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Understanding LAWS of SCIENCE

—is easiest when an experiment shuts out all extraneous effects and lets one principle alone shine through. Try these six simple demonstrations to see how strikingly clear their principles become To demonstrate why exposed airplane parts are streamlined or given a tear-drop shape, place a piece of cardboard, bent into such a shape, in front of a candle as shown. Now blow at the rounded end of the model. The air from your breath follows the form and blows the candle flame straight from you, almost as if the obstacle were not there.
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This article is trying to describe the discovery of the isotope carbon-13 in 1929

Twin Discovered for Carbon

CARBON is the latest chemical element to be shown to have a twin. Last winter two California physicists showed that oxygen, long supposed to be single, was not only double, but triple. Now Dr. Arthur S. King, of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, and Dr. Raymond T. Birge, of the University of California, have found a kind of carbon that is heavier than the ordinary form. Carbon is one of the most essential elements in living matter. These experimenters heated carbon in a vacuum in an electric furnace to a temperature around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. When the light that it emitted was analyzed with a spectroscope, the usual bright bands of the spectrum appeared.

Girls Could Help Fill Science Need

In the hue and cry for more scientists America should look to its gifted girl students, a Michigan State University researcher has indicated.

Girls have shown the same ability as boys to do high-level work of a scientific nature, according to Dr. Elizabeth Monroe Drews, who made a four-year study of gifted adolescents in Lansing. Mich.
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Beating the Celestial Strip-Tease

by Bill Williams

THE Eskimos call them “the dancing souls of the dead.” The ancient Norsemen said they were Valkyries carrying warriors to Valhalla. Modem scientists call them a “celestial strip-tease.” But communication engineers call the Northern Lights a plain pain in the neck.

The Northern Lights—the Aurora Borealis —have been the subject of superstition and folk-lore for ages. There have been tales as fabulous as the eerie lights themselves—of immense radium mines in the Arctic that glow at night, of frigid goddesses of the glacial ice, of vast fires that bum beyond the rim of the earth.

So long as the ghostly Gay White Way of the Heavens did nothing more to disturb us than frighten a few superstitious people, scientists paid no particular attention to them. Read the rest of this entry »

SCIENCE NEWS of the MONTH

Interstellar Traveler Visits New England
• WHEN a bright meteor shoots across the sky, astronomers appreciate a report from any observer who is able to describe its apparent path. One such report is useless; but several permit calculations of the true motion. One meteor, which went across Connecticut last October, was travelling 100 miles a second; it was therefore from outside our system, since the highest velocity to be obtained from the sun’s attraction is less than 30 miles a second at the orbit of the earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Your Body Heat Is Sufficient to Cook Pan of Potatoes
SCIENTISTS have learned that our bodies are living machines of the combustion type in which the burning of fuel (food) is accompanied by the consumption of oxygen, liberation of heat energy and production of carbon dioxide as is the case in all combustion engines. Scientists find that the heat from a single person, if properly focussed, would be sufficient to cook potatoes.

Science Makes it Possible

Steam Melts Iron.

In the flame produced by the combination of hydrogen and oxygen, refractory metal melts like wax. But this flame is merely the production, from its elements, of water vapor— commonly called steam!—J. Milota.

Straight Tunnel Sags.

If a tunnel 40 miles long is perfectly straight, so that one might see through it, the center is 260 feet below the water level of either end; because of the curvature of the earth in that distance.
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An Underground Laboratory for Studying Radium Rays

NEW advances are being made daily in a study of radium rays, cosmic rays, and X-rays. Cancer and other diseases are being treated and the effect of these powerful rays upon various forms of life are being noted. Science is probing deep into the mysteries of ray treatment.

Prof. E. B. Babcock, of the University of California, has constructed for himself a strange laboratory underground in a speculative study of the effects of radium rays.
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Luminescense Still Mystery to Science

by Calvin Frazer

ON DECEMBER 28, 1929, the British steamship Talma was off the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal, en route from Calcutta to the Far East. The weather was calm and clear. Toward seven in the evening an extraordinary display of luminosity was seen in the surrounding sea.

“At first,” says the captain’s report, “what appeared like small globules of phosphorescence rising from below and breaking at the surface were observed. Later these assumed an appearance almost like flashes of lightning under the water, which rapidly formed into regular beams, curved as the curved spokes of a wheel might be, and of a width at the ship of about 30 feet.
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SCIENCE NEWS of is MONTH

Chemical of Rage is Discovered.

WHEN we become roused to anger, the adrenal or suprarenal glands, above the kidneys, pour substance into the blood which stimulates the activity of the body; in the more active animals, like the big cats, these glands are especially developed. Physicians at the University of Toronto find a similar property in the drug ergotoxin, which produces tension of the muscles and nerves, with resulting glaring expression. Here is another drug to be added to the vices of mankind.
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Unlocking Fortunes from Atoms

by Jay Earle Miller

Now that chemists have discovered the last element, it remains for the research worker to find practical uses for substances which are at present mere laboratory curiosities. Somebody will make a fortune one of these days by finding ways of using gallium, germanium, tellurium, and many other “unpopular” elements.

THE last missing thing that goes to make up our known world was detected recently. Almost simultaneously the next to the last of the ninety-two elements, which had been located last year, was isolated in the form of a metal, and isolation of the last may be expected shortly.
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Just How ‘Human’ Are Apes, Anyway?

From a Malayan jungle comes a strange story that may prove they’re more like us than not.

By Lester David

A SCIENTIFIC discovery of global importance may stem from the dark and wild jungleland of Northern Malaya. Here is the bizarre series of events which led to an exciting hunt now in progress: A native workman was tapping a rubber tree on an outlying plantation a few months ago when he felt a pair of strong arms encircling his waist. Startled, he whirled around and stared squarely into the grinning face of a creature half-ape, half-human, whose lips were drawn back over protruding fangs.
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