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Top 10 Scientific Advances of 2004
TarrVetus writes "Science Magazine's The Top Ten Science Breakthroughs of 2004 have been announced. The winner: The NASA Rovers and their evidence of water on Mars. The runner up was the Hobbit species found in Indonesia. Other breakthroughs include cloned human embryos and the first discovered pulsar pair."
Your ignorance is interesting.
It's not illegal. You just won't get federal funding.
Prohibition on Federal Funding for Cloning of Human Beings
In case your interested.
... seems to blow all that other crap away, even if the news was released in december. evidence of water once being on mars is big... but hardly surprising enough to rank at #1.
Here is a reference from the primary literature:
Nobrega et al. Science 302:413- (2003).
Nobrega et al. made 2 knockout mice, deleting 2 Mb and 1 Mb (Mb= 10e6 basepairs of DNA) regions, respectively, of the genome called "deserts", i.e., gene poor regions that nonetheless are highly conserved between humans and mice, but not humans and fish. The authors believed that since this sequence was conserved, it must not be junk, and therefore likely contains cis-acting regulatory sequences that important for gene regulation. When these regions were deleted, however, the mice developed normally and had no apparent defects or pathologies. In other words, what was once thought to be junk, then thought to not be junk, turns out to be junk again (sounds like a Fark cliche).
Here is another link that is informative. One possibility that is mentioned in this blurb is that the knockout mice are just defective in a non-obvious way.
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