Word: sodium
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...last week's Lancet Dr. Meulengracht revealed the answer to this medical mystery. The patient was a "hypochondriac," he said, "and obsessed by his evacuations." Every morning for 35 years he had taken one teaspoon of Carlsbad salts as a laxative. Carlsbad salts "are mainly composed of sodium sulfate and sodium bicarbonate, and presumably a certain amount of calcium of the food was transformed in the intestine into insoluble calcium sulfate which was then evacuated." The result was "a calcium deficiency of the skeletal system." When the patient was deprived of Carlsbad salts his disease was checked. Although still...
Concentrating on the 'hoppers, however, were WPA, CCC, State highway crews, and of course the farmers. The U. S. Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine already has spent $2,500,000, and provided gratis 188,700 tons of deadly delicacy beloved by grasshoppers, a mixture of bran and sodium arsenite. The Bureau will ship enough more to spread 40,000,000 acres with poison bait by season's end. So that the grasshoppers will take readily to the fare, it is mixed with sawdust and water or molasses, flung over infested fields from buckets, or spread from barrels...
...intestinal tract is in the least eroded, the phenolphthalein quickly seeps into the blood stream.* The harmlessly adulterated blood in due course swishes through the kidneys, leaving a residue of phenolphthalein to trickle into the bladder with the urine. Phenolphthalein turns pink when mixed with an alkaline substance like sodium hydroxide. So when Dr. Woldman drops sodium hydroxide into an ulcerated or cancerous individual's urine, the urine turns an indicative pink. For patients too sick for roentgenological study, or in cases where X-ray cannot distinguish between old lesion scars and new lesions, Dr. Woldman's technique...
...diabolic yellow flame spurted from the water, fizzled for several seconds before going out. When he passed the same way a quarter-hour later, the students were still arguing about how he did it. What the scientist had done was to conceal a bit of metallic sodium in a piece of paper in his hand. Sodium is so active chemically that it burns on contact with water. Dr. Wood's histrionics while spitting concealed the fact that he simultaneously dropped the sodium into the puddle...
...chemist can truly say that he has seen a molecule under the microscope, laymen may be mystified to hear scientific talk of "giant molecules." But molecules, infinitesimally tiny as they are by ordinary standards, vary greatly in size. Molecular weight of ethyl alcohol, for example, is 46 units; * of sodium chloride (salt), 58.5; of the hormone secretin, 5,000; of hemoglobin, about 68,000; of the thyroid substance thyroglobulin, about 700,000. Dr. Wendell Meredith Stanley and his associates at the Rockefeller Institute have crystallized the virus which causes mosaic disease in tobacco, found that it weighs...