Word: variants
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Still, prostate cancer does kill some 30,000 men a year in U.S. Learning more about genetic predisposition, particularly through a test that does not require cancer to be present to determine risk (PSA screening does), may help lead to the way to identify gene markers for the lethal variant of the disease. "It's a step in the right direction," says Dr. William Isaacs, a professor of urology and oncology at the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a co-author of the study. "Who's at risk of a more aggressive disease? That...
...Second, a faith in the good intentions of the American nation spawns two types of arguments about Iraq. The first variant, largely confined to the political Right, connives to apportion blame for the ‘mess’ in Iraq to the Iraqis themselves. Aside from ignoring Coalition troops’ direct hand in Iraqi deaths (according to the Lancet study, 56 percent of all cases where a perpetrator was known, amounting to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis), not to mention their role in fomenting Iraq’s sectarian bloodshed, this claim whitewashes the gross illegality of their...
...second variant of the belief in American benevolence deserves closer scrutiny. Here the incorrectness of the invasion of Iraq is admitted, but a select cabal of criminals is held responsible. Yet not only does this willfully ignore the bipartisan makings of the occupation itself (from Democrats’ sanctioning the initial invasion to their pithy, insipid “opposition” today), it demonstrates a deep-seated refusal to engage the historical role of the Democratic Party in fashioning imperial policy. In the specific context of Iraq, one only has to point to the murderous regime of sanctions...
...depending on the symbol he had chosen. All men were equally good at learning to pick the symbols that won them a smiley face, but some men were worse than others at avoiding the ones that resulted in sad faces. Those men, it turns out, had a particular gene variant, or allele, that reduces the density of receptors for dopamine - a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in motivation, pleasure and addiction - in certain areas of the brain. Brain scans also showed significantly less activity in those areas in response to the sad-faced negative feedback...
...good news is that having the allele doesn't necessarily mean you can't learn from your mistakes. Although the men who had the genetic variant did show weaker responses to negative feedback, they did not perform markedly worse on the task at hand: They selected the good symbols from the bad about as often as participants who didn't have the allele. The results suggest that learning - though influenced by dopamine - is a complex process that involves much more than one kind of brain receptor. "It's just one factor that may contribute to some problems that might arise...