Word: feats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some bacteriologists may still be skeptical. Bacteria can be enclosed in crystallized salt and stay alive. Only last week bacteria were reported that had lived in Antarctic ice for 44 years, since the Shackelton Expedition of 1917. But living in salt for 180 million years is an unheard-of feat. Dombrowski, nevertheless, has able supporters. Bacteriologist Georg Henneberg, head of Berlin's famed Robert Koch Institute, does not doubt that Dombrowski extracted living bacteria from the interior of solid blocks of Zechstein salt-though there is still a slim possibility that the salt was contaminated relatively recently by bacteria...
...speech recognizer, called "Shoebox" because it is smaller than a shoe box, so far recognizes only 16 spoken words, including the ten digits and six arithmetical command words such as plus and minus. But this is no mean feat. Earlier attempts to make machines recognize spoken words have run into trouble because they tried to copy the human ear, which analyzes the complicated mixture of sound frequencies in human speech. IBM Engineer William C. Dersch, inventor of Shoebox, thinks that this is like designing an airplane by copying a bird's feathers. His machine does not depend on sound...
...viruses and viral diseases. At Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Peyton Rous in 1910 proved that a filterable virus is the cause of sarcoma (a kind of cancer) in chickens. At Harvard and then at the Rockefeller Foundation, South Africa-born Max Theiler performed the delicate and dangerous feat of getting yellow-fever virus to grow in the brains of mice. With infinite patience, Theiler in 1936 grew 176 generations of virus in tissue cultures of chick embryo cells,* weakening the virus with each "pass" and seeking a generation that would be too feeble to induce the disease...
...filtering and re-filtering, dissolving and redissolving, until he had isolated the cause of this economically costly disease. What he had to show for years of imaginative perseverance was about a teaspoonful of white crystals that looked no more impressive than powdered sugar. It was pure TMV, and the feat won Stanley a Nobel Prize in chemistry...
...predicts the Labor Party will lose for the fourth consecutive time in the next General Election--"a feat unique in British electoral history." "If the Labor Party fails to extract itself from internal problems," he suggests, "a party realignment after the General Election" will force them to the extreme left, and leave a vacuum for the Liberal Party. Great Britain, he slaims, no longer wants "a party connected with Socialism and labor unions...