Word: social
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...Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae, Pembrey's paper, now considered seminal in epigenetic theory, was contentious at the time; major journals had rejected it. Although he is a committed Darwinist, Pembrey used the paper - a review of available epigenetic science - to speculate beyond Darwin: What if the environmental pressures and social changes of the industrial age had become so powerful that evolution had begun to demand that our genes respond faster? What if our DNA now had to react not over many generations and millions of years but, as Pembrey wrote, within "a few, or moderate number, of generations...
Fermi Wong had her moment of revelation one day in 1998. The social worker was roving the streets of a working-class neighborhood in Hong Kong's Kowloon district, looking out for truant youth, when she came across a gaggle of Pakistani kids playing soccer. They ran and tackled each other along the edge of a pavement, in view of an unoccupied public field equipped with proper goals. Bemused, Wong asked them why they weren't using the actual soccer pitch, which was open to all. "People told us we're not allowed there," came the response...
...have ties to the city that predate the Chinese majority.) It's an apathy that has led to hiring practices in the city that discriminate against minorities as well as a public school system that has neglected a generation of poor non-Chinese. Even many of Wong's social-worker colleagues are bewildered by her interest in defending the rights of South Asians over improving the lot of fellow Chinese. "There is no empathy here," she says. Watch TIME's video "Hong Kong Parkour...
...Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Brunei Town, John Wilson, better known as the English novelist Anthony Burgess, nearly lost his mind. The tropical climes nagged him as much as his wife Lynne, whose zany behavior, like cursing out the Duke of Edinburgh, had turned them both into social pariahs. Add to that a bottle-of-gin-a-day drinking habit, and Burgess was pretty much pickled by September 1959, when an agreement was signed granting internal self-governance to Brunei, then a British protectorate. That month, Burgess one day crumpled like the empire around him onto the floor...
...womb - to effects on health and behavior later on, such as an increased risk of heart disease or becoming addicted to drugs. Scientists are finding that such effects are not only long-lasting, but can even be inherited by future generations. (Watch a video about obesity and social networks...