Word: inertly
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...OPERATING TABLE IN A small white room, a naked humanoid creature lies supine and inert--its stomach bulbous; its six fingers slightly curled; a deep, foot-long gash in its right leg. Two humans in white contamination suits circle the creature, slicing its chest, sawing its skull in half, removing internal organs. A third takes notes on a sheet of paper. Behind a window, a fourth person watches, hidden by a surgical mask. The only identifiable figure is the humanoid. Its face shows strain, perhaps pain. When the camera recording the event catches the creature's sightless gaze, an eerie...
Some residents dismiss their neighbors' fears as overblown. While arsenic can be a fast-acting killer, the form found in gold-bearing ore is far less potent than the fabled poison and remains inert until it comes into contact with air or water. And few researchers have studied--much less established--possible links between long-term exposure to gold-mine tailings and damage to human health. "It's all debatable," says Dan Ziarkowski, an expert on hazardous materials for the state Environmental Protection Agency. True, chronic exposure to arsenic has been connected to cancer and kidney disease. But, Ziarkowski says...
...ingredient is left to do any harm. But it also ensures that not enough is left to do any good. Consumer Reports in July examined homeopathic treatments for vaginal yeast infections, noting that the 28X dilution means that "the mixture had 10 trillion quadrillion times as much of the inert ingredients as active ingredients." To stimulate the body's defenses with little--or none--of the original medication, scientists contend, would require a miracle...
...brilliantly imaginative new novel, Galatea 2.2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $23), a book that should go immediately to the top of the year's 10-best lists. As the title suggests, one of the novel's central themes is the bringing to life, and to independent awareness, of inert, nonhuman matter. The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complex network of computer circuitry, and the Pygmalions-there are a couple of them-are an acerbic cyber-scientist called Lentz and a becalmed writer named, sure enough, Richard Powers...
Even before the Oklahoma disaster, forensic experts had called for additional regulations that would make it more difficult to create ANFO bombs. Some have called for bans on the sale of ammonium nitrate except to licensed buyers. Or, less drastically, the government could require the inclusion of inert materials that make the compound less explosive--as is done in England and Northern Ireland. That would inconvenience American farmers, who would have to use more fertilizer to get the same result. But it might also end up saving lives...