Word: commonest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...commonest type of case is believed to be like the first U.S. record: the baby who gets the disease in the womb from a mother who has a smoldering, low-grade infection. The baby may be sick at birth, or not until a few weeks later. In either event, the tiny Toxoplasma invaders usually cause inflammation of the brain and spinal cord so severe that it is crippling if not fatal. (Later children of the same mother are believed to be safe because she develops antibodies...
Surprisingly few U.S. visitors are taken to the hospital because of traffic accidents. Most are so shaken by their first sight of Paris traffic that they are extra careful in crossing streets. The commonest ailment treated at the hospital is "Paris tummy" -a catchall label for the painful bellyaches that result from too much French food and wine. Next in frequency are heart attacks, suffered by elderly businessmen pursuing delusions of youth in Montmartre. A few scared youngsters and sheepish oldsters drop in at the outpatient department after a possible exposure to venereal disease...
Frozen in Death. Human subjects, of course, are not exposed to the deadliest struggle with G. Rats are the commonest victims for these experiments. They are spun in a smaller centrifuge until everything movable inside their bodies has gone well away from normal position. The rat is then dead, but unfortunately for researchers, his organs do not stay in their distorted position when the G-force is relaxed. The organs creep back toward their proper places, depriving the G-doctors of valuable information...
Some optical ghosts are common: the ordinary mirages which nearly everyone has seen. Commonest of all is "water-in-the-road," which is caused by a thin layer of warm air above sun-heated pavement. The two layers (cold and dense above, hot and less dense below) "refract"* upward the light that reaches them from the distant sky. A motorist sees shining water (really sky) lying in the road. In hot deserts this sort of mirage is extremely deceptive...
Normally, he explains, the atmosphere grows cooler as altitude increases, but under some conditions it may contain layers of warm air with cold air below them. These are called "inversions." They occur in all climates but are commonest in deserts, where both the ground and the air get very hot in daytime. As soon as the sun sets, the ground cools off, radiating its warmth into the sky. The air for a few feet up grows cool by contact with the cool earth, but the air a little higher stays warm...