Word: ear
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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responds to faint sound waves whose power is measured in quadrillionths of a watt. "The human ear is actually so sensitive that at its best it can almost hear the individual air molecules bump against the eardrum in their random thermal flight...
...half million people in the U.S. are deaf or hard of hearing. A lot of them would hear and feel much better, doctors say, if they wore a hearing aid. Thanks to recent improvements in such aids, and to large-scale studies of hearing during World War II, ear specialists now take a more hopeful view about deafness than they used...
...Terrible Racket. The human ear, Dr. Davis observes, is a miraculous instrument. It is normally so finely tuned that...
...wonder," says Davis, "is not that our ears sometimes fail us, but rather that they stand the racket as well as they do." At 120 decibels (the noise of a nearby plane engine), the ear begins to feel uncomfortable; at 130 decibels, it tickles; at 140 decibels (near a powerful air-raid siren), it hurts, and grows temporarily deaf. But even a shattering noise rarely causes complete deafness. The commonest causes of deafness (besides old age) are 1) inflammation of the middle ear (otitis media), usually due to a head cold; and 2) a bony growth in the middle ear...
Little sound waves are deadlier than big ones. Last week the U.S. Army Signal Corps described (with dark reticence) some experiments at State College, Pa. on sound waves too short (high-pitched) for the human ear to hear. The inaudible racket killed mice in one minute. The insidious little waves also killed cockroaches and mosquitoes...