Word: worms
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...loudspeaker and exposed them to batlike trains of ultrasonic pulses. At once the moths started clicking in what seemed to be an effort to confuse an oncoming bat. To test the effectiveness of the countermeasure, Dunning and Roeder built an electrically operated gun that tosses live meal worms on short trajectories. They trained captive bats to find the meal worms by echolocation, and to pick them skillfully out of the air. Then the entomologists recorded the clicks made by moths and played them over the loudspeaker just as a bat was making its swoop at a meal worm...
Across paddyfields, through mountains and over highways last week streaked the world's fastest long-haul train, slithering like an ivory worm along the 320 miles of rail between Tokyo and Osaka. For the first full test run of Japan's $1 billion New Tokaido Line, the super-express Hikari averaged 80 m.p.h. and often went as high as 125 m.p.h. Crowds waved and cheered, highway traffic stopped to watch, and planes of newsmen circled overhead. Japan was greeting not only a new rail service but a symbol of the nation's postwar industrial growth...
...Etonian Nick is a somewhat overage second lieutenant assigned to backwater posts in Ireland and Wales, where he passes his time studying anti-gas warfare and reading Thackeray's Henry Esmond. The shooting war, which largely flows past him, interests Powell less than its effects on the worm-eaten aristocrats and upper-middle-class English men and women who inhabit his fictional world. Not a great deal happens. Nick's brother-in-law, Robert Tolland, is killed while serving in France with the Field Security Service. "Would he have made a lot of money in his export house...
...Purcell in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the caterpillar that grows into one of the flannel moths, Megalopyge opercularis. Country folk use so many other names that they have confused the issue. In North Carolina it is usually the "woolly slug," in Texas it is often "woolly worm," and in between it may be the puss caterpillar, possum bug, or Italian asp. In Mexico it becomes el perrito, or little dog. By any name, it stings...
Houston doctors report that there seem to be epidemics of woolly-worm stings every four or five years, when the moths, and therefore their caterpillars, are especially numerous. In one recent year, Houston area doctors reported 2,130 cases; almost every one involved severe local pain and local swelling. One patient out of three had swelling of the lymph glands and a headache too severe to be relieved by aspirin. One in 20 went into shock, and eight patients had to be hospitalized, mainly for convulsions. Children are not the only victims: a Houston man was stung by a woolly...