Low Down

On February 5, 2003, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell spoke at the United Nations to present information that the United States knew about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and to try to persuade UN member countries to support a military action against Iraq . Powell reminded UN members that Iraq admitted having vast quantities of biological weapons in 1995, was known to have used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988, and in both 1991 and 1995 was discovered to have been working on developing nuclear weapons. He argued that Iraq had failed to account for many of these weapons as the UN demanded, and had been trying to conceal evidence of prohibited weapons from UN weapons inspectors. The evidence Powell presented included audio tapes of discussions between Iraqi military officers allegedly discussing how to hide prohibited items from UN weapons inspectors, satellite photos of a weapons munition and missile facilities allegedly showing trucks used for decon...

DNA fingerprinting or DNA profiling (as it is now known) was first developed by Alec Jeffreys in 1985 who found that in the human genome, some regions contained DNA sequences that were repeated over and over again, next to each other. He also discovered that the number of repeated unit could differ from individual to individual allowing human identity testing. Since that time, DNA typing methods has been commonly used in criminal cases (to identify a suspect or a victim or to absolve an innocent individual) as well as in the identification of missing persons or in paternity testing. Today, the most commonly used DNA repeat regions used are microsatellites also known as Short Tandem Repeats (STR). These loci in which the repeat unit is at least two bases but no more than seven in length, are amplified by PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) in a multiplex fashion (multiple primers) reducing sample consumption. Nevertheless, it is of great importance to make the distinction b...

Feelings of self-efficacy have to do with one’s feeling that one can accomplish a task or project, such as learning a foreign language. It is not quite the same thing as self-confidence, which is more general. You may be generally self-confident in most settings, but you may or may not have a sense of self-efficacy as a language learner, on the playing field, or at cocktail parties, just to take a few examples. Self-efficacy is a close partner with motivation: if you think you can accomplish something, you are likely to want to try it. If you think you are likely to fail or not be very good at something, your motivation may suffer. Needless to say, lack of self-efficacy is likely to involve some anxiety, so the two concepts are related, and so are the ways to cope. A sense of self-efficacy is normally the result of previous successful experience. This is one of the reasons for practicing small tasks, like getting the verb at the end of the sentence in Turkish, and large ones,...

It was 1871 when a baby boy was born in a tepee village on the Dakota grasslands. Hi s parents were Sioux and they named him Sitting B ull. Sitting Bull grew up to be a respected leader of   his people. He did not take pan in the fighting at the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn. But after the battle he defended the actions of his people: “(…)We were camped there awaiting the will of the Great Spirit. praying to the Great Spirit to save us from the hands of our enemies. Now near and coming to complete our extermination. My men destroyed them in a very short time. Now they accuse me of slaying them. Yet what did I do? Nothing. We did not go out of our country to kill them. They came to kill us and got killed themselves. The- Great Spirit so ordered it(…)" After their victory at the Li ttle Big Horn the Amerindi ans were pursued by the army. In 1877 Sitting Bull led some of his followers to safety across he b orde r in Canada, but in 1881 he returne...