Word: phenomena
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When New York Correspondent Mary Cronin began her reporting for this week's cover story on New Age phenomena, she was momentarily dismayed to learn that some of her most important sources were called channelers, the advisers who link disciples of the movement to a spiritual core of the universe. "I had recently returned from nearly six years in London," she says. "And I wondered what these people had to do with the English Channel." But Cronin was soon immersed in sessions with a jolly Manhattan channeler named Bob Johnson, who served as her conduit for a wide-ranging, exclusive...
Though Groothuis is now writing a second book, Confronting the New Age, about the movement's inroads into business and education, it is probably wise to remember that phenomena like the New Age have to some extent been a part of the American scene ever since there was an American scene. Remember the 18th century Shaker leader, Mother Ann Lee, whose followers believed she represented the second coming of Christ. Remember Mary Baker Eddy, severely injured by a fall on the ice, who became cured while reading a passage in St. Matthew and thereafter taught the unreality of all physical...
...changes from the past. Eighteen thousand years ago, there was a massive continental ice sheet. Given the conditions that we know existed, can we reproduce accurately the distribution of sea-surface temperatures then? The answer is, We can do this very well. It gives you some confidence." Large-scale phenomena can be modeled more easily than those affecting small areas. So when it comes to the global warming produced by the greenhouse effect, for example, the outlines are predictable but the specifics are not. Says Manabe: "All we can say is that maybe the mid-continental U.S. becomes dryer...
Models can also describe the effects of climatic phenomena that have never been seen. In 1983 a group of scientists that included Cornell's Carl Sagan calculated what would happen if the U.S. and the Soviet Union fought a nuclear war. Their conclusion: the dust and smoke from burning cities would blot out enough sunlight to plunge the land into a "nuclear winter" that would devastate crops and lead to widespread starvation...
HAIR FROM shortly after we are born until shortly after we die, we all must deal with the constant growth of one of nature's most wonderful and perplexing phenomena. For most of us the periodic cutting of the hair is a ritual, less pleasant than going to a ballgame but more fun than seeing the dentist...