Word: specialization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the great breach finally came, it started undramatically. At a press conference last Thursday, Schabowski announced almost offhandedly that starting at midnight, East Germans would be free to leave at any point along the country's borders, including the crossing points through the Wall in Berlin, without special permission, for a few hours, a day or forever. Word spread rapidly through both parts of the divided city, to the 2 million people in the West and the 1.3 million in the East. At Checkpoint Charlie, in West Berlin's American sector, a crowd gathered well before midnight. Many...
...Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Lethal Weapon 2; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Ghostbusters II. They all aspire to the freedom of form and story that any animated film takes for granted. Problem is, real life gets in the way. Location shooting is at the whim of weather; special effects can look chintzy onscreen. And actors! They cost the moon, and their bodies aren't elastic enough to perform the comic contortions that Daffy Duck can give you with the wave of an animator's pen. So here's a tip for the '90s, Hollywood: junk the live-action...
...YORK CITY. At P.S. 93, a youngster tells teacher Donald Miller, "Melvin has a toy." Since toys are not allowed in the lunchroom, the teacher confronts five-year-old Melvin and demands that he hand it over. Miller suddenly faces not a toy but a "Saturday-night special" pointed at his chest. The gun turns out to be loaded, cocked and ready for action...
Working with microscopic machines presents special challenges to scientists. Not only do they risk inhaling their tools or scattering them with a sneeze, but they also have to cope with a new set of physical laws. The problem of friction, for instance, looms ever larger as parts get smaller. The tiniest dust speck can seem like a boulder. Rotating a hair-width dynamo through air molecules, says AT&T's Gabriel, "is like trying to spin gears in molasses...
They forgot about Mikey, the embryo (and then infant) with star quality. Sassy but never cynical, Mikey is first seen, through some cunningly simple special effects, as a kind of hot-rodding sperm cruising up the Fallopian tube to the tune of the Beach Boys' I Get Around. "The sperm comes on and people go crazy," says Jonathan Krane, the film's producer. "From then on they're laughing at the picture." Not quite. They're laughing with it, in the easy, conspiratorial laughter any domestic comedy would kill...