UNIVERSIDAD DE LAS NACIONES

ANTOLOGÍA DE LA MATERIA

INGLÉS AVANZADO II

DR. ARTURO MATTIELLO CANALES.

DR. FRANCISCO JAVIER ROCHA GONZÁLEZ.
EL ALUMNO DEBERÁ LEER LOS TEMAS QUE SE
ADJUNTAN EN IDIOMA INGLÉS Y AL CONCLUIR LA
LECTURA DE LOS MISMOS, REALIZARÁ UNA
TRADUCCIÓN Y RESUMEN EN IDIOMA ESPAÑOL.

ESTA ANTOLOGÍA FUE ELABORADA PARA EL

APRENDIZAJE DE LA MATERIA INGLÉS AVANZADO II, Y
ESTA DIRIGIDA PARA QUE EL ALUMNO PUEDA
CONOCER SU CONTENIDO DE UNA MANERA LÓGICA Y
ORDENADA.

ESTA ANTOLOGÍA PRETENDE LLEVAR DE LA MANO AL

ESTUDIANTE DURANTE SU RECORRIDO POR LA
MATERIA.
 MAN- MADE PARTICLES DIM SUN

ENVIRONMENT.- It may have escaped your notice, but the

skies are significantly darker these days than they were when
John F. Kennedy was president. These are simply more stuff
in our atmosphere, scientists says, and much of it is man-
made.

In May climatologists Michael Roderick and Graham

Farguhar of the Australian National University released data
suggesting that a little-know trend, commonly called solar
dimming, is a global phenomenon. Their study involves the
rate of water evaporation from metal pans placed at various
land sites around the world. Because Earth has been on a
steady warming trend, it would stand to reason that water
would evaporate more quickly now than in, say, the 1960s.
But observations show otherwise. “Pan Evaporation has
been, on average, declining,” says Roderick.

Many scientists think the reason is due to aerosols like

smoke that are man-made, particulates from volcanic
eruptions, and increased cloudiness. Tiny chemical particles
thrown into the atmosphere reflect sunlight back into space.
The particles may also contribute to cloud formation. Although
the net observed effect appears unnoticeable, agricultural
scientists are concerned that dimming will adversely affect
crop productivity. At least two groups of climatologists,
including Helen Power at the University of South Carolina and
Martin Wild of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
caution that solar dimming may have slowed or even reserved
in recent years, but they say it will take some time for them to
sort through recent dimming data to be certain.
-Maia Weinstock
 TWO- DEGREE RISE DROPS RICE YIELD BY 10
PERCENT

ENVIRONMENT. - Is global warming good or bad for farming?

The answer, no doubt, depends on the crop and the location
of the farm. But a pioneering study reported in 2004 gave an
alarming answer for one of the world’s most important crops:
rice, the staff of life for billions of people around the world.

After an 11- year inquiry, a group of Asian and American

researchers found a 10 percent drop in rice-crop yields for
every increase in nighttime temperatures of 1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit. The scientists, led by agronomist Kenneth
Cassman of the University of Nebraska and Shaobing Peng
of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines,
believe hotter nights may speed up respiration, causing the
plant to work harder and waste energy. The rice loss is
particularly strong during the dry season, the higher yielding
of the year’s two crops.

Global warming does not necessarily lead to agricultural

disasters. Heat might be expected to harm a crop (or force
farms to move poleward), but added carbon dioxide, which all
plants use to make organic matter, might act as a fertilizer.
“The big issue is, how do those two forces play out?” says
Cassman. “what’s the net effect?”.

Previously, most work on that question has been done in

greenhouses or computer models. Cassman and Peng
organized something different. For 11 years, from 1992 to
2003, they and their colleagues grew rice the way farmers do,
controlling everything that might prevent a good yield-
everything, that is, except the temperature and carbon
dioxide. With average nighttime temperatures up 1.8 °F at the
institute’s farm in the Philippines from 1979 to 2003, average
yields were down 10 percent.

So far, rice yields outside the lab aren’t falling yet –

farmers are clever, Cassman says, and keep finding ways to
improve output. But with the Green Revolution a distant
memory, yields are flattening, and Asian populations are
growing, raising prospects of future food shortages. “Yes, I’m
concerned about climate change,” says Cassman. “It’s like a
headwind scientists must fight to increase yields”
-Robert Kunzig

PROSTATE CANCER TEST QUESTIONED

MEDICINE- Millions of men over age 50 rely on the prostate-

specific antigen, or PSA, test each year in screenings for
prostate cancer. In October Stanford University urologist
Thomas A. Stamey made headlines when he declared that
the test is not a reliable predictor of cancer.

Back in 1987, Stamey was among the first to suggest

that the level of PSA, a protein normally produced by the
prostate gland, might be useful in detecting prostate cancer.
But based on an analysis of more than 1,300 prostates
removed over the past 20 years, Sramey reported in the
October issue of the Journal of Urology that the PSA test is
currently predictive of cancer in only 2 percent of cases.
Because of the increase in screening and detection of
prostate cancer over the past two decades, he now says a
higher PSA level may most often reflect a harmless age-
related increase in prostate size.

When doctors follow up a high PSA level with a biopsy,

they often find cancer. But this is only because most men
have some degree of prostate cancer. Studies have shown
that 80 percent or more of men over age 70 die with- but hot
from-prostate cancer. As counterintuitive as it seems,
detecting prostate cancer is not always in the patient’s best
interest. Once cancer is diagnosed, most men opt for treating
it either with radiation or removal of the prostate. In many
cases, that leads to impotence, urinary incontinence, and
other unpleasant side effects.

Although some experts question Stamey´s interpretation

of the data, his skepticism about the meaning of PSA levels
has significant support. “First of all, it is not know how often
PSA testing saves lives,” says Howard Parnes, an oncologist
at the National Cancer Institute. Randomized clinical trials
have shown, for instance, that screening for breast cancer
saves lives, but similar studies for the PSA test haven’t been
completed.

It seems likely that PSA testing leads to many more

people getting a cancer diagnostic and treatment than is
necessary, says Parnes. What would be more useful, he
says, is a diagnostic tool- such as protein marker for prostate
cancer- that could determine who among those people
actually needs to be treated. For now, some experts advise
doctors to notify patients of the low death rate from prostate
cancer, explain the risks of treatment, and allow them to make
an informed decision about testing. Physicians can also
perform yearly rectal exams and practice watchful waiting
rather than immediate intervention.
The American Urological Association, however, recommends
that the PSA test be

Used in conjunction with a rectal exam and a full medical

history to determine if a biopsy is warranted. And some
clinicians argue that a sharp increase in PSA from one year to
the next can be a significant clue. Still, without definitive
proof of the PSA test’s worth, the National Cancer Institute,
the American Cancer Society, and others say only that the
test should be “offered” ; in contrast, they recommend that
women “should be screened” for breast and cervical cancer.
“We feel there isn’t enough information the recommend for or
against,” says Parnes. “We acknowledge that we don’t know.”
-Apoorva Mandavilli.

PROTEINS MAKE THE PRIMATE

GENETICS- Scientists uncovered subtle clues this year

suggesting that chimpanzees and humans, estimated to be
more than 98 percent identical in their DNA sequences, may
be more different at the molecular level than previously
thought. Instead of being distinguished by a small number of
crucial genes, as some geneticists had supposed, the two
species appear to have surprisingly significant and
widespread differences in the proteins produced by their
genes.

A group of international researchers completed the first

highly detailed map of a single chimpanzee chromosome and
matched it with its human counterpart. Among the portions
that lined up, only 1.4 percent of the chemical letters were
different consistent with expectations.
However, the researchers found 68,000 small discrepancies
where DNA had either been added or lost on the respective
chromosomes. And when they analyzed the sequences of
231 genes, they predicted that 83 percent of them would
produce proteins that different in some way.

If such discrepancies occur throughout the rest of the

human and chimp genomes, there will probably be thousands
of proteins that differentiate the two species. But determining
which specific genetic changes led to humans won’t be easy,
says Asao Fujiyama, of RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center and
the National Institute of Informatics in Japan, one of the
project leaders: “the key proteins are very difficult to iron out
because we have so many differences.”
-Chris Jozefowicz
 KILLER FLU INCUBATES IN ASIA

EPIDEMIOLOGY.-In October, as senior citizens and others at

high risk from flu waited in long lines for shots after half of the
United State’s vaccine supply for the season was lost,
epidemiologists were already on high alert because of an
ominous development halfway around the world. The death in
September of a Thai woman who had held her dying daughter
in her arms for 10 hours after the girl handled a flu- infected
chicken marked the first-well- documented human-to human
transmission of a particularly deadly strain of avian flu: a virus
that has been simmering in Asia for the past seven years.

Avian flu first made headlines in 1997 when it claimed

six lives in Hong Kong. The victims died so quickly that 1.5
million chickens were slaughtered in an attempt to contain it.
But the virus has since mutated and spread- most likely by
migratory birds- to Vietnam. Thailand and neighboring areas.
So far 31 of the 43 people who became sick by eating or
touching infected poultry have died, which amounts to a death
rate of more than 70 percent.

Scientists now fear the killer flu may be on the verge of

mutating into a form that can easily pass from human to
human. A July report by the Animal Influenza Laboratory of
China’s Ministry of Agriculture revealed that the virus quickly
replicated in mice and grew increasingly virulent in the
process. “That opens the possibility that the avian virus could
become a real threat to people and spark a new pandemic.”,
says Richard Webby, a virologist from St. Jude Children’s
Research Hospital in Memphis who contributed to the
Chinese study. “that’s the big scare.”
-Mark Prankel

QUARK EXPERIMENT POINTS WAY TO FINDING

ELUSIVE HIGGS BOSON

PHYSICS.- an experiment at Fermi National Accelerator

Laboratory in Illinois has physicists closing in one of their
most basic questions: why does matter have mass?

Fermilab researchers were studying the top quark, a

heavy version of the fundamental particles that make up the
nuclei of atoms. A new analysis bumped the estimated mass
of a top quark from 174 billion to 178 billion electron volts
(here, mass is expressed in terms of energy).such a small
adjustment can influence the euchre theory of how particles
are related to each other. “it´s like a watch: all the little gears
have to fit in just the right way,” says Michael Schmitt, a
member of a sister project at Fermilab.
As a result, physicists now have a better idea of where to look
for the all-important Higgs boson, which is believed to endow
all particles with mass. The heft that presses you down in
your chair when you sit is ultimately the work of the Higgs
particle.

Based on the new information, Fermilab physicists

calculate that the Higgs boson is weightier than expected-
probably around 117 billion electron volts. That higher number
would explain why experiments have failed to insolate it.

In a few years the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-

French border will become the world’s most powerful particle
accelerator and will presumably take over the search. Until
then, Fermilab will stay in the hunt, says John Womersley, a
spokesman for the project that made the discovery: “one
hundred seventeen billion electron volts are close enough to
what we can reach that it’s still a tempting target.”
-Ken Kostel.

BALD MEN: THIS MOUSE IS FOR YOU

BIOLOGY.- The cure for baldness may be imminent. A
Rockefeller University research team led by biologist Elaine
Fuchs reported last September that they had coaxed adult
stem cells to grow hair. When grafted onto bald mice, the cells
produced not only furry tufts but stretches of skin complete
with the oil-producing glands y that help keep it supple as
well. “Essentially, you’d put down a forest rather that plant
tree by tree”, says Fuchs.

Earlier work hinted that skin follicles harbor stem cells

kept in reserve to replace epidermal cells when they die. “The
critcal question was whether there really is a cell that can do it
all- epidermis, hair, sebaceous glands,” says Fuchs. “And now
we know that we really have a bona fide stem cell.” That
means curing baldness could just be the beginning. “Maybe
these stem cells could do other things,” says Fuchs.
“Maybe they could make corneas for the treatment of
blindness.”

The full potential of various stem cells found in adults is

still unknown. “It’s just presumed that they have fewer
capabilities than embryonic stem cells,” says Bill Lowry, a
coauthor of the study. But, he adds, harvesting adult stem
cells from skin has one clear benefit: “it’s such an easily
accessible source.”
-Aaron J. Sender

ETHICAL CONFLICTS PLAGUE NIH

SOCIOLOGY.- As chief of geriatric psychiatry at the National

Institute of Mental Health, Trey Sunderland conducted
studies of Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases
associated with aging. At the same time, he worked as a
consultant for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, earning
$517,000 in fees, honoraria, and expenses. His associate
Karen Putnam picked up another $64,000. Neither told the
institute about their outside work – or got approval to do it.

That was one of many iffy situation that came to light in

June according to transcripts of a congressional probe into
ethics at the National Institutes of Health. The hearings were
prompted by a Los Angeles Times investigation that
uncovered hundreds of unreported consulting payments to
NIH researchers from private industry. “I can’t believe that
they weren’t trying to be deceptive,” says Bruce Alberts,
president of the National Academy of Sciences. “That’s why
feel very outraged.” Neither Sunderland nor Putnam were
available for comment.

In late September the NIH announced- but had not put

into effect as of press time- a one- year moratorium on all
paid industry consulting while the agency reviews its internal
ethics policies. As a government agency that contains
research laboratories but also distributes funding to other
institutions, the NIH walks a tightrope between maintaining
the quality of its in-house research and appearing unbiased in
grants to outside researchers and universities. Ending paid
industry consulting would simplify the ethical problem but
could compromise recruitment of top scientists and the quality
of their research. Which the proper clearance, bench
scientists at the NIH should have the right “to do what every
other scientist has the right to do: consult for a science
advisory committee or pharmaceutical company or a biotech
company, partly because that’s become part of the culture
and partly because it’s very much a two-way exchange,”
Alberts says. “The scientists at the NIH would learn a lot from
those exchanges, and that would help make the science at
the NIH better.”
 The controversy points to a serious question: Are
scientists receiving the training thay need to grapple with
ethical situations?

In general, they do not, says Laurent Smith Doerr, a

sociologist at Boston University. Most graduate programs
expect students to get ethics training informally. In those
courses that exist, she says, ethics training is superficial.
Courses often cover legal issues, like how to handle research
involving human subjects , rather than examining how funding
may influence scientists or how cutting-edge research such
as genetic engineering may affect society at large. Many
ethics courses are one or two credit hours, less weight than
science- based courses.
-Sarah Web

RAKISH RODENTS REFORMED

ZOOLOGY .- Nature got a boost in the ongoing nature-

versus –nurture debate this year when researchers at Emory
University in Atlanta announced they could turn promiscuous
male rodents into faithful coddlers by manipulating a single
gene.

The research focused on two related species of vole:

prairie voles, which are about as close as mammals get to
being monogamous, and meadow voles, which express little
interest in each other after copulation.

“When those monogamous species mate,” Young says,

“they actually learn to make an association: wow, this feels
good, and I’m with her.” in contrast, no monogamous males
don’t connect mating with their partner.”They just remember,
this was a female, and I want to do this again.”
 By injecting the gene for the vasopressin receptor into
the ventral pallidum of promiscuous voles, researchers were
able to make the cells in that area produce levels of the
receptor comparable to those of monogamous species. The
genetically altered voles spent as much time snuggled up
next to their mates as did their pair-bonding cousins.

Young says studies like this can help reveal how certain
social behaviors may have evolved. For voles, the profound
lifestyle change seems to have occurred when previously
separate circuits in the male brain – one for processing social
recognition, another for reward- became biochemically linked.
-Chris Jozefowicz

MIRROR-IMAGE ANIMALS FOUND

PALEONTOLOGY.- The evolution of bilateral symmetry- the

left-right balance of arms, legs, and organs that is a hallmark
of all higher animals - was one of the greatest leaps in the
history of life. In June a team of paleontologists identified the
oldest example of such symmetry in a group of fossils
excavated from a 600- million- year – old quarry in southern
China.

Jun- Yuan Chen of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and

Paleontology and his colleagues collected and studied
samples of Vernanimalcula guizhouena, a microscopic animal
that probably moved along the seafloor sucking in bacteria for
food. Chen sees signs of a single anterior mouth as well as a
set of paired digestive canals on either side of the gut. That
would mean the first symmetrical animals appeared up to 30
million years earlier than previously know, well before the
Cambrian. Explosion around 540 million years ago, when a
wide array of hard-bodied animals are first seen in the fossil
record.
 Some paleontologists suggest the perceived symmetry
in V. guizhouena might simply be due to the to the
petrification process. David Bottjer of the University of
Southern California, who worked with Chen, responds that
the V. guizhouena fossils were found in an unusual mineral
setting that preserved then in exceptional detail. And a very
ancient origin of symmetry makes sense: Because all but the
most primitive animals are bilateral at some stage in their life,
Bottjer says, “This basic feature must have been an early
evolutionary innovation.”
-Maia Weinstock.
 TURNINNG POINT

Evidence of global warming became so overwhelming in 2004

that now the question is: what can we do about it? By Robert
Kunzing.

Let’s start with stinkbugs, on august 24, 2003 a fortnight

after the temperature in London had climbed above 100
degree Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history, D. E.
Maggs of Kingswood Avenue, Queens Park, walked into the
British Natural History Museum carrying a small glass jar. It
contained two specimens of a curious insect she had
collected on her tomato plants. She presented them to beetle
curator Max Barclay, who identified them as Nezara viridula,
the southern green stinkbug. He noted that they were
nymphs, meaning they had been born in London. “I thought
she was having me on”, Barclay recalls. Stinkbugs are
widespread in warmer climes, he explained to Maggs, and
had long been know to cross the Channel in crates of Italian
produce. But until now they couldn’t produce in the tepid
English summers. Apparently that changed: Barclay says a
new generation of stinkbugs has popped up in various
gardens around London.

When our grandchildren write the history of global

warming – how we discovered and debated it and what we
finally did about it – the stinkbugs that ate Maggs´s tomatoes
may not loom large. Nor will the blue mussels that showed up
this past year off Spitsbergen, Norway, at 78 degrees north
latitude. Nor even the catastrophic failure of Scottish seabirds
to breed, which some researchers attributed to a dearth of
plankton in the warming waters of the North Sea. But our
descendants may well decide that it was the long string of
such close-to-home observations- the early springs, the
shifting ranges of plants and animals, the mortal heat waves-
that, more than any climatological data, convinced people that
something needed to be done about global warming. And
maybe, just maybe, those future historians will decide that
2004 was the turning point.

If that sounds optimistic, consider a few of the year’s

headlines. The biggest was certainly the decision by the
Russian government to endorse the Kyoto Protocol, thus
allowing the treaty to take effect and leaving the United States
and Australia alone among industrial nations in their refusal to
accept limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet even in the
Unites States there was a palpable change in mood- and it
was not just because Hollywood made climate disaster into a
motion picture. Starting from the same kernel of scientific
truth as did The Day After Tomorrow-the global warming could
disrupt ocean currents in the North Atlantic- a study
commissioned by the Pentagon, of all organizations,
concluded that the “risk of abrupt climate change…should be
elevated beyond a scientific debate a U. S. national security
concern.” A cover story in Business Week, of all publications,
urged the need to “get serious about global warming” and
remarked pointedly on “the leadership vacuum left by
Washington.” And California’s Republican governor, of all
people, a notorious Humvee aficionado, vowed to defend his
state’s own pioneering limits on carbon dioxide emissions
against the girlie men in the automobile industry.

Meanwhile, the tide of scientific evidence continued to

roll in. Swiss researchers, looking at everything from ice cores
and tree legs to weather records, reported in March that the
summer of 2003, which killed tens of thousands of people,
was by far the hottest summer in Europe since 1500; the each
century as a whole was the hottest century. Computer models
can’t explain at trend without factoring in a man-made
henhouse effect, but skeptics have long argued that the
models also can’t explain y the lower atmosphere has
apparently armed less than Earth’s surface. That argument
took a knock in 2004. Reanalyzing the satellite temperature
measurements, Fu of the University of Washington and his
colleagues concluded that a cooling in the upper atmosphere
had been masking what is in fact a large warming of the lower
atmosphere.

A sillier argument was also laid to rest: the one that says
global warming might be a good thing because it would
protect us from the next ice age. The advance and retreat of
ice sheets is paced by cyclical changes in the shape of
Earth’s orbit. More than 400,000 years and four glaciations
ago, the orbit was about as round as it is now, and the planet
was in an interglacial period much like todays. Last summer a
team of European researchers reported the first precise
record of that distant time and of the past 740,000 years of
climate history. They obtained it by drilling the oldest ice core
ever, almost two miles into a godforsaken spot called Dome
C- 600 miles inland from the Antarctic coast and a little more
than 1,000 miles from the South Pole. The result: if that
earlier interglacial period is a guide to this one, we have
another 15,000 years or so before the ice sheets should start
to grow again. Accepting global warming now to forestall
global cooling 15 millennia from now, says Eric Wolff of
the British Antarctic Survey, with classic understatement, “is
not a good bet.”

Another thing that ice core showed, as others have

before, is that the great swing in temperature between glacial
and interglacial periods was invariably accompanied by great
swings in the amount of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere: when the greenhouse goes up, the ice sheets go
down. Today we are pushing the carbon dioxide level to a
height it last reached 24 million years ago, when there was a
lot less ice on Earth and the climate was very different. All
over the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from
Alaska to the Andes, ice is melting and flowing into the sea.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change protected in
2001 that the sea level will use by no more than three this
century. But that protection assumes the major ice sheets will
remain intact.

That’s why the news from the Antarctic this fall was so
disquieting. Two years ago, on the east side of the long
peninsula that just up toward South America- where average
air temperatures have risen between 3.6 and 7.2 degrees
Fahrenheit over the past 50 years- a 1,200-square.mille shelf
of floating sea ice called Larsen B suddenly collapsed and
drifted out to sea. Last September two teams of American
researches, using data from two different satellites, reported
that land-bound glaciers on the peninsula have since slid
rapidly toward the coast- because the ice shelf is no longer
there to hold them back.

A similar process may be under way in West Antarctica.

The ice sheet there- 750000 cubic miles of ice, which, if
melted, would raise sea levels more than 16 feet, drowning
south Florida- is bound not to land but to the seafloor. Its
bottom in most places is well below sea level. That makes it
vulnerable to collapse, because seawater can flow in
underneath it and transform its edge into a floating ice shelf
like Larsen B, which might then break up, freeing the ice
behind it. An early sign of this process might be an increased
thinning of glaciers along the coast. In September a team of
American and Chilean researchers led by Robert Thomas of
NASA found that glaciers in the Amundsen Bay region of
West Antarctica had thinned by as much as 100 feet in five
years. It’s still unlikely we’ll lose Miami before the century is
out, but Floridians would do well to follow the news from
Antarctica.

Californians, on the other hand, should be watching the

snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Water that falls on the sierra
in winter supplies Southern California in summer; the
snowpack stores half as much freshwater as all the man-
made reservoirs in the state. But because spring now comes
sooner, says Daniel Cayan of the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in La Jolla, the snow is already melting days
to weeks earlier- and could start running off uselessly into the
sea instead of being available when the state needs it most.
Global warming is going to make California’s water
problem much worse, Cayan and a team of researchers
reported this past year. They used two different climate
models, each with a different sensitivity to carbon dioxide, to
project California’s future under two scenarios an optimistic
one, in which we only double the level of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere- since the 19 century we have already increased
it by about a third- and a pessimistic scenario, in which we
more than triple C02.

Even in the optimistic scenario, according to the

models, summers in California will be 4 to 9 ° F hotter by the
end of the century than they would be anywhere from to 15
degrees hotter, and in Los Angeles say nothing of Fresno,
there would be months of heat waves- at least three days in a
row in the 90s. As for the snowpack, the models show it
decreasing by at least 30 percent. If aggressive action to
reduce CO2 emissions is not begun, snow could all but
vanish from the sierras this century.

It’s a gloomy forecast, but its most important implication

is that human choices now can still make a big difference
later. The catch is how much later. “That’s one of the
tyrannies of climate change,” says Cayan. “It always seems
like its 20 or 40 years away. So why should I worry?”

In September Cayan and three other researchers

testified before a Senate Committee chaired by Republican
John McCain from Arizona. McCain has cosponsored a bill,
so far rejected bye his colleagues that would set up a national
system of tradable emissions permits for greenhouse gases
and would require U. S. emissions in 2010 to be no more
than in 2000- not quite Kyoto, which sets the levels 7 percent
below 1990 – but a start. “Now the challenge is to update the
policy positions to be consistent with the science.” McCain
said in opening the hearing. After the scientists has testified,
another Republican, Olympia Snowe of Maine, told them: “it
always takes the immediacy of the problem to get any
reaction here in this institution. We are not exactly visionary, if
you had not noticed.”

Still, it is only a matter of time before the rising tide of

evidence washes over the last islands of resistance in
Washington. Stinkbugs have already advanced as far north
as Virginia. Pretty soon they should be in the Rose Garden.