Word: pigeonly
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When Penzias and Wilson first noticed the unexpected background static picked up by their antenna, they considered a number of causes, including the effect of what the German-born Penzias whimsically called "a white dielectric material"-pigeon droppings -in their antenna. But soon they learned from a Princeton group that was trying to detect evidence of the Big Bang that the radiation picked up by their antenna was of far greater significance: its temperature was remarkably close to what scientists had been predicting for radiation left over from the primordial fireball. In theory, this radiation should be equivalent to what...
...underlying tension. He and his party risked bites from golden fruit bats that objected to the indignity of having their private parts probed so their would-be saviors could ascertain their sex. They suffered seasickness and sunstroke to capture rare lizards. But to capture the cyclamen-colored Mauritian pink pigeon, all the rescuers risked was a fall from a tree. The birds proved so suicidally stupid that they merely watched, heads cocked with curiosity, as a Mauritian soldier the size of a middle linebacker climbed up a tree with all the agility of an elephant and snagged...
...rest under the eaves of buildings and set off small fire bombs attached to their chests. The Swedes had plans for using trained kamikaze seals to blow up submarines, and the Soviets for bomb-carrying dogs to attack tanks. In the 1940s, Behaviorist B.F. Skinner proposed installing a trained pigeon in front of a screen in the nose of a missile to guide it to a target. The U.S. Army trained dogs for jungle patrol duty in Viet Nam. The dogs would lie down when they met a wounded man, stand still if they saw anyone moving, and sit when...
...sardonically call it, turned out to be one of those populist-utopian fantasies of the '60s that have not yet been made to work. As a public meeting place, it certainly succeeds. Half Paris has taken to riding up and down its dramatic glass escalator tube, squinting through the pigeon droppings on the curved panes at a superb view of the city...
...murder reputed Godfather Carlo Gambino and two other high-ranking bosses, Colombo decided his victims would be worth more to him than his contract and tipped them off. Gambino awarded him a place on the Mafia's supreme council, the Commission, but Colombo was shunned as a stool pigeon and small-time hood by other leaders. Police speculated that his violation of the Cosa Nostra's traditional oath of silence, with his highly visible activities in the league (one aim of which was the elimination of the word Mafia from the U.S. lexicon), triggered the assassination attempt that...