Word: pigeoning
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Birds, fish and other migratory creatures have long been the envy of the U.S. Navy, which would like to learn to navigate with their casual accuracy. In its latest effort to understand animal travel tricks, the Office of Naval Research has been loading homing pigeons with tiny, transistorized radio transmitters designed by American Electronic Laboratories, Inc. of Philadelphia. Despite four batteries and a 40-in. trailing antenna, each transmitter weighs only 2½ oz. and does not overburden an airworthy pigeon. For 20 hours, it sends out a signal that can be picked up by directional receivers tracking the pigeon...
...faint chirp of the airborne radio has been followed for only 25 miles, and the Navy has added little to its pigeon lore. But seagoing scientists have far more ambitious experiments in mind. Porpoises, another animal uncannily clever at navigation, will be fitted with larger transmitters in the hope of learning how the aquatic mammals set their course. Eventually, the Navy hopes, its little radios will signal defeat for an ancient enemy: the albatrosses (known as gooney birds) that nest by the thousands on Midway Island and make its runways dangerous for aircraft. Naval experts on bird migration suspect that...
According to the quick, unstrained, and often exciting method of thinking--that of pigeon holing and generalizations--Harvard is composed of three types: intellectuals, playboys, and jocks...
...when, in the early 1930s, he was first confronted with these extraordinary churches, with their rounded, curving walls that follow the turning of the roads, their thick, often windowless outer shells looking like the ramparts of an ancient fortification, their arches spanning across narrow alleyways, and topped with strange pigeon-coop bell towers...
...embassy, Mallin was able to put together the story of Castro's police-state terror during the invasion crisis. Under Dictator Batista, the chivato, or informer, was the object of universal hatred; Castro, in the fashion of Communist and fascist dictators, has turned the government stool pigeon into a national industry. Every block has one. In the great invasion roundup of 250,000 Cubans, the informer was apt to be the untipped janitor, the office wasp, the neighborhood malcontent-all of whom now had their chance for revenge. In the city of Matanzas, thousands of Cubans were penned...