• The council said the fungi had decayed the roots.
• I stand to inherit a water penetration problem, caused not by my countless tea drinking, but by water decaying the roof beams in the lounge.
• It is easy for tiny amounts of food to get trapped in the tiny dents or fissures, and if you do not brush them thoroughly, bacteria can build up and start to decay the tooth.

• On the downside he's noticed that the urban infrastructure has decayed immeasurably in recent years.
• For years Blackburn's Church Street Pavilions have been allowed to crumble and decay so that the Grade ll listed buildings have become nothing more than an eyesore.
• A few suburbs have flourished, while the inner city has decayed and once relatively stable working class communities have deteriorated.

Synonyms

• But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within.
• Without the instability of the declining 18th century, as the old European order decayed, we would not have gained the French assistance decisive to our struggle for independence.
• Institutional inertia, social customs, and psychological habit ensure that systems can maintain their outer shapes long after they have begun to decay internally.

• Some atoms can undergo radioactive beta decay, in which a neutron decays into a proton, an electron and an electron-antineutrino via the weak nuclear force.
• Once solidified, the lead is ‘locked ‘in place and since the uranium decays to lead, the lead-to-uranium ratio increases with time.’
• The uranium eventually decays to radium and, eventually to polonium - 210, a substance that, when inhaled, can endanger tissue health and damage the immune system.

• Since antibody affinity is expected to stay the same even in AIDS, unlike antibody quantity which decays in advanced disease, this approach is less likely to give false recent classification.
• We found that fluorescence decayed with an averaged time constant of 142.8 s due to photobleaching.
• LD decayed relatively slowly but steadily within genes.

• However, too much growth produces a strain on tissues and early decay.
• When the decay reaches the pulp tissue, the blood vessels, and the nerves that serve the tooth, the pain starts - an insistent throbbing.
• Layers of moss and decay give a funereal quality to this weighty hall.

• The home fell into decay by the start of the 1970s.
• Gradually the abandoned buildings fell into decay or were adopted for other uses.
• The home is still empty today, and has suffered considerable interior damage, including structural decay resulting from water leaks in the building.

Synonyms

• ‘Together let us find solutions to moral decay by jointly developing a strategy and a programme of action,’ Masondo says.
• People talk a lot about cultural decay and declining values and the blame is usually placed on evil liberals.
• For Webster's audience, Italy was perceived as a site of political intrigue, economic power, decadence, and moral decay.

• The radioactive decay releases energy in the form of ionising radiation.
• The principles of alpha decay are used in radioactive dating, in which half-lives play an important part.
• Radon is present in the atmosphere because it is constantly being formed during the radioactive decay of uranium and radium.

• After linear baseline subtraction, to account for the gradual decay of the synchrotron beam intensity, two kinds of treatments were performed.
• Measurements of the decay of the electrical field across the thylakoid membrane following a light - dark transition might give some clues to this.
• This is one order of magnitude slower than the decay of K in the bacteriorhodopsin photocycle.