Word: celling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hope is a better understanding of why the cord doesn't heal itself. In 1988 neuroscientist Martin Schwab of the University of Zurich isolated substances in the central nervous system whose sole purpose appears to be to block growth. In a healthy spine, the chemicals establish boundaries that regulate cell growth. After an injury, they do little but harm. In recent years, however, Schwab has developed antibodies that neutralize the growth blockers, allowing regeneration to occur...
This welcome boom in cancer drugs owes its beginnings to one of this century's greatest scientific insights: that cancer is caused not by depression or miasmas or sexual repression, as people at various times have believed, but by faulty genes. Every tumor begins with just one errant cell that has been unlucky enough to suffer at least two, but sometimes several, genetic mutations. Those mutations prod the cell into replicating wildly, allowing it to escape the control that genes normally maintain over the growth of new tissue...
...there will be drugs to trip up a cell at each of the steps it takes on the path to malignancy. A patient with lung cancer, say, might undergo gene therapy, breathing in genetically altered cold viruses that don't cause infection but instead act as miniature delivery vans carrying copies of the p53 gene. Good copies of this gene, which is mutated in many cancers, can force some cancer cells to commit suicide. The effects of p53 could be bolstered with antibodies that slow tumors by attaching to the surface of cancer cells and gumming up their ability...
China could use 50% less energy if it only installed more efficient electric lights, motors and insulation, all technologies currently available on the world market. Americans could trade in their notoriously gas-swilling SUVs for sporty new 80-m.p.g. hybrid-electric cars. Better yet: hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars, expected in showrooms by 2004. Since their only exhaust is water vapor, fuel-cell cars produce neither smog nor global warming...
ENERGY Our power will come from sources cleaner than fossil fuels. Some energy will flow from modern-day windmills [9], but much of it will be generated in our own homes. Rooftop solar panels [10] will supply electricity to our appliances and to a basement fuel cell [11], which will produce hydrogen. When the sun is not shining, the cell will operate in reverse, using the hydrogen to make electricity...