Word: peculiarities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light forced physicists to conclude that Newton's laws were incomplete, so the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. "What Darwin described in the Origin of Species," observes Queen's University paleontologist Narbonne, "was the steady background kind of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of evolution that functions over extremely short time periods - and that...
Ptashne, the Smith professor of molecular biology, says he doesn't know whether his musical talents help him in his scientific research, but he notes that few scientists have such a "peculiar" lifestyle...
...addition, the legacy of Forbes and Sachs has increased opportunities for curators to author exhibitions and a greater sense of intellectual autonomy regarding their peculiar interests. Unlike large public institutions such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg is not dependent on returns at the door...
Calls for reform have resounded almost as long as there has been a U.N. Little has been accomplished, except in some cases the creation of additional "coordinating layers" of bureaucracy--which should be no surprise, given the U.N.'s peculiar structure and how it grew. None of the specialized agencies is even formally part of the central U.N., the organs (Security Council, General Assembly, Secretariat) created by the 1945 charter. Most, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), were set up later as separate organizations with their own charters, assemblies and staffs. They are tied into a "U.N. system...
...been John Travolta's peculiar fate to personify our desperate hope that a certain modern delinquent type--the grammatically challenged guy wearing tight pants and sporting a duck's-ass haircut--may not be quite as dangerous as he appears to be at first appalled-bourgeois glance. It is what made him a star almost two decades ago in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. And now that he's 41 and finally able to play grownup versions of the punk that was, it is what's making him--after a long season of neglect--a star again...