Word: barked
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...current experiments, almost everyone agrees, do not pose any such threat. They involve a modest bit of genetic engineering on the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae, a common parasite that lives on the bark and leaves of many plants. The bacterium produces a protein that serves as a seed for the formation of ice crystals when the temperature drops below 32 degrees F. By snipping the seed-making gene from the DNA of the microbe, Berkeley Plant Pathologists Steven Lindow and Nickolas Panopoulos created a mutant form of P. syringae that does not promote frost. They call their new microbe "ice- minus...
...INSTRUCTIONS that the flight attendants bark out during every flight are equally stupid. For the benefit of anyone who hasn't been in a car in the last 20 years, the attendants explain how to put on a seatbelt. For the benefit of the very stupid, the attendants point out that it is wise to extinguish cigarettes before putting on an oxygen mask. For anyone anxious to struggle out of a seat and stand in the aisles for a half-hour while the landing crew tries to open the doors, the attendants suggest waiting until the plane has landed before...
...found it inhospitable and sparsely populated by an aboriginal race, whose first recorded words spoken to the English were "Go away!" Newly arrived whites, after 252 days at sea, found a "land of inversions where it was high summer in January ((and)) trees kept their leaves but shed their bark." The island's first lieutenant governor bitterly concluded, "I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worse country...
...accounts of the famine are excruciating to read. Arthur Koestler, then an ardent Communist, was traveling through the Ukraine by train. He recalls women outside his compartment window holding up babies who looked like "embryos out of alcohol bottles." For soup, people boiled rats, nettles, tree bark and the skin of old furs. While guarded warehouses nearby were filled with grain, peasants were beaten, arrested and even shot for trying to take the few remaining kernels lying on the fields of collective farms. In one village, families gathered acorns from under the snow and baked them into a sort...
...heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent profile of Mount Gaussier to the west do look exactly like that, just as the writhing strokes of his brush on the olive trunks are a direct pictorial equivalent to the real arabesques of ancient bark and wood. One might not often see a real cloud like Van Gogh's -- that strange fetal shape extruded into the blue sky -- but it powerfully conveys the strength of the wind over the plains beyond Les Baux...