Old-school news, just in time
by Jacqueline Howard CNN It was a moment Meagan James never expected to witness. A surgical team at NYU Langone Health in New York had performed the world’s first successful whole-eye transplant in a living person: her husband, Aaron James. After an accident at work led to the loss of his left …
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by Kevin Burton Last month on Page 7 we looked at words such as several and handful that defy exact definition. Here’s another: Jiffy. How long is a jiffy? Merriam-Webster says a jiffy is “a very short period of time: moment, instant.” The Cambridge dictionary lists synonyms “flash, heartbeat, instant, split second.” …
by Kevin Burton Would you believe? Rainbows by night; moonbows! They’ve got to be good looking ‘cuz they’re so hard to see. But they do exist. Poets, take note. Never heard of this, but this week I read about them on interestingfacts.com, then on Wikipedia. I say, there must be a song …
by Kevin Burton I am late to the great caffeine-vs-decaf debate. But if we take caffeine from our coffee, let’s certainly not throw it out altogether. Why not? Because caffeine is a natural insecticide, according to the New York Times and others. Yesterday I mentioned that I am considering switching to decaf …
by Kevin Burton Gather round kids, because it’s National High Heels day and boy do I have news for you. According to multiple websites, high heels were invented for men. It seems the heels helped warriors on horseback, providing leverage for them to stay in the saddle and stand up to fire …
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by Kevin Burton Somewhere between the art of science and the science of art, I dropped the ball and missed a moment. The girls were up from Oklahoma between Christmas and New Years Eve. The girls are our now-ten-year-old granddaughter on my wife’s side and her five-year-old step sister by living arrangement, not …
by Kevin Burton Fourteen blind people had vision restored after receiving cornea implants made from pigskin, according to published reports. Three of those people had perfect vision after undergoing a new surgical technique developed by Swedish researchers, wrote Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian Magazine. The cornea is the clear outer layer that protects …
by Kevin Burton My career as an English as a Second Language teacher came to an abrupt early end one night under the streetlights outside a small taco shop in Puebla. To tell you how and why that happened, I first turn to BBC writer Nicole Chang, who recently wrote about what speaking …
by Kevin Burton Apparently the purring our cats do isn’t all good vibrations. These are cats after all, I should have known. It just had to be more complicated than we thought. “We think we know what a cat’s purr means,” writes Stephen Dowling of the BBC. “It is arguably the most recognizable sign …
by Kevin Burton As a consumer of popular music for more than 50 years I thought I knew exactly what a groove was, until I tried to define it. I have no trouble feeling the groove in “Ain’t That Peculiar,” by Marvin Gaye for example. But how to define it? The website …
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