Word: variant
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...toxicity of the substances they ingested in the hope of shedding offending kilograms. From differing ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds and ranging in age from 16 to 60, the women had one thing in common: like De Cruz, they were all taking Chinese-made diet pills containing a variant of fenfluramine, an appetite suppressant that has been banned in the U.S. since 1997 for damaging heart valves. Doctors and health officials in Asia now believe the newer compound, called N-nitroso fenfluramine, can cause liver failure...
Shower stalls are particularly suspect. Some doctors believe that mycobacteria from the pipes are becoming aerosolized in water spray. The more enclosed a shower stall, the greater the buildup of germ-infested spray. (A variant of the illness--sometimes called hot-tub lung--occurs when people develop an allergic reaction to the mycobacteria in indoor hot tubs.) Making matters worse, says Dr. Michael Iseman of National Jewish, "we have changed the way we treat our water." Since the 1970s, the temperature of most hot-water heaters has been reduced to 120[degrees] to save energy and prevent scalding--perfect conditions...
...however, British psychiatrist Dr. Lorna Wing published an influential paper that revived interest in Asperger's work. The disorder Asperger identified, Wing observed, appeared in many ways to be a variant of Kanner's autism, so that the commonalities seemed as important as the differences. As a result, researchers now believe that Asperger and Kanner were describing two faces of a highly complicated and variable disorder, one that has its source in the kaleidoscope of traits encoded in the human genome. Researchers also recognize that severe autism is not always accompanied by compensatory intellectual gifts and is, in fact...
Nicholi’s premise is that all human beings endorse one variant or another of these thinkers’ “worldviews” and that our entire approach to life stems from our belief or disbelief in an all-powerful Creator. We may not have time to fully grapple with all these philosophical issues, though they rest somewhere in our minds. But by bringing out a discourse between two men, Nicholi hopes to present insight and evidence that might change or at least help define our own weltanschauung...
...film is seethingly bitter at its core. The setting is a young-yakuza breeding ground where everybody wants to join someone else's gang or start his own. Boys kill each other at school. Authority is a distant rumor. The boys' only respite comes through playing a heart-stopping variant on the game of chicken: they stand at ledges 30 meters above the concrete and see how many times they can clap their hands before grabbing at the railings to keep from falling...