Word: present-day
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Around the time of the mass extinction, the fossil site was apparently in a 300-mile-long rift valley fringed with high mountains. The climate swung between wet and dry spells every 20,000 years or so, leaving telltale alternating layers of lake sediments and sandstone visible on the present-day cliffs. "When it rained," says Olsen, "chunks of rock and mud raced down the mountainsides and buried large swaths of ground." Many of the now fossilized animals escaped the slides, only to be trapped in cracks that opened as the mud flow dried and shrank. Olsen believes the animals...
Similarly, the present-day attitude toward disease has been tempered by modern medicine. Many of the ogres of the past, including small pox, polio, and tuberculosis, have been tamed or eliminated. With the advent of microsurgery, even chainsaws and lawnmowers have lost their element of danger. Death has been driven back to the frontier of old age, and so become distant and less real...
...outside San Salvador. The quick-paced film captures the Sturm und Drang of life at the front lines, cutting throughout to interviews of Clements's friends, high school snapshots, and snippets of Clements raising funds and consciousness back home in America. In a brilliant device, Clements sits in his present-day living room and reads out of his own diary from 1982 while Shaffer cuts to actual 1982 footage of him helping natives recover from a bomb attack...
Although such blind repetition may be sufficient for commercial applications, says Lozano-Perez, it does not exploit the full potential of the robot. He hopes to construct robots that need only general instructions, instead of the highly specified directions that present-day robots require. His creations would then by themselves identify needed parts, convey them to pre-ordained locations, and work them around--as a human might--until they fit properly...
...cannot harm us," but he has also cautioned that China must "combat the corrosive influence of capitalist ideas." At one point, the People's Daily pronounced that the world had changed so much since the days of Marx and Lenin that "we cannot expect (their) works to solve our present-day problems." A few days later, following angry and anxious cries that the paper had renounced the country's very ideology, the People's Daily backpedaled. It had meant to say, it explained in a retraction, only that Marxism-Leninism could not solve all of China's problems...