Boy Chemist “Eats Up” Course in Foodstuffs
Relationship between the fields of chemistry and cookery is the research project that interests seventeen-year-old Edgar Friedenberg, the youngest man ever to appear on a program of the American Chemical Society. Friedenberg is pictured below taking time off from his studies in synthetic foodstuffs to try a little practical work with the frying pan.
Spectacular Tests with Rubber Balls and Wax Show
How the Ice Age May Return
By Gaylord Johnson
WHEN we speak of the glacial period, or ice age, we are apt to think of it as over and done with for good—as unlikely to return on earth as the prehistoric dinosaur. When we see scratched and. grooved rocks showing the terrific grinding power of the mile-thick ice sheet that once covered the northern part of our temperate zone, we never think of what might happen to New York, Chicago, Boston, Leningrad, London, and all our other northern cities, if the conditions should return which produced the age of ice in the Northern Hemisphere.
Experiments With Oxygen FOR THE AMATEUR CHEMIST
A few common chemicals supplied by the druggist and simple apparatus is all that is required to produce these interesting experiments with oxygen.
by VERNON TRACEY
OXYGEN experiments form a very interesting field of adventure for the amateur chemist due to the fact that oxygen is one of the most active of the chemical elements. It readily combines with most any other element to form many different compounds. These compounds of oxygen and other elements are known as “oxides” and the process of combination is called “oxidation,” or more commonly known as burning. We see examples of oxidation every day in the burning of fuel, but this is not very active when one considers the fact that the air is only one-fifth oxygen, the rest being mainly nitrogen and a small percentage of other gases.
WE GOT OUR FACE FROM A FISH
Nothing else is of such supreme interest as the gripping and vital story of “Life— The World’s Greatest Mystery.” Here is the second installment of the dramatic history of man’s rise from a mass of floating jelly to the human being he now is. In a most striking manner a famous authority details the amazing facts about the molding of the human face.
What They Talked About: LAST month, Dr. William K. Gregory, world-famous scientist of the American Museum of Natural History, told Michel Mok, staff writer, how the earth and life originated. About two billion years ago the earth was torn out of the sun by the passing of another star. Slowly it condensed and cooled down. A billion years later, chemical forces created tiny bits of living jelly in the primeval puddles.
New Discoveries Show Electricity Governs Our Lives
By Edwin Teale
EXPLORERS, working in one of the strangest realms of science, are unearthing curious, dramatic facts. The way autos run, the way seeds sprout, the way eggs hatch, the way radios function, and even the way we feel when we get up in the morning, the latest tests have shown, are affected by flowing, invisible charges of electric power. Recently, experiments in the laboratories of many lands have added to our knowledge of the magical work of electricity in the air.
LIFE from the Test Tube PROMISED BY NEW FEATS OF MODERN ALCHEMISTS
By Robert E. Martin
FOOD from the test tube, strange acids that conquer disease, complex chemicals that make up the vital ingredients of human flesh and blood—these are recent creations of pioneers in a fascinating, unexplored realm of chemistry, far afield from the normal and conventional affairs of workaday laboratories.
Like seekers of another age, hunting an “elixir of life,” these modern alchemists are brewing odorous broths from tons of fish and bales of vegetables in order to extract and study the raw materials of living things. With their new-found knowledge, they are succeeding in putting together extraordinary substances that only nature knew how to produce before. Nearer and nearer they are coming every day to penetrating the age-old mystery of life.
Dangerous ACIDS MADE SAFELY BY Home Chemist
By Raymond B. Wailes
BECAUSE they enter into a wide variety of reactions, acids form an interesting and important group of chemicals. By preparing them in small quantities, the home experimenter can learn a great deal about chemistry and its many mysterious reactions and valuable processes.
How Scientists Are Taking the Pinch Out of America’s Billion-Dollar Shoe Bill
New Tanning Discoveries Will Bring You Cheaper Footwear By John Walker Harrington
WELL-SHOD feet are among the essentials of health and long life,” declared Dr. John B. Huber in a recent article in POPULAR SCIENCE Monthly.
The magnitude of our national shoe bill is revealed in this story of new discoveries in tanning, which hold forth hope of a coming fall in every family’s expenses for footwear.
Amuse Friends with CHEMICAL Stunts
DO YOU like to dabble with chemicals? It was a hobby with Thomas A. Edison during his youth and formed the basis of an education that later brought thousands of new inventions into the world. Far from being a “dry” science, chemistry can be very amusing and entertaining. How many people would believe that you could pour a little drinking water into a china bowl and cause it to burst forth with flames several feet high—without the use of matches?
Seconds Split a Million Ways
Measuring the split flashes of time that are microseconds makes possible many modern miracles of science.By Carl Dreher
IT TOOK you about one second, or 1,000,-000 microseconds, to read the title of this article. On that basis one microsecond may seem short enough to satisfy everyone, but to the modern electronics engineer it is a fairly long time. Describing a new electronic gadget, its inventor informs us that each dial division corresponds to 0.0132 microseconds; in other words, he is measuring down to a ten-thousandth of a millionth of a second.
That’s slicing it rather fine, but if it is worth a few dollars to you, you can buy a pulse generator that will deliver bursts of power adjustable down to 0.1 microsecond. You can order it from an advertisement-nothing special about it—plug it into a wall socket like an electric iron, and you’re a member of the microsecond-splitting fraternity yourself. It’s economical to operate, too—consumes only 40 watts.
Scientists are still building ever more powerful particle accelerators. The Large Hadron Collider is supposed to come online this year and is expected to make some major discoveries. For comparison the most powerful accelerator at the time of this article was about 6 bev. Or 6 billion electron volts. The LCH will collide two beams each with 7 tev (trillion electron volts) making it about 20,000 times more powerful.
If you haven’t seen pictures of the ATLAS detector yet, you really should check them out. It really is an engineering marvel. Plus when it was being built it looked like some kind of trans-dimensional portal.
These Fabulous Tools Unlock the Atom’s Secrets
By Thomas E. Stimson, Jr.
THE RESEARCH TEAMS that discovered atomic energy are probing deeper into the heart of the atom today and there’s a good chance that other exciting, though unpredictable, discoveries will be made.
Basically, the physicists are trying to find the true fundamental particles of which the atom (and hence the universe) is composed.
Once it was thought that the atom itself answered this definition; now it is known that the atom contains a bundle of assorted particles or bits of energy in its structure.
Compton gives a nice history of the rise of American science and engineering prowess as well as making some pretty good predictions here.
Some answers to this question seem clear, and others seem very uncertain. It is safe to predict that the 2002 person will be clothed with synthetic textiles which will not fade, shrink or wrinkle and in which the desired creases will stay put. Atomic energy will be in use for special, but not for general, power purposes. Gasoline will be coming more from oil shale than from oil wells, and may be already produced commercially from coal. Cancer may then be as well under control as tuberculosis is now. Television may have proved to be an instrument to perpetuate dictatorship, or to make the democratic process more effective, depending on the trends of control and public concern.
Cancer is certainly not under control, though we do have much better treatments and shale oil is only now starting to take off but he nailed clothes, atomic power and TV.
As an aside; the design of this article is really nice, however, for people who are supposed to predict the future I wish the PM’s designers would have shown a little consideration for schmucks like me who have to scan their articles. Why didn’t they realize that putting an illustration of balloons behind the text of the article would play havoc with my already finicky OCR software? (Lest you think I’m picking on PM, Modern Mechanix also had a nasty habit of doing this.
SCIENCE ON THE MARCH
By Dr. Karl T. ComptonChairman of the Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology THE AMERICAN TRADITION of mechanical skill and inventiveness, often called “Yankee Ingenuity,” goes far back of the turn of this century. It grew out of the challenge of pioneer life to a people of high native intelligence engaged in forging a new way of life in an environment of rich but undeveloped resources. But our development of scientific knowledge and its useful applications is, despite a few notable predecessors like Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Henry and Thomas Edison, essentially an achievement of the last 50 years.
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