Word: mattering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the University of Oklahoma Hospitals reported that rarely in medical annals has the poignant phenomenon of false pregnancy-pseudocyesis-survived such odds of matter over mind. Pseudocyesis is older than Hippocrates, has affected subjects from seven to 79. Modern medicine knows it as a mental condition, arising from emotional needs so intense that they lead to suppression of menstruation, distention of the abdomen, enlargement of the breasts, and morning nausea. Most cases involve psychotic women with a feeble grasp of reality. But this patient was not psychotic. Her perceptions were normal; she knew all along that the operation...
Completely successful by contrast was the mouth-to-mouth method, in which the victim is placed on his back, mouth cleared of all foreign matter, while the rescuer leans down from the side. The rescuer raises the chin of the patient with one hand, forcing open the jaw with his thumb, holds the nose with his other hand. He then blows hard and fast, inflating the victim's lungs, stops when the chest rises so that the lungs can automatically deflate. The cycle is repeated at a rate of 20 inflations per minute until revival. For even more efficient...
...great bevatron at Berkeley creates antiprotons (protons with negative charges, in fair quantities. When they hit particles of ordinary matter-protons, neutrons, etc.-they generally annihilate themselves and their targets, both turning into weightless energy and neutrinos. About a fortnight ago an antiproton observed by Dr. Segrè and Dr. Wilson M. Powell behaved differently. It entered Dr. Segrè's bubble chamber, which is filled with liquid propane on the point of boiling, and made its normal, slightly curving trail of tiny bubbles (see cut). Suddenly the trail stopped, and a "star" of four diverging bubble trails appeared...
Anti-Gravity. Another long-range problem is to find out whether antiparticles have antigravity. Some theorists think that they do. repelling ordinary matter instead of attracting it in the normal way. Physicist Segrè thinks this unlikely, but he says that the question of anti-gravity cannot be answered conclusively without an actual experiment. One way would be to isolate anti-neutrons and observe whether they rise in the earth's gravitational field instead of falling as neutrons do. This experiment looks difficult, and Dr. Segrè fears that it may not be accomplished for another generation...
...biggest problem of all is whether the universe contains large quantities of antimatter. Since the two kinds of matter destroy each other in microseconds, there is no antimatter on earth, and probably none in the local Milky Way galaxy, but Segrè is not so sure about the distant galaxies scattered through space. They are so far apart that they would not normally bother each other, even if made of opposite kinds of matter...