Word: toolboxes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...environment in which they lived? Today an unprecedented effort to answer these questions is under way. Geologists and geochemists are reconstructing the Precambrian planet, looking for changes in the atmosphere and ocean that might have put evolution into sudden overdrive. Developmental biologists are teasing apart the genetic toolbox needed to assemble animals as disparate as worms and flies, mice and fish. And paleontologists are exploring deeper reaches of the fossil record, searching for organisms that might have primed the evolutionary pump. "We're getting data," says Harvard University paleontologist Andrew Knoll, "almost faster than we can digest...
...Madison, Wisconsin, showed that a homeobox gene involved in insect-limb formation also controls the genetic signals that paint spots on butterfly wings. In essence, says Carroll, butterflies use an old gene to perform a new trick. "Evolution did not have to invent new genes," he observes. "One basic toolbox gives nature enormous potential for diversity...
...genes and the non-Hox homeobox genes are not independent agents but members of vast genetic networks that connect hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other genes. Change one component, and myriad others will change as well-and not necessarily for the better. Thus dreams of tinkering with nature's toolbox to bring to life what scientists call a "hopeful monster" -- such as a fish with feet -- are likely to remain elusive. Scientists, as Duboule observes, are still far from reproducing in a laboratory the biochemical artistry that nature has taken millions of years to accomplish...
...about time the U.S. Navy went coed on its combat ships. Twenty years ago, I was one of the first five women to graduate from radio-relay school, and I found there was a lot of confusion. I had to ask for a toolbox that was issued automatically to everyone else. When the men in my shop realized I was fully prepared to get dirty and I could crawl under a truck, climb an antenna and wade in the mud without melting, I was no longer a liability but an asset. My assignments from 1974 to 1980 were a learning...
...shop on the computer networks, those networks-and the telecommunications systems that carry their traffic-are turning out to be terminally insecure. One of the things Mitnick is believed to have stolen from Shimomura's computer is a set of utility programs-the electronic equivalent of a locksmith's toolbox-that would make, in the hands of a determined hacker, a potent set of burglar's tools. Given the speed with which such programs can be duplicated and transmitted, it must now be assumed that they have been distributed widely throughout the computer underground...