Word: original
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...riggers carried marked-up tea to Boston. Noting that the Canterbury city council makes an annual grant to the almshouses in the nearby village of Harbledown, Archivist Urry wondered why. The city treasurer hadn't the foggiest. So Urry peered down through history, found the grant's origin nearly 800 years deep. In 1170, his dreams darkened by the blood of Archbishop Thomas a Beckett, the conscience-stricken Henry II ordered the grant to the almshouses to be made in perpetuity. Hence, chirps Urry, "every time anyone living in the city of Canterbury pays his or her rates...
Among the many mysteries of Joan of Arc's meteoric career, one of the most baffling is the origin of her inspiration-her "voices," as she called them. Was she hysterical? Was she insane? No, say two British students of the Maid and her works: all the available medical evidence fits together into a neat and simple explanation that detracts nothing from Joan's greatness...
...fission process, nuclear reactors produce a gas-Krypton 85-which hangs in the atmosphere. The U.S. can take careful readings of Krypton 85 in the air, subtract what it knows it has put there, subtract what the British have put there, and assign the balance to Russian origin. Making an even less exact calculation, U.S. experts guesstimate that the Russians must have something like 3,000 nuclear weapons. The U.S. may have at least three times that, but it does not make much difference: nuclear parity is achieved when each has enough to destroy the other...
...ever going to get rich in Springhill, they knew that, and the work didn't seem the safest in the world. Mostly the young people talked of leaving first, of going up to Ontario where they could work in a factory. And a few oldtimers, generally of Scots origin, themselves admitted it mightn't be such a bad idea. But for the most part, the band of lean and wiry miners hung on in belief that things could scarcely get much worse...
...thing that medicine's learned men once knew, or thought they knew, was that cancer is not infectious. Therefore, no "infectious agent" could be involved in its origin. Then a young (31) researcher just starting in at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, went to work on a sick Plymouth Rock hen. He took material from a tumor on the bird's breast, ground it ultrafine to smash the very cells, filtered the stuff through silica so that not even a broken cell could pass, and injected the liquid into healthy chickens. They soon developed cancers...