Word: scent
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...resinous scent of hot green summer flowed in waves across the sprawling north campus of the University of Michigan. But the obsessed, drifting in and out of the five-building brick residence complex perched above Ann Arbor, hardly noticed. This was a weekend devoted to the joys of combat...
...Penn Station, from which the Crescent pulls out each day at 2:45 p.m. under Amtrak's auspices. (Southern takes over at Washington.) Rather, for the passenger embarking on the 1,378-mile, 28-hour trip to New Orleans, the Crescent City, there is the comforting scent of soap and polish, the promise of solicitude, of pride and punctuality. Not to mention a rockaby sleep, punctuated by the occasional hissing stop, and a glimpse of some dimly lit Southern station in the dark...
...first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has approved for commercial use as a pesticide an insect sex pheromone, the scent emitted by a female to attract males. The new substance, being marketed by Albany International under the trade name Gossyplure H.F., is actually a synthesized version of the scent given off by female pink bollworm moths. These insects produce caterpillars that eat their way through the cotton crops in Southern California and Arizona, costing farmers some $40 million a year in damage and control expenses...
...with female pink bollworm moth pheromone that the male moths sometimes go on indiscriminate sex orgies. They try to mate with sticks, stones, vegetation or anything else in the vicinity. However they react, they are seldom able to find the available females; they soon become so accustomed to the scent that they no longer respond to it. The result: a sharp drop in the population of caterpillar young -and crop damage. In field tests near Blythe, Calif., last year, only 10% of cotton crops treated with Gossyplure were damaged, compared with 80% in unsprayed areas...
...vegetation and had no effect on other species of insects. (Standard chemical sprays used on cotton fields also kill insects that are beneficial to the crop.) It is conceivable, so to speak, that the bollworm could evolve immunity to its own sex pheromone-for example, by producing a different scent. But scientists could then synthesize the new pheromone and continue to control the frustrated moths...