Word: trigger
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...almost everyone knows, iron is routinely added to "enriched" flour and bread because the element, needed to make hemoglobin, is stripped out in the grain-milling process. But disturbing news from Sweden suggests that too much iron may trigger a serious and often fatal hereditary illness. It is an iron storage disorder called hemochromatosis, and it causes its victims, mostly male, to absorb too much iron. Possible results: liver disease, diabetes, impotence, sterility, heart failure, even sudden death...
...were the Russian pilots so trigger-happy? Western experts speculate that the Soviets might have been more than normally jittery about security in the Kola Peninsula area because of an embarrassing incident that occurred a few weeks earlier: a light plane flown by a daredevil Swedish pilot landed on a lake near Leningrad to pick up three would-be Soviet defectors; although the rendezvous failed, the pilot managed to fly away scot-free...
That was enough to trigger a widespread panic. Worried marijuana smokers in Urbana, Ill., told a drug counselor that several of them had vomited and passed out after smoking pot. G.D. Searle Laboratories in Skokie, Ill., reported that 39 out of 40 marijuana samples tested had traces of paraquat. "People are running scared," says Dr. Vernon Patch, a Boston drug-abuse expert. "A situation exists which borders on hysteria," agrees the deputy director of the Illinois dangerous-drugs commission, Daniel Behnke...
...tons of TNT. Unlike the earliest A-bombs, which involved the fission-or splitting-of such radioactive materials as uranium and plutonium, H-bombs work by fusing isotopes of the simplest and lightest element, hydrogen, into slightly heavier atoms of helium, although they still require a small fission "trigger" to reach the sunlike temperatures (tens of millions of degrees) required for fusion...
Those found guilty of overdeducting in previous years can expect audits, as can those whose returns were prepared by tax advisers suspected of bending the law. Even simple math mistakes or failure to sign the form can trigger an audit, since agents scanning these "problem" returns may spot irregularities...