Word: relaying
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Your opinion of the Olympic-torch relay - which kicked off Oct. 22 with a traditional flame-lighting ceremony in Greece - is likely to reflect your opinion of the Olympics themselves. If international cooperation and glory keep you misty-eyed from the opening ceremony through the last television montage, then you'll love the heady symbolism of the torch relay, a "journey of harmony" in which a succession of runners transports a flame lit by the sun's rays from the Games' ancient birthplace to the host site - in 2010, that's Vancouver - over...
...other hand, if you think the competition has been buried under layers of scandal and crass commercialism, you may have never been a fan of the torch relay - and you might be incensed to learn that its roots lie in Nazi Germany. Carl Diem, the secretary-general of the 1936 Berlin Games, pitched the event as a way to infuse the Games with pageantry and buff the mythic image of the Third Reich. That year, on its way from Greece to Germany, the flame passed through Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia - all of which...
...wake of World War II, the relay took on more peaceful overtones. For the 1948 Summer Games in London, the relay's first runner, a Greek army corporal, symbolically removed his military uniform before setting off. Four years later, the first torch relay for Oslo's Winter Olympics started in Morgedal, Norway, the birthplace of skiing pioneer Sondre Norheim. That relay also featured the torch's first trip in an airplane. (For the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, the torch got an upgrade, flying from Athens to Paris on the famed Concorde...
Surely, being an athlete both helps and hurts in this regard. What they all share, though, is a heightened appreciation for their specialties during challenging and busy times, most notably when they must relay the values that sports have taught them to others. When times are hard, morale is high...
...other hand, the discovery of PICALM came as a bit of a surprise. That gene's activity affects the junction between nerve cells, where various neurochemicals work to relay signals from one nerve cell to another. While most of the research attention in Alzheimer's has been on the build up of amyloid protein and tau tangles that strangle nerve function, the identification of PICALM suggests that some part of the disease may have to do with a breakdown in nerve-cell communication at the junctures. "If you had given people a list of genes and said which ones were...