Word: wormed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...even as Wonderful Life was being published, the discovery of new Cambrian-era fossil beds in Sirius Passet, Greenland, and Yunnan, China, was stripping some of the weirdness from the wonders. Hallucigenia's impossibly pointed legs, for example, were unmasked as the upside-down spines of a prehistoric velvet worm. In similar fashion, Wiwaxia, some scientists think, is probably allied with living bristle worms. And the anomalocaridids - whose variety is rapidly expanding with further research - appear to be cousins, if not sisters, of the amazingly diverse arthropods...
...proliferation of wildly varying body plans during the Cambrian, scientists reason, therefore must have something to do with Hox genes. But what? To find out, developmental biologist Sean Carroll's lab on the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus has begun importing tiny velvet worms that inhabit rotting logs in the dry forests of Australia. Blowing bubbles of spittle and waving their fat legs in the air, they look, he marvels, virtually identical to their Cambrian cousin Aysheaia, whose evocative portrait appears in the pages of the Burgess Shale. Soon Carroll hopes to answer a pivotal question: Is the genetic...
...dive to the bottopm of the Challenger Deep. JAMSTEC engineers watched anxiously on a video screen, the robotic craft spent 35 min. at a depth of 35,798 ft.--2 ft. shy of Trieste's 1960 record. But during that brief visit, Kaiko saw a sea slug, a worm and a shrimp, proof that even the most inhospitable place on earth is home to a variety of creatures. Next winter Kaiko will return to the deep to look for more signs of life...
...often with Carter's diplomacy, the long-term value of his intervention is in doubt. "It was negotiated on behalf of the guinea worm,'' gibed a State Department official. Indeed, the combatants had agreed to stop fighting largely to allow aid workers to treat a terrible parasitic disease. While the pause might open the door to negotiations, it seems unlikely to end Sudan's relentless slaughter. Carter did not address the fundamental conflict over the government's insistence on imposing Islamic law throughout the country...
...truce with the help of former President Jimmy Carter. The two sides, which have been fighting a 12-year war in which more than 1 million people have died, agreed to a two-month cease-fire so that health workers could try to wipe out the parasitic Guinea worm, which causes debilitating disease...