Word: evening
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Sheltering leaves that ordinarily prevent the forest floor from baking in the sun are thinned out. The rainy season may provide a brief respite, but during the next dry season, the remaining trees quickly exhaust soil moisture and become more susceptible to fire. When the giants burn and fall, even more fuel is deposited on the forest floor, and more sunlight scorches the land...
...part of their computer's time to the FightAIDS@home project, which uses distributed computing to help Arthur Olson's lab at the Scripps Research Institute search for new anti-AIDS drugs. Others enroll participants in raffles for free airline tickets or cash prizes. Apparently, virtue has its price, even for computers with time on their hands...
...should you care? Even if you're not concerned that the world's greatest trove of biological diversity, including millions of undiscovered animal and plant species, is vanishing in a cloud of smoke, you should know that the burning of the Amazon is pumping countless tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, intensifying the threat of global warming...
...trying to tap into the same community computing power for commercial purposes, selling it to industries in dire need of supercomputer muscle. One lucrative market: biotechs and pharmaceuticals trying to analyze data from the Human Genome Project. "The genome is so huge, and it takes so long to analyze even a single protein, that there's no way to do it without resorting to some sort of distributed computing," says Vijay Pande, who runs Folding@home...
Invasions of settlers can help make conditions even dryer. Land burned and cleared by farmers releases less water to the skies than forest does. Moreover, smoke inhibits rainfall by saturating the air with vast numbers of tiny particles, each of which can become the center of a water droplet. But the droplets remain tiny, and do not become heavy enough to fall to the ground, according to a study conducted by David Rosenfeld at Jerusalem University in Israel...