Word: albatross
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lonely center of the North Pacific Ocean, farther from just about everything than just about anywhere, lies Midway Atoll. I've come with Canadian writer Nancy Baron to the world's largest Laysan albatross colony--400,000 exquisite masters of the air--a feathered nation convened to breed, cramming an isle a mile...
Slowly comes the surreal sight of a green plastic toothbrush emerging from the bird's gullet. With her neck arched, the mother cannot fully pass the straight brush. She tries several times to disgorge it, but can't. Nancy and I can hardly bear this. The albatross reswallows and, with the brush stuck inside, wanders away...
...single experiment. The biochemical features underlying this amazing variety and the coherent fossil record of 3.5 billion years (implying a single branching tree of earthly life with a common trunk) indicate that every living thing on Earth, from the tiniest bacterium on the ocean floor to the highest albatross that ever flew in the sky, arose as the magnificently diversified evolutionary outcome of one single experiment performed by nature, one origin of life in the early history of one particular planet...
That second albatross--which even still continues to dangle around Harvard's neck--is Ivy League-leading Penn, whom the Crimson have not beaten since...
...Russian embassy in downtown Beirut, Monday, killing two policemen and recalling that city's heyday as the mayhem capital of the Middle East. The attacks followed weeks of protest by local Islamic militants against Russia's military campaign in Chechnya, which the U.S. warned Sunday could become an albatross around the neck of acting President Vladimir Putin if he's unable to find an exit strategy...