Word: million
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tree of life, we often envision evolution working like a patient gardener, pruning species that don't quite fit, bit by bit. But that's not how extinction works in practice. Throughout our planet's history, mass extinction has occurred five times - most recently 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs finally died out - taking out vast amounts of life all at once, usually due to a catastrophic and sudden climatic change. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Chicago examined 200 million years of history of marine clams, oysters and mussels; they picked the simple bivalves because they have a long and detailed fossil record. Going back to the Jurassic period, researchers analyzed when each genus - a taxonomic category just above species - disappeared, and whether relatives vanished at the same time. On average they found that closely related groups of clams went extinct together at a rate that was more often than expected by blind chance - generally those groups of species were confined to a fairly small geographic area...
...nation's 55 million children prepare for a new school year, the foremost question on many parents' and school administrators' minds is, How will we protect our students from swine flu? Some education officials anticipate that each of the country's 100,000 public schools and thousands of private schools may have to close at some point between now and next summer to stem the tide of the H1N1 pandemic...
...traditional tourist mecca of Las Vegas is facing similar challenges. The coroner's office in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, saw a 22% increase in burials and cremations of unclaimed bodies this year, jumping from 741 to 904. When burial costs exceeded $1 million in the 2003-04 fiscal year, the agency turned to cremating the unclaimed unless it could be determined that burial was required because of religious or other beliefs. Each cremation costs $425 to $475. (Read a grim story of unearthed graves outside Chicago...
...years ago that an up-and-coming member of the House Democratic leadership pointed to a cozy arrangement in the Republican-written Medicare prescription-drug program as a symptom of everything wrong with Washington. The 2003 bill barred the government from negotiating for lower drug prices for its 43 million Medicare recipients. Instead, that task was delegated to private insurers and their agents, who Democrats argued - and still argue - don't have the muscle to get the steep discounts that a huge government program could. "Direct negotiation for lower prescription-drug prices is directly related to our lobbying- and ethics...