Word: waterous
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...villager had a point. In the mid-19th century, British explorer Charles Warren, while searching for the legendary treasures of King Solomon, uncovered a shaft leading down to an underground stream. He hypothesized that this was the water source for the city founded in 1000 B.C. by the Jewish King David. This underground stream, which surfaces in the Pool of Siloam about 500 ft. (150 m) below the ancient city walls, was Jerusalem's only source of water, so it made sense to Be'eri, and to many archaeologists, that David would have built his citadel over the stream...
Mycelium doesn't taste very good, but once it's dried, it has some remarkable properties. It's nontoxic, fireproof and mold- and water-resistant, and it traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. It's also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete. In December, Ross completed what is believed to be the first structure made entirely of mushroom. (Sorry, the homes in the fictional Smurf village don't count.) The 500 bricks he grew at Far West Fungi were so sturdy that he destroyed many a metal file and saw blade in shaping the 'shrooms into an archway...
After the husks are cooked, sprayed with water and myco-vitamins and seeded with mushroom spores, the mixture is poured into a mold of the desired shape and left to grow in a dark warehouse. A week or two later, the finished product is popped out and the material rendered biologically inert. The company's first product, a green alternative to Styrofoam, is taking on the packaging industry. Called Ecocradle, it is set to be shipped around a yet-to-be-disclosed consumer item this spring...
...last time Avatar was not No. 1 in North American theaters was the weekend of Dec. 11-13, when the top spot went to the Disney animated feature The Princess and the Frog. That was another fish-out-of-water (or amphibian-in-the-bayou) love story, about a New Orleans girl who hopes to build her dream restaurant but is turned into a frog when she kisses a cursed prince. In Dear John, the hero meets his sweetheart by diving into a lake to retrieve her purse. The Sparks story has even more in common with Cameron...
...alas, the movement appears to have entered its baroque phase. Consider Mina's preposterous fish. There's no doubt that poaching a fish in seawater produces an effect different from that of salted tap water, or broth, or whatever. But they had to fly that water a thousand miles in a jet plane to get it to Vegas! What can be more unnatural than that? Mina sees the technique as the ultimate in no-frills cookery ("there's literally nothing to it"), but even he admits it's not exactly a feat of conservation...