Word: bacillus
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Lately, subtler forms of warfare have been introduced, including sprays that contain Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a bacterium that kills various moth and butterfly larvae. It, too, should be applied early. Another new experimental spray spreads a virus that afflicts the gypsies with fatal wilt disease, so called because the dying caterpillar shrivels into a kind of inverted-V shape. More diabolical are traps scented with sex lures to attract male moths. Scientists have also been distributing different types of insects-wasps, flies, beetles-that prey on gypsy moths at various stages in their life cycle...
...natural images, emphasizing their closeness to the land and wilderness: "The sun stings Catherine's shoulder, a dark yellow bee...She felt her heart being eaten from below the way a tomato is eaten when it brushes the ground...Enthusiasm spread like a disease bacillus in a kissing game...Cows moved slowly over the fields crossing the veins of tiny streams, like white worms on a leaf." This fertility of his imagery becomes explicitly sexual in a young man's sense of spring...
...century, tuberculosis-or consumption, as it was then called-exacted a horrifying toll; up to 20% of the population in Western countries died of it before the age of 50. But by 1882, when the German bacteriologist Robert Koch demystified the disease by identifying the tiny rod-shaped tubercle bacillus that caused it, the tide was turning...
There are about 150 Americans on Majuro (pop. 7,500), and it is difficult for them not to stick together. The district center of the Marshall Islands is a bacillus-shaped coral atoll less than 100 yds. wide. A palm-fringed island with a glistening lagoon, Majuro shelters the most unusual mix of American expatriates in the Pacific. The island's biggest contractor is a Portuguese Hawaiian. A Massachusetts Jew manages the copra-processing plant. They are a demonstrative lot. When Majuro's American Chamber of Commerce got no satisfaction at a meeting to protest air-freight rate...
...Gerald Fink of Cornell University spoke before a crowd of approximately 150 at the Medical School yesterday to describe his recently successful experiments in recombinant DNA research with yeast cells and the E. coli bacillus...