Word: shock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Healthy disks are like a car's shock absorbers. A soft, gel-like substance in their center, or nucleus, helps cushion the jolts caused by simple movements like running and jumping. But for various reasons, a disk's hard, protective shell can degenerate, allowing the spongy interior to bulge out and press on spinal nerves. This can cause excruciating pain that radiates down the leg in a condition commonly called sciatica...
...these ancient events, Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and Erik Asphaug of the University of California at Santa Cruz re-enacted them in their computers by taking into account such factors as gravity, impact shock, melting and vaporization. They also created models with a finer level of detail than earlier efforts. Finally, after a number of tries, they arrived at a scenario in which an object, the size of Mars but with only one-tenth the Earth's mass, striking at a highly oblique angle, ejected enough debris from itself and our planet's iron...
Towle's bombshell provoked outrage from two directions. To some, it was shocking that a Catholic priest would violate his calling by betraying a penitent. (Towle says Fornes' statement wasn't part of a formal religious confession.) To others, the shock was that a man of God kept silent while two innocent men languished behind bars for a crime they didn't commit...
...course, millions of people in the world have never read a book. Millions of people are illiterate - unable to read anything. 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...
...going to feign shock at the fact that this President is using photo ops in an attempt - some might say a cynical attempt - to influence public opinion. It would be news if he weren't doing just that. But it is worth noting that in the same week that Bush ventured to a pristine piece of the country to help maintain a nature trail and to tout the money he's put in his budget to help restore national parks, the news out of Washington carried a very different message. The Washington Post ran an article about the Bush Administration...