Word: amberes
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Through a teardrop of ancient amber -- fossilized tree sap as hard as plastic and as translucent as glass -- the scientists beheld their quarry: a small stingless bee that shared the earth with giant mastodons. With sterile instruments and gloved hands, microbiologist Raul Cano and his student Monica Borucki proceeded with an improbable experiment. First they delicately extracted the bee's diminutive digestive tract. Then they placed the tissues in nutrient-rich broth. Within a week the mixture turned cloudy, a sign that bacterial spores, dormant inside the bee for 25 million to 40 million years, had suddenly, miraculously surged back...
...exciting as Jurassic Park," ventures Cano -- and maybe then some. For the stunt pulled off by scientists in Michael Crichton's novel and Steven Spielberg's movie -- retrieving strands of dinosaur DNA from amber, then using it to recreate monsters from the past -- belongs to the realm of fiction. By contrast, the article in which Cano and Borucki describe their achievement appeared last week in the pages of the journal Science. And while the Jurassic Park scientists cloned DNA to re-create approximations of dinosaurs and used frog DNA to fill in the genetic code, Cano's team claims...
...raise the dead but rather to study symbiosis, the mutually beneficial relationship that exists between complex organisms and their microbial fellow travelers. To that end, Cano, chairman of the microbiology department at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, began working with insects fossilized in ancient amber and the microbes, presumably long dead, that their bodies contained. The problem, noted an exasperated Cano, was that live bacterial colonies kept popping up in the samples. And, oddly enough, the super-clean procedures followed by his laboratory appeared powerless to prevent the unwelcome intrusions...
Also working hard to branch out is the waifish Amber Valetta, who just signed on as a correspondent with Fashion Week, a new TV show that premiered on the E! cable channel two weeks ago. It is one of four fashion-news shows that have sprung up in imitation of mtv's successful House of Style, starring Cindy Crawford. The paradigm for the supermodel-as-enterprise, Crawford is surely inspiring many of the professionally beautiful. Her various ventures-a TV show, exercise videos, contracts with Revlon, Pepsi and Kay Jewelers-earn her an estimated $6.5 million annually. According...
...promo begins with the swell of Coplandesque melodies. The camera pans over spacious skies, over purple mountains' majesty and amber waves of...tobacco. We hear the voice-over of a man, a simple farmer; we'll call him Merle: "Some things jes git better with time..." (more Copelandesque strains) Merle goes on to describe the painstaking process by which the "tobacco smooth enough to be Select" is cultivated and packaged. We follow the camera through Merle's tobacco fields to his barn, where another man cuts and dries the tobacco leaves. The crop will become Wintson Select's "Perfectly Aged...