Word: polarizer
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When they began finding polar bears with both male and female sex organs, scientists had a suspicion about what might be causing the deformities. The industrial chemicals known as PCBs, which have polluted land and water all over the world, tend to become concentrated in animals' fatty tissues. Seals, which are the bears' main source of food, are essentially blobs of blubber with flippers attached. And because PCBs are thought to mimic estrogen, some experts fear that even low-level exposure could wreak havoc with a bear's reproductive system...
...time, that chain of reasoning was mostly theoretical. Now, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, an international agency based in Norway, has firmed up at least one of the links. In a report released last week, the group says that polar bears, Arctic foxes, harbor porpoises, seals and birds do indeed show significant contamination, not just with PCBs but also with mercury and other toxins carried north by winds and ocean currents...
...Like polar bears, the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland subsist on seals and other fatty Arctic animals and have some of the highest exposures to PCBs. Nobody has yet reported any hermaphroditic children, thankfully, and while the effects of massive PCB exposure can include cancer and retardation, the lower levels in seals and seabirds haven't been definitively linked to any specific ills...
Finally we spring our trap: global warming gets much worse, the polar ice caps melt and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are rendered inoperable due to water damage...
...expedition, a 52,000-mile trip; of a heart attack; in Framfield, England. Burton and friends set off from London in September 1979. Before arriving at the North Pole and returning home in August 1982, Burton, the son of a Royal Navy commander, battled the Sahara sun and a polar bear, survived on an ice floe for three months and married his fiance during a brief stop in Sydney, Australia...