Word: precursor
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With a mixture of excitement and dread, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena are rushing to augment an already extensive seismic network with portable instrumentation. "Before the San Andreas goes," reflects geologist Ken Hudnut somberly, "maybe we'll catch a precursor." A hot wind swoops across the desert as Hudnut retrieves a plastic box from under an oleander bush and pops the lid to reveal the small satellite receiver it shields from blowing sand. Nearby, a tripod-mounted antenna straddles a survey pipe like a spindly sentinel. Coded signals beamed down by orbiting ! satellites, Hudnut explains, serve...
...home by the gulf war, which presented a number of dicey identification problems. In one case, a pound of tissue turned over by the Iraqis had to be matched against beard shavings taken from a missing soldier's electric razor. But civil libertarians fear that this might be the precursor to a national DNA screening program. The Army insists that the samples will not be tested for AIDS, drug use or anything else. In the event of a subpoena issued as part of a criminal investigation, however, the Army would be forced to comply...
...unwed mothers, though Murphy Brown had at least one important precursor. Molly Dodd, the neurotic single New Yorker played by Blair Brown in The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, found herself pregnant two years ago, and the suspense revolved around which boyfriend was the father: the white bookstore owner or the black policeman (the law carried the day). Yet the revelation caused little stir: the show was tucked away on cable, and went off the air shortly thereafter. It took a Top 10 network series that will undoubtedly be around for years to grab the Vice President's attention...
...necessity was the spur to invention. In the 1930s and '40s, metal and leather, the staples of shoemaking, were scarce in wartime Italy, so he experimented with what came to hand -- straw, raffia, bark, even fishskin. Another local material, cork, launched one of his greatest inventions, the wedge. The precursor of the familiar wedged heel was a shoe with four corks from local wine bottles sewn together to make a heel. Later in the 1940s, he made uppers of cellophane, after noticing how strong and durable the material was when he twisted a bunch of candy wrappers at his desk...
...halting the transfer of tactical nuclear weapons to Russia. Kiev had pledged to hand over all such weapons by July, but so far, only around half of the roughly 2,500 tactical weapons have been shipped. In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin retaliated by creating his own defense ministry, the essential precursor to a separate Russian army. Ukraine then refused to take any part in a unified command structure. A proposal to set up a group of military observers to help resolve ethnic conflicts was rejected by both Ukraine and Azerbaijan...