Word: castor
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...standing in beaver territory, you had better be wearing hip boots. An ungainly waddler ashore, Castor canadensis spends 80% of its life in water, where it's as agile as a 50-lb. minnow. Dam building is its way of making the world a wetter, safer and more convenient place. Only humans alter their environment more drastically...
...tells of how three women from different generations in Taipei react when faced with crises of the heart. The only Chinese movie to be selected for this year's Berlin Film Festival, 20:30:40 goes down like a happy-hour Cosmopolitan?a nice antidote to the castor oil of the typical Taiwan art-house flick. "This is not a grand story. It doesn't have a big theme," Chang says. "I just wanted to let the audience see how modern Chinese women...
...ricin isn't especially good as a weapon of mass destruction. It's easy to make, using a recipe you can get off the Internet. It comes from the castor bean, which is used around the world in products ranging from laxatives to brake fluid to nylon, and also grows wild in the southwestern U.S., so there's no shortage of raw material. But unlike anthrax, ricin is tough to aerosolize and inhale; the easiest way to deliver a fatal dose is injection or ingestion, and you need a lot for the latter. Ricin is powerful...
...bulletin also tells local law officials and other first responders to be aware of telltale signs of toxin production: for instance, large caches of yeast or infant formula, which can be used to grow or dilute biological toxins, and sacks of castor beans, from which ricin is extracted...
...possibility of terrorist retaliation. But others are less restrained. Last week British Prime Minister Tony Blair said an al-Qaeda attack in Britain is "inevitable." According to the New York Times, U.S. officials believe that Islamic militants arrested in London early this year for allegedly manufacturing ricin--a castor-bean-derived poison that Saddam may also possess--may have been plotting to tamper with food served to British troops at least at one nearby base...