Word: dinosaur
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...electronic devices - flat-screen high-def TVs, 2-lb. laptop computers, the iPhone - the national power grid we plug them into is almost as old and unchanged as Edison's lightbulb. We rely on the grid to juice everything from vacuum cleaners to dialysis machines, but it is a dinosaur, a leaky, money-wasting, carbon-dioxide-spewing system that remains shockingly vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks...
...Tianyu is not short on natural history. In one hall alone, 480 dinosaur fossils are randomly placed in glass cases or left in the open air around a room the size of a basketball court, along with Triassic fish and other more recent fossils, primarily from different parts of China. "We are the world's number one," says Zheng Xiaoting, director and keeper of the Tianyu (which means "universe" in Chinese) Natural History Museum's collection of thousands of dinosaur fossils. Though no official records of the collection's number exist, several Chinese paleontologists echo Zheng's claim that Tianyu...
...that using authenticity as the basis for judging a collection's worth is unrealistic. "Granted, there are many fakes and processed [fossils] in Tianyu, like everywhere else in China," says Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is part of a team that discovered primitive dinosaur feathers in fossils that are now housed at Tianyu. "But I was truly astonished by the caliber of its real and valuable collections...It probably has a larger collection of complete fossil skeletons than any other museum in the world...
...late 1970s, China's economic reform and opening up spurred a fervor of fossil-hunting among impoverished peasants, who began selling their finds to the highest bidders - state institutions, private individuals and foreigners alike. Since then, numerous dinosaur and bird fossils have been identified in the northeast province of Liaoning, and the southwest regions of Guizhou and Yunnan have become well known for their massive output of Triassic marine-life fossils. Fakery became a natural part of this lucrative business, and several Chinese paleontologists say fakes, typically made into the shape of bones using plastic, charcoal and construction materials...
...Prestige and Mobility still encourage you to rejoice in the rivers of champagne that flow in Adams like the mighty Euphrates and we would not dissuade you from wallowing in self-pity as you walk the trail of tears down Garden Street to the forgotten, volcanic, dinosaur-plagued underworld of Currier. However, as Aristotle once said, “Man is a political animal (as relates to blocking groups and also women...