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Gules Crusily and a Fess Dancetty Or
That's heralds' talk for a shield covered with red crosses and bearing a zigzag stripe like the one on Charlie Brown's famous yellow shirt. If you want to know which knight bore it in 1307, check out Gerard Brault's new book, The Rolls of Arms of Edward I.

The Almost Perfect Definition
Vincent Foster died because he was a perfectionist. That's one psychiatrist's take. Counseling psychologist Robert Slaney disagrees: What we mean by "perfectionist," he says, could be better defined.

Before the Flood
For centuries people have engaged in taming rivers: straightening, deepening, shortening, gathering, turning back high water. Only now, says civil and environmental engineer Ana Barros, are we learning to live with them.

Looking for the Globin Switch
For centuries people have engaged in taming rivers: straightening, Somewhere in the 45,000 to 75,000 base pairs of DNA that code for one form of the globin protein in hemoglobin there's a switch. Ross Hardison and a team of undergraduate and graduate researchers are trying to find it and turn it on -- or off.

OUTLOOK: Babies in Bottles

PROFILE: A Collaborative Story

ENCYCLOPEDIA:

FIELDNOTES: Ancient China and the First Copiers

NOTEBOOK: Nobody's Perfect

COVER: Yue Fei, a famous Chinese general and patriot, reads a book in a rubbing from a stone painting originally made during the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.)

For an argument that such rubbings represent the first successful copying technology, turn to Ancient China and the First Copiers.