Word: quirk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...comes word that it might be easier to clone humans than was previously believed. According to research at Duke University, people have a genetic quirk that might prevent some of the developmental deformities associated with animal cloning. "That doesn't mean there aren't other things that could go wrong," says Randy Jirtle, a professor of radiation oncology at Duke and one of the study's authors (who hastens to add that he has no intention to try such cloning). "But humans may be less susceptible to these kinds of [mishaps...
...Still, it came as a shock, flying with the lucky classes at 30,000 feet across twenty-first century America, to hear this strange admission. When Nancy repeated the story to me, I thought the story was funny, but also obscurely dislocating, ominous. I wondered: Is this an individual quirk? Or is it possible that, without our noticing, the previously literate American middle class, which used to be required to slog at least through a little Dickens or Thoreau or even Vonnegut or Morrison in order to get through high school, has deserted books altogether? Or leap-frogged electronically beyond...
...Staff writer Matthew F. Quirk can be reached at quirk@fas.harvard.edu
...Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard of the University of California at San Diego. Their studies take advantage of a perceptual quirk: when an image in the periphery of our visual field is surrounded by similarly shaped and colored images, the brain has trouble registering its presence--even though the eye picks it up. They reported at a meeting of the Vision Sciences Society in Sarasota, Fla., last week that even when synesthetes can't "see" a peripheral image--say a 5 that's "crowded" by 3s--they see the color associated with the digit in question. That suggests that synesthesia...
...Staff writer Matthew F. Quirk...