Word: spills
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...whole series of DNA identification tags. To foil counterfeiting, for instance, everything from paper currency to designer jeans and compact discs might be laced with DNA markers. Oil carried in tankers and toxic chemicals carried in trucks might similarly be "branded" by molecules of synthetic DNA. With PCR, a spill of unknown origin could then be traced back to the responsible party...
...environmentalists and sports fishermen watched in horror, a 10-mile lime green plume of death drifted slowly down the river, wiping out most of the ecosystem -- aquatic plants, nymphs, caddis flies, mayflies and at least 100,000 trout. Even more alarming to Californians was that the spill occurred 27 miles upstream of Lake Shasta, the state's largest man-made reservoir...
Fortunately, the long-term threat to humans is probably minimal. Lake Shasta holds 550 billion gal. of water and should easily absorb the spill. Health officials say the water is safe to drink. But the incident served as a reminder that no one living in a modern industrial society is safe from an environmental catastrophe like the one that befell the Sacramento. Each year more than 1.5 million carloads of poisons, solvents, pesticides and other hazardous materials are hauled across the U.S. by train. Given the sheer volume of traffic, accidental chemical releases are inevitable, and they occur...
...with a policy and calculated the appropriate premium. But disasters have a way of defying the laws of probability. Recent years have witnessed an extraordinary string: the Piper Alpha oil-rig blowout in the North Sea, the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and America's Hurricane Hugo. Last week Lloyd's announced that it would post a $980 million deficit for 1988 -- the most recent year on which books can be closed, since they are kept open for three years to allow for claims to be filed. And worse is to come...
...soon became a Rolling Stone regular. Several books followed, among them Holidays in Hell, an outrageous account of his world travels, and Republican Party Reptile, an uneven collection of essays that includes his infamous "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink." From there, he has become a member of what passes for Washington's political literati...