Con retrieved her bag and brushed off her coat as best she could, then made her way over the sill.

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To test this idea, Dr Hebets turned to her make-up bag and brought out two shades of nail varnish (NailSlicks, midnight metal and bronze ice, as her paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences quite properly describes in its materials and methods section, in case any other researcher wishes to replicate the experiment).

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He was not a risk taker, she said, and that made it unlikely in her view that he would have put himself into the bag even as a personal challenge without making sure he could get out.

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