Word: basic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...chosen, what all of them have in common is the speed with which they could be pulled off. Unlike the early Apollo planners, who weren't even sure they could get astronauts into near-Earth space, much less fling them out to the moon, Mars-mission directors have the basic space-travel technology down cold. All they need is the go-ahead to design and build their machines...
Superficially persuasive as this view is, it ignores certain basic realities. It assumes, for instance, that organisms are little more than agglomerations of special-purpose mechanisms, each of which can be tracked independently of the "packages" of which they form part. We speak of the "evolution of upright walking" or the "evolution of the hand," often without realizing that legs and hands can only be parts of the story...
Precisely what that fundamental uncertainty tells us about the basic nature of the subatomic world is a question theorists have been wrestling with for decades. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, for example, believed that before you pinned a particle down by measuring it, the particle was literally in several places at once. The act of measurement, he suggested, forced the particle to choose one location over all the others...
...showcase the latest IPO, decide to try to re-create the genome of a dinosaur. They bring together a few complete bird genomes--complete DNA texts from the cells of different birds--and start mapping the shared features. The result is a sort of prototype genome for a basic bird...
...basic science is pretty straightforward. The earth lurches from time to time because its outer shell is broken into 11 huge, solid plates floating on a layer of molten rock that has the consistency of Silly Putty. These tectonic plates are constantly jostling each other, like rafts crowded into a small pond, and it's along the boundaries where they meet that most quakes are born. The two plates that form California's infamous San Andreas Fault, the Pacific and the North American plates, are the largest on Earth. And they're moving inexorably in opposite directions...