Word: lichen
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...savory truffle is a fungus, and so is the unsavory trifle that causes athlete's foot. Life-saving penicillin comes from one fungus (Penicillium notatum); from another comes the lichen that is slowly devouring the Parthenon. Yet another yields the drug LSD, which has been used experimentally in the treatment of schizophrenic children and alcoholics. Knowledge of the complex, infinitely various, unbelievably hardy fungus kingdom has multiplied immeasurably in the past century. In this fascinating, ambitious book by Lucy Kavaler, its villains, heroes and hopefuls are fully explained to the nonscientific reader...
Died. Peter Lanyon, 46, British abstract painter, who drew inspiration by soaring over his native Cornwall in a red glider, then came down to record his sensations in whirling masses of rust reds, lichen greens and salt whites that vigorously joined the rugged earth below and the dazzling sky above; of injuries sustained when his glider nosedived into a macadam airstrip in Somerset, England...
...Bible after only one reading. At 12, he entered the University of Nebraska, at 17, emerged as a first-rate botanist, and between studying and practicing the law, he found time to earn a Ph.D. in botany and direct a botanical survey of Nebraska, which now boasts a rare lichen called roscopoundia...
Radioactive Skimmings. University of Alaska Zoologist William O. Pruitt, an authority on caribou, gave the beasts a thorough going over and found that their flesh contained an unusual amount of caesium 137. After that, the story unfolded with dangerous logic. The caribou's winter food is largely lichens, a primitive plant that has no roots but gets its moisture and nutrients entirely from the air. Its spongy tissues soak up the scant Arctic rain like blotting paper and retain a large part of it. The fallout that is carried down by the rain is retained too. Instead of mixing...
...Soviet tests spinning around the earth, fallout was on almost everybody's mind. U.S. housewives worried that their milk might be contaminated by the tests or that their children might get cancer. The Finns worried that their reindeer meat might become radioactive when reindeers munched on contaminated lichen. Great Britain set up plans for rationing baby foods and dried milk if radioactivity became too high. And in India, some people stopped buying chicken and other fowl because they feared radiation poisoning...