Word: cockroaches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Entomologists have long known that female cockroaches use perfume to advertise their nubility. Army chemists at Natick, Mass., once extracted a powerfully attractive substance from filter paper crawled over by virgin females, but it was mixed up with too many other materials to be analyzed successfully. The Beltsville system is better; the air passing through the cans carries the cockroach perfume to a flask cooled by Dry Ice. There the vapor condenses and is periodically collected. After an elaborate purification process, Dr. Yamamoto has saved up 12.2 milligrams (.0004 oz.) of pure attractant, equivalent to the perfume produced...
Sneaky Scheme. When this is done, it may mean the end for at least one kind of cockroach, Periplaneta americana, the species bred by Dr. Yamamoto. The males cannot resist its attraction, so they can be lured easily into baited traps. But this simple scheme does not satisfy the anti-cockroach forces. The females will not be affected, they point out, and a few males attracted to them in the age-old way will work overtime to make them lay fertile eggs...
...their lives while the males take no further notice of them. But each female that has mated with a sterilized male lays only infertile eggs. If most of the males in a given locality have been sterilized, then most of the females will have no living offspring, and the cockroach population will plunge toward zero. The same unsporting trick, say the Beltsville scientists, should work on other insects that use sex perfumes, including bollworms, army worms and corn borers...
...breakdowns on Havana's streets in one day alone recently. "What am I supposed to do when this thing finally goes-join the militia?" said the disgruntled driver of a 1953 Cadillac taxi. Cubans are leary of the Coca-Cola they drink-it has been known to contain cockroach eggs; in bars they pointedly order Coke "sin bacilli" (without germs). "My father would be very sad to see this," said the son of the late president of Coca-Cola in Cuba...
Sail Away (by Noël Coward) is carbon-copy Coward. All it needs is a carbon-copy audience from the dated musical comedies of the '20s and '30s. Sample dialogue: Englishman, in tweeds and monocle: "I've just found a cockroach in my bath." Steward: "I trust it was a British cockroach...