Word: variant
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...Texas originated in the Caribbean in the fall of 1976 and spread from there to the United States. A spokes woman for the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga., said yesterday the disease is a variant of the A Victoria virus, the most common strain of the flu in America in the past several years...
...Party candidate for Parliament, Economist Robert Smit, and his wife Jeanne-Cora, were murdered in their home near Johannesburg. The victims were shot and stabbed, and their killers sprayed mysterious letters in red paint on the kitchen walls. Police were not sure whether the killings were a South African variant of the Charles Manson case, as one anonymous caller hinted, or whether they had political connotations...
...infant's chromosomal sex will not match its outward appearance. There are, for example, people with a female XX chromosome makeup who display pronounced male sexual development. Wachtel discovered why. Analyzing the blood of these individuals, he found that their chromosomes apparently contained a hidden male factor-a variant of the same signal found in normal males. In the first few weeks after conception, when the embryo is still sexually neutral, the signal causes the development of testes, a source of male hormones. In the case of the XX males, however, the male factor, apparently consisting...
...Calif., two California scientists reported that they had isolated a chemical from the blood of schizophrenics that may be at the root of their illness. Drs. Frank Ervin of U.C.L.A.'s Neuropsychiatric Institute and Roberta Palmour of the University of California at Berkeley described the substance as a variant of a peptide-a short chain of amino acids-that belongs to a family of newly discovered opiate-like brain hormones called endorphins...
Despite Spielberg's preoccupation with UFOs in Close Encounters, he prefers to call the film an "adventure thriller" rather than science fiction, and he may have a point. The movie's conception is pure Hitchcock?on an intergalactic scale. The hero, Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), is a Middle American variant on the kind of man-in-the-middle played by Gary Grant and James Stewart in films like North by Northwest and Vertigo. A power-company worker who lives with his wife (Teri Garr) and three kids in Muncie, Ind., Roy is engulfed one night by phenomena he cannot understand: searing...