Word: pigeoning
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...does a homing pigeon navigate, often over hundreds of miles of territory it has never seen before? Professor (of physics) Henry L. Yeagley of Pennsylvania State College thinks he has found the pigeony secret. Last week, on General Electric's Science Forum broadcast, he described the pigeon experiments he has been doing for the Army Signal Corps...
Yeagley began with the idea, not original with him, that a homing pigeon is equipped with some sort of "magnetic compasses," i.e , some sensitivity to the earth's magnetism. Yeagley tested this notion by fastening small magnets to the wings of well-trained pigeons. Confused by their own magnetism, most of the birds never got home. Others, carrying equal wing weights of nonmagnetic copper, made the home roost without trouble. The experiment indicated that the earth's magnetism is a factor in pigeon navigation...
...pigeon's own magnetic compass could not, by itself, bring him back to his roost. Like a ship, a pigeon needs some other instrument too. Many places on the earth's surface have identical magnetic conditions. A pigeon guided by his compass alone might end up almost anywhere...
...many as 16 shows a week; his record is seven in one day. Last week, on "a sort of summer vacation," he did the dirty work in nine, including one soap opera. All this crime pays Bell about $30,000 a year, but he sweats like a stool pigeon for it-twelve hours a day, six days a week.* Even off the air, Bell sounds and looks like a hood just back from escort duty on a one-way ride. With his sneering voice goes a curling lip (with black, headwaiter mustache to match) and a martini-cold...
...Hume Cronyn), a sadist who plays Wagner while softening up a prisoner with a rubber hose. There is the boozy prison doctor (Art Smith) with a heart of gold and some of the crummiest "philosophy" ever scraped out of the bottom of a cracker barrel. There is the stool pigeon who is efficiently murdered by his fellow convicts; and the steady old hand (Charles Bickford) who grimly joins the rebels when his parole is canceled. The one comparative novelty-Calypso Singer Sir Lancelot, improvising verses about the prisoners-seems like stale...