Word: funguses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their delicate, almond-shaped leaves framed against summer skies, elms once grew thickly in the forests of the eastern U.S. and served as shade trees along thousands of Main Streets. Then, in the early 1930s, disaster struck. A load of elm logs arrived from Europe infested with a parasitic fungus. First identified in 1919 by Dutch plant pathologists, the fungus, Ceratocystis ulmi, invades the elm's vascular system, clogging it and causing death. Beginning in the Cleveland and New York City areas, then in scores of other communities across the nation, American elms died by the thousands from...
...year's most perverse children's book is Raymond Briggs' Fungus the Bogeyman (Random House; $4.95). Fungus is free to do what kids cannot: live underground, put grease in his hair, make things go bump in the night and in general be a grain of sand in the public eye. His adventures cover oversized pages full of puns ("Hullo, my dreary," "my direling") and bile green anatomy charts that provide a perfect send-up for the child who has ODed on gnomes and faeries...
When the last Dalai Lama died in 1933, after predicting the future destruction of Tibet, he left no clues. According to custom, however, attendants placed his body in a shrine facing south. Within several days, cloud formations appeared over the northeastern end of the city. A giant star-shaped fungus grew overnight on a pillar in the northeast corner of the Dalai Lama's room. And, several days after his death, the head of the deceased ruler had turned from facing south to facing towards the northeast...
...President Anwar Sadat, the present ruler, leaned so solicitously over the glass-topped coffin of Pharaoh Ramses II last week at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Three years ago the mummified pharaoh, who built Abu Simbel in the course of his 67-year rule, developed-well, a fungus and parasites. He was shipped to Paris to be cured of the condition. Back in Cairo, Ramses II went on display again, along with a plaque noting that in 1258 B.C. he and Hattusilis, great chief of the Hittites, ended a 20-year war with an agreement that neither would pass into...
DIED. Elvin C. Stakman, 93, pre-eminent plant pathologist who led the war against wheat diseases; in St. Paul. Combating the fungus diseases called rusts, he attached Vaseline-coated slides to plane wings in 1921 and by collecting the parasitic red spores in the air, proved that the disease blew seasonally across the nation. A member of the University of Minnesota faculty (1909-53) and the Rockefeller Foundation, "Stak" increased the world's wheat yields by breeding new, hardier strains as the fungi also continued to evolve. "Find out all you have to buck," he once said, "and then...