FireChat may catch on as a way to corral revelers, but that's just the beginning of its practical applications. For political organizers, it could become a critically important way to keep protesters and activists connected when their traditional forms of communicating get cut off.
Desiccators are sealable enclosures containing desiccants used for preserving moisture-sensitive items such as cobalt chloride paper for another use. A common use for desiccators is to protect chemicals which are hygroscopic or which react with water from humidity.
Scansion is the process of marking the stresses in a poem, and working out the metre from the distribution of stresses. The verb is to scan. 'Mark' can be taken to mean both 'notice' and 'annotate', the latter often done with a u for an unstressed syllable and a slash, / , for a stressed one.