Word: acidly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cities struggling to meet pollution standards. Environmental controls on electric plants have cut emissions of six principal air pollutants by half since 1970, despite a 42% increase in energy consumption. But even with mandated controls, old-fashioned pulverized- coal plants still spew nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide (think acid rain) as well as toxic mercury. Carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for global warming, would soar. Shareholder activists are increasingly aggressive about demanding an accounting when companies like TXU, which had 2005 earnings of $1.7 billion, stick to old coal methods. "TXU," says Leslie Lowe, program director of the Interfaith Center...
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...
Some of the differences could have enormous practical consequences. Since his discovery that human cells lack one specific form of sialic acid, which was accomplished even before the human genome was decoded, Varki and his collaborators have determined that 10 of the 60 or so genes that govern sialic-acid biology show major differences between chimps and humans. "And in every case," says Varki, "it's humans who are the odd one out." Such revelations could probably lead to a better understanding of such devastating diseases as malaria, AIDS and viral hepatitisand likely do so faster than by studying...