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Education

Swallowing Magnets Poses a Danger, Poachers Beware, Car Naming Redux

by Stephen K. Ritter
January 10, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 2

Swallowing magnets poses a danger

Swallowing foreign objects is not uncommon among small children. Barring choking, most objects pass without a problem. But children who swallow more than one magnet, from refrigerator ornaments, for example, need immediate medical care, according to pediatric radiologist Alan E. Oestreich at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

His advice, based on a case he recently witnessed and a few other cases he has found in the medical literature, was issued in an urgent letter to the editor published in the November issue of Radiology [233, 615 (2004)]. The danger is not in the toxicity of magnets per se, but rather the possibility that two or more magnets can attract each other through adjacent intestinal walls and become lodged there indefinitely. Over time, the magnets can perforate the intestinal walls.

Magnet swallowing is not as common as swallowing other foreign objects, such as coins, jewelry, or toy parts. Still, parents and physicians need to be on the alert, Oestreich says. "Moreover, if the possibility of magnets in the abdomen exists, magnetic resonance imaging is to be stringently avoided."

Poachers beware

Ginseng
[+]Enlarge
Credit: Thomas G. Barnes/USDA-NRCS
Credit: Thomas G. Barnes/USDA-NRCS

Enter James E. Corbin, a plant protection specialist with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, who came up with a colorful way to track down and catch illegal ginseng collectors. Corbin discovered that a commercially available orange dye could be used to permanently mark the roots of plants growing in protected areas. Mixed in the dye are tiny silicon-based chips, which are coded to provide information on exactly where plants are collected. Marking ginseng plants in the national park has sharply curtailed poaching there since the mid-1990s.

A blue dye is now used to mark cultivated ginseng plants or plants collected on private lands. Registered ginseng dealers have been alerted to the dyes and how to detect them. The successful program is now used in 15 states and several other countries to trace a number of prized plants, Corbin says.

Car naming redux

It seems that no one really knows how the Chevy Nova ended up with its name, despite what was reported here earlier (C&EN, June 28, 2004, page 96). One reader suggested that the name Nova was constructed from N plus the first letters of the General Motors cars Omega (Oldsmobile), Ventura (Buick), and Apollo (Buick).

Stanley D. Young of Fort Collins, Colo., and Gerald J. Hoffman of Edinboro, Pa., both wrote in to say that this could not be so because the Nova debuted in the early 1960s--originally as the 1962 model Chevy II, to be exact. Thus, it predates the other cars, which came out in the early 1970s. Hoffman also notes that the Ventura is a Pontiac, not a Buick. While the Omega and Apollo apparently came out in the early '70s, Internet snooping uncovered an example of a 1960 Pontiac Ventura.

A call to General Motors resulted in an "I don't know, but we'll check." It seems no one there is certain about how the Nova got its name either. One assumption is the company used a celestial reference, following the lead of other cars at the time, such as the Ford Galaxie and the Mercury Comet.

The early-1970s models of the Nova, Omega, Ventura, and Apollo all have a similar body style, which may be a cause for the confusion. This led to discovery of an Internet theory that the Omega, Ventura, and Apollo are Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick versions of the later model Chevy Nova. Other variations apparently exist, such as the Acadian Canso in Canada.

This week's column was written by Steve Ritter . Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.

 

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