Word: spraying
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...defense system is extraordinarily intricate, a cross between tear gas and a tommy gun. When the beetle senses danger, it internally mixes enzymes contained in one body chamber with concentrated solutions of some rather harmless compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones, confined to a second chamber. This generates a noxious spray of caustic benzoquinones, which explodes from its body at a boiling 212 degreesF. What is more, the fluid is pumped through twin rear nozzles, which can be rotated, like a B-17's gun turret, to hit a hungry ant or frog with bull's-eye accuracy. When Rue learned...
...father beetle tells his son Bomby about the ways of the bombardier family. The text is peppered with scientific terms like amino acids and catalase, but it is so riddled with errors that entomologists cannot begin to guess where Rue got her information. (For example, the beetles do not spray their eggs with tear gas for protection, as the author maintains.) Biologist Thomas Eisner of Cornell University, one of the world's leading bombardier experts, says of the book, "I've never seen anything like...
Another arrested squatter was Lutheran Pastor William Rex, a D.M.S. activist who faces additional troubles. Pittsburgh police accuse him of conspiring to plan a protest at Shadyside Presbyterian Church, where suspected D.M.S. members hurled balloons filled with dye and skunk spray at participants in a family Christmas pageant. In addition, members of Rex's parishes in Monroeville and Trafford, Pa., have petitioned Bishop May to investigate the parson's conduct...
There were other blinding flashes of fear: diplomats cut down on fashionable European streets, mines strewn in the Red Sea, even the awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prizewinner Bishop Desmond Tutu disrupted by a bomb threat. From the elegant Libyan embassy on a leafy London square, a mad spray of gunfire aimed at marching dissidents killed a young British policewoman. Muammar Gaddafi's murderous schemes embarrassed him when Egyptian authorities faked the death of a former Libyan Prime Minister marked for extinction by Tripoli. Gaddafi took responsibility for the assassination that never...
...full of juice. It is interesting to note that John Updike, in his Bech chronicles, Philip Roth, in his Zuckerman books, and now Doctorow have written some of their best recent work about the impossibility of writing. Writers, it seems certain, will outsurvive cockroaches, no matter what toxins they spray on themselves. -By John Skow