Word: extinct
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...symbol of the country's frontier toughness. (The dog-sized marsupial's second life as a Looney Tunes character hasn't hurt its popularity either.) But as fierce as it is, the devil - which is found only in the Australian island-state of Tasmania - is in danger of going extinct...
...grow so large that they prevent the animal from feeding and lead to starvation. First discovered in 1996, the cancer has spread swiftly through the Tasmanian devil population, killing more than 70% of the island's animals. If nothing is done to stop the disease, the devils could go extinct within 35 years. (See 10 species nearing extinction...
According to the velocity maps that Loarie and his colleagues put together, only 8% of the world's national parks and other preserves will retain their current climate over the next century, compounding the problem of how to keep species from going extinct. One way to do that is simply to move them. But that's not only extraordinarily difficult, it can also backfire - just ask anyone in the southeastern U.S. about the inexorable advance of the imported invasive species the kudzu vine. "For some species on the brink of extinction, physically moving them might be our only option," says...
...Jimenez says the debut of electronic voting in 2010 should eliminate two major sources of election crime: trying to fix the outcome by threats of violence again election officials during the vote-counting period, and the practice of dagdag bawas, or padding and shaving votes. "Both should be rendered extinct by an automated vote count in which there will be no opportunity to change the outcome," says Jimenez...
This discovery is part of a five-year planet-hunting campaign designed to solve those problems with four keys: first, the Subaru telescope, which sits at an elevation of nearly 14,000 ft. on the summit of the extinct volcano Mauna Kea and is by itself one of the world's biggest and sharpest telescopes; second, the adaptive optics with which the telescope is equipped, which largely cancel out atmospheric blurring; third, the telescope's top-notch coronagraph filter, which blots out most starlight to remove the glare. And finally, the whole thing operates in infrared light, a type...