Word: swollenness
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There was a little hyperbole in the President's remarks, but only a little. In the past several years NASA has been quietly reinventing itself. The slow and swollen agency that grew so fat in the post-Apollo years has been painstakingly downsizing itself to something approaching the agency it was first designed to be when it was founded in the late 1950s: a crew of garage engineers cobbling spacecraft from simple parts and getting the job done both on budget and on deadline...
...cage attached to the good ship Reel Lady, Maroney crawled 112 miles in 24 1/2 hours. In the wee small hours she hallucinated, seeing monkeys in the water. And to distract herself from the hammerhead sharks cruising by, she mentally replayed Seinfeld episodes. Upon arrival in Florida, her tongue swollen from salt water, her skin tattooed with jellyfish stings, she said, "So many times you think, 'I just don't want to keep going.'" Then she passed out cold. Later Maroney announced plans to swim some 140 miles from Cuba to Mexico. Good thing Seinfeld is back next season...
...time when nobody believed Oliver, but when Weil heard the story, he didn't doubt it for a minute. At the time of his cure, Oliver was 64 years old and had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis since he was in his 30s. His hands were so swollen that he had given up trying to find gloves to fit them. His shoes were two sizes larger than they used to be and seemed to be growing each year. He took up to a dozen different pain relievers every day, though few actually relieved his pain...
...evening Oliver was putting on a pair of pajamas that had been dried on the backyard line when he felt a sharp pain in his left knee. He slapped at the spot, shook his pajama leg and out tumbled a bee. The next day Oliver's knee was tender, swollen and hot with venom. After another day or two, a curious thing happened: as the pain from the sting subsided, the ache from the arthritis in that knee began to diminish as well. A few weeks later, the swelling in all of Oliver's joints was gone. A short while...
Then, in the mid-'70s, federal funding abruptly slowed and had to be spread among the swollen ranks of professors bearing Ph.D.s earned at Penn and other schools during the boom years. The government, moreover, began distributing its money among a wider range of schools and insisting that institutions pick up more of the costs of research. And inflation began to accelerate. Even before the oil crisis of the late '70s, energy costs began climbing. From 1969 to 1975, Penn's heat and electricity costs rose nearly 300% while its income from investments declined and the growth of funding from...