Word: scour
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...diversity of the Amazon is more than just good material for TV specials. The rain forest is a virtually untapped storehouse of evolutionary achievement that will prove increasingly valuable to mankind as it yields its secrets. Agronomists see the forest as a cornucopia of undiscovered food sources, and chemists scour the flora and fauna for compounds with seemingly magical properties. For instance, the piquia tree produces a compound that appears to be toxic to leaf-cutter ants, which cause millions of dollars of damage each year to South American agriculture. Such chemicals promise attractive alternatives to dangerous synthetic pesticides. Other...
...handle the cleanup, Exxon has deployed an army of 10,500 workers and a flotilla of vessels. Some 3,000 beach cleaners wield high-pressure hoses in twelve-hour shifts to scour the crude from rocky shorelines. The task must be repeated often because tides wash the oil back onto beaches that have just been cleaned...
...become obsessive, which both accounts for the book's repetetiveness and goes a long way toward explaining its strengths. The book is spectacularly well-documented, with almost every sentence of the text scrupulously foot-noted. And anyone with more than a passing interest in the Mafia will want to scour Scheim's bibliography, which includes a vast range of writings about La Cosa Nostra, an organization that guards its secrets with deadly jealousy...
PHOTO RECONNAISSANCE. Satellites in the top-secret Keyhole series and high- flying aircraft like the U-2 and SR-71 scour the Soviet countryside with sharp-eyed optical and video cameras that can pick out a football-size object from 500 miles. Beamed to earth electronically, the satellite images are enhanced by computers that can compare them with earlier pictures and show only those objects that have entered or left the area...
Certainly it can make mounting a defense harder. The notorious Carlos Lehder Rivas, said to be a leader of the Colombian cartel involved in last week's ranch seizure, had to scour southern Florida to find a lawyer willing to represent him in his current Jacksonville trial. His attorneys signed on only after he provided solid proof that they would be paid with untainted -- and unconfiscable -- money...