Word: dna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Without honeybees and some 200,000 other species of insects, birds and small mammals, plants would be in a terrible predicament. So would humans. These creatures are the world's pollinators, quietly nuzzling and probing flowers for nectar and in the process, transferring DNA-bearing pollen from stamen to stigma. Without their work we wouldn't have healthy fruit and vegetables or viable seeds. We depend on this free service for 90% of our staple crops...
...Mystery Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks to get a genetic encoding. It then puts it into a huge computer so that it always knows what you are doing." Murphy takes a breath. "Of course, I might be just a little paranoid...
...race argument: it is more often southern blacks than whites who end up being executed. There is the wealth argument: those who have the money to assemble a "dream team" a la O.J. Simpson have a vastly superior chance of avoiding execution. There is the fallibility argument: DNA tests have recently shown that many convicted criminals were actually not responsible for the crimes for which they were imprisoned. If they were executed, that would have been that. And there is the deterrence argument: the pro side argues that the death penalty deters others from committing crime and prevents the criminal...
...interstellar space more than 25 years ago, which makes it plausible, according to one of the scientists on the Illinois team, that molecules of ammonia and acetic acid linked up to form basic amino acid. Amino acids, which are the basic building blocks of life, form the proteins and DNA that make up all living organisms. The Sagittarius cloud is believed to be similar to the cloud which formed our solar system. This latest discovery, according to the scientists, could back up the theory that comets and asteroids, carrying biologically important chemicals, descended on earth to help form life...
What does a posthumous haircut have to do with secrets? Forensic scientists have long known that a body's hair has tales to tell. To begin with, it carries DNA, which can be used to determine family relationships (that's how scientists determined that a woman named Anna Anderson was not, as she claimed, Princess Anastasia of Russia) or hereditary diseases (that's how they hope to prove Lincoln suffered from Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that makes its victims grow tall and gangly). Hair also soaks up drugs and other foreign substances from the body (low levels of arsenic...