Word: trefoil
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Look at the black and yellow symbol on the right. Is it a fan? A propeller? No. It's a trefoil, the international sign used to warn people away from potentially deadly sources of radiation. If you didn't recognize the degree of danger that is supposed to be conveyed by the three-bladed symbol, which represents radiation emitting from an atom, you're not alone. Over the last two decades, at least 20 people have died and more than 400 have been injured after accidentally exposing themselves to radioactive sources, such as radiography units dumped in scrap heaps. Experts...
...help reduce these avoidable deaths, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna unveiled a new warning symbol on Feb. 15 to label potentially fatal radiation sources, such as those found in food irradiators or machines for cancer treatment. Unlike the original trefoil, which was first developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1940s, the new warning was tested to ensure it's universally understood. Starting in 2001, researchers showed a series of motifs to 1,650 adults and children, many of them illiterate, in 11 different countries. The red background conveys danger; a skull and crossbones...
...crown vetch, henbit, spotted Joe-Pye weed, gray beardtongue, spreading dogbane, live forever, steeplebush, crazyweed, woolly locoweed, hairy vetch, lady's thumb, common speedwell, field milkwort, Lyon's turtlehead, ragged robin, calypso, common burdock, spotted knapweed, hairy willow herb, purple saxifrage, red baneberry, slender glasswort, toadshade, climbing bittersweet, birdsfoot trefoil, moth mullein, smooth false foxglove, showy rattlebox, prince's plume, agrimony, squawroot, mouse-ear hawkweed, rattlesnake weed, coltsfoot, tickseed sunflower, Jerusalem artichoke, sneezeweed, swollen bladderwort, clammy ground cherry, purslane, muskflower, rough-fruited cinquefoil, climbing boneset...
From their gay, Gothic home beyond the Hackensack meadows they come the young visitors. The square is filled with them. Orange and Black mingles with sober crimson in the store windows. Spectators speculate; trefoil frailties and the Yard gendarmes reminisce quite audibly. One might call it Indian summer--but the House of Hanover could not brook that...
...TREFOIL...