Good morning.
Thursday will be a mostly sunny day with a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise today is 6:22 AM and sunset is 5:51 PM. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets tonight at 6 PM.
On this day in 1899, Bayer patents aspirin:
…the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin registers Aspirin, the brand name for acetylsalicylic acid, on behalf of the German pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer & Co.
Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees. In its primitive form, the active ingredient, salicin, was used for centuries in folk medicine, beginning in ancient Greece when Hippocrates used it to relieve pain and fever. Known to doctors since the mid-19thcentury, it was used sparingly due to its unpleasant taste and tendency to damage the stomach.
In 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffman found a way to create a stable form of the drug that was easier and more pleasant to take. (Some evidence shows that Hoffman’s work was really done by a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, whose contributions were covered up during the Nazi era.) After obtaining the patent rights, Bayer began distributing aspirin in powder form to physicians to give to their patients one gram at a time. The brand name came from “a” for acetyl, “spir” from the spirea plant (a source of salicin) and the suffix “in,” commonly used for medications. It quickly became the number-one drug worldwide….
Here’s the Thursday Puzzability game:
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This Week’s Game — March 3-7
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Opera Boxes
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What opera, doc? For each day this week, we’ll give a three-by-three letter grid in which we’ve hidden the title of an opera. Each has 10 or more letters and any number of words. To find the title, start at any letter and move from letter to letter by traveling to any adjacent letter—across, up and down, or diagonally. You may come back to a letter you’ve used previously, but may not stay in the same spot twice in a row. You will not always need all nine letters in the grid.
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Example:
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Answer:
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Il Trovatore
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What to Submit:
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Submit the opera’s title (as “Il Trovatore” in the example) for your answer.
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Thursday, March 6
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