Word: inert
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...prisoners were forced to kneel in a row before a wall. Calmly their military escorts strolled over to them, drew pistols, plunked a bullet through the head of each at 15-sec. intervals. As each shot buried itself in the victim's brain a body slumped forward, inert. Only one prisoner required two bullets...
Stanley showed. The biggest known, they weigh 17 million times as much as a hydrogen atom, nearly one million times as much as a molecule of water. Left by themselves they are inert. But in contact with living plant or animal material they multiply incessantly. Under some conditions the virus protein molecule changes its inner structure all by itself. It then causes a totally different disease...
...Hitler. Emperor Hirohito and President Lin Shen; encyclopedias and newspapers: stainless steel or Monel metal models of furniture, printing presses, automobiles, airplanes, typewriters, etc.: a film projection machine with instructions for its operation; specimens of food, drink and chewing gum. Perishable materials might be sealed in an atmosphere of inert gases like neon or argon...
...nipped off the end of Dr. Lawrence's finger on the way. He and his men carry little gadgets resembling fountain pens clipped to their pockets, electroscopes to warn them of baneful radiations of the sort that set up tissue necrosis in x-ray experimenters. But neutrons, electrically inert particles, do not affect electroscopes, and penetrate many times farther than x-rays. Dr. Lawrence found that rats placed a few inches from the neutron source lost 80% of their white corpuscle blood count, and if exposure was prolonged the rats developed ulcers, died in two days...
...enter into chemical compounds with other substances. As long ago as 1896 noble argon was thought to have been caught in a fleeting intimacy with water, but that and other reported associations of the noble gases were so dubious that chemistry textbooks continue to label the six gases "inert, incapable of forming compounds...