Word: sharp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last day of Ashura is marked by the spilling of blood. This time, the flails are tipped with razor-sharp blades the shape of elongated hearts. This time, it's public. The penitents march through the streets in orderly rows and pause in front of the shrine. Again the mournful chanting, and the whipping begins, blades flashing in the sun. The air is thick with the metallic edge of fresh blood. It is as much a public spectacle as a demonstration of faith. "Everyone who watches is mourning for Hussein as well," says Ali Hosseini, an 18-year...
...dips in the middle, the way coffee does when it is stirred in a cup. In perfect deference to the laws of physics, the metal's highly reflective surface takes the form of a parabola, the shape of solid mirrors used in conventional telescopes to focus starlight into a sharp image. Says Ermanno Borra, the Laval astrophysicist who built it: "It's a wonderfully simple arrangement...
...pauses before biting into a muffin. "I really shouldn't," he says during a day of campaigning in Scotland. "I'm fat." That's not true, but like many an Englishman who ingested stodgy food at boarding school, David Cameron, 40, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, lacks sharp angles. His telegenic appeal has propelled the Tories to a consistent lead in opinion polls for the first time since Tony Blair's 1997 victory. That has infused Britain's Conservatives with a sensation so unfamiliar, they barely recognize it: optimism. Giddy at this turn of fortune, some are already...
...smaller" than the tracts, ganglia and nuclei of the brain's gross anatomy--but "bigger" than the cells and molecules of the brain's physiology. We really should have bumped into it on the way down. Yet we have not. Like our own image in still water, however sharp, when we reach to grasp it, it just dissolves...
That may overstate the case. Even enthusiasts agree that there are limits to how much mirror neurons can explain. At the same time, says Christian Keysers, scientific director of the neuroimaging center at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, their discovery provides sharp insight into the mechanisms by which humans communicate their innermost desires and feelings. "When you sit in a chair and watch a movie," Keysers observes, "you don't have to think to yourself, 'Now the hero has this expression on his face, so he must be afraid.' Or, 'Now he is smiling, so he must...