Word: preciousness
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Ford is well aware that there is precious little hard evidence to date that being green brings in greenbacks. And sustainability will absolutely require profitability. "Can we do this and make money? We have to," challenges Ford. "Has it ever been done? No. But it hasn't been tried either...
...Alzheimer's turn. Precious little is known about this terrible illness, which threatens to strike some 14 million Americans by 2050. Its precise cause is still largely mysterious, and effective treatments are still years away. But epidemiologists are beginning to get a handle on what kinds of people are most seriously ravaged by Alzheimer's--and, conversely, which people tend to escape relatively unscathed...
Because the records were relatively standardized, Snowdon could extend his study of aging far beyond the few years in late life that such studies traditionally cover. Most precious of all were the autobiographies written by each sister on her entry into the order. They were full of basic information about where the sisters were born, who their parents and siblings were, and why each one decided to join the order. With these documents, moreover, Snowdon now had an objective measure of the sisters' cognitive abilities while they were still young and in their prime. An epidemiologist could not have designed...
...crops and their livestock before them - or move on as environmental refugees. In Canada - which has about the same amount of water as China but less than 2.5% of its population - the resource has been labeled "blue gold." In parched Botswana, dominated by the Kalahari Desert, water is so precious that the national currency is called pula - "rain" in the Setswana language...
These scenes aren't necessarily just slices of life. Sometimes they are suffused with symbolic references. A case in point is the exquisite Woman with a Balance, circa 1663-64. A young and beautiful housewife stands at a table on which are scattered her more precious worldly goods--strings of pearls (including a rare set of "black" pearls, which are actually gunmetal gray), gold and silver coins, and boxes that presumably contain more small treasures. She gazes with rapt attention at a jeweler's balance, which has nothing in either scale; she is checking that the empty balance hangs level...