Word: shinns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Monitor. Somehow, radioactive mud seemed to be getting into instrument boxes. But how? Insect Ecologist Alvin Fleetwood Shinn was called in to investigate. Dressed in white coveralls, rubber boots and gloves, and carrying a radiation survey meter, he prowled the forbidden woods and soon identified the culprits. Hidden among the monitor instruments, sometimes even plastered on vacuum tubes, were dozens of mud nests built by wasps...
Dauber's Difference. Insects can stand more radiation than humans, but they are not immune. Shinn put dosimeters in the nests and found that young wasps sometimes got 25 times as much radiation as a human can stand. The dose apparently reduced by 40% the number of wasps that developed success fully into adults. Of the two kinds of wasps that built nests among the instruments, Shinn noticed that only the yellow-and-black daubers used radioactive mud. The nests of the closely related pipe-organ daubers were always as free of radioactivity as if nuclear phys...
...Shinn does not yet have the answer, but he is running elaborate tests to find out. It may be that the cautious pipe-organ wasps are repelled by the faint odor of ozone and other gases that rise from radioactive mud. More fascinating is the possibility that among the wasps of Oak Ridge, which have been exposed to radioactive wastes for a longer period than any others, the pipe-organ daub ers may have evolved a special sense that detects radioactivity and enables them to build nests that will not be lethal to their sensitive young...
...John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Robert Henri, Everett Shinn...
...Shinn, a member of the United Church of Christ, is a theological student of atheism, an adept Christian critic of such contemporary ideological trends as existentialism and linguistic analysis. "Let's welcome the modern world," he says. "Let's look for the good in secularism." Son of a clergyman, Shinn studied English literature at Ohio's Heidelberg College, theology at Union. Refusing a ministerial deferment, he entered the Army in 1941, was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge, and ever since has had little patience with theology that is "remote from the affairs...