Word: acidity
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Some of the royal portraits are etched in acid (James Cromwell's bullying, befuddled Philip), some daubed with sympathy (Alex Jennings' bereaved Charles). And after about an hour of wickedly acute satire, the movie shifts its focus to find the pathos behind Elizabeth's stern gaze. As incarnated by Mirren, that least sentimental of great actresses, the Queen might be any aging executive, devastated by the insight that her reign has been endured but not embraced. Mirren, who won an Emmy playing Elizabeth I for HBO, may deserve an Oscar for this ripe appraisal of Elizabeth...
Even before the chimp genome was published, researchers had begun teasing out our genetic differences. As long ago as 1998, for example, glycobiologist Ajit Varki and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, reported that humans have an altered form of a molecule called sialic acid on the surface of their cells. This variant is coded for by a single gene, which is damaged in humans. Since sialic acids act in part as a docking site for many pathogens, like malaria and influenza, this may explain why people are more susceptible to these diseases than, say, chimpanzees...
...role in our ability to develop speech and language, evolved within the past 200,000 years--after anatomically modern humans first appeared. By comparing the protein coded by the human FOXP2 gene with the same protein in various great apes and in mice, they discovered that the amino-acid sequence that makes up the human variant differs from that of the chimp in just two locations out of a total of 715--an extraordinarily small change that may nevertheless explain the emergence of all aspects of human speech, from a baby's first words to a Robin Williams monologue...
...only in males. And when they compared the two species' proteins--the large molecules that cells construct according to blueprints embedded in the genes--they found that 29% of the proteins were identical (most of the proteins that aren't the same differ, on average, by only two amino-acid substitutions...
Yesterday, class discussion at HLS centered on whether virtual worlds were real enough to garner concerns about their laws and governance. Third-year law student Kwan Bul argued that Second Life is not to be taken too seriously, saying “it is more like an acid trip than anything else. You are getting your jollies by staring at a computer screen...