Word: fixes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once a broken gene is found, what next? Fix it, of course. But how? There are no tweezers small enough to pry out and replace bad nucleotides one letter at a time, and there probably never will be. So gene engineers have come up with a variety of indirect strategies for getting the same result...
...Justice Department and MIT have settled an antitrust suit charging the institute with joining the eight Ivy League universities to fix the prices of college educations...
...moon landings. The crew was set to perform at least five six-hour space walks, and maybe up to seven, in order to replace or repair the telescope's myopic primary mirror, an outdated camera, two wobbly solar-energy panels and three faulty gyroscopes, among other balky components -- 11 fixes in all. Says mission scientist Edward Weiler sardonically: "This is not a trip to Grandma's house to fix the faucet...
Despite 400 hours of training in NASA's space-simulating water tanks and plenty of spacewalking experience, the astronauts realize that the tiniest unforeseen problem could turn their effort into a disaster. A stripped bolt, a slightly misaligned part, a slip on the part of the fix-it crew could disable the telescope completely, leaving NASA and the scientists who depend on the Hubble worse off than before...
That is why the space station's advocates will be rooting so hard this week for the Endeavour astronauts. If they fail to fix the Hubble, Congress will have less confidence that NASA can carry out even tougher missions -- with or without Russian help...