1. The Chari River is gorged with water during the rainy season, and often floods.

2. Thailand's 12, 000-ton Chari Naruebet is an outlier: too small for more than a handful of aircraft, but nevertheless capable of carrying the country's ancient, vertical-landing Harrier jets.

3. Adds V.V. Chari, economist at the University of Minnesota: "At the end of the day most people think about it as the same as self-reliance for a household."

4. But Chari and his co-workers found that the gene expression patterns did not correlate with the severity of lung disease, which suggests that something else was to blame.

5. "I'm sure it will have some negative political fallout," Chari said.

6. "I wish they used the same passion to actually solve poverty, " Chari said as he watched the news on a hot afternoon.

7. "You are reducing the risk of disease by quitting, " says Raj Chari, a cancer biologist at the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre in Vancouver, Canada, "but it isn't going back to zero.