Word: whiffs
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...just this whiff of quackery that made vitamins a research backwater for years. Most reputable scientists steered clear, viewing the field as fringe medicine awash with kooks and fanatics. A researcher who showed interest could lose respect and funding. Certainly Linus Pauling lost much of his Nobel-laureate luster when he began championing vitamin C back in 1970 as a panacea for everything from the common cold to cancer. Drug companies too have been leery of committing substantial energy and money to studies, since the payoff is relatively small: vitamin chemical formulas are in the public domain and cannot...
Since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958 and cut short 14 years of political chaos, France has been a model of governmental stability. But last week brought back a strong whiff of the Fourth Republic atmosphere of clashing factions and evanescent coalitions. In elections for 22 regional councils throughout the country, voters dealt a stiff blow to the entire political establishment and catapulted fringe movements and personalities into new prominence; in many councils they will cast the deciding votes. The balloting has no direct effect on the national government; France is a highly centralized country in which...
...sights -- through a network of nerve cells to different areas of the brain. "It's a whole cascade of processes, physiological and chemical, that sensitizes the neurons to transmit messages," notes Mortimer Mishkin, chief of the neuropsychology laboratory of the National Institutes of Health. The proper stimulus, say, a whiff of a perfume or a glimpse of a familiar place, trips the relay, firing the neurons and bringing a past event to consciousness...
...Optima affair, with its whiff of a cover-up, raises many unsettling questions about what top executives knew, and when. Robinson, for instance, concedes that he wasn't made aware of the problems at Optima until a month or so ago, a point that raised eyebrows throughout the industry. Says a high- ranking executive at a rival credit-card company: "I heard rumors about Optima's losses a year ago. Something's wrong when competitors knew before American Express senior executives did. If James Robinson didn't know, he should have...
...typically white European male response toward unclaimed territory, combining voyeurism, sex and predatory aggression. This reading filters out all the fun and, more important, the awe and wonder that the Americas sparked in European minds. And the New World fed Europe more than literary tropes, intellectual excitement and a whiff of the exotic. It fed Europe . . . food, stuff that native Americans had been cultivating for thousands of years and that Europeans had never heard of: peppers, paprika, potatoes, corn, tomatoes...