Capsules

P: A pregnant woman is not "sick," the Internal Revenue Service ruled--at least not for the purpose of the new tax law, which allows up to $100 weekly in sickness pay or benefits to be deducted from income in figuring taxes.

P: Knowledge can be a more potent force than ignorance in keeping cancer victims from seeking prompt treatment. Of 314 Britons (mostly women), half had delayed going to a doctor for more than three months after symptoms appeared, and one-fourth had delayed more than a year. Regardless of intelligence, those who did not suspect that they had cancer delayed less than those who feared that they had. Doctors in the U.S. have reported opposite results.

P: The VA Hospital in Boston has developed an artificial eye that moves and twinkles. Made of plastic (with rayon threads imbedded to look like veins), it has a magnet built in. It moves in obedience to another magnet set in the muscles that formerly controlled the lost eye.

P: After Squibb Institute chemists tinkered with the molecule of hydrocortisone by inserting an atom of fluorine, Harvard Medical School's Dr. George W. Thorn and colleagues found that they had a synthetic hormone far more powerful than the natural ones. Still available only in pinhead quantities for research, it controlled a far-advanced case of Addison's disease, even when the dose was cut to one one-hundred-thousandth oz.

P: An infantryman going through rifle training may have good cause to complain that his left arm is so numb that he cannot move it, three medics at the U.S. Army Hospital at Camp Chaffee, Ark. reported. They saw scores of cases of "rifle-sling palsy," lasting as long as three weeks. The answer: loosen the sling every few minutes.

P: Mrs. Bernard Schnees, 34, of Delaware, Ohio had her second child in 48 days.* When the elder, Douglas Lee, was born, it was found that his twin, now named Deberah Lyn, was developing in the mother's abdominal cavity. She was delivered by Caesarean section.

P: After a seven-year test involving 2,400 women and 1,699 children, Columbia University's Dr. Arthur I. Gates showed that the children of low-income families on poorly balanced diets will have higher IQs if their mothers get extra vitamins during pregnancy. But this process cannot be extended to breed a race of geniuses: once a woman is getting a healthful diet, even bucketfuls of added vitamins will have no effect on her child's IQ.

*Probable record interval between twins' births: 56 days.

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