Word: dna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When you apply the question to entire societies, you enter into a conundrum that may be approached as a sort of cultural-genome project. What is our social and economic DNA? A fascinating new book, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (Basic Books; $35), proclaims the secret in its title and, in a series of 22 essays by scholars, journalists and global-business experts, studies the record of societies' successes and failures in the light of their cultural inheritances and internalized mental models...
...somewhat artificial nature of this much anticipated milestone was underscored in two separate announcements last week. Writing in the journal Nature, a team of scientists working on the public project reported that they had finished decoding chromosome 21, the strand of DNA responsible for, among other things, Down syndrome. And a California company, DoubleTwist, Inc., said it had used data from the public genome project to pinpoint 65,000 individual genes, out of the 100,000 or so in each human cell...
DoubleTwist's achievement reminds us that sequencing the human genome isn't the same as understanding it. What Celera and the federal project have been doing is figuring out the order of the DNA's chemical constituents--some 3 billion molecular "letters" that spell out the instructions for constructing a functioning human being...
...This second outing focuses predominantly on Sherman's Klump clans-so much so, in fact, that Universal is considering dropping the Nutty part and simply calling the film The Klumps. In lieu of his plans to get married (to Janet Jackson, of all people), Sherman decides to excise the DNA of his altar-ego, Buddy Love, from his system, but unwittingly turns Buddy into his own person. Slapstick chaos ensues. All in all, Murphy, who's had a bit of a golden touch with family comedies the last couple of years, juggles six different characters, Buddy Love being the only...
...least three times the byte--as more than one punster put it--of Melissa, last year's electronic femme fatale. This was not so much because of its ingenuity, says Finnish computer-virus hunter Mikko Hypponen, whose team was among the first to capture the bug's digital DNA, but because of its blinding speed, spreading around the world in a hypersonic two hours (vs. six for Melissa...