Silk, during its self assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter.

We need to look for something else, and we've gotten ourselves a little bit into a rut.

For a country, opening up is like coming out of the cocoon and becoming a butterfly. There will be pain, but there will be new life.

You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. Be here now, you've probably heard a hundred times.

So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material.

And some sociologists actually feel that it's a closure, it's a cocooning, that we're disengaging from the public.

And by the end of this my arm is sore, I've got a callus on my hand, let alone Bob, whose rear end looks something more like this, like Swiss cheese.

And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things.

Our imagination might shrink our hearts might dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons.

NEW DELHI As the New Year dawns, it has become increasingly clear that India s new government faces a dilemma entirely of its own making one that its predecessor never had to confront.

One hears this everywhere nowadays, but it s not true. The euro itself is at risk, because the countries in crisis have, in recent years, been running the eurozone s monetary printing presses overtime.

We're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do, whether you want to replace a vein or a bone, or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics, perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt, maybe carry your drugs in your pocket, deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert, the answer may be in a thread of silk.

But even when people do not work together, globalization, by bringing the world to everyone s living room (or hut), enables them to make much wider comparisons of their living standards. It erodes the relative security in which the rich world could shelter itself, as in a cocoon.

NEW YORK The biggest economic news of the year came almost without notice China has overtaken the United States as the world s largest economy, according to the scorekeepers at the International Monetary Fund. And, while China s geopolitical status is rising rapidly, alongside its economic might, the US continues to squander its global leadership, owing to the unchecked greed of its political and economic elites and the self made trap of perpetual war in the Middle East.

But so is torturing children, which is how the civil war in Syria actually began more than two years ago. And is killing civilians with chemical agents morally more obscene than shelling, shooting, or starving them to death?

LONDON The US Federal Reserve s new policy statement will, as usual, be analyzed in excruciating detail in the days ahead, as investors seek guidance on when and how quickly interest rates will be raised. Notably, the word patient does not appear, and the Fed has signaled that it may raise its benchmark rate as early as June.

The label created a self imposed restriction, constraining Nestlé to sell a relatively narrow range of products. In 2010, however, the company s CEO, Paul Bulcke, redefined Nestlé as a nutrition, health, and wellness company.

In May, Hungarian reformers began tearing down the fence along their border with Austria a hole in the Iron Curtain. In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of a Common European House and repudiated the interventionist Brezhnev Doctrine.