Word: potassium
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Oldest Man. Atomic physics, says Brothwell in the current issue of Discovery magazine, can take a large share of the credit. When a manlike creature, Zinjanthropus, was discovered in East Africa three years ago, geologists from the University of California, using a potassium-argon isotope dating system, were able to show that flat-browed Zinjanthropus lived some 1,750,000 years back in prehistory, the oldest manlike animal yet found. By measuring the amount of potassium 40 and its decay product, argon 40, in a digger's find, scientists conceivably can fix an object...
...avoid radiation; milk and other vulnerable foods could be kept in freezers for a longer time before consumption, allowing short-lived radioactive materials to decay. Contaminated milk could also be diluted with uncontaminated milk, bringing radioactivity below the danger point. People could be protected from radioactive iodine by taking potassium iodine in their diet to block out or neutralize radioactivity. Farmers could use stored feed grain for their cattle during periods of high radioactivity. As for the vital water supply, most potable U.S. water sits in huge reservoirs for years before it is consumed, giving plenty of time for short...
...trust of several high-ranking Nazi prisoners (among them: Julius Streicher, General Alfred Jodl, Dr. Hans Frank), prayed at the execution of six of the convicted and was disappointed when Hermann Göring, who he thought had made a '"sincere" return to religion, preferred a cyanide of potassium capsule to his final ministrations; of a heart attack; in Chester...
...surgeon in chief of Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Dr. Moore is the nation's-perhaps the world's-outstanding authority on the vital importance of "electrolyte balance" in preserving life (TIME, Oct. 6,1952). The balance is usually expressed simply in terms of sodium salt solutions v. potassium salt solutions in the blood. But recent years' work has shown that it is far more complex than that...
Hard-won knowledge of the body's complex chemistry has developed the use of hormones such as ACTH and cortisone and their synthetic variants, and has led to life-saving control of a patient's sodium and potassium during severe illness and surgery. Thanks to new machines (see box), what once seemed impossible and then miraculous is now almost common place. And, notes U.C.L.A.'s Medical Dean Stafford Warren, "More medical research has been published since World War II than in all prior history...