Word: ddt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Czech-mating technique works on other insect species, it may provide a final answer to man's bug problems. Unlike the spraying of DDT and other chemical pesticides, the hormone technique affects only the treated species of insect and does not contaminate plant and animal life. And insects cannot develop immunity against it, for if they did, they would become immune to the hormone that is essential to part of their life cycle. The new technique is also superior to the release of radiation-sterilized male insects, which often fail to compete with their unradiated brothers in mating with...
...eaten by stronger ones in ascending order. The most closely studied example is the effect of pesticides, which have sharply improved farm crops but also caused spectacular kills of fish and wildlife. In the Canadian province of New Brunswick, for example, the application of only one-half pound of DDT per acre of forest to control the spruce budworm has twice wiped out almost an entire year's production of young salmon in the Miramichi River. In this process, rain washes the DDT off the ground and into the plankton of lakes and streams. Fish eat the DDT-tainted...
...meat market, had a close friend who was seriously injured in an auto wreck (though not through any fault of Detroit: the friend fell asleep at the wheel). Later, he was horrified during his undergraduate years at Princeton when songbirds on the campus began dying as a result of DDT spray-long before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring raised an anti-pesticide furor...
...enough, Piccard told a symposium at Hoboken's Stevens Institute, but man's whole technology "is little else than a widespread suicidal pollution affecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we till. Every infant born in America today has detectable quantities of DDT in his body." Possibly to get away from it all, Piccard announced plans to submerge himself in a four-to-six-week underwater "free drift" from Florida to Nova Scotia next summer...
...discovery is of special importance because most insects have by this time developed a resistance to the standard 'n-secticides, which were developed around World War II. Today DDT wouldn't kill a fly, much less a louse...