Word: gypsum
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...Romans themselves had few qualms about incorporating chemical warfare into their tactics. Roman armies routinely poisoned the wells of cities they were besieging, particularly when campaigning in western Asia. According to the historian Plutarch, the Roman general Sertorius in 80 B.C. had his troops pile mounds of gypsum powder by the hillside hideaways of Spanish rebels. When kicked up by a strong northerly wind, the dust became a severe irritant, smoking the insurgents out of their caves. The use of such special agents "was very tempting," says Adrienne Mayor, a classical folklorist and author of Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion...
...bottom of the slope, a path worn by unseen animals leads to a perfectly circular stand of trees sucking water out of the salty white gypsum. There are wattles, paperbark and bloodwood eucalypts; among them pink Major Mitchell cockatoos shatter the oppressive silence with their raucous screams as they feed. Fairy wrens dart between flowering shrubs, and from the knee-high sedges and grasses comes the whisper of tiny life...
...spades - can be identified amid a welter of enigmatic markings. Meanwhile Klee also expanded his experiments with an astonishing variety of materials, achieving exceptional nuances of texture, translucence and sheen. In addition to oil and watercolor, he worked with chalk, charcoal, pastels, colored pencils, wax color, tempera, varnishes, gypsum, poster paints and colored paste. He used them, in varying combinations and often in several layers, on coarse paper, parchment, newsprint, cotton, linen, gauze, burlap, cardboard, plaster and plywood. Ever the master colorist, he conjured up an eerie, otherworldly radiance, as in Masks at Twilight, by combining black, milky blue...
...Jamail brought a case against Remington for defects in a gun that injured a man in a hunting accident. The $6.8 million settlement landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Furth won his clients $70 million in 1973 on an antitrust price-fixing case against gypsum-wallboard manufacturers (and got a $4.3 million...
...east side is a plant that uses gypsum to make Sheetrock and that, thanks to Riverkeeper, has done a cleanup. Just beyond it rise Units 2 and 3 of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. Two mosquelike domes flank a sky-high smokestack painted in red and white stripes. It looks like a lighthouse that has been converted into a festive nuclear missile. Beyond that, at Charles Point, lies a garbage-burning plant, which turns trash into energy...