Word: leapings
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Their extreme sport is called BASE jumping, whose acronymic name derives from the four types of structures that its unusual athletes leap from--buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). Equipped with rectangular canopy chutes, toggles for steering, a knowledge of which way the wind is blowing, no reserve chutes (as compared with skydivers) and a special arrangement of brain cells, participants jump to conclusions from great and forbidden heights, or from little ones where a chute has little time to open. Until they release their chutes, they fall at 60 m.p.h. The end is often unsatisfactory...
...last week when Thor Axel Kappfjell, 32, known by the oxymoron Human Fly, leaped from a 3,300-ft. cliff in his native Norway in a fog, was flung back by an ill wind onto the cliff's face and was killed. His death came 15 years after that of Carl Boenish, one of four people who invented BASE jumping in 1980; Boenish also died in a leap from a Norwegian cliff. Before one begins to hatch a Scandinavian-unhappiness theory to explain all this, it should be pointed out that BASE jumpers have died all over the world...
...unappreciated by the gaping public. Kappfjell, New Yorkers may recall, accomplished the sport's trifecta by jumping off the Empire State and Chrysler buildings last October, and he achieved a personal high last March when he jumped 110 floors from the top of the World Trade Center. (The unlawful leap irritated New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and for that alone was deemed worthwhile by the citizens.) People seem to take pleasure in BASE jumping in the same way, I suppose, that Romans liked watching gladiators. The potential opportunity to observe a fellow human die at a moment of wild...
What got lost in the enthusiasm was a sense of how difficult it is to make the leap from mice to men--especially in this case. For starters, mice don't get Alzheimer's disease. The rodents in these experiments were genetically engineered to produce amyloid plaques, but they don't exhibit any of the other telltale signs of Alzheimer's. Indeed, scientists aren't sure whether plaques are a cause or an effect of the disease. A vaccine that removes plaques in mice could still fail to treat the underlying disease in people...
...going to get their hands on some of the features Microsoft has up till now reserved for the computer elite. According to a report by PC Week Online, Microsoft will develop one more version of Windows based on the original Windows 95 software, then it plans to make the leap to a version based on Windows NT, the faster, stabler operation system Microsoft created to allow businesses and power users to run mission-critical applications more efficiently and reliably...