Word: suss
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...from causing disease. Then they branded it with a series of watermarks that would distinguish it as a product of their lab. Using a code built around selected genes, they spelled out five words that Venter coyly refuses to reveal, saying only that any molecular-biology study can suss them out and promising that there are no obscenities. The next step, which could happen in a matter of months, will be to insert the gene into a cell and see if it indeed stirs to life. "This team is betting its reputation that that will happen in 2008," Venter says...
...just such a paper trail that enabled Marilyn Jo Drake, the auditor in Iowa's Pottawattamie County, to suss out an anomaly in a county-recorder race she was monitoring in June. She noticed that a 20-year incumbent was being beaten 10 to 1 by an unknown newcomer. Sensing a glitch, Drake cross-checked the electronic results against the totals on the paper vote and discovered the veteran was actually well ahead. The problem, it turned out, was the way the candidates' names had been ordered and coded into the access cards that activated the machines, which were made...
...things are easier than telling a lie, and few things are harder than spotting one when it's told to us. We've been trying to suss out liars ever since Cain fibbed to God about murdering Abel. While God was not fooled--hearing the blood of Abel crying out from the land--the rest of us do not have such divine lie-detection gifts...
...Sticks and Stones," (Three Rivers Press; 128 pages; $14) looks, at first flip-through, like a kid's book. The illustrations are large, often taking up an entire page, and contain no dialogue. While even pre-literate children may be able to suss out the broad good vs. evil story, only more mature readers will recognize it as a pointed political parable. It portrays a giant rock creature, born of a volcano, awaking to a barren, grey world. Klutzy and unskilled, he takes command of a tribe of tiny laborers by virtue of his might. Still unsatisfied, he makes...
Journalists and politicos have been trying off and on for a decade now to suss out exactly what George W. Bush did in the National Guard more than 30 years ago. The basic facts are not very mysterious: Bush got a coveted homeland gig in the Guard, just as many other well-connected college graduates did, while hundreds of thousands of other young men got drafted and sent to Vietnam. Ever since Bush ran for Texas Governor in 1994, details of the subplot have dribbled out, suggesting that he was a slacker in his later days as a pilot...