Word: calcium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...live? Brown University researchers fed the problem to an IBM 650 electronic computer, last week reported the answer: 21? a day. Caring nothing for variety or any other of life's spices, the computer solemnly accepted the facts that a man must have certain minimum quantities of protein, calcium, iron, phosphorus and five vitamins. Then its nerve cells went to work, concluded that only four foods are needed to sustain life: lard, beef liver, orange juice and soybean meal...
...Nobody knows how many of the additives now in use have been fully tested. Best guess: about 150 are tried and true, will cause no problem, e.g., old familiars such as sodium benzoate (preservative in foods and many soft drinks), and other items less recognizable but long widely used-calcium or sodium propionate (mold inhibitor in bread) and butylated hydroxy anisole (antioxidant to keep fats from going rancid). Another 150 are expected to pass the tests, but 100 or more are in a medical no-man's land...
About the time disulfiram (Antabuse) was hailed by Danish doctors as a wonder drug for alcoholism, plant physicians began hearing complaints that workers recently exposed to dust in the manufacture of calcium cyanamide*could not take a drink-it made them sick. Disulfiram proved a disappointment: it was too dangerous for widespread use, required a doctor's close supervision. But last week a medicinal variant of cyanamide was released in Canada for prescription sale, on the strength of researchers' reports that it is almost as potent as disulfiram and far safer...
Trade-named Temposil by Lederle Laboratories, it is citrated calcium carbimide (CCC). A single tablet sensitizes the patient so fast that if he takes a drink within as little as ten minutes he will feel flushed and short of breath, and get a headache-all severely enough to make him turn against the bottle. Unlike disulfiram, CCC rarely causes vomiting, a marked drop in blood pressure, or other undesirable side effects. But the effects of CCC usually wear off faster, so if the alcoholic misses his medicine for a couple of days, he may fall off the wagon...
...them by Scotland's heavy rains. In this week's Nature two scientists from Glasgow's Royal College of Science and Technology report on an antler taken on the Island of Islay in 1957. It proved to have 126 micromicrocuries of strontium radioactivity per gram of calcium. A cross section cut from it and laid on X-ray film for 82 days gave off enough atomic radiation to take a sharp picture of itself. For contrast, an antler that grew in the same place in 1952, before the H-bomb tests, showed only 11.2 micromicrocuries of radioactivity...