Friday, October 26, 2012

American International Assurance

American International Assurance known as AIA (Chinese: 美國友邦保險) is an insurance company based in Hong Kong. It has offices in Asia-Pacific region including Taiwan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Macau, South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Brunei and Vietnam. Holdings include Philippine American Life and General Insurance Company and minority stakes in TATA AIA Life Insurance and TATA AIG General Insurance.

It was a member of American International Group, but separated from the group in 2009 after it was finalized that AIA as well as ALICO (another AIG subsidiary) were placed under the administration of a Special Purpose Vehicle in exchange for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

According to the statistics from the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (保險業監理處), AIA being the number 1 of Hong Kong insurance company in terms of the number of policies, its market share in Hong Kong Insurance market (on Non-Linked Individual Business) is 26% and sum assured worth more than 400 billion HKD (i.e. more than $ 50 billion).

AIA was planned to be listed in Hong Kong Stock Exchange in April 2010. However, in March 2010, Prudential plc, a United Kingdom-based financial services company, announced that it will buy AIA for $35.5 billion.[4] The purchased later fell through, and AIA held an IPO later in October 2010 raising $20.51 billion, the third largest ever IPO

Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA)

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) is a federation of 38 separate health insurance organizations and companies in the United States. Combined, they directly or indirectly provide health insurance to over 99 million Americans. The history of Blue Cross dates back to 1929, while the history of Blue Shield dates to 1939. The Blue Cross Association dates back to 1960, while its Blue Shield counterpart was actually created in 1948. The two organizations merged in 1982, forming the current association.

History

Blue Cross and Blue Shield developed separately, with Blue Cross plans providing coverage for hospital services, while Blue Shield covered physicians' services.

Blue Cross is a name used by an association of health insurance plans throughout the United States. Its predecessor was developed by Justin Ford Kimball in 1929, while he was vice-president of Baylor University's health care facilities in Dallas, Texas. The first plan guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for $6 a year, and was later extended to other employee groups in Dallas, and then nationally. The American Hospital Association (AHA) adopted the Blue Cross symbol in 1939 as the emblem for plans meeting certain standards. In 1960 the AHA commission was superseded by the Blue Cross Association. Affiliation with the AHA was severed in 1972.

The Blue Shield concept was developed at the beginning of the 20th century by employers in lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest to provide medical care by paying monthly fees to medical service bureaus composed of groups of physicians. The first official Blue Shield Plan was founded in California in 1939. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans called the Associated Medical Care Plan, and was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

In 1982 Blue Shield merged with The Blue Cross Association to form the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, organizations administering Blue Cross Blue Shield were tax exempt under 501(c) as social welfare plans. However, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 revoked that exemption because the plans sold commercial-type insurance. They became 501(m) organizations, subject to federal taxation but entitled to "special tax benefits" under IRC 833. In 1994, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association changed to allow its licensees to be for-profit corporations. Some plans[specify] are still considered not-for-profit at the state level.

Assurant

Assurant, Inc. is a holding company with businesses that provide a diverse set of specialty, niche-market insurance products in the property, casualty, life and health insurance sectors. The company’s four operating segments are Assurant Employee Benefits, Assurant Health, Assurant Solutions and Assurant Specialty Property.

The company, formerly known as Fortis, Inc., was spun off from Dutch and Belgian financial-services company Fortis Insurance N.V. in 2004. The company’s initial public offering on Feb. 5, 2004 at $1.76 billion was the fourth largest that year. In connection with the public offering, the company changed its name to Assurant, Inc.

Headquartered in New York City, Assurant is 285 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest publicly traded companies in the United States. It also is included in the Ward’s 50, which recognizes the top property-casualty insurance companies domiciled in the United States.

History

Assurant recently celebrated its 120th anniversary, tracing its roots back to founding of the La Crosse Mutual Aid Association, which was established to sell disability insurance in Wisconsin in the early 1890s. La Crosse Mutual Aid Association would later become the Time Insurance Company. In 1978, N.V. AMEV of the Netherlands acquired the Time Insurance Company (now Assurant Health) via its U.S. holding company AMEV Holdings, Inc. During the next 12 years, AMEV Holdings, Inc. would expand through acquisition, buying American Security Insurance (credit-related insurance); United Family (funeral insurance); Western Insurance Company (mutual funds); and Superior Insurance (auto insurance). In 1990, N.V. AMEV of the Netherlands acquired VSB Groep NV bank to become the Netherlands first financial conglomerate combining an insurer and a bank, creating Fortis. AMEV Holdings, Inc. was rebranded Fortis, Inc. in 1991. The business was subsequently renamed as Assurant and spun off from the parent company. 

Products and Services

In March 2010, Assurant Solutions and IBM unveiled a Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP) to improve call center performance. RAMP is an application that works by analyzing historical data about the individual caller and the skill set of customer service representatives to optimize the routing of the call. As calls come in they are assigned to a customer service representative based on their expertise and past performance, improving customer response and retention rates.

In May 2012, Assurant launched solar project insurance for developers of mid-size (100 kW to 3 MW) solar projects.

Amerigroup

Amerigroup (NYSE: AGP) is an American managed care company, with two main goals: to meet the needs of Amerigroup members while keeping costs low. Amerigroup has more than 2.7 million members, and currently operates in 13 states nationwide including Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York State, Ohio, Tennessee, Washington, Texas, and Virginia and expects operations to its 14th state, Kansas, as a result of a previously awarded state contract. It is a Fortune 500 company.

History
Amerigroup began as AMERICAID Community Care in 1994 and was initially aimed at the health care problems of children, mothers and pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid. Amerigroup became a publicly traded corporation in the fall of 2001. Today, Amerigroup serves more than 2.7 million members including Supplemental Security Income recipients, seniors and people with disabilities, many with complex physical and psychological illnesses. In 2006, Amerigroup entered the Medicare Advantage program, serving low-income people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid through special needs plans. In 2007, Amerigroup began the operation of traditional Medicare Advantage plans. Currently, Amerigroup offers health care services through three government programs that target different segments of the country’s low-income population: Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Medicare

Health Care Products :
  •  Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
  •  Seniors and People with Disabilities (S/PD)
  •  Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
  •  Family Care
  •  Medicare Advantage

Thursday, October 25, 2012

TOP 10 ANIMAL STORIES OF THE DECADE

10. California Condor Pulls Back from Brink

 California Condor Pulls Back from Brink

Some of the best animal news in recent years has been about recovery from the brink of extinction.

On Oct. 31, 2009, conservationists had every right to celebrate. A 

survey of California condors determined that 351 of the critically 
endangered birds were alive and well, with 180 living in the wild. 

Those might seem like small numbers, but the California condor “has made an astonishing comeback,” San Diego Zoo spokesperson Yadira Galindo told Discovery News.


The bird came about as close to extinction as a species can get. In 
1982, just 23 of the large black-and-white vultures were left in the 
wild. All were captured and brought to the San Diego Wild Animal Park 
and the Los Angeles Zoo for protection and breeding in captivity.

The plan worked. 
In fact, Galindo said more zoos are now being added to the breeding program, in order to accommodate the rising captive California condor population.

9. Giant Pandas Successfully Bred in Captivity

Giant Pandas Successfully Bred in Captivity

Giant pandas remain an endangered species, with only around 1,500 living in the wild. But captive breeding programs for these rare mammals experienced tremendous success over the past decade. 

Most noteworthy outside of China is the program at the San Diego Zoo, where five cubs have been born at the zoo since 1999.  

Zoo Atlanta also celebrated two giant panda births during this time, 
while the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. welcomed bouncing baby boy Tai Shan into the world during the summer of 2005.
Yadira Galindo at the San Diego Zoo told Discovery News she thinks the future looks bright for breeding captive giant pandas because researchers learn more each year about the process. 

A promising sign is that at least one of the female giant pandas born at the San Diego Zoo has since given birth to seven cubs.

 8. Dolphins Name Themselves

Dolphins Name Themselves
In 2006, researchers studying bottlenose dolphins at Sarasota Bay, Fla., determined that dolphins created signature whistles for themselves that are like human names. 

Project leader Laela Sayigh of the University of North Carolina Wilmington speculated that other information, such as the age, sex and feelings of the dolphin, may be encoded into each unique whistle. 


Experts who spend time with dolphins suspect that they converse with each other, and now wonder what other things they might name.


Naming is just one indicator that dolphins and other animals have acute self-awareness. Also in 2006,


7. Non-Human Primates Invent New, Improved Tools
Non-Human Primates Invent New, Improved Tools
Non-human primates aren’t just inventing tools. They are crafting new and improved versions of them. Earlier research determined that chimpanzees use long sticks to probe termite nests. 

In March 2009, a chimp population was found in the Republic of Congo that takes the basic design a step further.

After selecting just the right stem and de-leafing it, the Congo chimpanzees modify “the end into a 'paint brush' tip by pulling the stem through their teeth,” project leader Josep Call told Discovery News. The chimps then use the tools like forks to retrieve even more insects.
In another example, a population of wild spider monkeys in northeastern Costa Rica has invented a medicated body scratcher.

6. First Pet Cloned



In 2001, the world's first pet was cloned, a female kitten named “CC,” short for “Carbon Copy.” The brown tabby appears to be doing well. In 2006, she gave birth to three kittens that were fathered naturally. 

Cloning dogs proved to be more complex and controversial. After much trial and error, including 123 surrogate dog mothers, in 2005 a team of researchers at Seoul National University’s College of Veterinary Medicine produced "Snuppy," the world’s first cloned canine. 

The team behind Snuppy continues to churn out dog clones -- most recently the world’s first cloned detection dogs, used to sniff out explosives, drugs and other materials.
While Snuppy lives on, and the quest for other cloned pets and animals continues, the idea lost some of its sheen in 2003, when Dolly the cloned sheep died at the age of six. Finn Dorset sheep like Dolly have a life expectancy of about 12 years, but scientists claim the lung disease and arthritis that spelled Dolly’s doom were not connected to cloning.

5. World’s Fastest Evolving Animal Found


One of the world’s most laid-back animals, the tuatara, is the 
fastest-known evolving creature on Earth. 

The lizard-like reptile's DNA changes naturally at a rate faster than in any other animal: 1.56 changes per nucleotide (DNA subunit) every million years. 

The 2008 finding is surprising, since the tuatara hasn't changed much physically since its ancestors hung out with dinosaurs 225 million years ago. Almost everything about the foot-long reptile, a New Zealand native, is slow and easy, according to co-author David Lambert of the Allan Wilson Center for Molecular Ecology and Evolution. 
He told Discovery News that "they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism" when "in fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly." 

Lambert now believes the rate of an organism's molecular evolution and the way it changes, or doesn't, over time are not necessarily connected.

4. Common Ancestor for All Animals a Sperm-Like Critter

In early 2009, every animal on Earth, including all humans, received a new addition to their family tree. This sperm-looking creature, called monosiga, is the closest living representative of the ancestor for all animals.

Monosiga is a one-celled organism that belongs to a group called the choanoflagellates. 

Rob DeSalle, an American Museum of Natural History curator, and his colleagues compiled data from multiple gene sequences from many sources 
to find many thousands of shared traits that help biologists draw lines between species on the tree of life.
"It is clear that the choanoflagellates -- living representative is monosiga -- are the best candidate for the nearest relative of animals," DeSalle told Discovery News. "So a choanoflagellate-like organism could be looked at as a probable common ancestor for animals."

3. Earliest Evidence for Animal Life Discovered


In February 2009, the oldest evidence for life in the fossil record was found: sponges that likely lived over 600 million years ago.

“Our findings suggest that the evolution of multicellular animals began earlier than has been thought,” said study co-author Gordon Love from MIT, when the discovery was announced. “Moreover, sponges live on the seafloor, growing initially in shallow waters and spreading, over time, into deeper waters, implying the existence of oceanic environments which contained dissolved oxygen near the shallow seafloor around 635 million years ago."

He and his colleagues believe that glacial activity during the Neoproterozoic era (1000-542 million years ago) probably caused a major reorganization of marine ecosystems, perhaps by altering ocean chemistry. This restructuring, in turn, “paved the way for the evolution of animal feeders living on the seafloor,” Love said.

It was some 100 million years after the sponges’ existence when the fossil record exploded with animal life, resulting in a period known as the Cambrian explosion.

2. 'Lost World' of New Animals Found


A number of countries offered up new species this decade. In 2007, Bruce Beehler of Conservation International hit the animal jackpot in Indonesia with at least 20 new species of frogs, a new bird called the wattled smoky honeyeater, and at least two new mammals.

The mammals could have made headlines in their own right, as they included one of the world’s smallest marsupials, a Cercartetus pygmy possum, and a Mallomys giant rat. 

"The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat," said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip.” 
Beehler and his team expect to find more frogs and mammals, along with 
new butterflies and plants, in Indonesia over the years to come.

1. All Fish Species Predicted to 'Collapse' by 2048


Dire predictions about the fate of many animals were made in the past 10 years and continue to challenge conservationists. One headline, which ran in 2006, garnered particular attention: “By 2048, all current fish, seafood species projected to collapse.” 

Boris Worm of Dalhousie University and his team came to that conclusion after compiling global fisheries catch data from 64 large marine ecosystems. 

"At this point," Worm said, "29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed -- that is their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating. We don't have to use models to understand this trend; it is based on all the available data."
"The good news is that it is not too late to turn things around," Worm added. Studies of 48 protected areas worldwide reveal improved marine biodiversity. "We see that diversity of species recovered dramatically, and with it the ecosystem's productivity and stability."

source: http://news.discovery.com



5 Things to Consider About Health Insurance

View of the current hospital as more and more congested. Therefore, various diseases come and go which makes people even more vulnerable to attack. Ranging from mild such as a runny nose or cough, to very risky as cancer, as more and more familiar with our society.

Therefore, the portion of medical and health care should be a priority now. Therefore, if at any time sick, sometimes the cost is not small. Moreover, if it had to do surgery or medical treatment due to a variety of dangerous diseases.

Therefore, the health insurance needs to be considered. Because, at the time of the emergency, health insurance will be the solution in terms of financing and hospital care.

However, there are some things to consider before choosing a health insurance. Here are some things that need to be understood more ..

1. Consider the track record of the insurance companies that offer health insurance. It is important to know how condition of the company, professional firms, and its services over the years. The more bona fide and good history of the company, usually the better the various types of insurance offered.

2. Learn and find out more about how the insurance company's network to hospitals there. Primarily, the      pain is all around us and the hospital has facilities for serving a wide range of diseases.

3. Know what kind of health care that are covered by insurance. For example, if a critical illness cover as    heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Then, if also serves hospitalization and / or treatment of the road. Also, get also related information about the claim payment. By knowing this, we would be more assured when choosing insurance.

4. Understand all the written agreement of the policy, especially that we receive. For example, what classes will be given to us, when to begin the coverage period, and various other things that will bind us when choosing insurance. Do not hesitate ask the people who know if you do not know what is in one grain agreement. Including, for example, whether the money could be paid if in some period of time does not occur claim.

5. Health insurance is one solution. But, the real key solution is to stay fit. Therefore, The best step is to keep in shape and trying to distance themselves from a variety of sources of disease.
 

TOP 10 TECH STORIES OF THE DECADE

10. iPod Crushes Internet Music Piracy


iPod Crushes Internet Music Piracy
This has been the decade of portable electronics: the Blackberry, the digital camera, the GPS device. But the digital music player, the iPod, has steamrolled the market and put a stranglehold on Internet piracy. It was released on Oct. 23, 2001, and by the end of 2002, Apple had sold 376,000 units.
Around the same time, online music was becoming popular, with people sharing or downloading digital music for free. In 2003, one million tracks were illegally downloaded.

But then came Apple’s iTunes Store in April 2003. It made downloading music legal and inexpensive, with royalties going to the appropriate recording companies. The only catch was that a person needed to own an iPod, since the digital music player was the only one compatible with iTunes.
By January 2009, 6 billion songs were sold on iTunes and by September, more than 220,000,000 iPods were sold worldwide, making it the best-selling digital audio player series in history.

9. YouTube Goes from 0 to 60 in a Click



In December 2005, Chad Hurley (left), Steve Chen (right) and Jawed Karim, former employees of PayPal, launched YouTube.com, a Web site for uploading and sharing video clips. Suddenly, people of all ages had a place to post homemade music videos, video blogs, home movies and, with the proliferation of the camera phone, criminals caught in the act and news events as they happened.
By the summer of 2006, people were uploading more than 65,000 new videos every day and logging more than 100 million video views per day. The term “viral video” went viral.

A year after launch, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Shortly after, Time magazine voted “You” as the Person of the Year, based in part on the success of YouTube. In 2008, YouTube hosted the CNN-YouTube presidential debates and asked YouTubers to submit questions.
The large range of topics shared on YouTube has made video an important part of our culture. As of October 2009, YouTube had more than 1 billion views per day.

8. Wi-Fi Takes to the Skies


The wireless Internet radio standard, also known as IEEE 802.11, was introduced in 1999. Within a few years, Wi-Fi hotspots were sprouting up everywhere, from coffee shops, libraries, airports and university campuses to entire cities.
In December 2001, the United States' Federal Communications Commission issued its first-ever license – to Boeing -- to operate in-flight wireless broadband data services.

Other countries quickly followed suit. By 2005, Boeing had Wi-Fi on commercial air carriers, though they were from Europe to Asia. U.S. carriers seemed reluctant. Boeing never made any money on the venture and discontinued the service at the end of 2006.
But airborne Wi-Fi didn’t die. In 2008, a handful of companies got into the in-flight Internet ring, and by the end of 2009, nine domestic airlines offered a range of Wi-Fi services. With Wireless Gigabit service just around the corner, surfing the Internet from a plane will get 10 times faster.

7. Laptops Get Smaller and Super Cheap



When in 2005 Nicholas Negroponte, then the cofounder and director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described his plan to develop a laptop that would cost $100, he raised a few eyebrows. At the time, the average price for a notebook computer was around $1,100.
Negroponte developed a smaller, lighter laptop -- named the XO -- suited for basic computing and accessing the Internet. The laptop relied on a simple operating system from Linux and flash memory (the same in USB memory sticks) that kept the machine power-efficient. It also came with a full-color screen, wireless capability, video and still cameras, and without any hazardous material.

Ultimately it cost $199, but One Laptop Per Child has distributed 1.2 million computers to children in 31 countries.
In 2006, Intel introduced the Classmate PC, a laptop similar to the XO, for $250.
Cheap laptops weren’t just for kids. In mid-2007, Taiwan-based Asus mass-produced the Eee PC, which retailed for under $300. In four months, it sold more than 300,000 units and immediately Dell, HP and Acer got on the bandwagon. Even in a slow economy, consumers bought about 25 million netbooks in 2009.

6. Humans Meld with Machines


Cyborgs are becoming reality. In the last decade, much progress has been made with brains controlling robotic limbs and computers.
In 2000, researchers at Duke University Medical Center implanted electrodes in monkeys’ brains and then trained them to reach for food using a robotic arm. Such a neurochip could one day restore motor function in paralyzed patients.
A team from the MIT Media Lab Europe developed a non-invasive method for picking up brain waves and, in 2004, used those signals for the first time to control the movements of a video game character.

Robotic limbs operated with nerve signals debuted in 2001 at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. There, Jesse Sullivan, a double amputee, used the method to control both of his robotic arms.
And in 2009, amputee Pierpaolo Petruzziello learned to control a biomechanical hand connected to his arm nerves with just wires and electrodes. Petruzziello became the first person to make complex movements -- finger wiggling, a fist, grabbing objects -- with a robotic limb, using just his thoughts.

5. Stem Cells Found in New Sources


In 2001, President George W. Bush cut federal funding to scientists working with embryonic stem cells -- found in a tiny, hollow ball of about 70-100 human cells that could become anything in the human body -- because of ethical concerns.
Embryonic stem cells were one of the most promising medical advances in years, with the potential to cure diseases from diabetes to cancer to genetic disorders, and more.

In 2007, scientists from Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, working separately, essentially turned back the clock for adult skin cells, allowing these mature cells, which were preprogrammed to become skin, to act like embryonic stem cells. The adult cells became pluripotent cells, or cells that could end up being virtually any other kind of cell.
These pluripotent adult cells solved two big problems. Ethical concerns and financial restrictions could be avoided, and doctors could ultimately use cells with a person's own DNA to grow replacement organs that a patient would be less likely to reject.

4. People Take Action Via Social Networking Web Sites


When on June 12, 2009, the Iranian government announced that incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won by a landslide, even though opinion polls had shown Mir-Hossein Mousavi with a strong lead, the Iranian people took to the streets in protest.
In response, the government jammed cell phone services, blocked access to Facebook and YouTube and cut off the BBC’s Persian-language station. But they forgot about Twitter, founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey.

Throughout the weekend, protesters used the site to organize demonstrations and to communicate events to the rest of the world. According to Mashable, there were 10,000 to 50,000 tweets per hour mentioning Iran.
Social networking services also came into play during the 2008 presidential election in the United States. Democratic nominee Barack Obama made Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, a member of his campaign team. By using Facebook, as well as YouTube, Twitter and his own personal site, my.barackobama.com, Obama raised roughly $750 million -- more than any other candidate in history.

3. Scientists Create First Synthetic Bacterium


There are those who tinker under a car’s hood, modifying existing parts, and then there are those who machine their own engine parts from scratch. Synthetic biologists are the latter.
Synthetic biologists chemically engineer DNA, amino acids and other cellular parts from the ground up.
Their efforts could lead to cells that perform new functions, including making alternative fuels, drugs for treating malaria, AIDS and cancer, and even creating new forms of life. 

In 2003, Jay Keasling of the University of California, Berkeley, and his team engineered microbes to manufacture a synthetic version of artemisinin, a chemical compound found in the sweet wormwood plant that is 90 percent effective against the parasite that causes malaria, but is expensive to extract. His efforts garnered him $43 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to advance the research.
In 2008, a team from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Chicago created the largest man-made genetic structure, a bacterium containing 582,970 base pairs of DNA. Their next goal is to transplant a synthetic chromosome into a living cell.

2. Google Becomes a Verb


Google has taken the last decade by storm. One of the biggest stories to come out of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was the announcement of its Initial Public Offering  in August 2004.
Just four years prior, the Internet bubble had burst and with it the dreams of IPOs and overnight wealth. But then Google went public, establishing its opening share price of $85 through an unconventional Dutch auction. The search engine company, which launched in 1998 and whose name was voted the most useful word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2003, had put the Internet startup back on the map.

Google is also credited with overhauling email and online mapping services, building a variety of Web applications, a browser and for introducing content-targeted advertising. Today those shares are worth nearly $600 each, and Google has diversified the company even further, using its strengths in information and technology to drive philanthropy in global health, climate and energy.

1. Human Genome Mapped 


Coiled up inside every human cell sit 23 molecules that, if unwound and placed end to end, would stretch about three feet. Those molecules, known as chromosomes, contain all the instructions necessary to build an entire human being. It took more than 10 years and an international collaboration of scientists, but the year 2000 saw a rough draft of the entire human genome, followed by a completed version in 2003.
The publicly funded Human Genome Project and its private competitor, Celera Genomics, constitutes one of the largest scientific endeavors in history, one that revealed in intimate detail just what makes up a human being.

With the information from individual genome maps, scientists can uncover new clues about everything from a person's body odor to mental disease.
Since decoding the human genome, dozens of other species have had their genomes sequenced, including pigs, dogs, bees, mosquitoes, puffer fish, chimpanzees, yeast, corn, and rice. With these maps in hand, scientists can and will discover new ways to heal diseases and improve crop yields.

source: http://news.discovery.com

Share

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites