Word: resting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Behind its barred windows sit 28 atomic clocks, four of them holding atoms of hydrogen and the rest cesium. When excited by lasers or irradiated with microwaves, the atoms begin to dance with an utterly regular vibration that's monitored by computer. Once each second, the results are fed into America's Master Clock; the measurements from this and similar clocks around the world are sent to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside Paris--the ultimate timekeeping authority. It is there, next Friday, that the pulsing of billions of atoms will officially signal that civilization's odometer...
...physicists, then, time is an exceedingly complex and slippery concept. No wonder St. Augustine couldn't explain it. But when the month, the year, the century and the millennium end next week, it's a fair bet that theoretical physicists, like the rest of us, will be partying to welcome in the year 2000--whether it really exists...
...research is focusing on biological factors. Studies have shown that identical twins have a dramatically higher chance of sharing ASP than do fraternal twins. Adrian Raine, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has found that the brains of people with ASP look different from those of the rest of the population, with less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates behavior and social judgment. Just last month University of Iowa neurobiologist Antonio Damasio reported findings from a study showing that early brain injuries affect the long-term ability to distinguish between right...
...some reason this is the first thing people want to know when they hear you have met Matt Damon. "He's short, right?" the inquiries come. "How tall is he?" "Is he a Pygmy or what?" He's actually 5 ft. 11 in., but still, the fact that the rest of us are not Matt Damon--have no Oscar, have never kissed Winona Ryder and are not making $7 million a movie--would be no more palatable even if we could put him in the "good-looking but short" box with, say, Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson...
...Downey works as a professional Santa in December and as a Jerry Garcia impersonator the rest of the time (he has a full, tuggable beard). Downey told me that every good professional Santa deals with skeptics by deflection, and I think that's a good idea at home too. When your child asks you pointed questions, ask him what he thinks about the holiday, what he thinks it's really about, and what he likes most about it. If your child presses you on specifics--"How come you and Santa have the same wrapping paper?" is one of my favorites...