Word: planting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...true in today's world as it was in the antebellum South: cotton is king. The plant has been cultivated for its fiber for over 7,000 years, and today it's grown by more than 20 million farmers in some 80 countries. But while cotton accounts for nearly 40% of the fiber used worldwide to make clothing, there's one thing the plant has never been able to do well: feed people. Cottonseeds are a rich source of protein--the current cotton crop produces enough seeds to meet the daily requirements of half a billion people a year...
Remove the gossypol, however, and you'd have a cheap and abundant form of protein for everyone. But get rid of all the gossypol, as plant breeders did in the 1950s, and insects will devour the defenseless cotton. Enter Keerti Rathore, a professor at Texas A&M University, who found a way around the problem through genetic engineering. In new field-trial data, Rathore's team demonstrated that it can turn off the genes that stimulate the production of gossypol in the cottonseeds while the rest of the plant keeps its natural defenses. "This research potentially opens the door...
Rathore used a new technique, called RNA interference, to construct a genetic sequence that blocked the gossypol-producing enzyme in the seeds only. After succeeding in the lab, he began a test in a greenhouse to see if the genetically modified cotton plant would survive and pass on its new trait. Rathore's just-compiled data show that the modified cotton appears to be normal in every way other than the fact that it has instantly edible seeds. "What works in the greenhouse should hold true in the fields," he says...
...should he. Bloom is a pioneer when it comes to worker buyouts, in which the employees of a faltering firm buy an ownership stake to prevent plant closings or job losses. The idea of an economy of worker cooperatives may seem utopian, and the notion of using the tools of modern finance to do so absurd. But Bloom and his mentor at Lazard, Eugene Keilin, helped prove it possible—and did so with no less than the largest airline in the nation: United...
...that could quickly be converted to produce bomb matériel. Stating Washington's case at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna this week, Ambassador Glyn Davies warned that Iran had already created enough low-enriched uranium that, if it kicked out nuclear inspectors and reconfigured its enrichment plant, could be re-enriched to provide matériel for a single bomb. "We have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear option," Davies said...