Word: mammoth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mammoth demonstrations were designed to send a warning of discontentment to the conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy. Workers in France are angry about what they see as insufficient government efforts to protect both public and private sector jobs. People are also upset that union and employee concerns over stagnating salaries and slumping purchasing power were ignored when the government drew up its $34 billion economic stimulus package. Many remain concerned over the lack of any real effort to impose tighter regulations on banks and finance groups in France and abroad, despite Sarkozy's rousing call last year to "moralize...
...principles: that the provisions be "timely, temporary and targeted." "If we heap too much on top of the package, it will then take us deeply into debt," she warned in a speech on the House floor on Jan. 29, 2008. But now, as Congress gears up to craft a mammoth stimulus package that will dwarf last year's $170 billion bill, those requirements don't seem to be all that binding. (See a bailout report card...
Nature may have forgotten about the extinct woolly mammoth, but science has been buzzing about it lately, ever since researchers announced that they had sequenced 80% of its genome. That gave rise to chatter about whether a cloned mammoth could ever be born. Serious cloning science began in 1952, when researchers first reported transferring a tadpole nucleus into an ovum and producing identical tadpole copies. In 1995, biologist Craig Venter sequenced the genome of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium, the first living organism whose genes were decoded. In 1997, cloning made stop-the-presses headlines when embryologist Ian Wilmut announced that...
Rattled Americans have found some solace in the news that President-elect Barack Obama is working quickly with congressional Democrats to finalize details of a mammoth stimulus package expected to total between $500 billion and $700 billion. Europeans have been less lucky. So far, they've had to content themselves with a patchwork of national recovery plans frequently at odds with one another. A European Union-wide program, if leaders can even agree on one, is likely to be worth a comparatively anemic $130 billion...
...genetic sequencing of the woolly mammoth, meanwhile, raises the similarly fraught but increasingly realistic possibility of cloning extinct animals, a process that Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg has called "the science of eventuality." Still, scientist Stephan Schuster, who led the team at Penn State, isn't holding his breath. "What I'm trying to say is that there is a workable route to do that, but it is at this time technically, and cost-wise and time-wise, not feasible." Guess we'll just have to wait for Jurassic Park...