One of the rare precursors to the modern conservation movement.
LAWS ASKED FOR PROTECTION OF FLOWERS AND PLANTS
The success of Vermont in preserving wild flowers and plants, as game is protected, and preventing their extinction, has aroused an interest among botanists and lovers of wild flowers which may result in more legislation for their protection. Commercial collectors were found to be responsible for the extermination of wild flowers and rare plants. A law passed by the Vermont legislature prohibits commercial collecting and restricts botanists to two specimens of each plant in a year. Read the rest of this entry »
This reminds me of the RCA Selectavision system.
Home Movies From Phonograph Records
PLAY a moving picture from a phonograph record!
When Baird, the English television experimenter, suggested this system several years ago, he did not realize how soon it would be before his prophecy would come true.
Those who have listened to television programs know that the signals become audible in the form of a shrill whistle in the loudspeaker. This whistle carries the picture elements in the form of modulated sound.
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Apparently we discovered alien life in 1933. Nobody every bothered to tell me.
Living Germs from other worlds brought to Earth by Meteors
By Robert E. Martin
SPELLBOUND at a microscope, Prof. Charles B. Lipman, University of California biologist, recently gazed at what he believed to be the first living creatures from another world ever observed. Tiny germs—some round, some rod-shaped—swarmed beneath the lens. Despite their minute size, they were as fascinating to a scientist as any hypothetical man from Mars.
If Prof. Lipman has correctly explained the germs’ origin, they came to earth carried by a flaming meteorite from the voids beyond our planet! Here, after centuries of speculation, seems the first credible indication that life exists outside the earth. To test the possibility that living things might exist in other worlds, Prof. Lipman acquired a number of stone meteorites that had fallen on the earth. He proposed to grind these to powder and drop the powder in suitable culture media to see whether germs would grow. If so, evidence would be strong that the germs had survived the cold of the journey through space, the heat of the flaming meteor when it struck the earth’s atmosphere, and the years the meteoric stone had rested on the ground or in a museum case. Of course it would be necessary to take extraordinary precautions to make sure the meteorite was uncontami-nated by bacteria from the earth.
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This article is all over the place, but the last sentence is pretty prescient considering that the discovery of DNA was still 20 years away:
“Will other unknown rays, in combination with a life-chart like Morgan’s, enable man to analyze and rearrange the genes of mankind and build a new race of supermen?
Given what I’ve learned by watching the documentary series Heroes, I think it’s clear they succeeded.
Sensational Study of HEREDITY May Produce New Race of Men
By Sterling Gleason
BLACK light, heat, and X-rays are being used by experimenters in sensational efforts to solve the mysteries of heredity. Workers in a score of laboratories in many different countries are delving for secrets locked in the living animal cell.
From their discoveries may emerge a new human race, stronger, more intelligent, and better able to resist disease. As the first step, they have produced an amazing chart by which the character of generations of flies yet unborn can be accurately foretold.
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Very interesting article about pollution in the nations bodies of water. It would be another 34 years before the clean water act was passed. No doubt if you dig deep enough you’ll find that it was Prescott Bush and his faithful advisor Pappy Rove who caused this problem with their “Healthy Rivers” act.
Death Lurks in the River
by Huntington Stone
Cellulose and sawdust pollution in the North Atlantic, acid pollution in the Middle Atlantic, malaria in the Coastal plain, soil erosion in the Piedmont plateau, unpalatable water in the South East—this is the dangerous condition of our coastal and inland waterways. This story tells what the government’s special floating laboratory is doing about it
WE HEAR much about pollution. Conservationists inform us that the defiling of our inland and coastal water is causing a serious health menace to human as well as to aquatic life at an alarming rate. The life or death of every type of American fresh water fish is involved: bass, trout, pickerel, pike, perch, crappie, catfish, carp, sturgeon, salmon, whitefish and many others. Our own health, particularly that of our children, is involved.
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The census department had some serious technical chops in 1950. Census workers were given maps and aerial photos of their districts so they could find all of the residences. The punch card counting machines seem pretty advanced as well with data validation circuits that would reject, for example, a two year old with six kids. I wonder how many kids they considered it alright for a two year old to have?
COUNT OFF, AMERICANS…
By Richard F. Dempewolff
For A house-to-house canvass that will make all the brush salesmen in the world look like an army of pikers, wait until you see the one that gets under way April first. Yup, it’s time for the 1950 decennial census, Uncle Sam’s national inventory of noses—the biggest quiz show, most mammoth tabulating phenomenon and most accurate poll in history.
It’s a job that has taxed the ingenuity of a harried Census Bureau every zero year since 1790. At that time 17 U. S. marshals and 600 assistants knocked on colonial doors, asked five questions of whoever answered, then tacked their lists on the walls of local taverns, so that people who’d been skipped could add their names or Xs when they dropped by for a flagon of ale. Results were mailed to the President.
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