Word: research
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...goal would be hard to meet. He estimated that as many as 6 of every 10 students would flunk if they had to advance on merit. Zacarias wanted to spend $140 million in the first year alone to help these kids. Why so much? Because a mountain of research shows that ending social promotion doesn't work if it just means more Fs. Kids who are simply forced to repeat grades over and over usually don't improve academically and often drop out. Zacarias wanted more tutoring, summer school and intensive-learning classes. Unqualified students wouldn't rise...
...offering lessons in infant cello or pint-size French horn? Dr. Kyle Pruett, who is a professor at the Child Study Center at Yale, a musician and the father of a nine-month-old, told me that even if we are born with perfect pitch, there is still no research showing that we can do anything to retain it. Formal musical training that comes too early can frustrate parents and "won't make much of a difference, musically," to a baby. Perfect pitch is a cool party trick, but it doesn't necessarily correlate with musical talent. Many professional musicians...
...this era of big science, most of the research on the 1918 virus has been done on shoestring budgets by determined individuals. Kolata celebrates the obscure scientists who did the scut work, which included collecting tissue samples from bodies moldering in permafrost for eight decades. Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington didn't have to go far. While searching through the institute's museum of diseased body parts ("a Library of Congress of the Dead," says Kolata), Taubenberger found a lung scrap from an Army private who died on Sept...
...next century, and we are already seeing heat waves, melting polar ice and rising seas. Local impact remains unpredictable: some areas could suffer stronger storms and other places severe drought. Seven environmental groups--Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund--have put together a world map showing "early-warning signs" of global warming. Reviewed by a team of scientists, the signs fall into two categories: direct manifestations of warming, called fingerprints, and events that could become more frequent and widespread with climate...
Hooper re-creates the early days of polio-vaccine research and weaves this narrative into the story of HIV's origins, which is pretty solid until it hits Africa. HIV can be traced back to bustling villages along the Congo River in the 1950s. From there, however, the story line frays into dozens of related but possibly unconnected threads. Hooper picks up several of these, including, tantalizingly, the fact that the earliest recorded AIDS cases coincide almost perfectly with a map of the polio-vaccine testing sites. But there is no evidence that cells from African chimps were used...