WASHINGTON — When the Army doctor walked into the musty hospital room, the patient, strapped in a neck brace, eyed his uniform, looking for the patch on the right shoulder that would signify that the doctor, too, had been in combat. But Dr. Brandon Goff doesn’t have one. He’s never been to war. War comes to him. Goff, a major, has spent this war in Wards 57 and 58 of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where as director of patient rehabilitation he treats soldiers who’ve suffered amputations, traumatic brain injuries and spinal cord injuries. At 35, he’s an unintended historian of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He knows that improvised explosives in Iraq are bigger now because he’s seeing more patients with both legs blown off above the knee, not just one below the knee. He thinks that insurgents first acquired especially lethal explosively formed projectiles last spring, because that’s when he saw his first patient who’d been wounded in such an attack. And he thinks that brain trauma from explosions could be the cause of the abnormal bone growths that soldiers wounded in this war have around their amputated limbs. The phenomenon […]
Former US vice president Al Gore on Friday criticized the ‘trivialities and nonsense’ of celebrity gossip in the media and called on people to focus instead on issues like Iraq and climate change. Gore, who is promoting his new book ‘The Assault on Reason,’ made the comments at a book signing in New York, where he was treated to a rock star reception by more than 1,300 cheering and screaming fans. ‘What is it about our collective decision-making process that has led us to this state of affairs where we spend much more time in the public forum talking about — or receiving information about — Britney Spears shaving her head or Paris Hilton going to jail?’ Gore asked. He lamented what he described as the ‘destruction of the boundary between news and entertainment’ and said the United States was ‘vulnerable as a democracy to mass and continuing distraction.’ His new book draws parallels between the US government’s approaches to climate change and the war in Iraq. ‘Just like the facts available before the invasion of Iraq, these facts about the climate crisis have been repeatedly brushed aside and ignored as inconvenient,’ he said. ‘In […]
PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures. But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away. What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail. For here […]
Even with the sound turned off, babies can tell whether a person speaking on video has switched between English and French, a new study suggests. The findings are the latest contribution to a growing body of research on the remarkable ability of very young infants to process languages. The paper also shows that babies growing up in bilingual households are better able to retain that ability to visually perceive a switch to another language, whereas such a skill declines among those raised in unilingual settings. Conducted at the University of British Columbia, the appears today in the journal Science. It comes as other scientists have documented the great abilities of babies to distinguish vowels, consonants, rhythmic patterns and tonal inflections in languages the infants don’t yet speak, even in languages that are not native to them. Seven-month-old Quinn watches a silent video clip of a bilingual speaker at the University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre. Lyle Stafford for The Globe and Mail Babies from English-speaking families are, for example, able to distinguish between similar Hindi-language sounds that adult English speakers would struggle to tell apart. But unless they remain exposed to other languages the […]
BERLIN and WASHINGTON — Political tensions between the US and Germany over climate change have worsened sharply, with Washington threatening to no longer ‘tread lightly’ in negotiations on global warming ahead of the Group of Eight rich nations’ summit next month. The US has sent Germany a harshly worded statement in which it accuses Berlin of ignoring of Washington’s ‘serious, fundamental concerns’ with Germany’s draft climate change communiqué for the Baltic coast summit. The statement, written in red ink and obtained by the Financial Times, says: ‘We have tried to ‘tread lightly’ but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position.’ Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, would like the summit to agree limits on carbon emissions but the US says climate change should be tackled with technology-based solutions rather than mandatory emissions targets and accuses Berlin of ignoring its stance. Washington says the latest version of the communiqué ‘is called final but we never agreed to any of the climate language presented in the document’. It adds: ‘The majority of our comments on the previous draft have not been addressed and some new, problematic text has been […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
