Word: zeroed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Purists like to point out that, technically speaking, the beginning of the new millennium does not really occur on Jan. 1, 2000, but on Jan. 1, 2001. This is because there is no year zero in the Christian era, on which historical calendars are calculated. The first year of the era is called A.D. 1, and the one immediately preceding is 1 B.C. Therefore, by the time the calendar reaches Jan. 1, 2000, only 1,999 years will have elapsed since A.D.'s starting point. The same phenomenon occurs as each new century is recorded. In popular observance, however...
...preventive measures for people who want to avoid passing their defective genes on to their children. When one parent carries the deadly and dominant gene for Huntington's chorea, for example, there is a 50% chance that any offspring will have it too. To reduce those odds to zero, doctors of the future will extract several eggs from the prospective mother and fertilize them in a test tube with her husband's sperm. When the fertilized eggs have grown to the 32- or 64-cell stage, the doctors will flick off a few cells from each and analyze their...
...Goliath, commanding the 100-person team of Operation ATLAS the most critical mission in the history of space exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh could never revisit. Decades in space -- and neglect of the mandatory zero-G exercises -- had so weakened him that he could now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from the planet of his birth...
...facing his awesome responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to the "Bald Is Beautiful" school, if only because wigs were a nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable "Brainman," could make bare heads the norm within a single decade. Not even quick-change skin coloring, or the lens- corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses, had made such an impact upon style...
...best hope for both humanity and other life-forms would be to cut human propagation in half, so the world's numbers do not exceed 8 billion by mid- century. (The only event in which the earth would achieve zero population growth or even shrinkage would be some environmental or social catastrophe.) The huge run-up in human numbers has foreclosed most options and shortened the amount of time available to come to grips with rising threats to the environment, contends systems analyst Donella Meadows, co-author of Beyond the Limits, which updates the controversial 1972 blockbuster The Limits...