Word: digesting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when he led a patrol behind the German-line near Arnhem, returning with 32 prisoners and without a scratch. Mostly he told the people about the issues of the 81st Congress, and how to apply for a Farmers Home Administration loan, wound up offering to send a weekly news digest from Washington...
...wool. Their larvae ate dead animals on which the females deposited their small white eggs. But as soon as man started to make woolen clothes, many thousands of years ago, some moths began to change their feeding habits. With a good deal of difficulty, says Moncrieff, they learned to digest wool, have not yet completely adapted themselves to their unnatural diet. Researchers have proved that moth larvae grow faster when fed on fish meal or casein, and that unless they get vitamin B they never reach maturity. Vitamin B, plentiful in dirty clothes, is what a moth is after when...
Most moth repellents and mothproofing chemicals, says Moncrieff, are expensive, not very successful, and often wash out of the wool eventually. So wool-protecting chemists tried another, more subtle approach. Noting that even the best-adjusted moths can barely digest wool, they tried to make it completely indigestible...
...chemical structure of wool, which is made up of long, thin molecules linked together crosswise, roughly as the side pieces of a long ladder are linked by the rungs. The chemists found that if they broke the cross links chemically, the wool was much easier for the moths to digest. The links, apparently, were the moths' big problem. So the chemists reasoned that if the links were made stronger, the moths might not be able to digest the wool...
Paper World. Prior to this happy time, there had been the dismal Age of the Digest (mentioned with good-natured scorn), in which the effort of the intellectuals was to reduce knowledge to capsule form, and in which lectures and articles were turned out in a wild spirit of competition in almost inconceivable numbers, until the emptiness of a world built of paper brought on a collapse...