Word: sonar
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...birds make use of the coastline, the sun or, more commonly, the stars. There is a theory that others are guided by the slight force of the earth's magnetic field. Some animals seem to depend upon old-fashioned topographic features, which they pick up with their own sonar. Eels, according to studies reported by Orr, have so keen a sense of smell that they could detect half a teaspoon of alcohol diluted in 42-mile-long Lake Constance...
Planned to save words in print and speech, acronyms have created new ones instead (radar, sonar, loran) and even corrupted spelling, producing "snick" out of SNCC and "rotsy" from ROTC. Today inappropriate acronyms are a constant hazard. When the Nixon Administration set up its new Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for example, it seemed clear that the awkward initials were invented to avoid the more logical name. Bureau of Management and Budget (BOMB). Military men seldom avoid such errors. The Army is especially prone to fatuous acronyms like BAMBI, which stands for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept. Some civilian agencies...
...addition to providing fertilizer, guano bats are exceptional exterminators. It has been estimated that Texas guanos alone consume 6,600 tons of insects each year. Although a few bat varieties hunt by sight and smell, most rely on echo location, a natural sonar system. The bat emits high-frequency beeps that rebound when they strike any object, allowing the animal's receiver system to compute direction, velocity and distance instantly...
...false killer whale, back into deep water. But the whales doggedly finned themselves onto the sand again, and 125 died. Scientists were at a loss to explain the mass death wish: perhaps a leader gone berserk, or a quirk of weather or topology that disoriented the whales' biological sonar systems. To those who see omens, it seemed that the whales were trying to tell us something. To those who have read the remarkable novel The Day of the Dolphin, the event had a haunting ring. In that book, Novelist Robert Merle fantasizes an unsettling interview between a reporter...
...giant basketball. Strangely enough, the water temperatures near these ridges are considerably higher than those elsewhere in the ocean. In addition, there are ocean-floor fault lines or cracks that were apparently caused by movement of the seabed itself. Although the oceans are billions of years old, sonar measurement of the depth of accumulated sediment indicated that the sea floor is no more than a few hundred million years old; the deposit of sediment should be much thicker...