Free Republic

It's available year-round, but most people would probably consider candy corn to be Halloween candy. Brach's has tried to break that association by offering unique flavors of candy corn tailored to other holidays and seasonal events. We've seen a wider variety of autumn-inspired flavors, including Green Apple, "Witches Teeth," caramel, and "Harvest Corn," which are made with a chocolate layer. Then came the Funfetti, Carrot Cake, and Pastel candy corn flavors, which were released to attract candy corn lovers during Easter and spring holidays. Finally, we saw the release of the Turkey Dinner candy corn collection, which took us into...

Imagine that I’m a mad scientist (or perhaps just a geneticist who doesn’t blink an eye while fiddling with nature’s design) and I want to see what happens when I introduce substantial genetic changes into a chimpanzee.In my experimentation, I double the chimp’s height, change it’s hair color to yellow, induce mutations to change eye color, give it the ability to see better at night, increase muscle strength in its lower body so that it can jump long distances, and several dozen other changes. The end result looks different, acts different, has changes in physiology, its capacity to tolerate heat,...

A trade group overseeing an effort to unlock corn's genetic code says more than 120 researchers have already used a Web database created to speed up development of biotech crops.The National Corn Growers Association said this week that the researchers, representing 35 academic institutions, accessed maize gene sequences catalogued in the database. "There are only little pieces of gene sequences available in the public domain," said Jo Messing, a professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University, who has used the database. "The private collection offers a lot of those missing pieces." The 8-month-old Web site pools research done on the...