Word: whaled
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...After years of protest by conservationists around the world, the 15-member International Whaling Commission, an organization that controls whale hunting, has just set drastically reduced quotas for next season's catch. The total number of harvestable whales was cut by 9,000, to 32,500. Most important change was a complete ban on hunting the endangered finback whales except in a small area of the Antarctic. The two biggest whaling nations-Japan and Russia-apparently are going to comply with the new limits. Reason: self-interest. Under new procedures that were designed in response to pressure from...
...every ill: to ease childbirth, as a remedy for cancer, even as a laxative. Spanish colonists liked to rub the waxy, colorless oil on their mustaches. Last week a panel of National Research Council scientists reported that the jojoba bean may also be a panacea for the endangered sperm whale...
...giant sea mammals (up to 60 ft. in length) are relentlessly hunted for the exceptionally fine oil that can be extracted from their tissue and head cavities. Sperm-whale oil and the waxy substance separated from it-spermaceti -are resistant to high temperatures and pressures, and have been used in such varied processes as coating paper and fabrics, manufacturing cosmetics, soaps and candles, cold-rolling steel and lubricating automatic car transmissions, watches and other precision machinery. In an effort to protect the world's dwindling population of sperm whales, in late 1970 the U.S. banned the importation of their...
...fact, there was. In the 1930s, Robert A. Greene, a chemist at the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture, noted that there was a remarkable chemical similarity between jojoba-bean oil and that of the sperm whale. Other researchers confirmed his findings; the university's Office of Arid Lands Studies still publishes an occasional bulletin called Jojoba Happenings to promote cultivation of the bean. But until recently sperm-whale oil was still plentiful, and efforts to substitute jojoba oil did not attract much commercial enthusiasm...
...until now been almost totally unproductive. The panel conceded that the startup costs for a jojoba plantation would be high, but after the plants reach maturity in five years, they would begin to pay off handsomely, even as they were contributing to the salvation of the great sperm whale...