Word: blobs
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...building, please don't block the entrance while you gaze at the wonder of Harvard's architecture. When I'm trying to get to the Union to eat, there is no need for you to block the gate in front of Lamont while you stare at the metallic blob...
...last week a Japanese comet hunter spotted a faint blob through powerful binoculars, and a check of its orbit confirmed that Swift-Tuttle had come back at last (it may be barely visible to the naked eye in November). Why so late? A comet's orbit is determined only by careful plotting of its position when it's visible; evidently the 1862 measurements were off. To his credit, Brian Marsden, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had argued in a 1973 paper that Swift-Tuttle might be late. Few astronomers paid attention -- but Marsden's prediction was only...
MOST HOMEOWNERS WOULD READILY AGREE THAT the only good termite is a dead termite, but the one unearthed on a dig in the Dominican Republic was better than most. The insect, trapped between 25 million and 30 million years ago in a blob of tree sap that hardened into amber, has yielded genetic material that is the oldest ever studied, by at least 8 million years. It has also resolved a long-simmering dispute over the family tree of cockroaches...
...Solomon Islands. (His verdict: "The yolkiest eggs I had ever seen.") To be sociable, the author occasionally took swigs of kava, the mouth- and mind-numbing intoxicant of the islands, which is made by chewing the root of a plant known as Piper methysticum and then mixing the blob with water. The best kava, connoisseurs assure him, comes from root masticated by pretty teenage girls...
...swung by a Tucson pottery shop to pick up some firebricks for a backyard kiln. Then he purchased some glass ovenware at a nearby hardware store. A few days later, he materialized in a graduate student's doorway, brandishing a couple of Pyrex custard dishes melted to a misshapen blob. "We can make telescope mirrors out of this!" Angel exclaimed. Thus began a monumental and quixotic effort to reinvent the central light-gathering surface of the telescope, from its initial design to its final polishing...