Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Admiral Sherman was an unusual man -brilliant, modest and, at 53, one of the youngest officers ever proposed as Chief of Naval Operations. His World War II record was impressive. He commanded the aircraft carrier Wasp until she was shot out from beneath him in the Solomons in 1942. During the final years of the war he was Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz' "brain"; he helped plan the great sweep across the Pacific from Tarawa to Okinawa...
...with its four Rolls-Royce Ghost jet engines looking sleek and slim on its moderately swept-back wings. Its claimed cruising speed is 500 m.p.h. at 35-40,000 feet. At this speed and altitude, each Ghost develops thrust equivalent to 10,500 h.p. The Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp reciprocating engines that power the DC-6 develop only about 2,100 h.p. at full throttle...
...full, busy career as professor of physiology at Stanford University. On the first morning of the college year after "Emeritus" was added to his former title, Professor Shafer, feeling lonely and at loose ends, wandered into his beehouse. There he began to watch a mud-dauber wasp as she buzzed purposefully to the window sill, stretched her forefeet out like a kitten, and took a sun bath. She seemed to know exactly what she was about. In a matter of minutes Shafer's admiration was aroused and he found a new and absorbing interest in life. That...
...Shafer learned some inside details of the mud dauber's life cycle. One of the most striking was the insect's built-in sanitary facilities. Each egg is laid in a separate mud cell, along with perhaps a dozen spiders which have been paralyzed by the mother wasp's sting. After the larva hatches from the egg, it begins to eat the spiders...
...larval period (which lasts through the winter) and in spring when the pupa has emerged from the cocoon, no urinary wastes are excreted. Instead, embryonic mud daubers produce uric acid pellets which are stored in an organ called the "fat body." Only after the adult wasp has started to eat its way out of its mud cell are the uric acid pellets excreted...