investing $2,000 in glassware and chemicals, a skilled chemist can synthesize one kilogram of the dnig, a quantity worth millions of dollars on the street.
Seeking quick profits, underground manufacturers frequently turn out 'sloppy" batches, with fatal consequences for drug users. Roughly 3,000 times more potent than morphine, 3-methyl-fentanyl has caused at least 100 deaths in California to date. Another narcotic, MPPP (an analog of ~neperi- dine, or Demerol) is only three times as potent...
their former occupations and observed that the prevalence of nearsightedness rose as the men became more educated: from 2.5 percent among farmers and fishermen to 12 percent among craftsmen doing close handiwork and 32 percent among scholars. A research project in Alaska found that young, literate Eskimos were more often myopic than their illiterate elders. It is also known that lawyers and graduate students have myopia rates approaching 50 percent.
Only within the last few years, the authors observe,...
creating protein messengers that bind with some genes, and not others. The result of this intricate process is that sets of cells end up with special genetic instructions that differentiate them from other cells nearby. Each cell group then migrates to its proper place in the growing embryo and develops into a specific body pan or system.
Gehring first became aware of these special genes in 1965,while study- ing the developmental stages of fruit flies. Observing strange mutations- legs sprouting...
the year 2000, total downtown office space and employment are projected to rise 21.7 million square feet and 91,000 jobs, respective1y:The Planning Commission hopes the new rules will cut the rate of annual growth by anywhere from one-third to one-half and encourage some businesses to settle outside of the city.
"Oil Pollution: A Decade of Research and
Oil and Water
Monitoring" by John W. Farrington, in Oce-Sometimes Mix anus (Fall 1985),woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, Woods Hol...
Sandra S. Batie, in Issues in Science and Poor Farming Technology (Fall 19851, 2101 constitution
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20418.
The Great Farm Shakeout, as the newspapers call the current agricultural crisis, has awakened America to the financial mismanagement of many of the nation's farms. Yet money troubles are only half the story, contends Batie, an agricultural economist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Batie argues that sloppy, shortsighted farming practices have damaged untold acres and...
I? N.Furbank) actually deflates Forster's heroic image. The new portrait reveals facts that show him to be not a paragon of virtue but a mollycoddled "prig" who was bullied at school and unable to get along with his peers.
At Cambridge University he finally came into his own, Epstein says. Forster read Classics and fell in with an elite coterie of intellectuals, inclucl- ing philosopher Beitrand Russell and economist John Maynard Keynes. He sought to establish his independence. He shed...
desires and passions-a kind of life that Epstein finds "thin, hollow, and
.. .
finally empty."
Audubon "Audubon and His Legacy" John McEwen, in Art in America (Sept. 1985), 980 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10021
"It is a strange snobbery that isolates botanical or ornithological illustration from. . . art," says McEwen, who writes for the Times of London. "John James Audubon [1785-18511 is one of the most notable victims of this prejudice."
It is true...
tlie great terror of his formative years, a feeling that seems to show up in his later works ("the stricken great black-backed g~111,the fierce hawks and their victims, the two golden-eye in the act of I>eing shot . . . ").
In 1803, Auduhon left France for America, to enter business and mar^^^. But he failed repeatedly as an entrepreneur. the time lie was 35 years old, he decided to abandon business altogether and just paint birds. Within six years he had completed enough good drawings...
the expansion of the record and radio broadcasting industries, professional songwriters copyrighted more than 100,000 popular tunes during this 20- year "golden age" ofAmerican songwriting. Of course, most of those ditties were flops. (Even the "giants" of the era could only count about five percent of their total output as commercially successful.) Yet the ones that hit, hit big. Royalties from recordings and sheet music of Berlin's "Alexan- der's Rag Time Band" (1911)...
easing up on several fronts: halting religious persecution (and freeing the 400 or so current "religious prisoners"); opening the doors to emigration; creating less arbitrary legal and penal systems; and appeasing some dissident ethnic groups, particu- larly the Muslim Tatars and Meskhetians who were ousted from Crimea and Georgia Stalin in 1944.
Help for the "dissident" group most in need of reform-the proletariat-is not so close at hand, the author maintains. Various workers'...