Word: gravid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...night until the larvae are enclosed in cocoons to change into motionless pupae. Deprived of the stimulation which they get from, the larvae's squirmings, the workers lose their restlessness. The whole colony marches into a hollow log. After a few days of this seclusion, the queen is gravid. Her abdomen swells enormously, and she lays some 30,000 eggs, which hatch into tender white larvae. When both larvae and "callow" ants are ready to travel, the colony becomes nomadic again...
Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed; it was taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two Socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat for 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen-to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape, and by the great Viceroys, austere...
There are three standard chemical tests for diagnosing early pregnancy. All depend on the fact that the urine of gravid women contains hormones which affect certain animals when the urine is injected into them. All these tests are about 98% accurate...
...test works a good deal like skin-testing for allergy. The test material is colostrum-a thin, watery fluid secreted in the breasts of gravid women. From them colostrum is extracted, mixed with sterile salt solution and a preservative chemical, stored under refrigeration to await use. To make a Falls test, a small amount of the colostrum preparation is injected into a woman's forearm. If she is not pregnant, a reddish weal will appear. If she is pregnant she will not react. Theory is that pregnant women, secreting colostrum of their own, are immune to injections...
...yawning graves and skittering ghosts; no two-headed dogs were seen; no lioness whelped in the street. There were no such signs or portents anywhere. Yet very soon now, on a Monday at high noon, a U. S. President would be inaugurated for a third term-a fact as gravid with significance to the U. S. as Julius Caesar's fatal Ides of March were to Rome...