Word: hydrogen
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Like many another elderly and distinguished scientist, Britain's Lord Ernest Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's electrical structure, has a way of having his way. Few weeks ago he published an article in which he referred to the tripleweight atom of hydrogen, generally called tritium, as "triterium." When this verbal goblin reached the eye of Dr. Kenneth Claude Bailey, professor of physical chemistry and authority on chemical etymology at University of Dublin, Dr. Bailey promptly took pen in hand and wrote a letter of protest which appeared in Nature last week. Excerpt: "The word 'deuterium...
...this reminded connoisseurs of scientific nomenclature of a controversy which willful Lord Rutherford stirred up some time ago after Columbia University's Harold Clayton Urey had christened doubleweight. hydrogen "deuterium." Dr. Urey had discovered doubleweight hydrogen and it seemed that he had a right to name it. The nucleus was called the "deuton." Dr. Rutherford did not like these names, especially "deuton," which he declared was likely to be confused by Englishmen with "neutron," particularly if the speaker had a cold. Lord Rutherford was for calling the atom "diplogen" and its nucleus the "diplon," and a number of British...
Photographer Mingalone picked Old Orchard Beach, Me., for secret experiments in overhead photography from a cluster of 30 hydrogen-filled stratosphere balloons. He had successfully ground out several reels over the local country club golf course while a ground crew towed him from spot to spot when suddenly a stiff gust snapped the 200-ft. sash-weight cord anchor line...
...possibly millions of atoms. Although they cannot be seen under the microscope, the giant, complex molecules of proteins are among the most important targets of current research in biological chemistry. Until recent years not much was known about them except that they were very big; that they contained carbon, hydrogen. oxygen, nitrogen and sometimes sulphur and phosphorus; that in such animal processes as digestion they were broken down by protein-wreckers called enzymes and that they were composed of polypeptide chains which might, presumably, be contorted in any number of patterns...
Then Svedberg, Wyckoff and others weighed & measured the giants by whirling them in powerful ultracentrifuges. Stanley found that the virus which causes tobacco mosaic disease in plants is a huge molecule, which was weighed by Svedberg and Wyckoff at 17,000,000 times as much as a hydrogen atom. The virus of noninfectious rabbit warts was isolated as a protein molecule weighing 20,000,000 units...