Word: containers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pacific coastal waters are generally cleaner than most, but they also contain pockets of dead -- and deadly -- water. Seattle's Elliott Bay is contaminated with a mix of copper, lead, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals once widely used by the ( electrical-equipment industry. "The bottom of this bay is a chart of industrial history," says Thomas Hubbard, a water-quality planner for Seattle. "If you took a core sample, you could date the Depression, World War II. You could see when PCBs were first used and when they were banned and when lead was eliminated from gasoline...
Fish and shellfish that have absorbed toxins can indirectly pass contaminants to humans. Birds migrating between Central America and the Arctic Circle, for example, make a stopover in San Francisco's wetlands, where they feast on clams and mussels that contain high concentrations of cadmium, mercury and lead. Says Biologist Gregory Karras of Citizens for a Better Environment: "The birds become so polluted, there is a risk from eating ducks shot in the South...
Some kinds of algae contain toxic chemicals that are deadly to marine life. When carcasses of more than a dozen whales washed up on Cape Cod last fall, their deaths were attributed to paralytic shellfish poisoning that probably passed up the food chain through tainted mackerel consumed by the whales. Carpets of algae can turn square miles of water red, brown or yellow. Some scientists speculate that the account in Exodus 7: 20 of the Nile's indefinitely turning red may refer to a red tide...
...clash with not one but two other Braque exhibitions, in Japan and Norway, so that half the paintings one would most want to see were unobtainable. The New York show samples all the stages of a long career, but it is complete only in a chronological sense. It does contain some of Braque's masterpieces, but it gives you just the scaffolding of the oeuvre, not its full body. Given the ever mounting difficulty of borrowing major paintings and the spiraling expense of insuring them, the complete Braque retrospective may now be beyond our reach...
...beginning to spice up courtroom drama. U.S. Judge John Grady, chief of the federal district courts in Chicago, recently allowed actors to read depositions taken from absent witnesses in a securities case. Such depositions, usually read in a deadly drone by court reporters or law-firm secretaries, often contain important evidence but can put juries to sleep. One of the attorneys objected that an actor was hamming it up, but Judge Grady pronounced himself delighted by the lively break from what is typically the "dullest part of a trial...