Word: saliva
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Muzzle-loader fans have to be devoted. Their guns are handmade (many fans make their own), and firing them takes effort. To load a flintlock rifle, the marksman 1) measures out a charge of powder, 2) pours it down the barrel, 3) moistens a cloth patch with saliva, 4) puts a lead ball on the patch, 5) sets patch and ball in the muzzle, 6) taps the ball with a little mallet or some other appropriate tool, 7) trims away the excess cloth, 8) shoves the ball down the barrel with a short ramrod called a bullet starter, 9) works...
Will the baby be a boy or a girl? A biochemist at Chicago's Loyola University, Gustav William Rapp, thinks he can find the answer, nine times out of ten, and three to four months before birth. The answer, he believes, is in the mother's saliva...
...Rapp got the idea in a roundabout way from Dr. Garwood Richardson's simple urine test for pregnancy (TIME, May 2, 1949). Rapp decided to see whether any secretions besides urine showed pregnancy. He tried tears and sweat, found them no good. Saliva seemed to be a flop, too: half the results were negative, even with women known to be pregnant. Dr. Rapp decided to forget about it, and put the work aside...
...telling him something, after all. He checked the hospital records of 50 cases, found that all the "negatives" had had girls, the "positives" had had boys. Rapp's hypothesis: a male fetus releases male hormones into the mother's system-in sufficient quantity to be detected in saliva...
...Bonham to other parts of Fannin County. Close to 8,000 people, one out of every five, had gotten it, and Texans claimed that it was the biggest epidemic of Coxsackie ever recorded. The National Institute of Health had a special team on the spot to get specimens of saliva, blood, and urine for lab analysis. Doctors speculated that the Coxsackie virus might act as a deterrent to polio. Only one case has been reported in Fannin County this summer...