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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This tube is about the same size as an entire modern hearing aid.
Tiny Tube for Hearing Aids
Only 3/4-inch long and 3/8-inch wide, tubes like this powered such war devices as walkie-talkies and mine detectors. Now their maker, Sonotone, is using them in hearing devices. Three of them go into Sonotone’s latest instrument, which can be used for either low- or high-powered amplification.
