Word: original
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Khabarovsk itself is a garrison city. Soviet troopers throng the streets, and though it is only 20 miles from the Chinese border, no Soviet citizens of Chinese origin are to be seen. Westerners who have been there say the surrounding terrain is flat and bushy, broken by occasional birch forests. The soil is fertile: travelers describe the Amur River basin, in which Khabarovsk lies, as the "breadbasket of the Soviet Far East." For hundreds of miles, from Vladivostok on north, industry has been built up as well. Across the border, in the Chinese provinces of Heilungkiang and Kirin, industry...
...origin of the constellations of the zodiac is more problematic. Their number, twelve, is obviously an approximation of the number of moon cycles in a year, and the system probably began as a way of measuring time and relating it to agriculture. But how the twelve signs came to be identified with specific creatures (the Greek word zodiakos means "pertaining to animals") is obscure. Only two of the zodiacal signs bear any visible relation to actual arrangements of stars in the sky. One is Gemini (the Twins), which consists of two principal bright stars (Castor and Pollux) of almost equal...
...find in the world's proverbs valuable clues to the history of human intelligence? What is the origin of such familiar advice as "Waste not, want not"? (See BEHAVIOR, "The Wild Flowers of Thought...
Back in England, Milner compared his Samoan stock with the proverbs current in Europe, and was struck by the many similarities in structure, rhythm and content. It was almost as if the proverb shared a common source. Since this was culturally impossible, Milner considered another potential origin: the universality of human thought...
...credits: mind-boggling rearrangements of the solar system have been discussed before; e.g., by Fritz Zwicky at Caltech and Freeman Dyson at Princeton. Regardless, the examination of the Martian moonlets in situ should become a scientific objective of the highest priority; it could be the key to understanding the origin of the solar system and especially of the inner planets...