Gene cornucopia
Varieties of maize that produce high yields while also being drought and disease-resistant will become easier to breed, now that the first draft of the maize genome has been published. Researchers at Washington University in St Louis led the $30 million effort to sequence the 10 maize chromosomes. They contain 2.5 billion bases; the human genome has 3 billion.
Health gap widens
Healthcare is infamously inequitable in the US, and it appears to be getting worse. Nancy Krieger of Harvard University and colleagues found that in 2000 the death rate in people under 65 in the poorest sections…
