Word: potassium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first atomic bomb. Packed into 37 tubes of heat-resistant nickel alloy, the fuel is mixed with zirconium hydride, which acts as a moderator, slowing down the high-energy neutrons released by fissioning atoms of U 235. The heat of the reactor is carried away by a sodium-potassium alloy (NaK) that turns to liquid at 48°F. A beryllium reflector 2½ in. thick bounces escaping neutrons back into the uranium and keeps the reactor operating. When four openings in the reflector are uncovered, neutrons leak away, slowing or stopping the nuclear reaction...
...local beauty comes to Glas with a problem: her clergyman husband keeps insisting on his connubial rights, even though her heart belongs to another. That other, she intimates, is Glas. The doctor sees his duty. He must rescue the lady from rape. One afternoon. Glas slips a potassium cyanide pill into the clergyman's Vichy water. But the man with nerve enough to murder lacks the will to make off with the widow...
Getting ready for the try, Olivier boomed and bellowed at the rehearsal hall's rafters until he had amplified his "rib reserve." He soaked himself in potassium permanganate, but that failed to darken him sufficiently, so he settled in the end for coal-black grease paint. He tightened the spring in his stride, explaining, "Othello should walk like a soft black panther." He practiced the curiously accented, oddly stressed speech that evoked the way some Jamaicans and Africans gush English, managing thereby to convey the way the Moor spoke Italian...
...tactfully as possible. Somewhere Eric had procured some photographic developer, a compound more than fifty per cent potas. sium cyanide. The children had been found dead in Eric's parked car, and there was ample evidence that, in their case, at least, the popular belief that cyanide of potassium causes quick and painless death was untrue...
...were clogged with vomit. Worst of all, the Nidelven is a fresh-water river. And fresh water, when inhaled into the lungs, does far more damage than salt: it evidently dilutes the blood, breaks down red cells, overfills the heart, destroys the body's balance of sodium and potassium salts, and usually causes the heart to twitch uselessly...