Word: corns
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...this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved nearly 100 test plantings of crops that have been genetically altered to give them traits such as pest resistance and tolerance to weed killers. More ambitious projects are envisioned, among them adding protein to staples like corn and changing the type of oil produced by soybeans. Pigs that grow faster and leaner and cows that manufacture medicine in their milk are other goals. Observes Arnold Foudin, a biotechnology specialist at the USDA: "Ideas that a short while ago might have been dismissed as harebrained Buck Rogers are now being taken quite...
...past, desirable properties were introduced into plants and animals through simple crossbreeding, but for the most part scientists merely reshuffled genes within a particular species. Corn could not be crossed with soybeans, nor cows with pigs. Now plants as diverse as tomatoes and cotton have been equipped with genes that scientists have borrowed from bacteria. Shrimp may soon be given disease-fighting genes taken from sea urchins. Eventually, crops and farm animals may be raised to produce not just food and clothing but also a wide array of chemical compounds and human proteins like insulin. While research on plants...
...Omaha to tell him that he and his year-old brother Phillip would have to prolong a visit with their grandmother. The next day Christie and Donald flew to Wilmington, N.C., with an Army reserve unit called to active port-security duty, leaving family and friends to harvest the corn and soybeans from their 200-acre farm in October...
...which is a long way from stock-car racing's roots in moonshining. During the 1930s and '40s, drivers running corn whisky from backwoods stills to thirsty customers needed their cars to be a little lighter and quicker than the sheriff's in order to remain in business. Bootleggers like the legendary Junior Johnson of Ronda, N.C., took to tearing out the radios, door handles, glass and backseats from "stock" cars (i.e., directly off showroom floors) and muscling up the engines in their own garages. Although Johnson had to take an enforced break from driving to serve a 10-month...
Critics reply that current farm policy hurts exports by artificially raising prices of American commodities above those of foreign competitors. In addition, farmers who get reliable subsidies for crops such as corn have no incentive to shift to unsubsidized crops such as soybeans, even though they are in heavy demand overseas...