Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...about a century, scientists have been studying the role bacteria play in the gastrointestinal tract, a complex ecosystem made up of helpful and harmful bugs whose interactions aren't fully understood. The bugs begin to infiltrate when we're born. Some make us sick, while others help the body work better. An average adult gut contains about a kilogram of bacteria - 100 trillion bugs of some 500 different species...
Over the past two decades, wall street and the rest of the financial ecosystem became obsessed with the quantification of risk. Assigning numbers to the chance of something bad happening is a centuries-old endeavor--mortality tables have been used to devise insurance premiums since the 18th century. With modern computing power, though, financial engineers captured, packaged and sold risk exposure in startlingly new ways. Buying protection against a bad corn harvest or a spike in interest rates was just the beginning. Over time, as instruments became more complex, a huge shift occurred. Risk itself became the thing to trade...
Abandoned ships wreak havoc on the marine ecosystem long after they've sunk. Decaying wreckages leach toxic chemicals like petroleum products and PCBs that remain in the water harming or destroying sea life and potentially enter the food chain, eventually getting ingested by humans. Sometimes dead watercraft foster the growth of new sea life that threatens the pre-existing local ecosystem. On Palmyra Atoll, 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, a population explosion of corallimorph, an aggressive creature similar to anemones and coral, killed almost all the coral growing around a long-line fishing vessel that sank in 1991, according...
...landscapes and basically take care of themselves.” In addition to improving soil and tree health, the sustainable organic method is also more environmentally-sound as the organic plots are less dependent on nitrogen from fertilizers. “The amount of nitrogen being pumped into the ecosystem from fertilizers is having a very serious environmental impact,” said Peter J. del Tredici, a lecturer in landscape architecture and a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. “A lot agricultural nitrogen has run off into aquatic ecosystems and has destroyed...
Over time, MySpace says its library will grow and be competitive with those of Rhapsody and iTunes, something that music industry insiders say is part of the Grand Plan for music. "A healthy ecosystem - that's all we want," my friend says. "Music as a utility." In other words, the labels want to see the same library of music available everywhere, in every possible way: for free and by subscription; streaming from sites and pay-per-download; locked and unlocked. Let the best business model win! The labels make money every which way. Indeed, both Sony Ericsson and its rival...