Word: weed
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Like crab grass in a suburban lawn, wild oats in a field of wheat are an insidious pest. The stubborn weed looks like wheat, grows like wheat, and is so closely related to wheat that neither cultivation nor common weed killers can hold it back without harming the wheat crop. But a couple of U.S. manufacturers have finally concocted the kind of agricultural magic that farmers have been seeking for centuries: a weed-killing chemical so selective that it can actually tell wild oats from wheat...
Stirred into the soil, Avadex (Monsanto Chemical Co.) kills wild oats just as seeds begin to sprout. Carbyne (Spencer Chemical Co.) is sprayed on weed seedlings causing them to turn blue and shrivel, while surrounding wheat continues to thrive. Tested on wheatfields in Can ada and the U.S., the two chemicals have been a spectacular success, sometimes boosting an area's yield by as much as 15 bu. an acre. They will get their first full-scale workout this spring on the rolling wheatland of Western Canada...
Another task of the Committee will be to weed out or change courses which have become obsolete. With the retirement of Professor Scott, for instance, the course on Trusts may eventually be dropped, since, as one practioner explained, all the open-ended questions in the field have been answered by Scott on Trusts...
...need for, and the absence of, skilled technicians in the French army led to the founding of L'Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, where "they spent several months of every year in examinations to weed out the weak and encourage the strong," said Courant. The Germans followed suit with a technical school in 1793, and both institutions collected the best minds of all ages. Napoleon drew on the Ecole for his Egyptian campaign, taking the celebrated mathematician Fourier along to decipher hieroglyphics, Courant related...
Explosion. From all the evidence, killers do a fairly effective job if applied properly. Since the chemicals kill all seed, whether weed or good grass, the trick is to sow grass lawns in the early fall only, and to apply pre-emergent chemicals in the spring. By that time, all the good grass will have caught hold, and the killer chemicals will attack only the germinating seeds-the crab grass and other undesirable weeds-that remain. Even if used properly, however, the killers may cause some harmful side effects...