Word: shells
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Play along with us, and we can make good things happen for you. Oppose us, and . . . well, watch out. Delivering the first part of the message, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen on March 12 welcomed into his airy office executives of seven major oil companies: Amoco, Ashland, Chevron, Conoco, Phillips, Shell and Unocal. "We're willing to adjust our fuel tax in ways that will help you," said Bentsen. He noted that his department had already promised to revise the way it proposed to collect a new energy tax to favor U.S. oil refiners over foreign competitors. He vowed to consider...
...they show videotapes of hundreds of fish floating belly up on the brackish waters. Emma Nicholson, a British M.P. who has made three trips to the marshes, says the inhabitants can no longer sustain themselves. In the past eight months, more than 350 villages have been destroyed by shell and rocket fire. "The only way to live in the marshes today is to remain alone and move every day," said a recent escapee...
...water for weeks; they lie on their blankets all day long. At 105, Fatima Malokos has suffered through all of Yugoslavia's 20th century wars. "In World War I they only fought, in the second they only burned some houses," she says. "In this one they just shell civilians. This one is the worst...
...however, just as clearly as Band Professor of Science P.O. Wilson does in his recent Diversity of Life. Beginning with some real-life trouble in Tahiti, this message carries explicitly through Gould's first three essays, ending with a reflection on the loss of the limpets, a snail whose shell "looks like a Chinese hat of the old caricatures." Through Gould's superb interweaving of history and biology, the limpet becomes a poor pitiable and yet complex organism, with symbolic meaning for other endangered species...
Biological wizardry of a different sort is responsible for the ruggedness of abalone shells, which under high-powered microscopes resemble elaborately constructed stone walls. In this case, crystals of calcium carbonate, siphoned from seawater, serve as the stones, while a slurry of protein and complex sugars acts as the mortar between them. "The ingredients themselves are not at all impressive," marvels Princeton University materials scientist Ilhan Aksay. "Yet the shell is as strong as the most advanced man-made ceramics." And if a simple stone-and-mortar design can turn an intrinsically chalky substance into a tough coat of armor...