Word: plummet
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What Seiden and others claim is that the FDA glossed over evidence that both Redux and the older drug fenfluramine cause significant brain damage in laboratory animals, from mice to baboons. The problem, they say, is that after the drugs are withdrawn, serotonin levels plummet and stay low for weeks at least. The effect is similar to one caused by the recreational drug Ecstasy, a distant chemical cousin of the fenfluramine family, and the cause is evidently the same: neurotoxicity, or more plainly, the killing of brain cells. An overdose of Redux makes the neurons that produce serotonin swell, then...
...bomb or, less likely, by a missile attack. If in fact TWA Flight 800 fell under its own weight because of metal fatigue or faulty engineering, then my father has it right: you'd be crazy ever to fly again. But this seems unlikely. 747s don't just plummet into the sea in a ball of flame because of technical flaws. Aviation is not a perfect science, but almost all crashes are attributable to some problem not intrinsic to the airplane...
...when they're already well on the way down, but when they're still in the air. It seems silly to intervene only at the latest possible stage; sure, it may prevent actual suicides, absolving Harvard of guilt, but it will not spare students the terror of the plummet...
...outlet for the billions of dollars they earn from their exports, buy heavily in U.S. Treasury bills. By virtue of the trade deficit, Japan's holdings of U.S. Treasuries are huge. If Japan ever started selling those bonds, U.S. interest rates would rise and the stock market would plummet. As a Japanese official put it, "Japan can pull the trigger on U.S. financial markets." But Japan would hurt itself in the process. The rise in rates and the drop of the U.S. dollar would make it more difficult for the U.S. to pay its debts, and for its consumers...
With these abysmal odds, a man clearly needs every last sperm cell he's got. Any fewer than 20 million or so per ml of semen--40 million to 120 million in a typical ejaculation--and his chances of fathering a child begin to plummet. That's why doctors are so concerned about a trend they have noticed over the past few years. In study after study, sperm counts in men the world over seem to be dropping precipitously...