Word: protoplasmic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lowliest of nature's creatures, a rod-shaped beastie less than a ten-thousandth of an inch long. Its normal habitat is the intestine. Its functions there are still basically unknown. Yet this tiny parcel of protoplasm has now become the center of a stormy controversy that has divided the scientific community, stirred fears-often farfetched-about tampering with nature, and raised the prospect of unprecedented federal and local controls on basic scientific research. Last week the bacterium known to scientists as Escherichia coli* (E. coli, for short) even became a preoccupation at the highest levels of government...
...huge, high-ceilinged warehouse and the walls have been painted bright blue. A plush veneer--carpets, mirrors, glittered cushions--has been splashed over the walls and floors. In the middle, in the big empty space, people are dancing. From up above them seem one pulsating mass--a motley, throbbing protoplasm that expands and contracts in rhythm to the newest disco song. As the music reaches fever pitch, it threatens to engulf the upper mezzanines, slide out to the hallway, push itself out the door and burst smokily all over Lansdowne Street...
...menacing form depicted in this dramatic photograph is not some giant glob of man-eating protoplasm from a science-fiction film. It is actually a hamster's kidney cell magnified 15,000 times by a scanning electron microscope. Such scientific snapshots taken by Caltech Biologist Jean-Paul Revel may offer an important clue to a mystery that has long puzzled scientists: how a living cell moves across a surface. The cell's perambulations, Revel says, are apparently made possible by a strange phenomenon called "ruffling...
...John Calhoun's white mice. A psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., Calhoun started with eight mice in an null cage; within a little more than two years, they had multiplied to 2,200, but they were hardly alive-mere "passive blobs of protoplasm, frozen in a childlike trance." Summing up the sentiments of many population experts, Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich (who has had himself sterilized) concludes that "if we don't do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there is just no hope that civilization will persist...
...maintain balance, all ecosystems require four basic elements: 1) inorganic substances (gases, minerals, compounds); 2) "producer" plants, which convert the substances into food; 3) animal "consumers," which use the food; and 4) "decomposers" (bacteria and fungi), which turn dead protoplasm into usable substances for the producers. As the key producers, green plants alone have the power to harness the sun's energy and combine it with elements from air, water and rocks into living tissue?the vegetation that sustains animals, which in turn add their wastes and corpses to natural decay. It is nature's efficient reuse of the decay...