Word: permian
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When students went back to school last week at Permian High in Odessa, Texas, they wondered what had happened to the place over the summer. Gone was their old wide-open campus, now surrounded by a security fence with controlled entry points and clusters of surveillance cameras. Inside the school, they had to wear bar-coded photo-ID badges, and in many classrooms, "black boxes" with mirrored eyes stared implacably down from the walls, above signs that read, IT SHOULD BE ASSUMED THERE IS A CAMERA INSIDE THIS ENCLOSURE RECORDING VIDEO AND AUDIO...
What had happened was that Permian, like thousands of other schools alarmed by recent campus shootings, had responded by clamping down on all sorts of security problems, from fights to theft, vandalism, graffiti and intruders. In an approach not unlike urban police clampdowns of recent years, schools have tried to create a new environment of conspicuous order and security. What school administrators, parents and students worry about most are potential copycat gun crimes, especially after it was revealed last week that T.J. Solomon, 15, accused of shooting six classmates last May in Conyers, Ga., had referred to the Littleton, Colo...
...schools, though, have tightened their security as thoroughly as Permian High. It has formed an alliance with Sandia Labs, based in Albuquerque, N.M., which has three decades of experience in locking down top-secret facilities that manufacture, transport and store nuclear weapons. Sandia started advising schools on security in 1991 after Congress ordered the labs to share the wealth of its technologies. Yet protecting a nuclear facility, says Sandia analyst Mary Green, is in some ways easier than securing a school. "Nuclear weapons usually stay where you put them," she says. "They don't have a lot of civil rights...
...never been equaled. With just one possible exception - the Bryozoa, whose first traces turn up shortly after the Cambrian - there is no record of new phyla emerging later on, not even in the wake of the mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period...
...phyla? Some scientists suggest that the evolutionary barrel still contained plenty of organisms that could quickly diversify and fill all available ecological niches. Others, however, believe that in the surviving organisms, the genetic software that controls early development had become too inflexible to create new life-forms after the Permian extinction. The intricate networks of developmental genes were not so rigid as to forbid elaborate tinkering with details; otherwise, marvels like winged flight and the human brain could never have arisen. But very early on, some developmental biologists believe, the linkages between multiple genes made it difficult to change important...