Word: billionths
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...spinal cords of polio-infected cotton rats, froze it. Then, letting it start to thaw, they whirled their material in an ultra-high-speed centrifuge (60,000 revolutions per minute) to separate its protein, and with chemicals refined the protein further. Eventually they isolated a particle less than two-billionths of an inch in diameter. The protein particle proved to be 80 to 95% pure virus; a billionth of a gram of it, injected in a cotton rat, produced symptoms of polio...
...drop of water were enlarged to the size of the earth, each atom in it would be about the size of an orange. Yet most of an atom is empty space through which the electrons whirl. The nucleus itself occupies only one million-billionth of the atom's bulk...
Modern scientists have been able to study ever smaller particles of matter. Recently the pursuit of the infinitesimal reached a new vanishing point. An R.C.A. microphysicist developed an instrument which can analyze the atomic composition of a particle as small as a millionth of a billionth of a gram...
...human nose is an extraordinarily sensitive organ: it can detect as little as a billionth of a milligram of an aromatic vapor; the tongue needs at least a million times that amount in order to taste...
...costly, slow and tedious, the method of isolation employs the mass spectrometer the uranium ore is vaporized in a tiny electric furnace, then electrified, and the isotopes are separated and sorted by weight in a magnetic field. The rate of isolating U-235 is one ten-billionth of a pound per hour. It is generally agreed that at least a pound would be needed for practical power experiments. By this method a pound would take about 11,000 centuries to produce...