Word: fragments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...March 8 of next year. This has led some other states to move up their dates as well. By March 15 nearly half the delegates will probably have been chosen. No one knows whether this front-loaded calendar will make for early decisions or whether the large fields will fragment the results until later in the game. The presence of two Baptist ministers -- Jesse Jackson on the Democratic left and Pat Robertson on the Republican right -- also casts conventional scenarios in doubt. But one thing is certain: more candidates are out campaigning earlier than ever in the belief that late...
...sounds like a child's riddle: What do you get when you cross a firefly with a tobacco plant? Answer: tobacco that lights itself. That is essentially what a team of scientists at the University of California at San Diego has done. By outfitting a fragment of a plant virus with the gene that tells firefly cells to produce a protein central to generating light, the researchers have created a plant that literally glows in the dark...
...that's a big monkey, thought Paleontologist Alan Walker as he plucked the skull fragment from a gully west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. But that was no monkey. The bone belonged to a 2.5 million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue...
Last summer Walker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, was looking for baboon fossils, when he spotted the skull fragment. By studying volcanic ash and other bones nearby, his colleagues determined the skull's age. Its pedigree was trickier. It has the structure of a late australopithecine: wide palate, huge rear molars, enormous cheekbones and a pronounced crest of bone running along the top of the skull. But other features -- a for- ward-thrusting muzzle, an orangutan-size brain and an apelike jaw structure -- are primitive. Leakey believes this mosaic suggests, as he has argued for years...
...reconstructor: "Ships were the most complex structures made by these societies. When you look at the remains of a ship, you're looking at a very high degree of technology within that period." Working with a crew of assistants and archaeologists, Steffy sketches the shape of each surviving plank fragment, frame and other timbers as soon as possible after it is raised, then makes scaled-down copies of the pieces and fits them together. He has made a hypothetical reproduction of a ship's hull from 10% of the surviving timbers...