Word: precursors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...north pole before -200 F winter temperatures hit the region and threaten to freeze the instruments. But Phoenix is designed with a longer, six-to-eight-month stay in mind, so hopes are high that the probe will not only find frozen water but will also serve as a precursor to later missions seeking evidence of microscopic organic life. Which means that NASA, like Frosty, will probably be back again someday...
...stems from genetics. There's a particular protein that's made in people with Alzheimer's - which is made from a protein that all of us make, the amyloid precursor protein. [In people with Alzheimer's] that precursor protein is clipped by enzymes in the wrong place, and begins to form these little toxic parts that aggregate [in the brain] and eventually form fibrils and plaques that are the main pathologic feature of Alzheimer's disease. It's not clear why this happens exactly, and a lot of people have been studying it pretty hard. It's also not clear...
Drug discovery work is going on right now, mostly in two directions. One is to block these enzymes that cut the precursor protein in the wrong place, so that the plaque-forming bits of the protein aren't formed. And the other is to think of ways, probably [having to do] with the immune response, to break up the aggregated protein bits once they do form...
What it did have, though, was experience. Telenor adopted gsm - the global standard for digital mobile telecoms - as early as 1993, and had pioneered gsm's precursor more than a decade earlier. By the late '90s, mobile-phone penetration levels in Norway were more than double those in France and Germany, according to telecom consultancy Analysys. In light of deregulation, Telenor's savvy for nurturing a customer base from the early stages to maturity looked like its strongest export...
...human nature, and in his uncanny ability not only to capture the horrors of his own age but to foreshadow the atrocities to come. If earlier generations have found in the Spanish painter's work clues to their own iconography of despair (The Third of May as a precursor of Picasso's Guernica, the Black Paintings as preparation for images of Auschwitz), the Prado's "Goya in Times of War" is an exhibition for us, the Abu Ghraib generation...