Word: cornelis
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...mouth of the Mississippi, the land was formed of sedimentary deposits from farther upriver, rich topsoil blown from the hills of Wyoming into the Missouri, acres of Kansas prairie swallowed by flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once a hellish jungle, cleared by the backbreaking labor of slaves and sharecroppers. It's a wet western Kansas, a beautiful, flat, fertile...
...half to go through the lock and then reassembled on the other side. "You want to keep moving all the time," explains Captain Dennis Drury over the thrum of his boat's diesel engine as he slowly pushes more than two acres of barges carrying 20,000 tons of corn into a narrow lock at Winfield, Mo. "But you can sit here for a day and a half waiting on your turn to lock." So the corps wants to build seven new 1,200-ft. chambers--double the length of the current locks--at a cost of $1.2 billion...
...justification for building bigger locks is simple: time is money. Supporters, including farmers and such commodity heavyweights as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ConAgra, say the time saved on a trip down the river could generate an extra nickel or dime of profit on every $2 bushel of corn floating down the Mississippi. "I produce about 100,000 bushels of grain a year, and 5[cents] on each one is a pretty good chunk of change that goes straight to my bottom line," says Gregory Guenther of Belleville, Ill. The river, 22 miles from his 1,000-acre farm...
...through at least six more human genomes, probably including his own ("Why not, if that's the business I'm in?" he asks, admitting nothing). After the mouse, he'll probably go on to the chimp, among our closest primate kin, and explore plant genes, including rice and corn. He is also taking Celera into the emerging field of proteomics--understanding how genes make and manage proteins, the actual building blocks of life...
Damage caused by pests is incredible. The European corn borer, for example, destroys 40 million tons of the world's corn crop annually, about 7% of the total. Incorporating pest-resistant genes into seeds can help restore the balance. In trials of pest-resistant cotton in Africa, yields have increased significantly. So far, fears that genetically modified, pest-resistant crops might kill good insects as well as bad appear unfounded...