Word: slugs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...next year I chose a seminar with an extremely nice visiting professor who had the soul of a poet and the backbone of a garden slug. I was surprised to get back one particularly shoddy essay with the final mark of “A.” At first I rationalized the grade, deciding that my work must have stood out because the seminar included several legendary stoners. One of them, known to his peers as the Bazooka (because he was often heavily loaded), differed from Bill Clinton in that he had never actually exhaled. But at semester?...
...over the border, hunting for anyone trying to escape. Orange fireballs bounced through the valleys of the White Mountains. Navy SEALS and Green Berets massed on the ground, shawls wrapped around their heads, lasers in hand, guiding the B-1s and B-52s overhead. Snipers capable of putting a slug into a dime from more than a mile away waited for the call. Afghan Alliance commanders may have been willing to negotiate a surrender, but the U.S. special forces were there to get a job done...
...early age because there at least they would get a meal and some education. What they missed was any contact with women. They grew estranged from even their mothers and sisters, and they feel more comfortable around men. It's common to see two young Taliban strolling around, rifles slug over their shoulders, laughing and holding hands. The Taliban would thrash any male-female couple who dared hold hands in public...
Here's how the Slugbot works: a lawn mower-size machine with a long arm shines red light on the ground to identify a shiny, sluglike object, then analyzes its shape. When it finds a slug, it picks it up and drops it in a hopper. Bacteria inside the robot eat the slimy critters--a process that releases electrons that can be captured and, in theory, keep the bot's batteries perpetually charged...
Kelly says he has perfected the slug-identification-and-retrieval system but estimates that it will be several years before the slugbot is ready for market. Biggest hurdle: getting the robot to convert those captured mollusks into usable energy. While the concept of microbial fuel cells has worked in laboratory tests, applying it to slugs turns out to be a sticky proposition...