Word: randoms
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...acquisitions and product launches tied to its powerful website. From spreadsheet software to online word processing and a digital payment service, the company seems to offer new stuff every day. Free, for the most part, the offerings are dumped onto Google's "more" or "labs" page, in seemingly random order. Mayer wants to streamline that process, helping return Google to its roots in simplicity. "Users aren't going to remember our 50-plus products. They'll remember three to five. We need more features and fewer products," she says...
Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons (Random House; 422 pages) isn't about the end of the world, just the end of a world. Frazier is something of an ambulance chaser when it comes to historical disasters--his best seller Cold Mountain was about the fall of the South in the Civil War. Thirteen Moons, Frazier's second novel, consists of the late-life recollections of one Will Cooper, an orphan who at 12 was put in charge of a remote trading post on the outskirts of the Cherokee Nation. There Will encountered two father figures--the wise, laconic chief Bear...
...executions by Saddam's regime in Dujail showed that those boundaries were a mirage: they could close in on you in less time than it takes a bullet to fly from the barrel of a gun. But life in Iraq has become so bloody and death so ever present, random and unpredictable that some Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam's tyranny. When I told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about the killings of witnesses' families in Dujail, he shook his head but said the current loss of life is "different than a government carrying on violence against its own citizens." Iraqis...
What causes changes in both the dark matter and the genes themselves as one species evolves into another is random mutation, in which individual base pairs--the "letters" of the genetic alphabet--are flipped around like a typographical error. These changes stem from errors that occur during sexual reproduction, as DNA is copied and recombined. Sometimes long strings of letters are duplicated, creating multiple copies in the offspring. Sometimes they're deleted altogether or even picked up, turned around and reinserted backward. A group led by geneticist Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has identified...
...most of us, though, it's the grand question about what it is that makes us human that renders comparative genome studies so compelling. As scientists keep reminding us, evolution is a random process in which haphazard genetic changes interact with random environmental conditions to produce an organism somehow fitter than its fellows. After 3.5 billion years of such randomness, a creature emerged that could ponder its own origins--and revel in a Mozart adagio. Within a few short years, we may finally understand precisely when and how that happened...