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Maybe. At their stepped-up pace, the government scientists should complete their road map of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes by late June. But there are folks out there who could spoil the victory party. Scientist and entrepreneur Craig Venter's company, Celera, using a riskier "shotgun" approach to plow through all those letters, is working at a furious pace as well. Only two weeks ago, he announced that Celera had completed mapping the genome of Drosophila melanogaster, a.k.a. the fruit fly, a favorite tool of lab scientists. While the fruit fly genome is far less complex than...
...questions of science may never be answered, a lot of new and exciting science could still come from overturning truths that we now take for granted. Robert Gallo, the AIDS researcher, once told me that at the end of the 1970s, he was at a conference where a prominent scientist confidently summed up the truths of biomedicine--such truths as: epidemic diseases are things of the past, at least in so-called developed nations; a widespread outbreak of infectious disease is impossible unless the microbe is casually transmitted; the kind of virus found in animals known as the retrovirus doesn...
This creates an additional conundrum. Because a polluted cloud does not rain itself out, notes University of Colorado atmospheric scientist Brian Toon, it tends to grow larger and last longer, providing a shiny white surface that bounces sunlight out to space. Indeed, one reason the earth has not yet warmed up as much as many anticipated may be due to the tug-of-war between industrial aerosols like sulfuric acid (which reflect heat) and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (which trap it). Ironically, then, the cost of reducing one kind of pollution may come at the price of intensifying...
...clearing efforts under way around the world wipe all that out. The ongoing development of South Florida, for instance, has filled in and paved over much of the Everglades wetlands, which have long served as an important source of atmospheric moisture. As a consequence, says Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Roger Pielke Sr., South Florida in July and August has become significantly dryer and hotter than it would have been a century ago under the same set of climatic conditions...
Although renowned computer scientist John L. Hennessy is about to become the president of tech-savvy Stanford University, many of his first challenges are likely to have little to do with technology. Arts and humanities, faculty concerns and student housing are the foremost concerns at the campus on the edge of Silicon Valley...