ROAD KILL

Squirrels are the worst. Unlike more sensible animals, squirrels don t just cross over. While far away you can spot them sitting on one side of the road. As you get closer, they dash over to the other side, stop, reverse, and scramble back to the center. Closer and closer you get, and they re still in the road. Finally, as you drive by, they decide that your side is where they really want to be. Squirrels can fit under the car, so there s always hope as they disappear under the front end that you might see 

The example of groundhogs crossing a road illustrates a problem for gradualistic evolution. Up until this point in the book I have emphasized irreducible complexity—systems that require several components to function, and so are mammoth barriers to gradual evolution. I discussed a number of examples more can be seen just by paging through a 

BIOSYNTHESIS OF AMP. THE FIGURE STARTS WITH INTERMEDIATE III. F REPRESENTS THE FOUNDATION - RIBOSE-5-PHOSPHATE. WHITE BOXES ARE NITROGEN ATOMS, BLACK ARE CARBON ATOMS, AND GRAY ARE OXYGEN ATOMS. THE ATOMS ARE NUMBERED IN THE ORDER THEY BECOME ATTACHED. ONLY ATOMS THAT WILL BE PART OF THE FINAL PRODUCT ARE NUMBERED. ATOMS THAT BECOME ATTACHED BUT ARE SUBSEQUENTLY REPLACED OR CUT OFF ARE MARKED WITH AN X. 

Under the guidance of Enzyme III, an amino acid called glycine (consisting of a nitrogen atom that is attached to a carbon, which is 

In the next step a molecule of formic acid (actually the related ion, formate), consisting of two atoms of oxygen attached to an atom of carbon, is stuck onto nitrogen 4 of Intermediate IV to make Intermediate V. In the process one of the formate oxygens is kicked out. Ordinarily formate is unreactive, so getting it to hook onto other molecules requires some preparation. A biochemistry textbook emphasizes the problem  

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Last on the list of OPM are the individuals who invest their own money on Wall Street. Rarely do they play a significant role in company financing, since their individual investments are too small to permit efficient fund raising. The only biotech companies where retail investors represent a majority of shareholders are those that have been abandoned by institutional investors, i.e., the road kill. 

No one has a clue how the AMP pathway developed. Although a few researchers have observed that the pathway itself presents a severe challenge to gradualism, no one has written about the obstacle posed by the need to regulate a cell s metabolic pathway immediately at its inception. Small wonder—no one wants to write about road kill. 

The authors wish to thank Janet Sanjur (for technical assistance) and Dean DeNicola (for statistical support). This work was made possible by a SRU international travel grant and travel funding from C of C. Light-microscopy photography was made possible by a National Science Foundation equipment grant, application 9970189. All animals were obtained through either routine culling practice in the UK or road kill. No permit was required to collect these specimens. 

The plate dent experiments are so difficult to understand or model that reference 16 did not consider Munroe jets as a mechanism for the formation of the dents or connect the results of the experiments with the PHERMEX Munroe jet data base. Such experiments are similar to attempting to do biology from road kill. 

An early morning explosion, Dec. 13, 1994, killed four employees and injured 18 at Terra Industries Port Neal, Iowa, nitrogen fertilizer plant, 16 miles south of Sioux City, The blast leveled half the facility and forced evacuation of more than 2,500 people from nearby towns with an ammonia cloud released from a ruptured storage tank. Road and air traffic were diverted. Some were injured by falling debris and others by the impact of the explosion. Many suffered from ammonia inhalation. 

The salts content of soils may be markedly altered by man s activities. The effect of cathodic protection will be discussed later in this section. Fertiliser use, particularly the heavy doses used in lawn care, introduces many chemicals into the soil. Industrial wastes, salt brines from petroleum production, thawing salts on walks and roads, weed-killing salts at the base of metal structures, and many other situations could be cited as examples of alteration of the soil solution. In tidal areas or in soils near extensive salt deposits, depletion of fresh ground-water supplies has resulted in a flow of brackish or salty sea water into these soils, causing increased corrosion. 

Even though Jen was angry with me for a long time, she finally realized that she was slowly killing herself, and eventually she thanked me. She still sees a psychiatrist for her eating disorder, and may have to do so for a long time. She is safe and healthy again, but the road to recovery for this disorder is a rocky one. 

Joseph Stone was a long-haul truck driver, age twenty-two, who lived off-the-road in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. His sleeper-truck was a Freightliner which pulled into Avondale Mills too late for unloading on January 5, 2005. Stone, also known as Rolling Stone, his CB radio name, drove for J.W. Express located in Deauville, Quebec. He called his girlfriend at home in Quebec to tell her he would be held up for the night, and then went to bed in his truck. Runaway chlorine gas killed Joseph Stone by inhalation while he slept on Leitner Street in Graniteville, and he may never have known what killed him. 

Wind power has been slowed by public opposition. In 2002, a citizen s group in Prince Edward County, Ontario, vetoed a small windfarm project on the coast of Lake Ontario near Hillier. They proposed that the 22 proposed wind turbines would be noisy, kill birds and harm the neighborhood by being too visible. These are common complaints about wind-farms, but at a distance of about 200 meters, the sound of a windfarm is faint. At closer distances the noise is similar to the sound of an airplane s engine from inside the cabin. Even under the spinning blades it is possible to converse in a normal voice. One Dutch study showed that a small wind-farm is less harmful to birds than 1-kilometer of road or powerlines. 

Two years later, an explosion and fire at Bartlo Packaging (BPS, Inc.), in West Helena, Arkansas, killed three firefighters and seriously injured another. Hundreds of residents, including patients at a local hospital, were either evacuated or sheltered-in-place (USEPA-OSHA, 1999). Property damage was extensive. Major roads were closed and Mississippi River was traffic halted for nearly 12 hours. 

Colin Ferguson opens fire on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train, killing five people and injuring 19. 

Pierre and Marie Curie called Becquerel s radiation radioactivity . They found that another heavy element, thorium, was also radioactive, and deduced that natural uranium ore (pitchblende) contained other radioactive elements, which they called polonium (after Marie s native country) and radium (because it glowed). After two years of sifting through tonnes of uranium ore, they isolated salts of these new elements. The work left both the Curies with hands badly scarred from radiation bums, and it no doubt hastened Marie s death from leukaemia in 1934. Pierre might have met the same fate had he not been tragically killed in a road accident in 1906. 

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