Word: sproutings
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...area where all the concert stages and concession stands are. The City of Rock. Actually, it turns out not to be a city at all but a rather ordinary-looking festival site, albeit larger than most. The festival is all about product placement, advertising and naked commerce. Huge billboards sprout up from the walls around the festival, signs for GE and Nextel, Direct TV and Polaroid 'I-Zone' cameras, and one desperately commercial sign in which a brand of Brazilian beer seems to be ejaculating its contents. Outside the walls hundreds of local kids, mostly in their teens, roam about...
...device debate right now is over convergence: Will single-purpose machines prevail, or will new appliances emerge with multiple functions? It's a high-tech version of Lamarckian evolution, in which new characteristics are acquired through demand. You can expect cell phones to sprout color monitors so they can be used to surf the Web, and PDAs to develop telephonic capability. When the convergence is complete, the theory goes, we'll have a single device combining in one small, supersmart package the qualities of a PDA, cell phone and pager--allowing you to schedule, e-mail, call, beep and surf...
These trees reproduce by releasing huge masses of fruit in a synchronized fashion that is designed by nature to overwhelm the appetites of fruit and seedeaters and ensure that there are always some seeds left over to sprout. The strategy, called masting, worked for millions of years. Now, however, the forests in Borneo have been so reduced that humans and animals can consume all the dipterocarp fruit, with the result that no new dipterocarp trees are taking root in the areas studied by Curran and her colleagues. Since a host of creatures ranging from the orangutan to the boar...
...except perhaps the mind of a rebellious teenager--that is stranger than the bright cutting edge of science? We try to wrap our imagination around the radical ideas that modern scientists take for granted, but we're left breathless. Cosmic strings that snap like rubber bands! Parallel universes that sprout like bubbles! Wormholes! Gravity waves! Particles that vibrate not in three or four dimensions...
...serious about protecting yourself and your loved ones against colorectal cancer, it will help to know something about the disease. Nearly all colon cancers start as polyps, tiny grapelike projections that sprout on the inside of the large intestine. Most of the time these growths are benign, but occasionally a collection of cells--through a series of genetic mishaps--will get bigger and bigger until it turns into a tumor. About 25% of these malignant growths are triggered by a genetic predisposition that has been present since birth. The rest of the time, normal genes become damaged with...