Word: beacons
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Bright Red Beacon. Most of Professor Tinbergen's work has been with sticklebacks, prickly fresh-water fish that make good subjects for "releaser" experiments. The male builds a nest of fine sticks and tries to persuade females to lay their eggs inside it. He wastes no time on nonpregnant females. But when he sees one with a swollen abdomen, her shape acts upon him as a powerful releaser. He rushes into the lists of love, displaying his own releaser: a bright red belly...
...earliest aspirations toward European unity were mostly military. Rome unified those parts of Europe that it cared to lay hands on; but Europe as an entity did not exist. Charlemagne, a brief beacon in the Dark Ages, headed a "Roman Empire"-with the blessing of a new force for unity, the universal Church. Since then, most of the would-be unifiers have been secular-Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler...
...earlier years of its existence, the Sodality regarded the serenading of Boston belles as one of its handsomest traditions. Lantern-lit expeditions of romance-bent musicians would start from Porter's Tavern in North Cambridge, and comb the land from Brattle Street and Brookline to Jamaica Plain and Beacon Hill...
...such action from Beacon Hill would set a political precedent, but what is even more important, it would at last give Cambridge a man down at City Hall with enough power and prestige to issue okays for the newly painted shingles that must now stay inside its stores...
...Fire Extinguisher? President Harry Truman's words, committing the U.S. to see the fight against Communism through to the bitter end, heartened antiCommunists. Greece's Premier Themistocles Sophoulis called the speech "a beacon of hope." But many Europeans, who had expected the U.S. to draw a geographic line against Communist expansion and back it with a military guarantee, were disappointed and wondered what could happen next. Wrote the London Times: "If the American Congress and people, already excited and alarmed, do not respond promptly and in full to [this] appeal for practical measures, more harm than good...