Word: insection
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MOST HOMEOWNERS WOULD READILY AGREE THAT the only good termite is a dead termite, but the one unearthed on a dig in the Dominican Republic was better than most. The insect, trapped between 25 million and 30 million years ago in a blob of tree sap that hardened into amber, has yielded genetic material that is the oldest ever studied, by at least 8 million years. It has also resolved a long-simmering dispute over the family tree of cockroaches...
After a two-hour drive northward, we visited one of our Global 2000 agricultural projects. At the end of their second year in this program, farmers were weighing, storing and treating their corn harvest to prevent insect damage. Still produced with rudimentary hand tools, their yields were three times as large as any they had seen before. Directed by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the staff of one Senegalese scientist has trained and supervises 131 native agricultural-extension workers. We have found the 150,000 farmers in this program in six African countries to be eager to learn, hardworking, regular...
...Napa County farmer noticed that his vines were thinning out and called in experts from the department of oenology at the University of California at Davis. They concluded that the phylloxeras had mutated into a new, prolific biotype that threatened all AXR 1 rootstalks. Reproducing asexually, one insect can spawn a billion offspring annually...
...this makes the mosquito a formidable adversary, one that has caused no end of trouble for human beings. Malarial mosquitoes, some historians think, contributed to the fall of ancient Greece. Europeans of medieval times were tormented by the insect Chaucer knew as the midge; the English word mosquito, from the Spanish for "little fly," appeared in the 16th century, along with new and nastier New World species. In the 1880s the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from the triumph of building the Suez Canal, was utterly vanquished in his heroic effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama...
...hike out of the Ndoki in two days, covering more than 30 km in the last 24 hours. It would be rough going for a distance runner, but I am in no shape for the trip at all. An insect has apparently injected me with one of the countless toxins found in the jungle, and I come down with pleurisy-like symptoms that make every breath painful. It is probably dengue fever, also called breakbone fever. Whatever it is, the final day's march is sheer hell. As at the beginning of the trip, darkness falls when we are still...