and compromise the immune system of rats, if not humans? To me, this is the story. MATTHEW HODGES Cambridge, Mass...