Word: bacteria
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...HUMAN IMMUNE SYSTEM IS A POWERFUL DEfense against assaults by bacteria and viruses from outside the body, but now scientists may have found a way to turn it against a homegrown assailant: cancer. A research group at Stanford University has developed a vaccine that stimulates the body to fight B-cell lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that strikes 20,000 Americans every year and is especially hard to treat. They did it by removing cancerous cells from nine patients and treating the cells to make them more irritating to the immune system. Then they were reinjected under...
...lengthy,unrepeatable process that has led to today'sdelicate ecological balance. The word is alsosupposed to embody, Wilson told me, a sense ofwonder, a sense of respect, and a sense ofgratitude. "The most despised organisms from theburying beetles to ants that are scurrying awaycarrying dead insects, down to the bacteria whichactually bring the soil to life," he says, "arethe reasons that we are able to carry on from oneday to the next...
Wilson doesn't base his argument on a simplemessage of species appreciation. After all, thebeetles and bees and bacteria will be fine in ahundred million years. Humans, however, may not bearound to enjoy them. Wilson argues in his bookthat there is a limited amount of usable matter inthe world and humans are consuming an amazingamount of it in a very inefficient and destructivemanner. We are destroying the very ecosystemswhich are vital to our survival and overpopulatingan earth whose resources are already strained. Thespecific answers Wilson provides may require us torelate the wonders of our childhoods to modern daychallenges...
...future will be transported to work in his robocar. None of these advances are without their costs and risks. Drexler's assemblers, for example, could create bounties of goods and services -- or they could unleash artificial pests of unimaginable destructiveness. One nightmare creature from Drexler's book: an omnivorous bacteria-size robot that spreads like blowing pollen, replicates swiftly and reduces the biosphere to dust in a matter of days...
Robot probes no bigger than bacteria will eventually be possible. According to K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation, they will use nanotechnology to assemble devices atom by atom or molecule by molecule. His colleagues have already made motors smaller in diameter than a human hair. Drexler believes a bundle of nanorobots, weighing practically nothing, would be the perfect interstellar emissaries. Having arrived at a planet or asteroid around some distant star, perhaps in a solar sailship pushed to high speeds by a powerful laser beam from earth, they would go to work, antlike, building radio transmitters and other...