Word: extinct
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...impact of climate change on human populations is likely to be dire, we're pretty good at adapting to change overall. Animals, however, are not. When their habitats change irrevocably - when the rain forest dries up or cool mountains in tropical zones heat up - animals may simply go extinct. A recent study in Science demonstrates how that can happen. Robert Colwell, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut, analyzed data from nearly 2,000 species of plants, insects and fungi in the tropics, where organisms often lack the ability to escape warming temperatures by going north or south; instead...
...major American insurance companies are in little danger of going the way of the extinct banks, industry analysts and officials say. And policy holders are in no danger of being unable to insure their lives, homes, and property. "We don't have a liquidity crisis, we aren't experiencing a credit crisis," says Robert Hartwig, president of industry trade group The Insurance Information Institute. "We have the cash to pay claims...
...strong ties to Africa - he was born in Nice in 1940, but his family history on both sides leads back to Mauritius, an island about 500 miles east of Madagascar that has been best known in the West, at least until now, as the home of the famously extinct dodo. The son of a doctor, Le Clézio grew up in France and Nigeria speaking French and English. He began writing at the age of 8 - one of his childhood efforts, composed on a long voyage to Nigeria, contains a list of his forthcoming works. His family traveled prodigiously...
Threatened or Extinct...
...List, however, isn't a death sentence - careful conservation work can bring back species from the brink of extinction. The black-footed ferret in the western U.S. was believed to be extinct in the wild - meaning it was only found in captivity - until it was successfully reintroduced into the wild by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service between 1991 and 2008. Conservationists did the same work in Mongolia, where they successfully reintroduced wild horse to the steppes of Central Asia. And new techniques - like selling the carbon sequestered in standing forests as a way to fight climate change - offer...