Word: arens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Biological weapons are a disgrace to biology. Most biologists haven't wanted to talk or even think about them. For years leading U.S. biologists were assuring themselves and the public that bioweapons don't work and aren't anything to worry about. It was a naive dream from the childhood of biology. The physicists lost their innocence when the first nuclear bomb went off in 1945. The biologists will lose their innocence when the first biological weapon spreads through the human species...
Scientists are also focusing on the differences between two types of fat cells, known as brown and white. The former, active in young mammals (including humans), convert fat into heat rather than storing it. That's crucial in newborns, whose temperature-regulation systems aren't fully formed. As we age, the brown cells become inactive and the white, which convert dietary fat to body fat, take over. Several research teams have found that by reactivating the brown cells in an adult animal with medication, they can burn off fat dramatically. Now the doctors are looking for a genetic switch that...
Untangling this metabolic mess will probably take decades. But given the immense profits waiting for whoever can invent a safe, effective weight-control substance, drug companies aren't waiting. With the clues they have in hand, pharmaceutical firms are now investigating about 60 compounds, most of them based on some of the 130 genes that have so far been implicated in weight control...
...might think that, knowing what causes greenhouse warming, it would be an easy matter to predict how hot the world will be in the next century. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. The world is a complex place, and reducing it to the climatologist's tool of choice--the computer model--isn't easy. Around almost every statement in the greenhouse debate is a penumbra of uncertainty that results from our current inability to capture the full complexity of the planet in our models...
...coming century can be read in the numbers. The 6 billion people living on the planet are projected to swell to 9 billion by 2050. The pressure to exploit the world's remaining wilderness for natural resources, food and human habitation will become overwhelming. But bulldozers and chain saws aren't the only threats. A new menace has emerged from the least likely quarter; in many cases, the very people who care most passionately about empty places are hastening their demise...