Word: descent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Benefits from this new era are coming fast. Prenatal screening has helped to reduce more than 95% the number of Tay-Sachs births among American Jews of East European descent, a high-risk group. As a result of early identification, a few congenital conditions, such as spina bifida, a disabling hole in the spinal cord, are being treated in the womb by experimental surgery at about seven months. Sex-selection techniques based on in-vitro fertilization can reduce the risk of giving birth to a baby with sex-linked disorders, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and hemophilia, which affect only...
Only minutes after the probes hit the ground, the lander will follow, descending by parachute and braking engine. Bristling with cameras and sensors, it will study Mars' terrain and weather, snapping pictures both during its descent and on the surface. It will also carry a microphone to record for the first time the sound of the Martian wind. More important, the ship will be equipped with a robotic arm and scoop, much like the arms carried aboard the Viking landers in the 1970s. Unlike the Vikings, though, which were able to paw just a few feeble inches into the Martian...
...dust jacket bears an amazingly striking picture of author T.C. Boyle: rebellish earrings, a shock of red hair, a devilish goatee and those piercing green eyes. A compilation of his previous four collections of short stories (Descent of Man, Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey and Without a Hero) plus a smattering of new stories, Stories holds in one volume the complete spectrum of Boyle's writing. The satiric and the strange, the touching and the tender, the stories always have one trait in common: Boyle's characteristically piercing view of humanity...
...ways that go well beyond the demands of the genre. They give us an FBI agent in charge of the case--played by that paragon of sexy stalwartness, Denzel Washington--whose heroism lies largely in his ability to reconsider hasty conclusions. They provide him with an assistant of Arab descent (a quietly smoldering Tony Shalhoub), caught in a conflict between duty and disgust when the soldiery snatches his son because he happens to match a terrorist profile. They also add to the team a sassy CIA operative (Annette Bening) who knows more about these terrorists than she can tell because...
...Schauss stresses that the club is not just for people of Scandinavian descent...