Word: accountants
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PRICE CHECK Not long ago, banks were raising fees for checking-account customers who kept small balances. Is the tide turning? Citibank just slashed monthly charges on its EZ accounts to $7.50, from as high as $25 in some states. Nationally, fees average $9.50, according to Bank Rate Monitor. Washington Mutual, based in Seattle (800-756-8000), offers one of the best free-checking deals. For low-price offers check out community banks and credit unions...
...laboratory over at King's College, London, where a woman named Rosalind Franklin was creating the world's best X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA. Maurice Wilkins, a colleague who was also working on DNA, disliked the precociously feminist Franklin, and the feeling was mutual. By Watson's account, this estrangement led Wilkins to show Watson one of Franklin's best pictures yet, which hadn't been published. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open," Watson recalled. The sneak preview "gave several of the vital helical parameters...
Writing up their findings for the journal Nature, the famously brash Watson and Crick donned a British reserve. They capped a dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." They faced the question of byline: Watson and Crick, or Crick and Watson? They flipped a coin...
...double helix--both the book and the molecule--did nothing to slow this century's erosion of innocence. Watson's account, depicting researchers as competitive and spiteful--as human--helped de-deify scientists and bring cynicism to science writing. And DNA, once unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting. Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism--a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades of work on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies...
There is something wrong, however, with this account of how the universe began. There is not nearly enough matter in the universe to match the predictions of the Big Bang, and our current list of the particles of matter is almost certainly incomplete. We need a more sophisticated view of what is meant by "empty space," which turns out not to be empty at all. There are also serious philosophical problems created by the Big Bang, which can be described but not explained. Worse, nobody has been able to reconcile quantum physics with the other great triumph of 20th century...