Word: partings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...colleague at Harvard Medical School who had engineered a strain of mouse whose neurons died off in a tiny region of the cortex where cells were not known to regenerate. Snyder injected the stem cells into the mice. Like heat-seeking missiles, the cells rapidly sought out the injured part of the cortex and transformed themselves into healthy neurons. "That's the beauty of stem cells," says Snyder. "You don't have to find the injury--the stem cells do it for you. They instinctively home in on the damage even from great distances." In another experiment, Snyder used stem...
Such are the dreams of the nanotechnologists, engineers at places like M.I.T., Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon, who are already redefining the meaning of the word miniature. The prefix nano- refers to a billionth part of a unit--the size range these visionaries are talking about. Already, nanotechnologists have built gears and rotors far thinner than a human hair and tiny molecular "motors" only 50 atoms long...
...problem is, the "cure" for cancer is not going to show up anytime soon--almost certainly not in the next decade. In fact, there may never be a single cure, one drug that will bring every cancer patient back to glowing good health, in part because every type of cancer, from brain to breast to bowel, is different...
...against several million years of human evolution. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors literally didn't know where their next meal was coming from. So evolution favored those who craved energy-rich, fatty foods--and whose metabolism stored excess calories against times of famine. Love handles, potbellies, thick thighs are all part of Mother Nature's grand design...
...past century or so, most Americans have been living like kings. Thanks to increasingly high-tech farming methods, the fatty foods we crave have become plentiful and cheap in the U.S. and other developed nations. At the same time (thanks again to technology), physical exertion is no longer a part of most people's lives; most of us have to drag ourselves away from our computer or TV to burn off the excess calories. The result is inevitable. In 1950 one-quarter of Americans were classified as overweight; today half...