Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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HARDENING OF BRAIN ARTERIES and resulting mental deterioration in the aged. (This now causes 30% of admissions to New York's state hospitals and a vast number of milder, nonhospitalized cases.) Drugs could help by improving circulation in the brain, preventing extension of areas damaged by sclerosis, or stimulating the brain's repair mechanisms. Effective drugs for these purposes might outsell anything now on the market...
Behind them came a hundred rows of other children, followed by a vast crowd of men and women. Many had walked that morning through mountain wind and pelting rain as a special act of devotion to the Virgin Mary on the 100th anniversary of her apparition to little Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto at Lourdes. By 10 o'clock, some 50,000 people were massed within the encircling wings of the basilica, or jammed shoulder to shoulder on the surrounding hillsides...
According to Dr. Schatz, the dinosaurs were sluggish beasts whose metabolism (vital chemical processes) was so slow that they could keep their vast bodies alive without a great deal of food. In their age, he thinks, the earth's atmosphere did not contain so much oxygen as it does today. The dominant plants were mostly gymnosperms (conifers, ginkgoes, etc.) that did not excrete so much oxygen as modern plants...
...leaved plants and grasses) became dominant, the dinosaurs were headed for trouble. The vigorous angiosperms excreted so much oxygen that they changed the atmosphere. The oxygen-rich air increased the metabolism of the dinosaurs. They were compelled to live at a faster rate, and they could not gather the vast amounts of food their speeded-up bodies called for. So they burned out and died out, while the newly evolved mammals, well-adapted to oxygen-rich air, took over the earth...
...couple of weeks the supernova gives as much light as 200 million suns. The Russian astronomers do not think that a brief burst of light from a supernova 26 light-years away would have much effect on the earth. Much more serious, they think, would be the vast amount of cosmic rays streaming out of the wreckage of the shattered star. For a few hundred or thousand years after the explosion, the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth would be many times greater than it is today...