When fired against masonry walls, heavy iron balls tended to pulverize stone and brick.
Starting in the late 10th century, waterwheels, long used for grinding grain, were applied to many industrial processes that included tanning, olive pressing, sawing wood, polishing armour, pulverizing stone, and operating blast-furnace bellows.
The use of focused shock waves to pulverize stones in the urinary tract, usually the kidney or upper ureter, is called extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL).
Importantly, insertion or pushing of substances such as powders, creams, herbs, tablets, sticks, stones, pulverized rock, leaves or some local and commercial products can cause physical abrasions and potentially disrupt vaginal flora, leading to bacterial vaginosis (BV) [ 7, 9] and other sexually transmitted infections including HIV [ 26, 29, 33].
If you have a larger stone or multiple stones, your doctor may prescribe a medication or recommend a different course of medical treatment to pulverize the stones so you can pass them.
Larger stones are treated with extracorporeal shock-wave lithotripsy that uses sound waves to pulverize the stones.
Digestion may also have been assisted by a crop or gizzard full of pulverizing stomach stones (gastroliths), though none has yet been discovered in stegosaurian specimens.
WASHINGTON, April 9 — The use of shock waves to pulverize kidney stones into sand-like material significantly increases the risk for diabetes and high blood pressure later in life, according to the longest follow-up study of the popular therapy.
