Word: normalization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What do you feel when you get whacked? In my case, nothing, and I remember nothing, which seems weirder still but is actually normal. Doctors speak of "post-traumatic amnesia," PTA for short, to denote this peculiar whiting out of violent episodes. The other car hit me head on but slightly off center; its impact was concentrated on the driver's side. It then spun off the road, though its occupants too, astonishingly, survived. Under such an impact, bones may not just break; they can explode, like a cookie hit by a hammer, and that's what happened to several...
...damage is unknown. But what made it most frightening was the amount of time that passed before anybody seemed to know just how bad it was or wasn't. At one point, radiation levels a mile or so from the plant were 15,000 times higher than normal for an urban setting; 46 workers were exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation. U.S. and European experts said backup safety measures should have automatically shifted into gear to halt the disaster. But the facility, housed in a bland-looking white five-story building just 60 ft. from the nearest residential housing...
...fast-breeder nuclear power plant. It is where fissionable U-235 is combined with nitric acid to produce uranium dioxide, which is then combined at another plant with plutonium to produce the enriched uranium pellets used as breeder fuel. According to JCO, workers inexplicably mixed far more than the normal amount of uranium--35.2 lbs. instead of 5.2 lbs.--with the acid. Then they used stainless-steel buckets rather than pipes--again, inexplicably--to pour the liquefied uranium into the tank. The high concentration of uranium started the nuclear fission that normally occurs in power reactors. Power plants have equipment...
...already know people who have had their eyes--in that newest of buzz verbs--lasered. Nearly 500,000 Americans are expected to undergo the procedure in 1999--almost double the number in 1998. For 7 out of 10 it worked spectacularly: it corrected their vision to a very normal 20/20. Most of the rest still saw well enough to drive without corrective lenses. By 2010, some surgeons predict, LASIK will have advanced so far that 90% of patients will see better than 20/20. That's impressive for surgery you couldn't get in the U.S. until just four years...
...would be posed when he rushed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to a vote in the Senate last week. And with both sides conceding the treaty lacked the votes to pass, senators were negotiating Wednesday to reschedule next Tuesday's vote. "The White House was confident that given a normal legislative process with weeks of hearings and plenty of advance warning, it could muster the votes to win this one," says TIME White House correspondent Jay Branegan. "On the other hand, Senator Lott knew he could hold the line against the treaty if he caught the White House off guard...