Word: todays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While the purveyors of this voodoo medicine today point with pride to the fact that most U.S. medical schools, influenced by research grants and public opinion, have launched courses in alternative medicine, the result will not be what they expect. Legitimate medical schools--and most of them are--will dispassionately dissect the alternatives and evaluate their effectiveness. In so doing, they will breed new generations of doctors who will urge patients to be skeptical about false claims and bogus science...
...China's economic reforms began putting enough money in people's pockets to enable even peasants like Zhenbing's parents to buy coal. Today coal supplies 73% of China's energy, and there is enough beneath the country to last an additional 300 years at current consumption rates. Plainly, that is good news in one respect. Burning coal has made the Chinese people (somewhat) warm in winter for the first time in their history. But multiply Zhenbing's story by China's huge population, and you understand why 9 of the world's 10 most air-polluted cities are found...
...will increasingly rely on new types of foamed glass that can be made unusually strong but still lightweight. Glass is a very recyclable material made from sand, and it can be crushed back essentially into sand. Ausubel thinks we could see foamed glass replace much of the concrete in today's buildings...
...most casual cruise on the Internet shows how much debate Malthus still stirs today. Basically, the Pollyannas of this world say that Malthus was wrong; the population has continued to grow, economies remain robust--and famines in Biafra and Ethiopia are more aberrations than signs of the future. Cassandras reply that Malthus was right, but techno-fixes have postponed the day of reckoning. There are now 6 billion people on Earth. The Pollyannas say the more the merrier; the Cassandras say that is already twice as many as can be supported in middle-class comfort, and the world is running...
...nature. For it is how humans fit into the natural world that will settle whether Malthus was right or wrong. He was wrong in 1798. But if he had been writing 10,000 years earlier, before agriculture, he would have been right. And were his book being published today, on the brink of the third millennium, he would be more right than wrong. Let me explain...