Word: stopping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other into bed in 2025, though one can only hope the pickup lines will be different by then. Now here's the revolutionary (or should I say evolutionary) news: sex will seem a lot less necessary than it does today. Having sex is too much fun for us to stop, but religious convictions aside, it will be more for recreation than procreation. Many human beings, especially those who are rich, vain and ambitious, will be using test tubes--not just to get around infertility and the lack of suitable partners, but to clone themselves and tinker with their genes...
...last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it doesn't seem to work in humans. Researchers are still trying to figure out why not--and how to get around the problem. Another natural substance, called pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC), seems to signal that it's time to stop eating. Mice treated with POMC boosters shed 40% of their excess body weight in just two weeks. Again, it's not clear that this will work in humans, but it's conceivable that POMC therapy--perhaps in shots--could someday be standard...
...undo evolution, and we haven't found a way to fool Mother Nature--yet. But before the 21st century is half over, with the body's fat-centric metabolism laid bare and the ability to manipulate genes part of medicine's standard tool kit, the trend may finally stop. Chubbiness may not disappear, but it could become optional. A future without Richard Simmons' commercials would be a wonderful future indeed...
...greatest weapon against the bugs will always be our mind. Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predicts that in the end, the fight will come down to the same old sleuthing methods that disease hunters have always used to find bugs and stop them. "Shoe-leather epidemiology" is what Koplan calls it. "You wear out your shoes investigating an outbreak," he says. "You go around identifying the source of the disease and figuring out how it's being spread, and then you remove the source. Even if it's Vibram-soled epidemiology...
...figure drops by a pound or two every year. Because swordfish don't breed until the female is five years old and weighs 150 lbs., we're killing and eating the teenagers before they can reproduce. And though the U.S. is trying, at last, to lead a campaign to stop the slaughter, the effort is too little, too late. Swordfish, like tuna and the other pelagic (open-ocean) fish, roam far from American jurisdiction. There have been reliable reports of commercial fishermen in the Mediterranean routinely landing swordfish weighing between 10 and 15 lbs.--the babies, less than a year...