Word: ant
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...appears he may have been right--or largely so. Recently returned from a Himalayan expedition, French explorer-anthropologist Michel Peissel and British photographer Sebastian Guinness say they have located the gold-digging ants on Pakistan's Dansar plain near the tense 1949 cease-fire line with India. The "ants," it turns out, are actually marmots, cat-size rodents that burrow in a gold-bearing stratum of sandy soil a few feet underground. Peissel believes Herodotus' confusion came from the ancient Persian word for marmot, which means mountain ant...
...ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." The biblical proverb augured the work of E.O. Wilson, the pre-eminent biological theorist of the late 20th century who has explored the workings of the cosmos from the altitude of anthills. Wilson, 67, has used the study of minute creatures as a springboard for two crucial ideas. The first, expounded in 1967 in The Theory of Island Biogeography, which he wrote with the late ecologist Robert MacArthur, provides the scientific bedrock for understanding the decline of ecosystems. The second concept, laid out in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis...
...product of a lonely, itinerant childhood, Wilson began studying insects at age nine. Later, his scrutiny of ants in faraway places ranging from Suriname to Vanuatu enabled the self-effacing Harvard myrmecologist to discover connections between the size and remoteness of ecosystems and their diversity, an idea that has proved crucial to understanding the crisis of extinction. His examination of ant social structure started Wilson on investigations that led him to conclude that the social behavior of all animals, including humans, is influenced by genes...
...Israeli worries, cause concern among Palestinians, other Arab nations and especially Washington, where President Clinton was counting on a Peres victory to continue the process towards Middle East peace. Netanyahu has pledged to take a much tougher line against Yasser Arafat, to expand Jewish settlements in the West bank ant to renege on the promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Hebron. Adding to the fear that peace with Palestinians is in serious jeopardy, Ariel Sharon, a senior Likud official said on Israeli radio: "Our government cannot accept the Oslo accord exactly as it is." Many now hope that the American...
John Grisham's 1991 thriller, The Firm, offered an inside-the-ant-colony view of lawyers being loathsome, a redundant concept that made him rich and had readers roaring for more. His subsequent page turners wandered from this antijuridical obsession to a more casual sort of barrister bashing that occasionally had other things on its mind. In The Runaway Jury (Doubleday; 401 pages; $26.95), obsession is back...