Word: variant
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...generally harmless to cattle as well, even when infected sheep tissues are injected directly into a cow's brain. But scientists believe some sheep carcasses, ground up to add to British cattle feed, carried an unusual form of the disease that did manage to infect cows. That variant, renamed BSE, began to show up in British herds in the 1980s, eventually afflicting nearly 200,000 animals...
...scarlike plaques found in the brain of Alzheimer's patients, beta amyloid is made by nerve cells when beta and gamma secretase execute a one-two snip that cuts a larger precursor protein into a shorter fragment. Sometimes the fragment is 40 units long, sometimes 42. The slightly longer variant, scientists have found, is directly toxic to nerve cells. Among other things, it appears to stimulate the release of oxygen free radicals, thereby setting off in the brain a destructive biochemical cascade...
Other rogue therapists mistreat gender-variant children by trying to force them to conform to gender rules. They use blunt behavior-modification techniques such as rewarding tomboys for wearing frilly dresses or punishing effeminate boys for playing with a Barbie. "Many of those kids become runaways, and they are damaged for life," says Gender PAC's Riki Anne Wilchins...
...Allen Roses, a rapier-tongued contrarian then at Duke University, challenged the beta-amyloid orthodoxy. He announced that he and his colleagues had found a major Alzheimer's-susceptibility gene that affected the late-onset forms of the disease. It was the gene for APOE4, a common variant of the APOE lipoprotein, which is one of the many workhorses of the body's cholesterol-transport system. What, everyone wondered, could this lipoprotein, a known risk factor for heart disease, possibly have to do with Alzheimer's? Very quickly, many concluded that Roses could not be right...
When the 'Yale system' (or some variant thereof) was considered here, there was never an expectation that those assigned to a particular upperclass House would also be housed together as first-year students," she writes. "The numbers wouldn't work right,' I think, given size and configuration of the Yard, Union dorms and of Apley...