Word: unknowns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While the books of story spinners like Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz are usually reliable bets, a more striking measure of the risky bidding war is the six-figure contracts that publishers are dangling in front of unknown authors or those who would have been considered hopelessly academic not long ago. Sometimes these eye-popping deals are based on a one-page proposal sent over a fax machine, or even on no proposal at all. Yale history professor Paul Kennedy, who received an advance of about $20,000 from Random House for his surprise 1988 best seller, The Rise...
Instead of using the conventional technique of painstakingly inserting / foreign genes into an egg cell with a tiny needle, the scientists simply bathed sperm cells in a solution of bacterial DNA. The sperm, from mice, incorporated the genes by some still unknown process, then went on to fertilize eggs in a test tube. As the mice matured, 30% of them produced an enzyme normally made only by bacteria -- proof that the bacterial DNA had become part of the mice's genetic makeup...
...pointed out that Pons and Fleischmann never used a control experiment, although controls are standard scientific practices expected even of first-year chemistry students. Without a control experiment, it was impossible to tell for sure if the heat generated in the experiment came from fusion or from a previously unknown chemical reaction...
Despite such grandiose tributes to democracy, Gorbachev's candidacy was uncontested -- the first hint that the Congress was not out to rock the boat. An attempt was made to draft the popular Yeltsin, but he withdrew his name, citing party discipline. Leningrad engineer Alexander Obolensky, 46, a | political unknown, nominated himself -- not because he had any illusion of winning, he explained, but "to set a precedent" of contested elections. By 1,415 to 689, the assembly voted to keep Obolensky's name off the secret ballot. Gorbachev was elected President with 95.6% of the vote; 87 delegates voted against...
Call it the million-dollar panty raid. An unknown number of prurient perpetrators broke into the Los Angeles warehouse of Playboy magazine and swiped some of the Playboy empire's most valuable assets: namely, 421 hours of unedited videotape footage displaying Hugh Hefner's Playmates cavorting for the cameras. Valued at more than $1 million, the tapes constitute the raw material for such soft-porn piffle as erotic movies on the Playboy cable-TV channel and videocassette centerfolds. They included vintage rushes of Sondra Theodore, Miss July 1977 and a former Hefner girlfriend, interviews with Jessica Hahn...