Word: silk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Alexander Fell Whitney, 76, militant $17,500-a-year president (since 1928) of the 216,000-strong Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen; of a heart attack; in Bay Village, Ohio. Whitney once vowed to unseat President Truman after the unsuccessful 1946 rail strike ("You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and you can't make a President out of a ribbon salesman"). He later backtracked and gave Truman all-out support. Said the President in his message of condolence: "[He] became . . . the exemplar of the philosopher's teaching that...
...before the Foreign Relations Committee, "but," said he, "the Senators have come before Perle Mesta, many & many a time, in ... great feasts of the intellect and palate . . ." Texas' bellowing Tom Connally got in some licks too. "The Senator from Missouri wants a man with striped britches and a silk hat, perhaps," shouted Connally. "Career men are all right in their places, but . . . they get into ruts . . . The career man says, 'I have to go. We have tea at 4 o'clock. I am sorry, but I must go to tea.' They nearly all wear the same...
...green silkworms crawling around the Harvard laboratory of Assistant Professor (of zoology) Carroll Milton Williams look like normal specimens, but when Professor Williams tests them with a Geiger counter, they make it rattle like a cornpopper. The caterpillars are radioactive. Soon they will spin cocoons of radioactive silk and will eventually emerge, if not disturbed, as radioactive moths...
Professor Williams and his associate, Paul Charles Zamecnik, Harvard associate in medicine, have a serious purpose. They are trying to study the structure of protein, the basic substance of living creatures. Fibroin, the principal constituent of silk, is a protein. Scientists know that it is made of certain amino acid molecules linked together in chains. What they do not know is how the chains are put together. The plan is to find out how the silkworms do it. Professor Williams is injecting mature worms with various amino acids which are made radioactive by carbon 14. After a while the worms...
Last year the Harvardmen produced two cocoons whose silk was "hot" enough to impress their images on a photographic film. This year they hope to grow a kilo (2.2 lbs.) of the stuff for themselves and colleagues to study. The hot silk, even in this quantity, will not be a menace. Even if it should escape from the laboratory and get itself woven into underwear, it is not strong enough to damage the most sensitive skin...