Word: sluggishness
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...mere adolescent, it is 15 ft. tall and armed with dagger-sharp teeth. The triceratops attempts a retreat, but the cold-blooded creature can only move slowly. It is too soon after sunrise, and the dinosaur hasn't had time to absorb the heat it needs to rouse its sluggish metabolism. While T. rex has the same problem, its longer legs enable it to quickly overtake the docile herbivore. And then...
...assumption that dinosaurs were ectothermic -- cold-blooded -- was originally based on a simple argument. Reptiles are ectothermic -- they can't regulate their body heat. If they get too hot, they die. If they get too cold, they get sluggish. Dinosaurs were closely related to reptiles. End of argument...
...fact, five or six different kinds of warm- and cold-bloodedness, and they are sometimes hard to distinguish, even in living animals. Moreover, making generalizations about the relationship between an animal's activity level and its metabolism can be misleading. "We tend to think that cold-blooded animals are sluggish, but that's not very accurate," says Yale paleontologist John Ostrom. "Some snakes, lizards and crocodiles can move faster than humans can. At the same time, we tend to think that warm-blooded animals are fast and very active, but the average house cat spends a lot of time snoozing...
Marx said Radcliffe's sluggish performance during the last 1000 meters can be largely attributed to fatigue...
...began laying off workers in 1986. Yet its stock has fallen 50%, in contrast to a rise of 48% by the S&P 500. Monsanto started cutting its work force in 1985, but its stock rose a slim 30%. Clearly these were troubled companies that would probably have suffered sluggish stock prices in any event, but the study indicates that cutting labor costs did not make Wall Street forgive their more deep-seated problems...