Word: precursor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...outside, however, IVD sperm are not identical to normal sperm. "We think, for normal structure development, sperm needs the testes environment," says Nayernia. It takes 15 to 16 years in the testes before the primordial germ cells that morph into spermatogonia, or a primitive precursor of the germ cells, are able to mature into sperm cells that can successfully fertilize an egg. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
There was more to Fisher than those infamous words. The longtime Yale professor was a successful entrepreneur (he devised and marketed a precursor to the Rolodex), the author of a best-selling textbook on personal hygiene, one of the most prominent backers of Prohibition and a leading eugenicist (that is, he believed the human race could be improved through the weeding out of "degenerates...
...soon told my parents that he had gone as far as he could with Noah, that he was now focusing on younger children. (I have since heard of numerous children who also, as one parent I know put it, "flunked" Lovaas.) It was an early disappointment but only a precursor of so many to follow...
...home. John's daffy older sister Marion (Katherine Parkinson, whose voice is as treacherously sweet as cotton candy) is halfway to becoming a Miss Havisham. The youngest Whittaker is Hilda (Kimberley Nixon), who is both jealous of Larita and bewitched by her and is, in her troublemaking, a clear precursor to Briony of Ian McEwan's Atonement, written nearly 75 years after Coward's play...
Designed to handle crimes committed in times of war or rebellion, military commissions stretch far back into American history. General George Washington convened a precursor to a military commission - a board of inquiry - in 1780 to try a British major accused of conspiring with Benedict Arnold during the Revolutionary War. The board recommended to Washington that Major John Andre be executed, and he was promptly hanged. Military commissions' first documented use came during the Mexican-American War in 1847, when the U.S. Army occupied large areas of Mexico that lacked a working court system. Since then they've been used...