Word: infects
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...park. The huge, shaggy bison not only can damage fences; about half the Yellowstone herd is also thought to carry brucellosis, an infectious disease that can cause cows to abort their calves. Montana cattle have been certified brucellosis-free since 1983, but ranchers fear that if the sick bison infect their herds, the result could be quarantine, slaughter and economic ruin...
...drawback of germ warfare is its unpredictability. Saddam might be reluctant to use it on the battlefield because his own soldiers could become infected. He would be more likely to launch germ attacks against specific targets, such as airfields, command centers and ships, or against civilian populations in an attempt to cripple oil production. Even then, the Iraqi leader would need to choose his weapon carefully. Some hardy microbes, such as anthrax and plague, can infect an area for years, which would make it dangerous for Iraq's troops to move into a territory that had been captured with...
...most notorious computer life-forms are the electronic viruses that have been injected, inadvertently or maliciously, into computer networks. Like real viruses, these programs are strings of instructional code that have the ability to infect a host computer and reproduce without restraint, sometimes causing considerable damage. But computer viruses are not really alive. They do not evolve or metabolize. And they are created, fully formed, by human programmers. The proponents of artificial life want their life-forms to create themselves, to emerge from nonliving components just as life on earth arose from the primordial ooze...
QUICK, THE RAID. Everyone knows that the computer industry is fighting against viruses, malicious programs that can infect whole networks and crash them. So it stands to perverse reason that hush-hush agencies like the CIA and NSA are trying to create such bugs as offensive weapons. The latest entrant in this quest is the U.S. Army, which is soliciting bids on a half-million dollar contract to develop tactical virus weapons capable of disabling enemy computers on the battlefield. The proposal has raised eyebrows among the military's hackers. Says one Army computer-security officer: "Many of my colleagues...
...warned the class of "the pervasive distrust and cynicism that infect public life today," citing the gradual erosion of the public's faith in American government beginning with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal...