Word: proved
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...suicidal scorpions; when surrounded by flames, they will sting themselves in the back. In the early 1880s in Britain, a debate on the topic blossomed after a London zoologist placed a scorpion in a glass container, administered chloroform and claimed he observed the animal trying to sting itself. To prove him wrong, the psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan set up a series of traps for the critters. "He surrounded them with fire, condensed sunbeams on their backs, heated them in a bottle, burned them with phosphoric acid, treated them with electric shocks and subjected them to 'general and exasperating courses...
...concocting cruel experiments to prove far-fetched points, both then and now, has its critics. "I think often our conversations about animals tend to go to these weird extremes and act to conceal what we are doing to them every day," says Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new book, Eating Animals, relates his attempt to understand how animals become food. "Should we swat flies, is it possible that plants like it when we play classical music, can dogs commit suicide - all of these things may be interesting, but they have nothing to do with how we regularly interact with animals...
Bottom line: A 96-team tournament would prove too unwieldy. "If it's really just about the kids, don't stop at 96," says ESPN analyst Jay Bilas, who played at Duke in the mid-1980s. "Let all 3,400 Division 1 teams in." (There are 347 basketball teams in Division 1.) Bilas believes a diluted tournament would ultimately inflict long-term harm to college basketball. "I just think there aren't 96 good basketball teams," he says. "And so what we're essentially saying is that we're going to allow 32 more teams who we think are just...
...course, the color revolutions - orange in Ukraine or rose in Georgia - prove that Thailand is not the only country that mixes politics and pigments. But no other nation is quite as rigid about color schemes. In the U.S., Democrats may be associated with blue, but that didn't stop Barack Obama from wearing a red tie on Inauguration Day. (Outgoing President George W. Bush chose a blue tie for the occasion.) (Read "Amid Massive Protests, Thai PM Won't Step Down...
...leaders to compromise. Plenty don't think they are up to the task. "They are going to push us back to civil war," says Daha Arwai, the head of a charity that looks after the children and widows of men murdered by militias. Will Iraq's leaders prove her wrong? Joe Biden is convinced they will - but then, the Vice President is one of life's sunny optimists. Most others, watching Iraq, have their fingers very firmly crossed...