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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.

Blow at a flat piece of cardboard held in front of the candle, however, and the flame blows toward you! Instead of flowing smoothly around the flat card, the air flows turbulently past it, creating a pocket of low-pressure air behind the card. If permitted in airplane design, unstreamlined parts would create similar pockets behind them, interfering seriously with plane movement.

Why do you need more power to start your car than to keep it going at moderate speed? You can get an idea by pulling a weighted toy truck with a rubber band. If you pull gently the band will stretch considerably before the truck starts at all. In the photo the car has not yet started to move.

But once the car starts moving, the band contracts, proving that less force is needed. The reason for this effect is that inertia and static friction unite to resist motion when the truck, or your car, is standing still. When the truck is moving at a constant speed, the only resistance encountered is that of rolling and sliding friction, which is much less than the original static friction.

By suspending two metal plates at opposite sides in a glass of water and connecting them in series with a small electric light bulb and several dry cells, you can readily divide all water-soluble substances into electrolytes and non-electrolytes —substances that form solutions that conduct electricity and those that do not. Add sugar to the water, for instance, and the light does not glow, indicating that sugar is a non-electrolyte.

Add salt to the water, however, and the bulb glows brightly, proving that a salt solution is an electrolyte. You can test other substances similarly. Substances which form electrolytes break up into ions when dissolved in water. It is these ions that carry the electric current.

Because of surface tension, liquid bodies freed of all distorting forces tend to become spherical—a sphere having the smallest surface for a given volume. You can demonstrate this by floating drops of cooking oil in an alcohol-water mixture. Using a flat-sided bottle, fill it two-thirds full of rubbing alcohol and into this put a few drops of the oil. Slowly add water until the drops descend part way into the mixture. To prove the drops will remain spherical regardless of size, enlarge some by injecting more oil into them with a medicine dropper.

Can you fill this modernized version of the Cup of Tantalus? Legend has it that this cup suddenly emptied itself just before reaching the parched lips of the king for whom it was named. Bend a glass or plastic tube in the shape of a question mark, as shown. Then slip a short piece of rubber tubing on the bottom end and press the rubber into the stem of the funnel. The funnel will now hold water until it rises to the top of the bent tube. At this point, siphon action starts and the water drains out. Consequently, if you pour slowly enough, the funnel will never fill up.

You can easily demonstrate the curious fact that heat waves from the Sun, from electric light bulbs, and from other bodies at extremely high temperatures can pass readily through glass, while waves from less highly heated bodies, such as radiators and electric irons, can do so only with difficulty. Set up two sheets of glass as illustrated. Facing one sheet, place an electric iron; facing the other, an electric light bulb. If you now put your hand between the sheets, you can instantly note the difference. The side of your hand facing the light bulb will feel much warmer than the side facing the iron, although the latter is actually giving off a great deal more heat.

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.

In the studies, records of some 3.000 Lansing public school eighth and ninth graders were carefully screened. Finally 150 students with -IQ’s (intelligence quotients) of 130 and above were selected for further testing, Dr. Drews explained.

She said all in the top sample averaged about four years ahead of their class, and in all subject matter areas tested, including mathematics, language skills, reading and critical think- ing, the girls did as well as the boys.

In the pre-Sputnik-era tests, three-fourths of the gifted boys said they planned careers as scientists or engineers. All indicated they planned to graduate from college and two-thirds of them expected to do graduate work.

With the girls it was a different story, Dr. Drews commented. Although the gifted girls averaged about four years ahead of their class and could match the gifted boys in scientific ability, the gifted girls chose occupations which were only only those of the average girl.

“Often, girls do not take the courses to prepare them for scientific careers and there seems to be very little encouragement in our society for them to go on to work in that area,” the MSU researcher remarked.

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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.

But since the advent of radio and long-range telegraphic and cable circuits, it has been noted that the Northern Lights are always associated with tremendous magnetic storms which play havoc with communications systems. And this discovery has spurred our scientists to a closer study of the stratospheric fireworks, until, now, we are beginning to learn something other than myth about them..

A few years ago, a magnetic storm accompanied by an unusual display of Northern Lights usually meant a complete breakdown of radio and telegraphic communication for several hours. Today, due to new facts which study of the phenomena have yielded and new methods of “dodging” electronic pyrotechnics developed by engineers, an outburst of the Aurora is not nearly so serious a threat to the vital flow of intelligence among humans.

The terrific display of Northern Lights and its accompanying magnetic storm on September 18 of this year—the most intense ever recorded in the United States—found communications engineers prepared. For the first time during such a storm, as a result, they were able to maintain radio communications, even with Europe. The tricks they used in keeping information channels open were almost as interesting as the latest explanations of the phenomenon of Aurora.

In the first place, it should be made plain that the Aurora and the magnetic storms on the earth’s surface are merely related phenomena, and not the same thing. Both, however, are due to gigantic exploding “spots” which show up on the face of the sun.

Only this year have scientists been able to make the definite assertion that both the Northern Lights and the terrestial magnetic storms are certainly due to sunspots. In the past, they have noted the relationship between these phenomena, but have not been sure that this relationship was not merely coincidental. This year, however, H. W. Wells of the Department of Terrestial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institute, was able to predict accurately the September 18 display several days ahead of time.

Before the September 18 Aurora, also, motion pictures were made of one of the sun’s spots for the first time, according to the report of Dr. Edison Pettit of the Mount Wilson Ob- servatory, using a new type of instrument known as an interference polarizing monochromator. The sunspot was shown to be a solar tornado of fiery gas, whirling on the surface of the sun at a speed of 120,000 miles per hour.

When first seen, the tornado was 8,000 miles wide at its base and 38,000 miles high! A smoke-like column projecting from its top reached an elevation of 68,000 miles, and during the course of observation a knot of gas broke away from the top and was hurled upward at a speed of 130,000 miles per hour!

But this “movie actor sunspot” was a baby compared to many sun-spots!

In the unimaginable heat of these fiery cyclones of the sun, hydrogen and helium atoms are being constantly broken up and reformed, and in the process great waves of solar radiation are shot out into space.

It has now been definitely determined that ordinary solar radiation—sunlight, as we know it, from the infra-reds through the ultra-violets— increases measurably during periods of sunspot activity. But also, observations by Dr. Harlan T. Stetson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have definitely shown that sunspots produce another radiation, different from sunlight, in the form of relatively slow-moving electrically charged particles, somewhat akin to electrons and protons.

Whereas light travels at a speed of 186,324 miles per second, these electrically charged particles travel at a speed of only 1,200 miles per second, approximately. These mysterious electrical “shots” are about 150 times slower than light.

Light, at its terrific speed shoots down upon the earth without being appreciably affected by the earth’s magnetic field.

But the sunspot’s slower electrically charged particles, traveling only about 1,200 miles a second, are seized upon by the earth’s magnetic field as they enter the outer atmosphere, and are drawn toward the magnetic poles.

Now, these slow-moving streams of electrical particles are what cause the Aurora, as we shall explain in a moment. Their attraction to the magnetic poles, due to their slowness, is the reason why the Aurora is seen principally in far northern latitudes. At times of great sunspot activity, more of these electrical particles are produced and they tend to “pile up” and back down into the lower latitudes. The September 18 Aurora was seen as far south as Georgia and Southern California.

Now for the manner in which these mysterious energy-bombardments from the sun cause the Northern Lights to light: The Norwegian geophysicist, Vegard, has recently explained that, in the simplest terms, the Northern Lights are lit in very much the same manner that one of our modern neon advertising signs is made to glow!

A neon sign is a sealed tube containing neon gas at low pressure, with an electric filament introduced. When the electricity is turned on, the filament shoots off electrons and the electrons bombard the gas. Outer electrons are stripped from the gas atoms by this bombardment, trans- forming the gas into an unbalanced energy-state which causes it to glow. Neon produces a red color. But scientists can reproduce all the eerie colors of the Northern Lights in the laboratory by bombarding various types of gases. Nitrogen glows green; mercury vapor, a blue-green; argon, a pink shade, and so on.

Scientists have now proven to their own satisfaction that this is exactly what happens in the upper areas of the atmosphere when the gases of the atmosphere, at low pressure, are bombarded by the electrified particles shot off from sun-spots. The Aurora is a celestial “strip-tease,” in which energy-particles from the sun strip electrons from the gas atoms of the super-stratosphere and cause them to luminesce.

They have even reproduced exactly the mysterious yellowish-green which is characteristic of the Aurora. This color, due to a single wave-length no where else duplicated in nature, puzzled researchers for a generation, until Sir John McLennan of the University of Toronto demonstrated in the laboratory that it is given off by atomic oxygen in a peculiar state of excitation, and then only when mixed with some of the other gases normally found in the atmosphere—argon, neon, helium and nitrogen.

The significance of this green line light is due not alone to its presence in the Aurora. It is also the most conspicuous light-line found in the luminescence of the night sky which is present all over the earth every night. On a clear, moonless night, sky-light is equivalent to that of a 25-candlepower lamp about 300 meters away. It has been found that the stars contribute approximately one-fourth of this light, and the balance is due to luminescence.

Experiments done by Stormer almost complete man’s knowledge of the Aurora. Stormer, in recent tests, determined that the Aurora occurs not at great distances above the earth, as was originally believed, but in that section of the atmosphere ranging from 50 to 80 miles from the earth’s surface. He measured the Aurora by photographing the phenomenon against a background of stars and then calculated by triangulation.

Dr. Stetson, of M. I. T., explained recently that there is a regular sequence of magnetic phenomena. First, sunspots are observed. There is a lag of about a day, and then the Aurora appears in the night sky. At about the same time, short- wave radio transmission is affected—in some cases completely blanketed out. Then, about a day later, standard-broadcast waves are affected.

In some instances, telegraphic communications are blanketed out, and the news teletypes in newspaper offices, and tickers in brokerage offices cease to function or bring in nothing but garbled messages.

During the September 18 storm, radio and telegraphic engineers whipped the sunspots for the first time in history.

By experimentation, they had learned that only east-west messages, or those running counter to the south-north magnetic field, are affected by these magnetic outbursts. They had also learned, as outlined above, that shortwave and standard broadcast frequencies are affected at different times during a magnetic storm.

RCA beat the magnetic waves on their foreign broadcasts by sending their messages “around the elbow.” They fired their radio messages south from New York to Buenos Aires, where it was automatically made to “turn the elbow” and was relayed to London, thereby dodging the storm by a 12,000-mile north-south detour. The messages made no stop in the Argentine and were flashed directly across the South and North Atlantic to out-trick nature’s bombardment.

Success was also achieved for transoceanic messages by alternating between long wave and short wave broadcast senders. The storm lasted for 25 hours, according to RCA engineers, but at no time was service cut off.

From the first observations recorded by literate men, the sublime display of the Northern Lights has stirred practical observers to lyrical ecstasies, and the scientific explanation detracts little from the enthusiasm.

One of the best descriptions is quoted from a Norse manuscript of the year 1250: “It appears like a flame of strong fire seen from afar. Pointed shafts of unequal and very variable size dart upwards into the air, so that now the one and now the other is the higher, and the light is floating in a shining blaze. So long as these rays are highest and brightest, this sparkling fire gives so much light that, out of doors, one can find one’s way about and even hunt. In houses with windows it is light enough for men to see each other’s faces.

“But this light is so variable that it sometimes seems to grow obscure, as if a dark smoke or thick fog is breathed on it, and soon the light seems to be stifled in this smoke. As night ends and dawn approaches the light begins to pale, and disappears when day breaks. Some people maintain that this light is a reflection of the fire which surrounds the seas of the north and south. Others say it is the reflection of the sun when it is below the horizon. For my part I think it is produced by the ice which radiates at night the light which it has absorbed from tlie day’s sunshine.”

Dr. Irving Krick, noted meteorologist, recently announced that he had determined a definite cycle of weather behavior which corresponds to the known 11-year cycle of sun-spot activity, which may make possible long distance weather forecasting hitherto undreamed of. The Harvard School of Business has released a report showing a direct relationship between solar radiation and the ups and downs of the stock markets. Scientists have found a relationship between sunspot radiation and crimes of violence. It has even been pointed out as significant that both World War I and World War II broke out at periods of maximum sunspot activity.

Science has explained the mystery of what makes the Northern Lights light. Perhaps even greater mysteries of the Northern Lights and their effect upon mankind’s behavior are only now opening up.

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.

Resting Muscles Rests Their Brain Centers
• WHILE it is impossible to find support for the early idea, that a man’s character is shown by the “bumps” on his head, it does appear increasingly certain that every muscle has a spot in the brain which controls it, and the action of the muscle is accompanied by an electric wave in the brain. Dr. Edmund Jacobson finds, by the use of a meter, that when the jaw muscles are relaxed the “jaw center” in the brain becomes electrically inactive. This was in a patient in whom the skull had been opened.

“Genes” of Human Heredity are Molecules?
• IT is now assumed that all inherited characteristics of mankind, of animals and plants are contained in extremely small particles called genes in their reproductive cells. Dr. Oscar Riddle, of the Carnegie Institution, remarking that the virus, of the “tobacco mosaic” disease is found to be a chemical with very large molecules, suggests that the human genes may be each one molecule, and therefore heredity, like disease, a chemical condition. However, such molecules must be versatile.

Sulphur and Inheritance of Cancer
• COMPOUNDS of sulphur, containing the sulfhydryl (SH) group are found in the body, and a discussion is raised in Science by Dr. F. S. Hammett, whether cancer does not represent increased susceptibility to substances of this kind, which promote cell growth, even of an unhealthy kind. Some of these compounds evidently grow hair; and in rabbits the amount of one such chemical, which appears to regulate the body size and weight, is regulated by heredity—like cancer risks.’

Cosmic Rays Are Electrified Particles
• FOR years an argument was carried on among scientists, as to whether “cosmic ray” effects are due to very short waves, much shorter than X-rays, or to electrified particles striking the air with great force. Dr. R. A. Millikan, who upheld the former idea, has been converted by measurements to the latter. It has been shown that the “rays” are attracted magnetically toward the earth’s poles and, since the earth’s field is irregular, more to the Asian than the American side of the earth.

Trees Keep Cool in the Hottest Weather
• DURING a great heat wave, a botanist inserted electric thermometers at different depths in a tree trunk. While the air outside was 110 degrees, for days, the tree heart was at a temperature of 60. The space between bark and fresh wood, where the tree’s growth is taking place, was 15 to 18 degrees below atmospheric temperature. The inner temperature rose while the air was cooling, and down as the day became hotter. It unquestionably has some relation to the tree’s life processes.

Radio Fading Followed Solar Explosions
• OUR January issue discussed the question, raised by astronomers and physicists, as to fading of short-wave radio signals, at 54-day intervals, last year, and whether it could be due to the sunspots. It was found that on such a day there was a sudden violent outburst of heated hydrogen gas from the sun, rising thousands of miles in twenty minutes; followed by radio fading. This was probably due to the ionization of the upper air by ultraviolet light, which was absorbed there completely.

Noxious Plant Undertakes to Disguise Itself
• WHILE scientists sit up nights figuring out ways to fight disease germs, it sometimes seems the germs are figuring out ways to beat the scientists; and germs can go through a few million generations of evolution while man accomplishes one. Then, too, that plant villain, Poison Ivy, has probably read the papers and found that he is advertised by his three leaves. At least, poison ivy with five leaves is now discovered, to the confusion of the nature lovers who thus might be overtaken unawares.

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.

Wheel Moves in Two Directions.

The rim of a wheel, as it rotates, gradually changes from one position to another. Thus one portion of the wheel, as shown, is moving in a general easterly direction, the other, westerly.

Flame Lifts 400lbs.

This laboratory trick utilizes the small current generated between the two thermo-couples at different temperatures to energize the single-turn winding of a special electromagnet— Clifford Field.

One lb. Lifts 1,000 lbs.

The hydraulic press is the practical application of the “hydrostatic paradox.” Since the one pound must move a thousand feet to lift the 1,000 pounds a foot, it has a corresponding leverage.—William S. Sykora.

Aviator Loses Weight.

An aviator, trying for the altitude record, gets appreciably farther from the earth; 7.92 miles up a 172-pound flyer will have escaped 11 ounces of the earth’s gravitational pull.

Speed Makes “Slow Motion”.

The “stroboscope” consists essentially of two moving elements, the difference of which produces a slow-motion effect. As the peephole disc speeds up, the radial disc appears instead to slow down.

Invisible Color Seen By Invisible Light.

Ultra-Violet light is beyond the spectrum seen by the eye. Thrown on certain substances, otherwise of neutral color, it makes them fluoresce. or glow—a property used in testing minerals, gems, etc.

$2.00 For Each Idea.

THE word “impossible” has no longer a meaning in scientists’ and mechanics’ vocabulary; the most impossible things are made possible these days. On this page we have shown eight examples of so-called “impossible possibilities.”

Each year science and mechanics bring out new wonders; and it is the purpose of this page to introduce them to the public.

We will pay $2.00 for every idea accepted and printed on this page. The rules are simple: The ideas must be of a scientific or mechanical trend. They must be. not mere natural phenomena, but MAN MADE. The idea need not necessarily lie brand new, because most ideas are really old.

Submit ideas to us with a short description, of not more than 50 words. In case of a tie, the best description will be used.

All entries must be received by the first of each month, for the next month’s issue. Each idea will be paid for upon publication at the rate of $2.00.

Address all entries to “Editor, Science Paradoxes”, Everyday Science and Mechanics.

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.

In a tunnel beneath a portion of San Francisco, a laboratory has been fitted up. Here the rock, Prof. Babcock had previously noted, contained a large amount of radioactive elements. This made it possible to utilize radium to a fuller extent than he could in his laboratory at the University. Everything necessary for study of these elements has been provided in this laboratory.

Prof. Babcock has raised fruit flies in this underground laboratory. The offspring of these flies show marked evolutionary changes due to the larger “dose” of radium rays there made. Other scientists have been attracted to the study of these strange rays upon animal and vegetable life. That there is a close connection between the emanations from radium, X-ray and cosmic forces is held certain.

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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.

“These revolved rapidly from right to left at the rate of two a second—timed as the beams passed the bridge—around a distant center, which could not actually be seen clearly but appeared to be about five miles off.

“This center passed ahead of the ship, being first observed on the port beam, and from there drawing slowly ahead of and across the bows of the ship, fading gradually till on the starboard bow, when the whole phenomenon disappeared about fifteen minutes after it began.”

Here is a tale that science would dismiss as a mere sailor’s yarn, but for one reason —very similar appearances have been reported many times in and about the Indian seas; especially in the eastern part of the Bay of Bengal and the adjacent Strait of Malacca.

A case almost identical with the one seen from the Talma was observed in 1909 from the Danish steamship Bintang. In other cases revolving systems of beams have been seen on both sides of a ship at the same, time. In one case the beams reversed their direction of rotation during the observation.

The beams are generally described as curved, with their concave sides in the direction toward which they move. Most of the displays reported have lasted only a few minutes.

In its ordinary manifestations the so-called phosphorescence of the sea is, of course, a very familiar spectacle and its cause is well understood. It has nothing to do with phosphorus—hence science prefers to apply the term “luminescence” to this and other varieties of light that are accompanied by little or no perceptible heat—but is due to the presence in the water of light-bearing organisms that are to the ocean what glow-worms and fireflies are to the land. It seems, however, quite impossible that these creatures should travel in the water in such a way as to produce the effects just described.

A more plausible assumption is that these apparent evolutions are not due to actual movements of the luminescent organisms, but to the passage of wavelike impulses of some sort over the surface of the sea, in response to which these creatures light up momentarily, after the manner of flashing fireflies.

What these impulses might be is a profound mystery. Vibrations from submarine earthquakes or volcanic outbreaks have been suggested as a possible cause, but this suggestion leaves much to be explained.

There are several other mysterious luminous phenomena of the sea, and there is one on land that has been famous for ages, though it has received little attention from scientific men, especially in recent years. Here is a case reported in 1916 by Dr. Matthew Luckiesh.

The Mysterious Will-o’-the-Wisp Dr. Luckiesh was tramping one dark night over the desert between Goodsprings, Nevada, and Ivanpah, California. About 2 a.m. he came to an area where a shower and melting mountain snows had left shallow pools of water. Suddenly a light was seen floating in the air about five feet above the ground. As its distance and size were unknown it might have been taken for a light in a cabin window but for the fact that there was no human habitation within twenty miles.

Presently the light sailed off some distance and then stopped. Soon others appeared; some floating apparently stationary, others darting here and there. When the display was at its height hundreds of individual lights were visible simultaneously. The display was seen for more than an hour.

These lights were not fireflies, which are unknown in the region mentioned. Apparently they were will-o’-the-wisp, and they were so described by Dr. Luckiesh—but what is will-o’-the-wisp? Nobody knows.

Most reference books tell you that it is supposed to be due to the spontaneous combustion of gases escaping from decaying matter in the soil, and certain gases in particular are mentioned in this connection; but when tried in the laboratory they fail to produce the effects described. No chemist has yet manufactured a good imitation of will-o’-the-wisp.

Luminous Bacteria Now it happens that many species of bacteria are luminescent; Dr. Molisch, the great German authority on luminescence, names twenty that shine by their own light, and he has utilized one species in constructing an ingenious “bacterial lamp,” which gives enough light to read by.

Prof. Fernando Sanford has suggested that bubbles of gas rising from wet ground are sometimes laden with swarms of luminous bacteria, and that this is the true explanation of will-o’-the-wisp. His suggestion seems to be the best guess thus far offered on the subject.

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.

Family of Atoms Much Enlarged.

• THE chemist still recognizes only 92 elements in nature —some very rare—but the physicist, diving into chemistry, and coming up on the other side, finds more than 250; not counting the radioactive elements, which do not stay put, or the artificial elements, whose nature is still in doubt. There are also electrons, neutrons, positrons, and other things which do not seem to be matter at all. The different substances which act chemically as one element are grouped together as isotopes.

Temperature Alters Sense of Time.

• THE word temperature comes from a Latin source, and indicates relation to time; a tempest is simply weather fitting the date. The French psychologist Francois has discovered that, if the internal heat of a human body is raised (electrically) the subject’s conception of the flight of time changes. In fact, just about in the same proportion that the rate of a chemical action is speeded by heating, so is the rate of perception of passing events increased by greater nerve action in ourselves.

Alteration in Styles of Bone Heads.

• SINCE bodies, after a very long time, are reduced to skeletons, it has been necessary to judge the race of primitive human remains by the shapes of their skulls. Long heads were Nordic, wide heads Mediterranean, and so forth. But Dr. Ales Hrdlicka finds that skull shapes in one racial strain will show changes in a few generations; and therefore we cannot rely on our previous ideas of races—such as those that Europe a few thousand years ago was inhabited by negroes and Mongolians.

Arc Lamp Cooled with Liquid Air.

• THE characteristic green color of a mercury-vapor lamp is due to highly-electrified particles of gas in the tube, as they boil off from liquid mercury inside it. F. H. Newman experimented by dipping a mercury lamp into liquid air, which is much colder than the freezing point of mercury. Where the tube was thus cooled, the light disappeared; although current was still passing through the lamp, in the form of a stream of electrons, which do not give light. The mercury itself glowed.

Sightless “Seeing” is Possible.

• OUR eyes never have a sensation of total darkness, even though no visible ray of light enters. Tests with carefully filtered ultra-violet light show that it causes “fluorescence” of the lining of the eye; so that there is a sensation of blue color without seeing the object causing it. The power of seeing blue varies in human eyes, even among those who are not classed as color-blind; and evidently lessens with age, when we see things appear yellower than we did in youth. (Reason not yet known.) Fireflies Conduct Flashing Flirtations.

• THAT every firefly’s glow is followed by another, is easy to see on summer nights. Recent investigations show that a male flashes—say every six seconds—to attract the attention of nearby females. If one is present, she flashes an encouraging reply, about two seconds later. The color of the flash is the same in both the sexes; but a group of males falls into step, flashing together, until all the firefly ladies nearby have responded. A blinker lamp, with proper timing, fools the insects.

A Science Magazine a Minute.

• COUNTING the scientific journals of the world indicates that there are about 36,000 published; of which about 13,500 are in English, 6,000 in German, 5,000 in French, less than 2,000 each in Russian and Italian. These include weeklies, quarterlies and monthlies at the rate of a thousand issues a day, 425 in English. Not only can no man read a tenth of them; but no man living can understand the whole contents of one issue of any of the more technical, less specialized publications.

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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.

With those two discoveries chemistry has finished the job of determining what the earth and every animate and inanimate thing in it is made of. Ninety-two things—some gases, some metals, some chemicals of different sorts, ranging from hydrogen at one end of the table to uranium at the other—have now been found. . Last Two Elements Discovered And because uranium and several of its near neighbors are radio-active, so complex in their atomic structure that they break down spontaneously, there is reason to believe that nothing more complex than they are can exist on this particular planet, and therefore that the table is complete.

Four research specialists working at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, located No. 85, the last missing element, in sea water, in potassium bromide, and in several well-known minerals by a process of super chemical analysis.

Two of the four last year had detected No. 87, and on October 15th a professor at Cornell isolated samples of it in a substance known as samarskite, a lustrous, velvet black mineral from Norway. And within ten days after that event a prospector located deposits of samarskite in the West, so if a useful field is found for the new element the United States will have supplies of it.

Uses Must Be Found For Elements The interest of the scientific world centered in the fact that the atomic table of the ninety-two elements which, supposedly, include everything that exists in this world of ours, has finally been completed, in accordance with the prediction and rules laid down by John Dalton, an English chemist, 128 years ago.

But for the practical man the discoveries open two new roads to fortune—if a use can be found for the newly-found substances. The story of fortunes made from the identification of new elements is a long one.

Von Welsbach was just a research scientist busy exploring the unknown world of the so-called “rare earths” until he conceived the idea of utilizing zirconium, which had been discovered by Klaproth in 1789, to make the original Welsbach gas mantle. Later he found that a combination of thorium and cerium, the former discovered by Berzelius in 1828, and the latter by Klaproth in 1803, made a still better mantle.

Aluminum Once a Curiosity Aluminum, known to the ancient Romans, was just a laboratory curiosity until Charles Hall, an American, found a way to extract it from its ores on a commer cial basis and so founded the great aluminum industry.

Edison searched the world and spent thousands of dollars seeking a practical material from which to make incandescent lamp filaments, while all the time tantalum, which had been found by Berzelius in 1820, and tungsten, first isolated by K. W. Scheele in 1781, were waiting to be put to work.

For a century the world went along believing it knew everything about air, and then, in 1898, after four years’ work, Sir William Ramsay, partly with the assistance of Lord Rayleigh and partly with the aid of Travers, proved that the air was not composed entirely of oxygen and nitrogen, but contained four additional rare gases. Those discoveries gave birth to argon, neon, krypton and xenon.

Rare Gas Builds a Fortune Then came Dr. Claude, seeking a cheaper method of extracting oxygen and making acetylene gas, and found himself with so much of the rare gases on his hands that he invented the neon tube and sign industry to dispose of the waste product, and so made several fortunes.

A spectroscopic photograph taken during an eclipse of the sun in 1868 showed a new and unidentified line, and the new element was named helium. In 1903 Sir William Ramsay proved the element, which had not then been discovered on this earth, was a by-product of the disintegration of Pierre and Mme. Curie’s newly-discovered radium. Next the gas was found in American natural gas wells, and so the helium airship was born.

Those are just samples of what has been done. There is plenty of fame and fortune waiting for the man who discovers new uses for* any one of a long line of elements. An enormous amount of research work is being done trying to find new practical uses for ruthenium, one of the series of so-called “platinum metals” which all belong to the platinum family. Large stocks of ruthenium have accumulated as a by-product in the purification of other metals, and, aside from some limited use of ruthenium red as a dye in the silk industry, no commercial market has been found.

Columbium, first found in 1801 by C. Hatchett in New England, and so named tor the United States as the first element discovered in American ores, is another example of a metal waiting for a market, it is scarcely used in the arts. A steel-gray metal, nearly as hard as wrought iron, malleable and capable of being welded, it is strongly resistant to all acids save a warm and highly-concentrated solution of sulphuric acid. It belongs to an- other family of elements, the other members of which are vanadium, widely used in making special steels, and tantalum, which was used for a time for incandescent light filaments, until replaced by tungsten.

Gallium Wants a Job One of Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s discoveries—and he made several—may shortly be put to use in several fields. It is gallium, which he discovered in 1875. Because it boils at a temperature of 1,700 degrees Centigrade it has recently been suggested that this metal might make a« excellent liquid for high temperature thermometers. Other suggestions are that it be used with aluminum in alloys for optical mirrors and as cathodes in metal vapor tubes. New uses for gallium are important to industry, for it is produced in considerable quantities from the residues of the zinc smelters at Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Germanium, which, as its name indicates was first found in Germany (by C. Winkler, in 1886), is another metal for which the Bartlesville zinc mines would like to find new uses, as it, too, is a byproduct of the zinc smelter. Germanium is a relative of tin and lead.

Rarest Elements Found by Americans The United States lagged in the discovery of missing elements, but out of seven found in the last six years the last three, and therefore the most difficult of all to find, because they were the rarest, have fallen to Americans. Until the discovery of illinium by Prof. B. S. Hopkins of the University of Illinois in 1926 no new element had first shown itself to an American investigator—columbium, while coming from a sample of New England rock, having been isolated and identified by a foreigner.

Last year Dr. Fred Allison and Edgar J. Murphy, at Alabama Poly, identified, but did not isolate, a sample of No. 87. This year they, with Prof. Edna H. Bishop and Anna L. Sommer, utilized a remarkable new method of super-chemical analysis to identify No. 85 in samples of sea water, potassium bromine and a number of well known minerals. At almost the same time Prof. Papish, at Cornell, succeeded in isolating samples of No. 87 in a substance known as samarskite, a lustrous, black mineral first found in Norway and Wyoming.

One Pint Weighs 16 Tons There is considerable evidence that far more complex elements than we know must exist elsewhere in the space, notably in the “white dwarfs” of the star system. Sirius, the dog star, for example, has a companion star which apparently consists of some substance or substances with an average weight of about 16 tons to the pint. It is impossible to conceive of anything with such a weight, yet the size of the body, and its computed attraction for Sirius shows that that must be its density.

The answer may lay in things we do not know about gravitation and magnetism. Einstein recently announced a new “fifth dimensional” system of mathematics to correlate gravity and magnetism, and it is possible that under certain conditions of temperature and pressure those factors may explain the seemingly impossible elements apparently existing in numerous stars.

Changing Lead to Gold Transmutation, the dream of the ancient alchemists who believed that all substances might be reduced to gold, seems nearer and nearer. The discovery by Ramsay that helium was a by-product of the breaking down of radium, was the first instance of transmutation in nature. Theoretically, if given sufficient power, it is possible to knock enough electrons out of the atoms of mercury, No. 80 in the periodic table, to get gold, No. 79, or to go a step farther and transmute gold to platinum, No. 78. In fact it has been claimed that the first step has been done on an experimental scale, the only drawback being that the power consumption made the resulting gold the most expensive metal ever produced.

Reaching out into the future science is speculating on the possibility that the relation of electricity to all things in nature may eventually be proven. There already is considerable evidence that disease, for example, is simply a change in the electrophoretic potential of the cells of the body. Dr. Falk, of the University of Chicago, several years ago found that the various types of pneumonia germs differed from each other according to their electrical potential, and he utilized this fact to develop a quick method of identifying the type of germ taken from any patient.

The solution of germs was placed in a tube leading across the field of a microscope, with electrical connections in either end. The current was then turned on and the observer timed the germs across the microscope field with a stop watch. The greater their negative potential the faster they were attracted to the positive electrode, and the faster they moved the more dangerous and deadly they were, because increased negative potential has something, as yet unexplained, to do with the deadliness of the disease.

Cells Made Artificially When Dr. George W. Crile, of Cleveland, announced the discovery of auto-synthetic cells last winter that same phenomenon of reaction to potential changes was observed. Dr. Crile does not claim that his manufactured cells are living bodies, the same as the cells in your body, but they do act the same, in that they grow and multiply and perform under the microscope just like any other living cell. The materials he used were the ashes of fats, proteins and body ash, mixed in distilled water.

But, getting back to the elements and their possible uses, if you want to go in for chemistry and seek a fortune where so many others have found it, the field is almost unlimited. There are two score or more of the 92 elements which remain laboratory curiosities because no one has found either a way to utilize them or a way to produce them in commercial quantities.

There is titanium, which is unique because it is the only new element ever discovered by a minister of the gospel, its discoverer having been the Rev. William Gregor, who found it in 1789. Titanium is extensively used in the paint and dye industry, and titanium white has been marketed as a rival for white lead and zinc white, but if additional uses could be found the available supply is sufficient to fill them.

Cobalt, a familiar metal widely used in steel alloys was known to the alchemists, who gave it that name because it resembles a metallic ore, yet yielded no metal when smelted. It was not until 1733 that G. Brandt first separated the pure metal, and today it is widely used in telephone and other magnets, as well as in highspeed cutting tools.

Strontium, discovered by Cruikshank in 1787, has found a wide use in separating sugar from molasses. Some of its neighbors in the table— krypton, one of the rare gases of the air, rubidium, yttrium, one of the rare earths, and zirconium, first used by Welsbach in gas mantles, all are awaiting commercial exploitation.

Molybdenum has found wide use in special steels, but the next three, masurium, ruthenium, which has already been mentioned, and rhodium are available for research work. Palladium, discovered by Wollaston in 1802, one of the platinum metals, has been used to coat mirrors, in dentistry, as a substitute for platinum in jewelry during the war, in airplane parts quite recently, and is also the element which, when added to yellow gold, turns it white, and so produces the well-known white gold of the jeweler.

Chromium Made Fortunes Chromium is an example of one of the most recent of the great fortune makers. First identified by L. N. Vauquelin in 1798, it was not isolated until 1859, and later found some use in special hard steels, for, next to the diamond, chromium is the hardest of all known things. Within the last few years the development of workable processes of chromium plating have made fortunes for several people, and threatened to practically displace the nickel plating industry—not that that has harmed nickel sales, for chromium usually is plated over a nickel plate base.

Cesium, lanthanum, praseodymium—one of the rare earths discovered by Von Welsbach before chance led him to make his fortune with the gas mantle—neodymium, another of his rare earth discoveries, illinium, samarium, europium, and gadolinium are others needing exploitation. Gadolinium is especially interesting at this time, for it is found chiefly in samarskite, the same mineral which has just yielded up element No. 87, and which has been found in Wyoming in quantities.

Selinium, discovered by J. J. Berzelius in 1817, went begging for a user for nearly a half century until a patient worker discovered that it was sensitive to light to such an extent that its electrical resistance changed when exposed to light rays. Another half century went by, and then television was born on the strength of that discovery.

Dysprosium is another element which has possibilities. Discovered in 1886 by de Boisbaudran, and first isolated in the pure state by G. Urbain in 1906, it is noted because its salts are the most magnetic of all mineral salts, and therein may lie the clue to someone’s fortune.

Hafnium, discovered at Copenhagen in 1923, rivals radium in the quick application found for it, for, within two years, several patents had been issued for its use in radio tubes, where its high melting point makes it valuable.

Smithson Tennant, an Englishman, got his name into the table of discoverers twice, once in 1803 when he discovered osmium, and again in 1804 when he isolated iridium. He didn’t live long enough to cash in, but his two discoveries have made fortunes for others. For osmium was used for some time to tip fountain pen points, and iridium is the metal used to alloy platinum and make it hard, for it is, in its pure state, too soft to be useful. The famous standard metre, preserved in the vaults of Paris as the standard of measure, consists of 90 per cent platinum and ten per cent iridium.

The University of Wisconsin has done considerable work trying to find new uses for tellurium, which was first discovered way back in 1798 by M. H. Klaproth. American miners of other metals accumulate as much as 125,000 pounds of tellurium a year as a by-product which must be isolated in purifying their ores. It was used as a crystal detector in early radio sets, and for a time found a place as an antiknock fluid for automobile engines, before tetraethyl lead displaced it there.

Cerium, one of the materials now used in gas mantles, also has a place in medicine—as have many other elements—its oxalate being used to prevent seasickness.

This list suggests just a part of the available material out of which new fortunes may be made. And it explains why chemistry is becoming an increasingly important and popular study in American universities, and why great industries are spending fortunes every year in research work.

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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.

The workman stood rooted for an instant, then broke away with a terrified scream, leaving part of his clothing clutched in the monster’s hairy hands.

A few days later a woman rubber worker named Wong Ah Mooi appeared at an official’s shack in a state bordering on collapse. Almost incoherently she blurted out her story. A hand had fallen on her shoulder while she was bending over a tree—she had looked up and seen a woman with long, matted hair, fair skin and apelike teeth. The strange female was clothed in yellow bark, Ah Mooi said, and “spoke in a funny language which sounded like a bird croaking.”

Incidents such as these multiplied and finally government officials sent squads of security troops into the jungles with strict orders: Bring ‘em back alive! So far, the story has all the aspects of a grade C movie thriller. But there’s a punchline to it that has all of Northern Malaya and far beyond in a big dither.

It’s this: Government officials believe strongly that these monsters could be the much-discussed, all-but-phantom missing link that has eluded scientists for more than a century!

The hunt for this link has been pursued ever since Charles Darwin told the world that man evolved from some primate ancestor. But there was one question neither Darwin nor anyone else could answer— where were some specimens of the intermediate forms between apes and men; where was the missing bridge in the chain of evolution?

Anthropologists, hunting in all the far-flung reaches of the globe, have unearthed a number of fossilized remains such as the Java Man, Peking Man and Kromdraii Man. These were milestones in the search but not the actual links between the man who walks the streets and the ape who swings from trees.

Could these amazing creatures who wandered from the jungle only last Christmas to terrify the natives be the answer at last? And living ones, at that? American anthropologists are frankly skeptical but one official in Malaya told a correspondent: “They could be one of the biggest anthropological discoveries in years.” In addition, experts in the department of aborigines at Kuala Lumpur in Malaya are leaving no stone unturned. They conducted an intensive investigation and got four important clues by piecing together the stories of witnesses. These are: 1. The creatures had apparently seen rifles before, because several fled in alarm when a security officer aimed one at them. 2. All had light skins, indicating they had lived for years in the sunless, overgrown jungles. 3. They knew about some food crops, particularly tapioca. They were discovered munching some of the plant roots on one estate. 4. Their language was neither Chinese nor Malayan, but a series of gutteral grunts, understood by no one.

A few persons have mentioned the possibility that they are either disguised Communists or Japanese soldiers in hiding since the war ended. However, the manager of the great Trolek Forest Preserve, a Mr. S. Brown, discounts the theory completely and adds that their animal-like smells, observed by witnesses, “indicates they are not ordinary human beings.”

In any event, scientists want to see them, talk to them, study them. Because if they really are the missing link, the story of man’s evolution will be finally complete and one of the most perplexing puzzles of the past century will at last be solved.

But the hunt for the link is by no means the only interest science has in these queer ancestors of ours. Anthropologists and psychologists have always been fascinated by what makes them tick and their experiments have brought some amazing facts to light.

One of the riddles the experts particularly want answered is: Just how close are the anthropoid apes—that is, the gibbon, orangutan, chimpanzee and gorilla—to being human? To find out, a man and wife research team, Mr. and Mrs. W. N. Kellogg, once took a baby chimpanzee and raised him with their own child.

The chimp, named Gua, began life in the Kelloggs’ Bloomington, Ind., home when he was seven-and-a-half months old, two-and-a-half months younger than little Donald. The two infants lived together as playmates and companions, while the scientists made careful tests and observations.

Among the things the Kelloggs wanted to find out was which youngster learned how to understand and obey spoken commands more rapidly. One of the significant results: The chimpanzee actually made faster progress in many ways than the human infant!

For instance: Little Donald responded to the command “Come here” when he was 11 months old—but Gua the chimp heard and obeyed when he was but nine months. The little boy was 12-1/2 months before he understood that “no, no” meant he should stop whatever mischief he was engaged in; while Gua understood—and stopped!—a full five months earlier. When the chimp was 11 months, he learned that “Do you want to go bye-bye?” meant he was going for an airing. Accordingly, he would run to his perambulator and climb in. Donald, on the other hand, was two-and-a-half months older before the phrase registered.

Gua, to all intents and purposes, was a second child in the family. By the end of the first week, she was clothed in a diaper and shoes and got her meals in a high chair, being fed from a spoon and cup. She slept in a crib, had her fingernails pared and before she had been in residence a month was letting the Kelloggs brush her teeth in the morning!

A fascinating, perfectly human trait was noticed about this tooth-brushing ritual. Take a child. He is easily conditioned to react in advance to something he doesn’t like. He bellows, for instance, when you take him to a doctor for a physical examination because he remembers the prodding and probing as unpleasant experiences. So with the chimp. Gua didn’t like the pricking of the bristles. Thus, after a while, she would immediately draw back her lips from her gums whenever she caught sight of the toothbrush. She also knew when she was going to be tickled. All the Kelloggs had to do was make a gesture and the chimp would begin laughing and squirming in advance.

One of the experiments by which the Kelloggs tried to determine the relative learning ability of chimp and boy was the cookie test. They tied a cord to the ceiling and put a small clamp at the lower end to which they attached a cookie. Now the cookie hung put of reach and could be gotten only by pulling over a chair and standing on it. The room was entirely empty, except for the chair, which was deliberately placed on one side.

The scientists put Gua and Donald in the room separately and watched. They let them try for five minutes and if they didn’t succeed in pulling the chair over and obtaining the prize, the attempt was scored as a failure. Here’s what happened: Donald failed in four out of 20 trials but Gua the chimp was smart enough to figure out the way every time but once!

But let’s face it. There were a number of things Donald could do which Gua could not. Try as he would, the chimp was a hopeless failure at the game of pat-a-cake, which Donald learned to perform admirably.

How close are apes to being human? Closer than you thought. Consider memory. . .

Kenneth Wells of Washington received a dramatic lesson recently in the remembering powers of gibbons. His family acquired Bimbo as a pet while he was headmaster of an American mission school in Thailand. The animal became greatly attached to Wells’ young daughter, Roberta, and there was sadness all-around when the family finally moved back to Washington and left Bimbo in his native habitat.

It was almost a year-and-a-half later that Wells spotted a picture in a Washington newspaper—the National Zoological Park had just acquired a new inmate, a gibbon from Thailand, which looked suspiciously familiar. Could it be Bimbo? They decided to find out. At the zoo, Roberta stood in front of the cage and called softly. The gibbon stared, then its lips slowly widened in a smile of recognition. Finally, the girl was allowed within the enclosure and the gibbon wound its arms around her in a tender embrace. It was Bimbo and he had remembered halfway around the world, in completely different surroundings and over the long months.

Prof. W. Kohler, an eminent authority on anthropoids, found that chimpanzees can remember for 13 to 18 months. A gorilla being trained by Prof. R. M. Yerkes of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Fla., remembered her lessons perfectly ten months after they were discontinued.

Consider intelligence, the kind used in planning. Baboons, the largest of the monkey family, have been found to be almost unbelievably smart. In Africa, for example, they frequently make forays upon the crops of local fanners. But they never swoop down like wolves, pell-mell, helter-skelter. Listen to how Prof. Earnest A. Hooton, the noted anthropologist of Harvard University, describes these raids: “On such occasions they march in regular formation, with advance guards, rear guards and flanking parties of old males, the females and young moving in the center.” And do they leave themselves unprotected? Not in these monkeyshines. When robbing an orchard, they actually post a sentinel at a strategic point, Prof. Hooton explains, and if danger threatens, the sentry gives the alarm and the entire pack scoots off.

Prof. Hooton cites an authentic instance of a legless railway signalman in South Africa who trained a baboon to push down his signal-box on a hand-car and to pull the lever which threw the switches! The ancient Egyptians, he says, taught baboons to pick dates and a modern bricklayer in South Africa is said to have trained one as a hodcarrier.

And now consider speech, either their own language or the human one. A number of experts are convinced that the anthropoids possess a special language all their own which they use among themselves. Prof. R. L. Garner made an intensive study of chimpanzees and announced that he actually understood their talk. He said they definitely employ sounds that stand for words. Mrs. William S. Learned transcribed 32 different sounds made by chimps which she listed as speech elements.

A few tireless workers have succeeded in teaching some members of the ape family to speak human words. For example, Dr. William H. Furness, after many months of daily training, taught a young orangutan to say “papa” and “cup.” Another husband and wife scientific team, Dr. and Mrs. Keith J. Hayes, reared a baby chimp as their own child and taught her to speak a few words.

Apes, therefore, are darned close to being human. How much farther do they have to go? There are five changes which must be made before they can take their place in the human family, Dr. and Mrs. Hayes reported at a recent session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
1. Remake the ape hands to enable them to use tools and weapons.

2. Develop the pelvis, the bone ring that supports the spine, to allow walking upright.

3. Refine the vocal cords so they could talk.

4. Change the micro-anatomy of the brain to produce man’s ability at abstraction, symbolism and foresight.

5. Acquire new inborn tendencies toward various kinds of play.

But even though they’re not human enough to take over your job at an aircraft factory or an office, they’re smart enough to take over some complex chores for working folks. In the Jimma country of Abyssinia, for example, monkeys (who are not apes, by the way) have been taught a number of useful jobs. One explorer wrote that he saw them officiating as torch-bearers at supper parties! They sat in a docile row on a raised bench, patiently holding aloft their torches so that the guests could see their dinners.

According to R. W. C. Shelford, formerly curator of the Sarawak Museum, the pig-tailed macaque is used in Malaya and Sumatra to pick coconuts for the natives. A cord is tied to the monkey’s waist and it’s sent up a coconut palm. Aloft, the monkey grabs a nut and glances down. If the owner doesn’t think it’s ripe enough, he shakes his head and the monkey grabs another until he gets an assent from below. Then the animal twists the coconut from the stalk and lets it drop.

Smart? There’s the organ grinder’s monkey in Detroit who no longer accepts nickels. He hands them back scornfully, meanwhile dipping in his vest pocket for a quarter to illustrate the denomination he wants. In Paris, a monkey robbed seven women of their gems. He was trained to enter windows and pluck jewels from dresser drawers and tables by its master.

Apes and ape-men have figured in a number of fabulous hoaxes, the most recent of which was the whopper just exploded at the British Museum. It seems that the skull of the famous “Piltdown Man,” accepted for 40 years as a relic of man’s earliest history, is a fraud. The skull, thought to be 500,000 years old, has the jawbone of a very modern ape who lived less than 50 years ago! Chemical tests exposed the fake. Who did it? There’s not the slightest clue to what the museum calls a hoax unparalleled in the history of paleonotological research.

A hoaxer of a different bent scared the wits out of a number of suburban New Yorkers not long ago. He sent letters to housewives, blandly announcing that “one of our educated apes is available to you for a 30-day trial.” The letter explained that many of the firm’s apes are doing domestic service in many homes, waiting on table, washing dishes and scrubbing floors. It concluded with the shocker: “Unless we hear from you to the contrary, we will send your ape together with an instructor in the near future.”

The petrified ladies called everyone from the zoo to the F.B.I, and the “ape employment agency” was finally traced to a James C. Adams of New Jersey, who explained that he was simply testing the gullibility of the American people.

But you can own a little monkey or an ape, if you wish. They’re for sale. The price? Ask Henry F. Trefflich, head of the Trefflich Bird and Animal Co., one of the largest animal dealers in the country. Baby gorillas have sold for between $3,500 and $5,000, he says. Chimps run between $500 and $1,500, while baboons cost from $50 to $350. You might pick up a gibbon for anywhere from $125 to $175 and a monkey, depending on the species, for as low as $25 to about $275.

Maybe they can be profitable investments, at that. Look at J. Fred Muggs, actor by profession, chimpanzee by birth. He’s now a featured attraction on the morning television show, Today, and he earns a whale of a lot more money than most people! •

Compass Needle is Unreliable

“TRUE as the needle to the pole”

says an old song, meaning that the sailor could depend on the compass pointing out true north. But when Christopher Columbus made his famous first voyage, he found out that the compass does not point in the same direction, in various parts of the world. It then pointed north in Europe, but not in America. And now it points north in America, but not in Europe. Furthermore, there are local variations, due to unknown causes.

It is also true that the compass does not always point in the same direction even at the same place; from time to time in the day, it varies a little. And the strength of the Earth’s field—the pull on the compass needle—is stronger at one time than it is at another. In short, the Earth may be a fixed magnet, but it is not fixed as exactly as it might be.

The Earth has two magnetic poles, but they are not quite opposite each other. One is north of the United States, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean; the other is in the Antarctic Continent. And they move around, slowly, for some reason also unknown. But, if the only attraction on the compass needle were the iron in the Earth—a great lump of it, a thousand or two thousand miles deep—we would expect it to be fairly uniform.

Scientists are now turning their attention to the air above us for its effect on the compass needle. We know, by its effect on radio waves, that it is carrying electric currents, probably caused by the sunlight and electrical particles from the sun falling on it. Perhaps some of it is due to “cosmic rays.” But a wire carrying a current causes a variation in a compass needle held under it; and it is probable that a good deal of the reason for the eccentricities of the compass are not the iron under our feet, but the oxygen over our heads. An electric wave goes round and round the world continually we know; being strongest about three in the afternoon and therefore keeping almost between us and the sun. However, we have no way to plug in on it for our own purposes—or we would have all our needed power for nothing.

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Giant Molecules: the Machinery of Inheritance

How Genetics, Youthful Science of Inheritance, Has produced Billions of Dollars of Wealth . . . Big Things that Boil Down to the Minutest Controls.

By BARCLAY MOON NEWMAN

THE remarkable discoveries in the youthful science of inheritance, genetics, have been applied to animal and plant breeding throughout civilization—and with almost incredible success. As regards the United States alone, during the past 30 years, even a conservative estimate of the cash value of the practical application of genetic findings would have to run into billions of dollars. Far greater yields of grains, fruits, vegetables, and cotton; far higher quality both in domestic plants and domestic animals of every description and their products, including milk, meat, eggs, and wool; increased and sometimes perfect resistance to disease; entirely new commercial varieties; and the lessening of the chances of famine: all these are in this story of science.

Thus, seemingly pure research into the machinery of inheritance has made possible stupendous progress in agriculture. This machinery works by controlling the development of the billions of cells, the tiny bits of living material or protoplasm which make up our bodies. Not only do certain cells develop into eye tissues or brain tissue under the influence of heredity’s mechanism, but also each special group of cells submits to even more precise regulation: frequently so precise that you may inherit a startlingly exact copy of your father’s nose, or mouth, or of your mother’s brain, perhaps with its peculiar sort of “nervousness.”

WE did not derive all our practically countless cells directly from our parents. Each parent provides only one cell. These two unite to form the first stage of our existence, the one-celled embryo. This tiny cell, multiplying by continued cell division, finally produces the fully mature body.

We are made up of billions of cells, and so, of course, as we recall, they are microscopic. Yet, small as they are, only a tiny fraction of each protoplasmic bit is involved in inheritance. If we could focus a fine microscope upon the single cell provided by one parent, and if this microscope were very powerful, we would discover, down near the limit of visibility, objects shaped like worms and called chromosomes. These chromosomes are made up of much smaller objects, the genes. At this point even the keenest microscope fails us—and scientists are not quite certain whether they can observe individual genes or, at best, clusters of genes. Nevertheless, all the evidence goes to prove that these minutest genes are the controllers of inheritance. And they have turned out to be giant molecules, each with some specific role to play in the development of color of hair, hardness of teeth, or some other of the thousands of characteristics which we inherit.

The science of genetics took its rise as late as the beginning of this century. That is, the first real approach to the understanding of the mechanism of heredity followed the discovery that practically the sole significant material which parents transmit to their offspring is the substance chromatin, the material of which all the wormlike chromosomes are made. It was found that chromatin makes up the chief portion of the sperm cell, the sex cell from the male. And in the case of the egg cell, the sex cell from the female, there appears to be little else but chromatin and reserve food. Hence, was it not logical to assume that chromatin contained the whole machinery for regulation of the offspring’s development of its parents’ characteristics?

The opening up of an entirely novel field of research placed the basic meaning of chromatin beyond any question. The highest honors for leadership in this field belong to Dr. T. H. Morgan, of the California Institution of Technology, who received the 1933 Nobel award in Medicine for his outstanding labors. The lowly vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster (“black-stomached fruit-lover”), has been in a major way the organism experimented with—though biologists have not neglected to check their results by ferreting out the secrets of wasps, barley, corn, wheat, primroses, jimpson weed, and many other living things. In this new branch of science, not only the chromosomes have been exhaustively investigated, but even the ultra-microscopic units out of which these wormlike rods are constructed. Modern scientific probing has penetrated down from the microscopically visible rods of chromatin to their constituent particles, the genes, whose measurements are in terms of a few hundred-thousandths of an inch.

More than 25,000,000 vinegar gnats have been examined. Excellent reasons lie behind this magnitudinous study. A human generation appears about every 25 years; the fruit-loving gnat reproduces in 12 days. Moreover, these gnats are readily raised by the tens of thousands in milk bottles in the laboratory. They have only four pairs of chromosomes, and it is not difficult to distinguish between the individual rods. Best of all, the vinegar fly has many heritable characteristics which are easily recognized: form of body, color, shape of wings; color of eyes; number and types of bristles; susceptibility to disease; and length of life. Finally, Morgan was awarded a Nobel prize in Medicine—because the laws of inheritance which apply to the fruit fly apply also to man. Like the fruit fly’s body shape, human feeblemindedness, short-fingeredness, and color blindness show up, generation after generation, in response to the manner in which heredity’s machinery operates throughout the animal and plant kingdoms.

MORGAN went far beyond merely proving that a given chromosome bears the determinants (genes) for a given characteristic, such as eye-color. By delicate and difficult technique, he demonstrated that a given determinant is located in a given region of a chromosome. Astoundingly, he was ultimately able to construct accurate maps of the chromosomal positions of the various physical bases of definite features of the species; that is, maps of gene locations. Tens of thousands of breedings have attested the accuracy of his chromosome mapping. Genes once had existence in theory alone. Today their existence is an established fact.

Now we are certain that behind susceptibility or resistance to disease in wheat or potato; production of milk with a high content of butter fat; liability to hog cholera; record egg-laying—-behind these characteristics and many another valuable financially, lies the gene as the fundamental unit, out of which the machinery of inheritance is constructed.

Once bio-scientists became satisfied that the gene is a real, physical unit, they sought its structure, its properties, and its arrangement in the chromosomes. Their findings have been amazing, not merely to themselves, but to physicists and chemists as well.

Compounded of a million atoms yoked in a bafflingly intricate design, the gene is gigantic among molecules. Though of course as a molecule it is (probably) invisible even beneath the most powerful lenses, its dimensions are for a molecule actually tremendous: somewhere near a ten-thousandth of an inch in length, and some fraction of this measure in diameter.

The chemical classification of this super-molecule seems to be with the proteins, which are exceedingly complex compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, often sulfur, phosphorus, and other elements, and which are assumed to be the truly essential molecules of life. Certainly, no live material without protein is known—or supposed to exist. Examples of proteins are hemoglobin, the pigment which gives red blood corpuscles their color; albumin, the main constituent of egg-white; and the milk protein, casein. The ultra-microscopic virus of mosaic disease of tobacco is another protein, recently obtained in bulk as glassy, needlelike crystals, each made up of countless molecules. These too are super-molecules—also with many an uncanny property of the gene.

The genes are strung end to end to form wisps, called chromonemas, and these fine threads are bound together to produce a chromosome. The machinery of inheritance therefore is no more and no less than a vast and stupendously intricate system of chemical systems—the basis of whose chemistry is the particle, the gene, a super-compound.

IN cell division, chromosomes are seen to reproduce themselves. The gene, the foundation of the chromosome’s architecture, must do likewise. Or, rather, genes, by their individual multiplication, construct new chromosomes. Here is an almost unbelievable, a wholly novel, ability of a molecule: to create its like out of the lesser molecules of a suitable surrounding medium. Only in the gigantic virus protein have we discovered such a remarkable property—almost incredible to the physical scientist, who is used to far simpler aggregations of atoms.

For an approach to this problem of self-creation, or autosynthesis, we must consider the enzyme, also believed to be a formidable protein, though not so accomplished a one as the gene. Digestive ferments, such as trypsin of pancreatic juice, stimulate and regulate the breaking up of complex compounds into simpler molecules, known as amino acids, which the body can then assimilate. This disintegration can be reversed, however: an enzyme under appropriate conditions works backward—builds up amino acids into proteins (or unites them into protein-like compounds). If a super-enzyme had the power to fashion not simply great molecules out of small ones, but moreover great molecules precisely like itself, would we not have autosynthesis, as in the gene? And so it is thought that a clearer idea of the workings of enzymes may give us a better grasp of the self-production of giant molecules, like the genes, the cogs in heredity’s mechanism.

In the first 25,000,000 fruit gnats studied, about 500 heritable changes in eye-color, length of life, susceptibility to germs, showed up. Such heritable modifications of the ancestral characteristics are mutations. For example, every so often a young gnat, offspring of red-eyed ancestors, is born with the mutation, white eyes. Man has made valuable use of natural mutants like the seedless orange and rust-resistant wheat.

How do the genes, linked by the thousands to make chromonemas, cooperate to change a microscopic, one-celled embryo into a billion-celled man —and even a man very closely resembling his parents? We must assume that the genes have the ability not only to reproduce themselves, but, still more like super-enzymes, to start, regulate, modify, and terminate the biochemical reactions which, all together, mean life— and growth of many diverse tissues and organs and organ systems into a body astonishingly similar to that of the preceding generation. Incomparable abilities!

We have to speculate that the gene, as a super-enzyme, causes a bafflingly complex chain of chemical processes in the protoplasm in which the chromosomes swim. And this chain must include the production of innumerable stimulators and regulators; that is, enzymes, every one with its kingdom of biochemistry to supervise and keep harmonious.

Far from halting his labors in despair at the vastness of such chemical systems, the embryologist has persisted in his attack upon these deepest mysteries of vital existence. Thus, recently, he has been able to exhibit the presence, in the developing animal, of substances called organizers, which promise to turn out to be super-enzymes, given substance and activity through the agency of the genes.

IN 1900, Dr. Hans Spemann, now of the University of Freiburg, Germany, began a laborious series of researches upon the embryology of amphibians, including newts and salamanders. He cut newt eggs and young embryos into pieces, and observed the development of these pieces with a view toward finding the stages at which special determiners of particular kinds of tissues appear—or might appear. He transplanted bits from an early embryo to certain definite sections of more fully developed embryos, to watch the effects of possible early-appearing or late-appearing super-enzymes, or organizers. In the course of these experiments, from one embryo he took tissue which would normally produce the spinal cord of the young animal, and transplanted this tissue into another embryo. A spinal cord came into being in the second animal where one would not ordinarily be formed. Hence, the transplanted cells must manufacture organizers which stimulate surrounding cells to change into a particular kind of structure: a spinal cord, in this case.

Spemann’s work established the fact that an organizer determines whether a group of cells becomes spinal cord or becomes skin, or some other sort of tissue; and that such activators bring about the growth of organs each in its own proper place and each with its own proper functions. His achievement won him a Nobel award in 1935.

The transformation of the single-celled offspring into smoothly functioning adult, with billions of cells, must involve many a super-molecule, the delight of the biologist and the confusion of the physical scientist.

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Radium ~ Science’s Most Mysterious Servant

Radium, the most mysterious element of science, is now accomplishing amazing feats in medicine and engineering. New uses for this marvelous substance are described here.

by ALFRED ALBELLI

FAR off in the isolated hamlet of Cabri, situated in a remote part of the province of Saskatchewan, Canada, a woman suffering from cancer listened to her physician solemnly pronounce her death-knell.

“Madame,” he said, in the somber note of a doctor who must admit that he cannot cope with the unfathomable ravages of Nature, “I am helpless. Our battle is done. There’s only one possible means of saving your life. It is radium.”

Dr. A. L. H. MacNeill, who ministers to the bodily ailments of the sparse population of Cabri, went on to say, “Madame, I have heard of the wonders of radium. If we could only get some of that precious substance, I am sure you could be cured.”

The patient’s eyes brightened with hope. It was decided that every possible risk would be made to bring the radium cure to this distant outpost. Thereupon began one of the multitude of radium’s glorious adventures.

Dr. MacNeill immediately got in touch with Radium Emanation Corporation in New York City, explaining the situation and telling them that it would be impossible for his patient to travel to New York, so acute was her illness.

The medic furnished the complete diagnosis and details of his patient’s condition and in turn he received, post haste, via airmail, train and dog-sled, several tubes of radium emanations—a radium gas called radon— and full directions. The heroic adventure resulted in a cure.

The radon is usually contained in tiny platinum tubes, one-eighth of an inch in diameter. They are encased in rubber tubes and do not come into contact with any other metal, in order to prevent secondary radiation. When radon tubes are then inserted into the malignant tissues, the healing process commences straightway. Occasionally radium itself is used in healing, but the universal use today is the application of the gas, which in the final analysis is the substance which contains the curative properties.

That is radium as it is utilized today. But to get behind this latest development, which scientists readily admit is far from the goal which radium still holds out to them, one must plunge into its inner secrets. Heretofore, so little has been available to the layman on this subject. The truth about radium has remained complicated and concealed in a maze of intricate equations, chemical symbols and formulas, understood only by scientists.

The evolution of radium may be traced back to 1896, to the experimental work of the French scientist, Henri Becquerel, who discovered the action of radium rays. Becquerel found that a uranium salt sent forth rays which made an impression on a photographic plate enveloped in black paper. He also found that these rays could pass through thin plates of metal and other objects opaque to light.

However, it was Madame Marie Curie who made one of the most momentous discoveries in medical history, as well as in the world of science in general. Born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867, where her father was a professor of physics, Mme. Curie migrated to Paris to continue her studies and experiments. In the French capital she met Pierre Curie, a young French scientist, and two years later, in 1896, they were married. Both had chosen the field of scientific research for their life work. They used a rickety woodshed on the outskirts of Paris for their laboratory. They were poor, but in their hearts throbbed golden dreams.

Both of them followed the experiments of Henri Becquerel with uranium salts. Quite accidentally, Madame Curie stumbled upon a curious fact. She observed that some of the rays emanated from uranium exerted an activity three or four times greater than that of pure uranium itself.

This the Curies had established, to themselves, as a scientific fact, though their skeptical friends frowned on their pretentions. Madame Curie then began her experiments with pitchblende—a hard, blue-black ore that looks something like magnetite, but is much heavier. She suspected that this compound of uranium contained some hitherto undetected substance with far greater radioactive qualities than the metal uranium itself. It was this product which Madame Curie determined to isolate and experiment with.

After scores of tedious chemical operations, she succeeded in separating two sub- stances from pitchblende. One she called polonium, after her native land, Poland, and the other, radium. These discoveries were made in the wood-shed laboratory, where an old gas furnace and some melting-pots had been installed. It was there that she often spent entire days stirring large pots of chemicals with a long iron rod. It was from these crude tools and “never-say-die” heart that radium was given to mankind for practical uses in 1898.

Four years later the Curies announced that they had succeeded in making their radium a pure chemical body. In 19.03 and again in 1911 Madame Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1907 the late Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, presented her with a laboratory which was the first real workshop she ever enjoyed.

Scientists gradually discovered that radium or its gas, called emanations, could be used in treating cancer, tumors, ulcers and allied conditions. The “Becquerel burn” perhaps led to the first discovery of the effect of radium on the skin. Henri Becquerel hap- pened to place a tube of very active radium in his vest pocket, just to keep it handy. He kept it there for several hours, never suspecting anything, then put it back in his laboratory. Two weeks later he discovered a burned area on his body. Recalling that the seared skin was exactly where the radium tube had been, he communicated his discovery to Pierre Curie.

So fascinated was Pierre Curie that he decided to experiment with his own skin, applying the radium to his hand in weak degrees. He became amazed at the possibilities presented. In turn he loaned a tube of radium to the Saint-Louis Hospital of Paris for further medical experimentation.

It was first applied to a case of tuberculosis of the skin. The results were excellent. The patient was thoroughly healed. Soon the demand for radium for therapeutic uses spread like wild-fire. The name of Curie was clothed in glory, but the modest couple preferred the quiet and peace and industry of their little laboratory, offering their discoveries to the world without desire for recompense—their lives dedicated to science and humanity.

Radium is now the most rare and the most precious of metals. Consequently, it was a great relief when an American physicist, William Duane suggested the insertion of radon, the radium gas, into the tissues and leaving it there a number of years. It is one of radium’s freak but beneficial properties that it does not injure normal tissues but destroys the diseased ones.

Uranium, and therefore radium, is found in this country in carnotite and its associated minerals, and in pitchblende. Carnotite is a lemon-yellow mineral, usually found in pockets of sandstone deposits. The mineral may be in the form of light yellow specks spread through the sandstone, or as yellow incrustations in the cracks of the sandstone.

Carnotite was first discovered on this continent in 1887 by a prospector named Charles Poulot, in western Montrose county, Colorado. There are other vast carnotite formations in southwestern Utah, 11,500 feet above the sea level, in high, arid and barren mountain regions. There are no roads to these Utah mines, only narrow, perilous paths which are traversed only by burro trains. There is no water there, nor any wild animals or vegetation for food. It is a ghastly region with the temperature over 100 at high noon, and sinking below zero at night.

The ore is hand-picked and packed in 80-pound sacks. A burro bears two of these bags down a precipitous mountain trail to a wagon road eleven miles away. The best that a skillful miner can do is two burro-loads a day. The ore is carried to an automobile highway, and finally reaches a railroad only to travel another 2,000 miles to a chemical plant.

A long, laborious process is used in the manufacture of radium from carnotite. Rather vaguely, the process has been compared with the methods used in the purification of table salt. This salt is placed in solution and the impurities driven off by crystallization.

However, this is child’s play alongside the task of extracting radium from carnotite. The carnotite is placed in solution, and step by step the numerous other elements are driven off by crystallization, each step making the radium purer. Here the preciousness of radium becomes evident when it is revealed that it takes from five to six hundred tons of carnotite ore to produce a single gram of radium.

At this point it may be appropriate to mention that in 1923 a gram of pure radium cost $120,000. The fact that this particular gram could “live” and keep its energy for 17,000 years did not offer much solace. Today, because of simplified methods of production, the market value of a gram is $70,000. This means that one ounce of radium would cost $1,960,000. The New York State Hospital at Buffalo recently bought $300,000 worth of radium at that rate. Its records show that 800 persons have been cured of cancer since its use there. The invention of radium emanation apparatus has helped the cause immensely.

The use of radium has by no means been confined to the field of therapeutics. Its services have been extended also to the field of structural engineering. Recently, with a bit of radium no larger than a .22 caliber bullet, three Washington, D. C. scientists startled the world by demonstrating that the powerful “gamma ray,” derived from radium, can actually penetrate a ten-inch. piece of steel, an accomplishment hitherto never realized.

The gamma ray is similar in use to the X-ray, but many times more powerful. Its all-revealing “eye” can see clear through the hull of the toughest battleship, thereby measuring strength, or revealing any structural defects that might be present.

This newest method of ray photography is the work of Dr. Robert F. Mehl and Chas. S. Barret, both of the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D. C., and Gilbert E. Doan, assistant professor of metallurgy at Lehigh University.

The mechanism of the gamma ray is simple in operation. With it, engineers simply need place a bit of radium into a little tube behind a steel casting of a bridge and a photographic plate attached to the casting will record the comparative soundness of the steel. Workmen can take pictures of the “insides” of a locomotive wheel, and a group of divers can determine the strength of a propeller strut on a man o’ war before subjecting it to the tremendous pressure of the deep seas.

The chief advantage of radium is its simplicity. Very easily the technician can group the objects he wants to photograph, then simply drop the bit of radium into the tube before starting his morning’s work on other projects. The radium rays will operate during the day and the technician can pick up his developed plates when he finishes in the evening.

An important phase of gamma light photography is its sensitivity. It will reveal defects as minute as two per cent of the material’s thickness, a fact which indicates that it will be useful in testing heavy guns and metal gun turrets.

Certain Navy experts point out that a gamma ray picture or “radiograph,” may properly be called a “textbook of metal defects,” since it teaches the student of metal construction all he wants to know concerning the “insides” of a sheet of metal. Any defects stand out on the photographic film as dark spots or streaks, in contrast to the lighter background of the rest of the material, thus accurately portraying the features of the hitherto hidden cracks and voids.

An important industry which is constructing equipment on which a great deal depends requires complete information on the trustworthiness of the materials utilized. In the case of a modern power plant, defective material used for this purpose may result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars and even in loss of life. By the use of radium, however, all these difficulties can be eliminated.

Name Elements 99 and 100

Two great scientists who died within the last year, Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, have been honored by the naming of elements 99 einsteinium and 100 fermium. The symbol for einsteinium is plain E, that for fermium, Fm. Now all discovered elements are named, since 101 was previously named mendelevium after the Russian, D. Mendeleev, who announced the periodic system of the elements in 1869.

The second outburst of T Coronae, however, clearly proves that the collapse theory is wrong.”

It is true that the nova on T Coronae Borealis which is a recurrent nova was not due to gravitational collapse of the star. However the other supernova they talk about, “Tycho’s Star“, is actually a type Ia supernova and was caused by the collapse of a white dwarf.

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When Suns Explode

Ours seems sturdy, but bursting stars reveal illness of others.

By DONALD H. MENZEL

Professor of Astrophysics, Harvard University AN EXPLODING star is not news. Dozens of stars blow up each year, increasing: their brilliance 10,000 times or more. Most of them, however, are extremely faint before the outburst, and even at peak brightness are not visible to the naked eye. Really bright objects are rare. But when a star bursts twice in a century-that is astronomical news! It gives us significant scientific information about such stars.

In 1866 a “nova” or so-called “new star’ flashed out in the constellation Northern Crown. It was certainly not a true new star. A distant sun had exploded and greatly in-creased its output of energy. The brilliance faded rapidly until the star could be seen only with a telescope. When it was about hundred times too faint to be seen with the naked eye, it stopped fading. It remained a faint star, fluctuating somewhat in brightness, until Feb. 9, when it blew up again. The astronomers call it T Coronae Borealis, i.e., T (variable star) of the constellation Northern Crown.

In 1866 photography was young and pictures of stars were not possible. But we have followed the variations of T Coronae ever since. We have studied its characteristics, some of them puzzling. Finding the answer to these might give us more information about the nova phenomenon.

We know little about the “pre-nova” stage. There are so many stars that we cannot hope to pick out for special study one that may explode some day. The star gives no advance warning of its approach- The burst of a nova is a fantastic explosion. The increase in stellar brilliance is as startling as if a firefly suddenly glowed like an arc light! The energy dissipated in a nova explosion is equal to more than that of 100 quintillion atomic bombs. A single bomb, to release that much energy, would have to be almost as large as the earth.

Somewhere in the star vast energy is suddenly released. This energy, struggling to escape, works its way to the surface.

The star expands like a soap bubble, all the while increasing m brilliance. Finally, the outer layers are blown entirely away, receding into the distance as filmy wisps of nebulae. Gradually the star subsides to something like its original brilliance. In many novae, some years after the outburst, the fragmentary shell of expanding gas is still dense enough to show up as a nebular ring encircling the star.

The average nova in its final stages appears to be much hotter than it was initially.

Observations indicate that the expanding gases around the star may continue to have a temperature of more than 1,000,000° C. for years after the outburst.

Certain astronomers have suggested that the whole phenomenon of novae is due to collapse of the star, and that the energy released in the explosion was produced by compression within. They argue that the nova is a stage in the star’s evolution, the outburst marking one last splurge before it settles down to enjoy a lengthy old age.

The second outburst of T Coronae, however, clearly proves that the collapse theory is wrong. It tells us that the tendency of a star to blow up is a sort of disease; some inherent structural weakness causes only certain varieties of stars to become novae.

This conclusion is somewhat heartening to us. It renders the chance of our sun’s exploding extremely small. The long record of solar dependability goes back over geological time, more than a billion years. During that interval the sun has never so much as doubled or halved its energy output. The common solar disturbances, such as sun spots or expelled jets of gas, do not indicate that the sun is likely to explode completely, as a few writers have suggested. Perhaps they are “safety valves” that regulate the star, and prevent catastrophe.

There are two other stars that appear to be repeating novae: RS Ophiuchi and T Pyxidis. Neither of these is as clear-cut a case as our recent example. The indications are that T Coronae—before the explosion—may have had an extremely bloated and fairly cool atmosphere surrounding a very hot and tiny core. During the outburst, this surrounding gas is blown out with other material. Thus the star (the minute core) is indeed much smaller after the explosion than before, as the observations demand, but there is no collapse.

The star probably explodes in jets, rather than uniformly all over the surface. The inner regions are so hot that the color of light has a distinct violet hue and the ultraviolet radiation is extremely intense. Along the jets the color changes from violet to blue to dazzling white. There may be a slight tinge of pink on the outer edges of the puffs, where the temperature is lowest. Between successive outbursts, T Coronae succeeded in at least partially rebuilding the bloated atmosphere, for the color displayed was often very red.

A nova outburst does not seem to be a major catastrophe in the life of the star. In most cases the star recovers and may prepare for another relapse in the near— or distant—future. Even a few thousand years is a short time in the life history of a star.

Most new stars have exploded only once within the memory of man. But it is quite possible that some of these may burst again.

The most famous of all novae is Tycho’s star, which outshone all but the planet Venus, in the year 1572. There were no telescopes then, and we do not know which of several faint stars in the vicinity may be the one Tycho observed. This outburst was so great that astronomers call it a supernova—a very rare phenomenon indeed. The explosion may have wrecked the star completely, so that we may not have a recurrence. But astronomers still watch, hopeful of seeing it again.

A variable star in Andromeda, Z Andromedae, shows signs of novalike activity and some day may flare into brilliance. Watch these places in the sky and you may some day see an unaccustomed star there. If you should see a nova, notify the nearest astronomical observatory by telegraph, as soon as you have checked that it is not just a planet. Those familiar with the sky can do a real service to astronomy and science by watching for and reporting new stars.

When one of these objects appears, astronomers all over the world train their telescopes upon it and take photographs and spectra (rainbow colors) in rapid succession.

The earlier stages are particularly important because we know least about them, and because the changes are most rapid.

The energy source of these tremendous explosions may well be some sort of nuclear reaction, different from, but none the less akin to, those in the atomic bomb. In ordinary stars the release of atomic energy appears to be well controlled, but in the novae the processes appear to get out of hand and the tremendous bursts occur.

Theoretical and observational studies of these- atom-star-bombs are important for scientific advance. The knowledge gained of gases at high temperature, the behavior of tremendous explosions and the conditions giving rise to them, may contribute to the problem of atomic power. It will certainly help us to understand a star’s constitution.

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THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST

On the fascination of microscopy and some curious amateur observations of the moon.

Conducted by Albert G. Ingalls

ADAM’S lack of foresight when he named the creatures of the earth (Genesis 2:19) certainly made things difficult for his scientific descendants. If he had made a list of the animals as he named them, how easy it would now be, for instance, to label a microscope slide! As it is, the rediscovery and renaming of the world’s organisms has been slow, painful work. Aristotle knew about 520 animals and Theophrastus could identify approximately the same number of plants. Today, thanks largely to Linnaeus and to the invention of the microscope, our catalogue has grown to about a million species of animals and 336,000 species of plants. But the census of life on the earth is far from complete; no one knows how many thousands of species remain to be discovered and identified.

The quest to complete the roundup of organisms and to name them is one of science’s most rewarding challenges. And for amateurs in science it offers a sport second to none. An amateur can engage in it simply by acquiring a microscope, since the biggest remaining field for exploration is in the world of small organisms.

Amateur microscopy has other lures besides the discovery of new organisms. According to Harry Ross of New York City, an amateur who became so-fascinated with the microscope that he abandoned a successful career in electrical engineering to deal in optical supplies, “the microscope and its applications cut across the field of nearly every science—any one of which can become a lifetime avocation.”

Ross points out that it is possible to make a workable microscope at home in less than an hour, and that one does not need to look far for material to study. “The saliva from your own mouth,” he says, “will provide enough varied specimens to keep you going for months on end. The more organisms we find and identify, the more, it seems, await discovery.

“In microscopy the problem is not so much finding things to study as developing the will to stick with one thing. We are constantly tempted to embark on a Cook’s tour of every avenue opened by the instrument. Suppose, for instance, that someone upsets the salt and its crystals attract your attention. You get to thinking about crystallography. Within arm’s reach von can find mate-rial enough to keep your microscope busy for hours as you examine the cubic form of salt, the glittering structure of sugar. A particle of dirt from the edge of your shoe provides a comprehensive collection of mineral crystals—quartz, mica, silica, calcite. You chip a Hake of ice from the cube in your glass, put it on the slide and look quickly. You are startled by the violence of the transformation as the needle-like crystals melt away. Check the resulting drop of water for purity. Does it hold specks of suspended matter, perhaps dormant organisms? Examine a few grains of pepper. Has its strength been cut, as is sometimes the case, by the addition of starch? If so, you instantly spot the oval-shaped grains. Are you interested in fats? Contrast the appearance of a smear of butter with a bit of grease from whatever meat the cook served. After fat, something else attracts attention. Thus within minutes you may be lured from your initial interest in crystals!”

Historians are not sure who invented the microscope. Like many products of technology, the instrument seems to have evolved from many tidbits of accumulated knowledge as intertwined and difficult to trace as the roots of a thousand-year-old redwood tree. The oldest magnifying lens so far discovered was found in the ruins of Nineveh by the British archaeologist Sir Austen Layard. It was a crudely polished planoconvex lens of rock crystal which magnified rather well. Pliny the Elder in 100 B.C. mentioned the “burning property of lenses made of glass.” But the science of optics in the modern sense did not begin until about the loth century.

Roger Bacon seems to have been the first to suggest its principles. His writings predicted the telescope and the microscope, and he can probably share credit for the invention of spectacles. Bacon taught the theory of lenses to a friend, Heinrich Goethals, who visited Florence in 1285. From Goethals the information found its way through a Dominican friar, Spina, to one Salvina D’Armato. D’Armato’s tomb in the church of St. Maria Maggiore today carries the inscription: “Here lies Salvina D’Armato of the Amati of Florence, Inventor of Spectacles. Lord pardon him his sins. A.D. 1317.”

The simple microscope—the single lens—must have been used as soon as spectacles were invented, or perhaps it even preceded them. Who was the first to use it we do not know. But the first to make any important discoveries with it was the Hollander Anton van Leeuwenhoek, born in 1632. After examining some common materials through a simple, single-lens instrument he had made himself, he wrote excitedly to the Royal Society in London about all the seemingly unbelievable objects it revealed. He discovered “wigglers” and “worms” in water taken from the canal of his native Delft and in scrapings from his teeth. Perhaps his greatest contribution was the observation of red corpuscles in blood. Leeuwenhoek not only identified the red cells but made accurate drawings of their shape and forwarded them, along with measurements of their approximate size, to the Royal Society.

Anyone with a little time to spare can make a duplicate of Leeuwenhoek’s microscope and enjoy a thrill now 300 years old. Ross urges beginners in microscopy to start with a Leeuwenhoek instrument. It is easy to make and will give the beginner valuable experience in preparing and handling specimens.

For materials you need only a small length of thin glass rod, a piece of about 20-gauge iron or brass one inch by three inches, two machine screws with nuts, a tube of quick-drying cement and a bit of cellophane. We have made several satisfactory miscroscopes of these simple scraps of material.

For the glass rod a clear “swizzle stick” of the kind used for stirring drinks will do. First you hold the center of the rod in the flame of a Bunsen burner or a burner of the kitchen stove. The rod is introduced into the flame gradually to avoid the breaking stresses set up by abrupt heating. The center of the rod will quickly reach red heat and become plastic. Withdraw the rod from the fire quickly and stretch it. The plastic center will pull into a hairlike filament about two feet long. After the rod has cooled, break off a convenient length, say six inches, from the middle section of the filament. Then slowly bring one end of this thread into contact with the flame. The tip will reach incandescence almost at once, and a tiny bead will form. Keep on feeding the filament into the flame until the bead grows to a diameter of approximately one sixteenth of an inch. The lens of your microscope is now finished. This little bead, if it has been made carefully, will yield a magnification of approximately 160 diameters. (The power of such a lens is roughly equal to the number 10 divided by the diameter of the bead in fractions of an inch.) The quality of the lenses made by this primitive method is far from uniform; hence several should be made and the best selected.

A bit of the glass filament may be left attached to the bead and used for mounting the lens to its base. Leeuwenhoek mounted his lens in a sandwich of two brass plates with a hole for the lens. But we find it more convenient to drill a hole in a single plate and fasten the glass piece to the plate by its stem, with the bead over the hole. The hole should be slightly smaller than the bead, so no light will leak past the lens and thus dilute the contrast of the image-. The glass is fastened to the plate with quick-drying cement.

The focal length of this tiny lens is of course very short. This means that the stage on which a specimen is mounted must be close to the lens, sometimes nearly touching it. For focusing his microscope and moving the specimen into its field Leeuwenhoek used a set of interacting screws, manipulating a metal point as the stage (see Roger Hay ward’s drawing on the opposite page). In our version of his instrument we substituted a bit of cellophane for the point and fastened it to the adjustment mechanism with cement. Specimens are cemented to the cellophane.

Unfortunately Leeuwenhoek’s microscope lacks the viewing comfort of modern instruments. To see the enlarged image you must bring the lens very close to the eye. Hayward has drawn a larger model which employs a conventional slide as the stage, a mirror for controlling the light and a more convenient focusing adjustment. This arrangement adds to the instrument’s convenience but does not eliminate the necessity of bringing the eye close to the lens (see drawing above).

Considering its primitive design, Leeuwenhoek’s microscope reveals an astonishing amount of detail. Leeuwenhoek is supposed to have worked successfully with smaller beads, which gave higher magnification, but he quickly learned to value resolution over magnifying power and to work with the lowest power possible. A big fuzzy image has no advantage over a small fuzzy one.

Leeuwenhoek handed down at least one other fundamental lesson—the importance of preparing objects carefully for microscopic examination. As the 18th-century mathematician Robert Smith wrote in his Compleat System of Optiks: “Nor ought we to forget a piece of skill in which he [Leeuwenhoek] very particularly excelled which was that of preparing his objects in the best manner to be viewed by the microscope; and of this I am persuaded anyone will be satisfied who shall apply himself to the examination of some of the same objects as do remain before these glasses. At least I have myself found so much difficulty in this particular, as to observe a very sensible difference between the appearances of the same object, when applied by myself and when prepared by Mr. Leeuwenhoek, though viewed with glasses of the very same goodness.”

Since Smith’s day generations of slide makers have developed techniques for the preparation of specimens which are almost as fascinating as the operation of the microscope itself. Some relatively huge specimens, such as the dry root of a hair or a dried flea from a dog, require no more preparation than being attached to a slide with a dab of Canada Balsam or some other slide cement and covered with a thin glass. Minute objects such as red blood corpuscles can be viewed with reasonable satisfaction if they are merely smeared on a slide J * and protected with a cover glass. But others which are thick and opaque, or transparent, or contain water in their structure, require special treatment.

If the interior of a specimen is to be studied, either its top must be cut away or, if it is translucent, it must be lighted from below. Some specimens must be cut into extremely thin slices. There are slicing machines called microtomes which can cut frozen tissue or tissue embedded in wax into sections almost as thin as a single wavelength of light. In addition to solving the lighting problem, thin sectioning simplifies the image, for the microscope magnifies in all dimensions. Amateurs do not, however, need an elaborate cutting machine; they can prepare slides with a safety razor blade.

When an organism is completely transparent, it may have to be dyed or embedded in a light-refracting substance. The staining process is an art in itself, because staining substances always produce a chemical change in the organism. Sometimes the stain affects one part of the cell and not another. By using different chemicals one may dye the nucleus one color and the surrounding cytoplasm of the cell another color.

Many bacteria can be distinguished from one another only by the way they take a stain; this is the basis, for example, of the classification of “gram positive” and “gram negative” bacteria.

The preparation of slides for the microscope has developed its own special literature, with whole volumes devoted to such subjects as techniques of desiccation; cleaning; bleaching to remove pigments which obscure the view; methods of floating objects in liquid cells; the selection of cover glasses with optical properties matching those of the instrument; the polishing and etching of metal surfaces to reveal crystal structure—processes almost as numerous and varied as the objects that go under the instrument’s objective lens. Like all other scientific avocations, the preparation of specimens for the microscope invites the amateur to plunge in as deep and stay down as long as he likes.

After building and using a Leeuwenhoek instrument you may very well decide to go further. A conventional compound microscope will save a lot of squinting. It should be an instrument of good quality, capable of showing fine detail. Its power should match the ability of the beginner. High-power objectives invariably prove disappointing to beginners, because their successful use calls for substantial skill. A good secondhand beginner’s microscope can be purchased for $60 or less.

Having acquired an instrument, what next? According to Joseph F. Burke, who like Ross is a member of the New York Microscopical Society, the minute plants called diatoms are ideal subjects for the beginner.

“Diatoms grow,” says Burke, “wherever there is light and moisture. This means that they can be collected in nearly every part of the world. They can be found on the beach, among the plankton at sea, on the mud bottom of ditches, on the stems of water plants, in the scum on stagnant pools, even in desert sands, for their silica shell remains as a fossil after they have died. A formation of living diatoms usually has a brownish tint, caused by a pigment which obscures the plant’s chlorophyll. Deposits of fossilized diatoms, laid down on the bottom of ancient seas, are mined as diatomaceous earth, valued for its mild abrasive action. Many silver polishes are rich in fossilized diatoms—a convenient source the beginner should not overlook.

“For live collecting the amateur should equip himself with a few wide-mouthed jars, a spoon and an ordinary coffee or tea strainer of 40 or 50 mesh. As specimens are taken in the field, the collector records the date, time and location along with other data that will assist in the subsequent identification of the material.

“To prepare diatoms for mounting, the amateur will need: technical sulfuric acid, technical hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide, powdered potassium bichromate, distilled water, strainers of 40 to 50 mesh, two Pyrex beakers holding 30 cubic centimeters, a Pyrex custard dish, a conical flask of 125 c.c., an assortment of pint and quart jars, glass stirring rods, half-ounce storage bottles with caps, and clean pipettes.

“The collected material should be transferred to a large jar. Filtered water is added and the material is thoroughly beaten with a glass stirring rod to dislodge the diatoms from foreign objects. The organisms should then be strained and permitted to settle; allow an hour per vertical inch of solution. Living diatoms should be processed in a darkish place, because their metabolic processes release tiny bubbles of oxygen which cause the organisms to rise to the surface. Having settled, the diatoms will form a brown layer on the bottom of the jar. The water should then be poured off without losing the specimens. This washing process should be carried out three or four times, particularly when the diatoms are salt-water species. Distilled water should be used wherever the local water supply carries a heavy content of lime.

“Part of the material is then transferred with the pipette to the Pyrex beaker to form a layer about an eighth of an inch thick. The beaker should be placed in the custard cup. The excess water is removed with the pipette, leaving the specimens moist but not wet. Next powdered potassium bichromate, approximately one third the bulk of the diatoms, is stirred into the mixture. Then comes an operation which must be performed outdoors or in a window with a strong outward draft, as the reaction produces poisonous fumes. Slowly add approximately five c.c. of technical sulfuric acid to the diatom-bichromate mixture. A violent reaction will follow. Beat down the resulting bubbles with a stirring rod. Should the heat of the reaction break the beaker, the custard cup will prevent the loss of the specimens.

“The material is then transferred to a quart jar and washed with distilled water five times, allowing about an hour of settling time for each vertical inch of water. The diatoms are now ready for separation according to size. This is accomplished by the familiar process of elutriation. The material is transferred to the first of a series of uniform glass containers. Water is added, and after a certain interval, say half an hour, the water is poured off carefully into the second jar of the series. Again at the end of the predetermined interval, the second jar is poured off into the third. This is repeated until the diatoms are separated into the desired sizes. The diatoms are now ready for m individual storage bottles, to which a few drops of hydrogen peroxide may be added as a preservative.

“For mounting diatoms, select a cover glass of 12-millimeter diameter and a thickness of .11 to .20 mm. The slide itself should have a thickness of 1 mm. (A supply of cover glasses, slides and mounting cement or ‘medium’ is available at most optical shops.) Clean the slide and cover glass thoroughly with soap and water. Select a storage bottle containing diatoms and shake it until they are in suspension. With the pipette place a drop of distilled water in the center of the cover glass. If the glass has been cleaned properly, the water will spread to the edge but not overflow. Next add a drop from the storage bottle which holds the diatoms in suspension. The diatoms will spread evenly and settle on the glass. Allow the water to evaporate overnight. Protect the glass from dust.

“You will next need a small hot plate and a bottle of medium. I prefer Hyrax for mounting diatoms. Warm the slide on the hot plate and place a drop of Hyrax on the slide’s center. Then re-move the slide from the hot plate and place it on a wooden support to prevent rapid cooling. With sharp pointed forceps, pick up the cover glass, invert ii so that the diatom side is down and press it gently onto the medium until the fluid reaches the edge of the cover glass. The slide is then returned to the hot plate and the Hyrax is brought to a state of vigorous bubbling. As the bubbling slows down, remove the slide to the wooden support. Experience will teach the proper moment of transfer.

“After cooling, the slide is placed under the objective and examined. If the washing and mounting have been performed carefully, the amateur is in for a thrill he will long remember. Diatoms have been called ‘nature’s jewels,’ and man has yet to fashion anything more exquisite.

“Although more than 10,000 species of diatoms have been recorded thus far, the list continues to grow. The beginner should equip himself with a reference book on the subject. He will find it essential for classification. Then, at last, he can experience the satisfaction of labeling his first slide.”

ASTRONOMERS define selenography as the study of the surface of the moon. They are so busy with the stars and the universe, however, that they have no time for selenography. Thus the moon has long been left almost entirely to advanced amateur astronomers, who find it made to order for their more limited resources—and also endlessly fascinating, with its maze of more than 30,000 craters, cliffs, rills and rays.

When a telescope user ceases to look at the moon in a merely desultory manner and begins to observe it, he has begun to be a selenographer. He singles out small areas or formations and studies them minutely throughout the long lunar day, at every hour of which the changing angle of the sunlight alters their appearance. While doing this he learns the lunar map, partly by copying and then drawing it from memory, partly by making sketches directly at the eyepiece of the telescope. If these sketches are dated and saved from the very beginning, his observations will be all the sharper. The ability of the eye to see detail improves immensely with practice.

The training of the powers of observation would be tedious if the telescope owner did not fan his interest by reading the literature to learn what other selenographers are doing. Perhaps the easiest way to start is by joining the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, 1203 North Alameda Street, Las Cruces, N. M., and reading its monthly organ The Strolling Astronomer. By following up the leads in its articles the beginner soon learns his way about in the world of selenography and is introduced to the many controversies in this field.

Of these perhaps the most interesting is the question: Does the moon’s surface ever change? Most astronomers believe that it does not, even in fine details. On the other hand, most selenographers believe that small changes do occur. Dismissing the theories of the astronomers on the ground that they do not observe the moon, the selenographers insist that their minute and systematic observations over many decades have confirmed a number of changes.

The most noted change was the disappearance of the crater Linne, six miles in diameter, some time between 1843 and 1866. After its disappearance, a white spot surrounding the crater steadily diminished in size and brightness until 1897, but then grew again and has now regained its earlier size. For many years the American selenographer William H. Pickering noted irregular changes in the sizes and shapes of dark regions within the ring plain Eratosthenes. Then there is the ring plain Plato, which is obscured at irregular intervals by some kind of haze or vapor.

In 1942 Walter H. Haas, now editor of The Strolling Astronomer, summarized changes that selenographers had seen in 21 lunar formations in a series of articles in The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Last year the selenographer H. P. Wilkins, director of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association and maker of the best detailed map of the moon, described 15 anomalies that he had observed in 40 years of lunar observation with telescopes from 3 to 15 inches in aperture. Wilkins said: “Things do happen and are continually happening on the moon.” It is not a dead world.

Some astronomers treat these many claims more open-mindedly than they did 50 years ago, when the U. S. astronomer Simon Newcomb said dogmatically that the moon was a world on which nothing ever happens. Most open-minded is the textbook Astronomy by William T. Skilling and Robert S. Richardson. They describe the work of selenographers and note that “astronomers are extremely skeptical of changes on the moon, considering them to arise from differences of illumination, unsteadiness of the earth’s atmosphere and the inherent difficulty of seeing and recording fine details which are just at the limit of visibility.” But they concede that “most astronomers have not systematically studied the moon.”

In the last two years readers of The Strolling Astronomer have followed a long account (15,000 words) of a lunar formation which seems to the Baltimore selenographer James C. Bartlett, Jr., to be playing a game of hide and seek. It is a puzzle that has fascinated selenographers for over 100 years.

Some time prior to 1837 Johann Maedler of Berlin saw a remarkably perfect square 011 the region of the moon between the ring plain named Fontenelle and the walled enclosure called Birmingham. The square was 65 miles on a side and had walls one mile thick. It is shown in Roger Hayward’s drawing above, reproduced from a drawing published in 1837 by Maedler and his collaborator Wilhelm Beer. On the floor of the square Maedler saw a very regular cross. In 1876 Edmund Neison, director of the Natal Observatory in South Africa, also published a lunar map containing Maedler’s square, which he had observed himself with a six-inch refracting telescope. He described it as “a square with regularity and perfect form, its walls from 250 to 3,000 feet in height.” Neison’s drawing is reproduced here by Hayward, himself a selenographer.

Thus two of the founders of selenography testified that the square was real in their time. Yet in 1949 Bartlett, after studying the area of the square for more than an hour with his 3.5-inch reflecting telescope on a very fine night, failed to find it! The “fact emerged,” he says, “with the impact of a hydrogen bomb. No such formation existed.” Another selenographer, E. J. Reese, confirmed the disappearance. Bartlett later found two walls of the “square” (the ones on the lower left-hand and right-hand sides of the drawings), but he could detect 110 trace of the other sides.

Bartlett then examined old photographs of the moon made in Maedler’s and Neison’s time. (The first photograph of the moon was made in 1840 by the U. S. astronomer Henry Draper.) The primitive photographs were in- conclusive, but in the first clear ones, made during the 1870s by the U. S. amateur astronomer L. M. Rutherfurd, the “square” did not appear. Bartlett concluded that what Maedler and Neison had seen with their telescopes actually was a square, which had “ceased to exist by 1874 and perhaps earlier.”

The next participant in the discussion in The Strolling Astronomer was Patrick A. Moore, secretary of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association. In July, 1951, he said that the Bartlett article had aroused a great deal of interest in Britain. He sketched the area with his 8.5-inch reflector, using powers from 200 to 400. Moore, a very experienced observer, found three walls of the square clearly visible and the fourth faintly so at times. But the square was not the neatly geometrical, fortress-like form Maedler had described, and all but one of its walls were very low.

Moore’s findings are pictured in the drawing labeled with his name. The wall at the bottom of the drawing is extremely low. At its left end is a small quadrilateral bounded by four hills connected by low ridges. It contains a small crater and fine detail of the kind selenographers delight in delineating as a test of their observing skill. The left wall, extending upward from this corner, ends in a series of heights which are very conspicuous during the times of the month when the shadows reveal them. The wall at the top of the drawing is very low indeed and perhaps discontinuous. At its right-hand end is a prominent crater. Finally, on the fourth side of the ¥ / square is a trace of a wall so low that it has to be caught under favorable conditions of illumination to be seen at all.

Have changes occurred since Maedler and Neison described the prominent, fortress-like walls they thought they had seen? Moore declares: “The evidence for change is totally inadequate.” He excuses Maedler on the ground that he had only a small telescope (a 3.75-inch Fraunhofer refractor with magnification 300) and that it is human “to err sometimes.” And he disqualifies Neison because the latter’s map was made mainly from Maedler’s. Supporting Bartlett’s observations, Moore suggests that “it would be a fitting gesture to attach the name of Bartlett to the curious formation that has been referred to as Maedler’s square.”

Moore’s careful observations seemed to have settled the question. But 14 months later Bartlett announced new evidence. Photographs taken with the 36-inch Lick refractor, he said, fail to show any eastern wall for the square. He suggested that the extremely low object seen there by Moore could not have been seen by Maedler and might possibly be the remains of a wall that was actually present in Maedler’s time. He dismissed the idea that Maedler’s observation was due to the inadequacy of his telescope, noting that Maedler was able to see objects much smaller than the square.

The Lick pictures, incidentally, raise a question. Since anyone can purchase prints of photographs made with large telescopes, including the 100-inch, why do selenographers strain to see minute lunar details with their own small telescopes? One reason is given by Walter Goodacre, a former director of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association. He points out that under the best seeing conditions an observer can see as much detail with a high-quality ] 0-inch refractor as is shown on photographs made with a 100-inch telescope. When used visually, the large telescopes give better detail, but they are rarely available to selenographers.

Recently Bartlett rediscovered Maedler’s cross—a dull, whitish formation— and Reese verified the find. “Now,” says Bartlett, “this wonderfully establishes Maedler’s accuracy. Have we any further reason to doubt that Maedler had faithfully depicted the square?” A few months later, with Maedler’s cross plainly visible, Bartlett observed to the east of it a smaller, dark gray cross very difficult to see. Neison discovered this cross long ago when Maedler had missed it-proving, Bartlett says, that Neison did not merely rehash Maedler’s book for his own.

Is Bartlett’s comeback on the accuracy of the early selenographers a proof? The most he asks is that the square be closely watched in the future. Meanwhile Moore and Wilkins have made a change in Maedler’s square. On the great Wilkins map of the moon they have renamed it “Bartlett.”

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A “Down the CELLAR” Chem Lab

by FREDERICK O. SCHUBERT

Here are some interesting experiments you can perform with simple chemicals, with notes on building the beginnings of your own basement chemistry lab. More next month!

NOW that we’ve succeeded in shoving Andy, the grease monkey, and the rest of the “hangar gang” over a bit for the lab boys, let’s get together and make real use of our “chem” pages. It’s not going to be hard if you spatula wielders and test tube wrestlers will get behind and push the crate along. After all, it’s to satisfy you birds who like to fiddle with specific gravity and distillation rather than angles of incidence or variable pitches that we’re goin’ into the mechanics of chemistry.

The major part of you fellows undoubtedly have some sort of a workshop either in the basement, up in the attic or out in the barn. But to get under way we’ve got to give all the gang a chance to start from scratch. So, at the risk of being considered elementary, we’re going to start by talking about the “down in the cellar chem lab”

that we have designed. Perhaps you seasoned experimenters will catch an idea or two.

As you probably have noted already, no dimensions are given in constructing this lab. Your own best judgment—and the size of space available—will have to govern its construction. Too, the location of the nearest gas, electric and water outlets must be considered. Your own ingenuity will enable you to adapt these plans.

An ordinary kitchen table is perhaps the handiest to start with because it can easily be obtained. It is already equipped with a “drawer and can quickly be set up. The details of shelving likewise are simple and require no great detailed discussion. Enough to say that as your experiments continue and you add more and more equipment and chemicals, the value of adequate shelf-room will be appreciated. They may look empty for a while, but Oh Boy, when you get going!

Much of the testing and mixing equipment must be purchased. If you’re on good terms with the local druggist you can get him to order much of your stuff wholesale. Then—you can make a lot of it yourself.

Take the centrifuge. In recent years this piece of apparatus has saved much time in separating liquids of different specific gravity from each other and solids from liquids when they are held in suspension in such a way that they cannot be filtered. What formerly required days is now done in a very few minutes.

This you can make from an old phonograph. By extending the pin that holds the playing disc and equipping it with a double cross-arm that has slots for test tubes at all four ends you’ve got the finest centrifuge in the world. Wind ‘er up, throw the switch and she is off while you’re doing something else. Although the number of revolutions per minute is not as great as electrically operated machines, it will serve every requirement of the cellar chemist.

A piece of marble can easily be obtained from any junk-shop. This serves well as an ideal mixing board for pasty materials. Bottles, too, can be salvaged from the heap in sizes to meet every need. The same holds true with corks, wire for test tube holders and scraps of pure metals for lab work and analysis. The illustrations show how you can make your own alcohol lamp.

Among the equipment that you will have to buy are graduates calibrated in cubic centimeters, spatulas, mortars and pestles, glass tubing for stirring rods and droppers, funnels, scales, test tubes, filter paper, litmus papers, thermometer, hydrometer and a gas or electric hot-plate. To this should be added a pair or two of rubber gloves for working with acids and a good, substantial rubber apron. A number of good books on chemical experimentation, too, are not amiss for in them will be found much of interest and value.

The question of what chemicals and preparations to purchase is a difficult one to answer in this limited space. When it is considered that the average pharmacopeia contains more than 25,000 chemical preparations to which additions are made almost daily, we can be pardoned our wish to refrain from specifically stating that you should have this or that acid, powder or liquid. As we continue in our monthly rambles we’ll have plenty of opportunity of adding to the chemical end of our lab.

One thing in chemistry that is always interesting is the large number of tricks you can perform. Take the case of glowing pictures. They can easily be made by drawing a picture on white paper with a solution of 40 parts saltpeter and 20 parts of gum arabic in 40 parts of warm water. An ordi- nary pen is used and all lines should be connected. Extend one line out to the edge of the sheet and mark the spot where it runs off with a light pencil. When a burning match is held to this spot the design— formerly invisible—begins to glow and appear in brown.

There is another little stunt that will make a permanent display for your living room. It’s a chemical garden and simple to make. Prepare a small jar full of cold, saturated solution of Glauber’s salts and into the liquid suspend a kidney bean and a non-porous marble, stone or piece of glass by means of silk threads. Cover the jar and in a few days small crystals of sulphate of sodium will be seen radiating from the bean increasing it in size and giving it the appearance of a sea urchin. The non-porous body will remain unchanged.

An explanation of this stunt states that the bean appears to have a special partiality for the crystals, which is due to the absorption of water by the bean, but not the salt. In this way a supersaturated solution is formed in the immediate neighborhood of the bean and the crystals, in forming, attach themselves to its surface.

A good “weather vane” can be made from white blotters saturated in a solution of one ounce of cobalt chloride, half ounce sodium chloride, 75 grains of calcium chloride, quarter ounce of acacia and three ounces of water and left to dry. The amount of moisture in the air is roughly indicated by the changing color of the blotters. Rain is denoted by a rose-red tint, lavender-blue bespeaks dry weather and a bluish-red announces a change in weather conditions.

Speaking about the weather, here is a handy little weather glass that is even more accurate than the papers. Dissolve 2-1/2 drachms of camphor in 11 drachms of alcohol and 38 grains each of saltpeter and sal ammoniac in ’9 drachms of water. After mixing the two solutions pour them into test tubes and cork them airtight—or better yet, draw out the tube until only a pin hole remains. If you use the corking method run a red-hot wire through the corks so that you will have a very small hole about the size of a pin.

When the camphor appears soft and powdery and almost fills the tube you can expect rain and south or southwest winds. When the substance is crystalline expect fine weather with winds from the north, northeast or northwest. When only a portion crystallizes on the side of the glass, wind can be expected from that direction.

During fine weather the substance remains clear and at the bottom of the tube. When the substance begins to rise and a small star can be seen swimming around in the liquid you can be sure that rain is on the way.

SCIENCE IS A PRISONER OF WAR

WHO won the war is already an old argument. But certainly science, forging the final weapon, stopped the war. Yet, a year later, science is still literally a prisoner of war.

When science was mobilized, the military services quite properly invaded the universities. They had to halt the basic research. They put the men and machines of science to work on the pressing necessities that mothered radar, sonar, loran, and a thousand other urgent applications of that basic research. The scientists did their work well, including the actual manufacture of such things as the rockets and the trained atoms.

Now, the military minds propose to maintain their command of the scientists by subsidizing pure research. Traditionally, the universities have been the birthplace of pure science. The directions of science for its own sake of knowing have been determined only by the resources of the great laboratories and the zeal of the seekers.

Now comes the brass, bearing cash, to the universities. Already, contracts have been let, researches have been begun. But what will it mean to science if the Navy is the paymaster? What will it mean to all of us if the Army calls the tune? How can science function honestly, let alone efficiently, under military security?

Certainly, we do not mean that this kind of work should not be undertaken by the universities. Certainly more, not less, money should be spent for science as science. But we strongly urge that public money for scientific research be spent directly by the people through qualified civilians, and not detoured through the military, which has its own traditions to preserve, and which would keep science in uniform.

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“HOT DOGS” IN THE LAB

by Harry M. Schwalb

Condensed from The Laboratory In 1939 the hot dog hit the front pages of the international press when President Roosevelt’s wife served it to the king and queen of England. And as 1955 draws to an end, Americans, by devouring over 8y2 billon tangy “red hots,” have made the frankfurter or wiener (formulation’s the same, though the wiener is a bit shorter) a major phase of the meat industry, outranking everything but ice cream in popularity on the national menu.

Few people realize that the humble frankfurter (which got its official name when a German butcher popularized it in Frankfurt a century ago) was commonplace 1,000 years before Christ; fewer still are aware that it has finally arrived in the transforming halls of the modern laboratory.

For example, in the American Meat Institute Foundation laboratories on the University of Chicago campus, you can watch bacteriologist Eileen Felton and physicist William Powers create a genuinely hot hot dog. They stuff the frank into a metal “bun,” lower the sample into a cobalt-60 furnace, and study the effect of gamma radiation on the processing of the foodstuff.

When atomic sterilization is perfected to the point where the franks maintain the desired ruddy color and develop no side flavors or odors, the food industry will have an effective new method of preparing franks for long-range non-spoilable keeping for soldiers and civilians the world over.

In still another Foundation laboratory, scientists study not the new techniques but the traditional ones (smoking franks to an internal temperature of 155 degrees Fahrenheit for two hours). And in their laboratory-sized smokehouse, chemists control the gas velocity, flow direction, temperature, humidity and smoke density with amazing delicacy.

From even the miniature lab smokehouse it is a tremendous jump in scale to the bench of histologist Hsi Wang, who uses a “micromanipulator” with his microscope to segregate the components of a single bacterial cell. Bacteriology is an important part of hot-dog science since the organisms that attack frankfurter surfaces, though non-toxic, are unusually cantankerous: they’re not only unafraid of the heavy salting that frankfurters get, they actually grow in media containing 10 percent salt. These bacteria produce hydrogen peroxide; while this turns brunettes into pretty blondes, it turns the ruddy frankfurter surface into a non-marketable green. These “greening” epidemics have been probed by frankfurter biochemists who, through their directions as to plant cleanliness and new smoking-room temperatures, just about have the intruders licked.

Supermarkets have boomed the success of the hot dog; they have also introduced a new problem: the intense artificial light of the retail counter. The problem initiated the study of meat pigments and what happens to them during processing, during exposure to light, and in the presence and absence of oxygen. Chemicals like disodium phosphate and ascorbic acid may solve the problem once and for all.

Frankfurter casings are still another lab achievement. For years, sheep and hog casings from China, Russia, and Australia were used, despite the fact that no genuinely clean, hole-free and uniformly-calibrated sheaths could be obtained. A fellowship was set up at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Institute with the object of devising an edible synthetic substitute. For ten years, chemists investigated all edible film-forming materials—gelatins, casein plastics, agar agar, algin, starches, cellulose.

Selecting cellulose, they next had to find a way to eliminate that stiff “papery” quality. After experimenting with every known softening treatment, they created an untreated soft, pliable film merely by making the film ultra-thin. Today, “skinless franks” outsell the other kind.

Until recently, little data had been developed on the nutritional properties of the hot dog; the thing was such a pleasure to eat, it was- almost too much to expect that it could be good for anyone, too. Especially unknown was the proportional nutrient-loss due to processing.

So, biochemists descended on retail stores in Chicago, scooped up samples, subjected them to hundreds of analyses. Result: the hog dog has been shown to be as adequate a source of 18 essential amino acids, plus thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and iron—as fresh beef, pork and lamb.

*The Laboratory, Vol. 24, Number 25; published by Fisher Scientific Co., 717 Forbes St., Pittsburgh 19, Pa.

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15 Million Volts to Shatter Atom

GOLD from lead was the aim of the old alchemists; the modern electro-chemist may accomplish it, with the apparatus shown above; yet it is not to be expected that gold so obtained will repay the cost of production. The quantity will be small, compared with the expense of the apparatus and of the power required. The purpose of this investigation is to obtain more information concerning the nature of the atom and the mysteries of its complicated structure.

It is believed now that the atom is composed, normally, of a “nucleus” which has a high positive electric charge, surrounded by electrons which have high negative charges. Electrons are all alike; the nature of the element, whether hydrogen, mercury or iron, being determined by the charge on its nucleus which, in turn, determines the number of electrons it will hold together, and the properties that it will thus acquire. Drive away an electron, and the positive charge of the atoms predominates; but there is an excess of free electrons, and another will soon be attracted to the atom.

“Firing” electrons (as in the cathode-ray tube) into atoms has been undertaken, in the hope of shattering the central nucleus, and thus changing the atom of one element into two atoms, of two elements of smaller atomic number. It is now proposed to use as a projectile the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, which’ is computed to be 1,800 times heavier than the electron, and thus of greater smashing power.

To put the nucleus when ionized (positively-charged by loss of its electron) in motion at sufficient speed, enormous voltage is required; more than obtainable by ordinary step-up methods. The recent invention of Dr. Robert J. Van de Graaf, of Princeton University, solved this problem. In the model shown at the left, he has reached a voltage of 1,500,000; it is now proposed, under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to build 15,000,000-volt generators for atomic research.

In the small model illustrated, two copper spheres are supported on heavy glass rods, which are charged by silk belts picking up frictional charges, in the same manner that they are collected in old “static electricity” machines, such as the Wimshurst and the Toepler-Holtz. The charge jumps to the belt in intermittent pulsations; and is carried up into the interior of the sphere, where a “collector” carries it to the metal ball. Since the electric charge is self-repellent, it flies to the outside of the metal sphere. It must be noted that the electricity thus collected is negative; for positive charges do not move in a solid substance. To charge the sphere positively, the negative charges are drawn out of it, by reversing the connections.

A larger supply of electricity, especially in damp weather, may be obtained through a high-voltage vacuum-tube connection, shown at the left in the diagram.

For experiments on atomic disintegration it is proposed to set up two globes so large that physical apparatus and observers may be accommodated in them. The charges, as stated above, will be all on the outer surfaces of the globes. From the positive sphere, positively-charged, “ionized” hydrogen atoms will be released into a tube of stout fiber, in which a high degree of vacuum has been produced. In this way they will travel at rapidly-increasing velocity toward the negatively-charged sphere, which attracts them. With a velocity measured in thousands of miles a second, they will collide with the target at the far end of the tube. Light, X-rays, and radiation more penetrating than X-rays, will be emitted; and probably a number of atoms of the target will be smashed and converted into atoms of lower atomic weight. In this way, gold might be transformed to lead.

It will be necessary for the observers to protect themselves from this bombardment by heavy screens of lead; or perhaps to leave the target sphere entirely during the discharge. The spheres, to avoid interference, will be set up in a great open area where their possible lightning discharges will not be too dangerous.

With less pretentious equipment, the electrical experimenter has a field of opportunity for interesting work along the same line.

SCIENCE NEWS of the MONTH

Estimates of Universe’s Size Vary

•IN the latest estimate of the size of the universe, contained in the Smithsonian tables of scientific data, there is considerable latitude. The largest estimate of the mileage, that of Dr. Edwin Hubble, is 190 billion light-years, or 1,140 sextillion miles. The smallest is that of Dr. Willem de Sitter, 76 quintillion miles, or 13 million light-years. The ratio is that between a mile and a third of an inch, or 15,000 to one, between these guesses. At any rate, it’s a long walk before breakfast.

Man Evolving Toward a Single Eye

• THE disuse of faculties causes withering and disappearance of their organs, as evolutionists have noticed. Dr. Thomas H. Shastid, leaving the loss of toes, ears, and teeth to others, is convinced that “in the course of countless ages, man’s two eyes will again become one.” This great central eye, he however believes, will have two distinct spots of sharp vision, instead of one, as at present, to allow judgment of distances. The eye, lower in the head, will afford more room for brains.

Dreaming is Bodily Activity

• WHEN you think, you generate electrical currents in your muscles, even though you do not consciously move them, according to Prof. Louis Max. Measurements on deaf mutes’ hands, by a delicate galvanometer, showed muscular currents even when the fingers were still. In sleep, the indications are that muscular currents are generated in dreaming; but not in unbroken, unconscious sleep. The greater the intensity of thought, the stronger the deflection of the galvanometer; as shown by test problems.

More Discoveries by “Black Light”

• ULTRA-VIOLET radiation, it is well known, causes substances to give off visible light; and this has been applied to many scientific purposes. One of the latest, however, has been reported from the University of Manitoba, in Canada. A cat was suspected of conveying a skin disease (“ringworm”) to its owner. When it was illuminated with ultra-violet, the microscopic fungus causing the disease shone brightly in the dark, with a greenish glow. Perhaps “athlete’s foot” will do this.

Did Pyramid Builders Keep Time?

• THE Great Pyramid is one of the puzzles of science to this day and, while it is hard to allow that it is a prophecy, its builders had considerable science. Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie suggests that the measures of the old Egyptians are based on the length of a pendulum which would swing 100,000 times in the day. If so, they were more consistent in their mathematical system than modern scientists with decimal measurements, but a day of 86,400 seconds. And they were ahead of Galileo.

Weather Waves and Crime Waves

• CLIMATE and civilization, it has been said, have an inseparable relation. Where the weather is bracing, yet food is readily obtainable, mankind is energetic and productive. Yet, says Dr. C. A. Mills, of the University of Cincinnati, the climate may be too favorable; and their people will work off their energy in undesirable ways that society calls “crime waves.” He considers that the American climate is so energetic that it causes “bodily and mental breakdown.”

Do You Prefer Red, or Blue?

• WHAT psychological effects, as well as physical, are inseparable from colors is a .question on which scientists have been working for a long time. Recently Austrian scientists tested the effect of light on blindfold subjects. While unaffected by white light, they turned their arms toward the beam when it passed through a red glass, and away from it when it turned blue. Incidentally, it is claimed that there is actual vision in the skin itself, which is capable of considerable development.

Cave Man Was Progressive

• WE think of the Troglodyte (“cave man”) as a very low-browed specimen of the genus Homo; in spite of some very artistic work which he did in decorating the walls of his home. Yet, says Prof. Ales Hrdlicka, famous anthropologist, the cave man was a comparatively brainy and advanced specimen, of recent date, who did not live exposed to the weather like his ancestors, without shelter, but instead looked up comfortable, warm and dry apartments in the rocks.

Science News of the Month

TO ATTEMPT ATOMIC DISINTEGRATION BY MAGNETS
BY the use of atomic protons, or nuclei of hydrogen atoms, Drs. Ernest O. Lawrence and M. Stanley Livingston, of the University of California, expect to bombard atoms of other substances and, by breaking up their nuclei, to achieve transmutation, or conversion of one metal into another.

The magnet that they intend to use —one of the four most powerful ever made—could give to the proton projectiles enormous energy; so that when one struck the nucleus of another atom, it would, be burst asunder. In this way, atoms of baser metals might be changed into more valuable and rarer metals. The protons used as projectiles would be traveling at 8,000 miles a second.

X-RAY PICTURES OF SINUS IDENTIFY LIKE FINGERPRINTS
A NEW method of identification, which may prove useful to police departments and life insurance companies, has been announced by a Washington physician, Dr. Thomas A. Poole. The method makes use of x-ray photographs of the nasal sinuses; those tiny cavities in the skull which have been a source of intense discomfort and pain to many persons in recent years. Examination of over 2,200 pictures of sinuses, over eight years, show that in no two persons are the shapes of these cavities exactly alike, Dr. Poole stated. Furthermore, the bony partitions making the sinus cavities never change. Neither age nor treatment makes any difference in them; so that an X-ray picture taken of them at any time during a person’s life will be a lasting and positive means of identification, Dr. Poole declared.

COPPER DEFICIENCY CAUSES COWS’ COMPLAINTS
THE condition among cows known as “Salt Sick” has been found, according to the American Dairy Science Association, to be caused by a deficiency of copper and iron in the diet. Vegetation growing on white or gray sand has been discovered to be deficient of ingredients containing these important minerals. As a result growth is retarded, frequently by half; reproduction is impaired, and so seriously, that in some areas in Florida it is impossible to keep cows.

A RUNAWAY UNIVERSE
NEBULAS, those islands in space, say Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, two distinguished astronomers, are “running away from each other so fast that they cannot have been running long;” and therefore the universe is much younger than has hitherto been supposed. (However, Dr. Robert A. Millikan and other distinguished scientists took issue with them at a recent scientific convention.) The universe, Eddington calculates, was originally a billion light years in radius, before it started expanding at a terrific rate, a few ages ago. The reasoning is based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.

STEREOSCOPIC X-RAY DEVICE PEERS INTO LIVING BODY
A STEREOFLUOROSCOPE X-ray instrument, that shows the inner workings of the human body as though it were a moving picture, has been perfected at the California Institute of Technology for the Henry Phipps Institute at Philadelphia where practical medical experiments are to be conducted.

Several months ago a rough experimental model was of much interest when introduced to the medical world. When it proved a success, funds were secured from the Rockefeller Foundation for construction of a more elaborate instrument designed for use in hospitals.

The instrument was developed by Dr. Jeffe W. M. Dumont, research fellow in physics, Dr. Archer Hoyt, teaching fellow in physics, and Clarence Brandmyer, at the California Institute of Technology.

PLANETS BORN OF SOLAR COLLISION, SAYS DE SITTER
THE formation of the solar planets by the collision of our sun with a passing star was asserted by Willem De Sitter, noted Dutch astronomer in a recent public address, to be the only possible explanation. The star, he said, pulled from the sun material which became the planets. The momentum of the strange sun, transmitted by the collision, started the sun and planets whirling in the same direction through space.

FIFTH DIMENSION IN NEW EINSTEIN THEORY
Abandoning his four-dimensional mathematics in his attempt to find an equation that shall combine gravitational and electromagnetic phenomena Albert Einstein has now developed new equations using five-dimensional vectors, which he finds much more satisfactory. To the four-dimensional space-time concept he has added a new dimension utilizing the discoveries of Theodore Kaluza, stated in 1921, that space-time is really of five dimensions.

NEW MACHINE SOLVES TOUGH MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS
A NEW machine which can solve the complex mathematical problems arising in the course of scientific research has been made by Prof. v. Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

The “differential analyzer,” as Prof. Bush calls his mechanical thinker, will do for the advanced branches of science and engineering what the adding machine has done for business accounting methods.

When a physicist or chemist makes a guess or forms a theory about a scientific problem, he can often express it in the form of what he calls a “differential equation,” which must first be “solved.” Prof. Bush’s new machine promises to do this difficult and frequently occurring job.

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ADVENTURES of the POISON SQUAD

by James Nevin Miller

IN THE city of White Plains, N. Y., not so long ago, more than 700 people suddenly were stricken with a mysterious ailment. City authorities thought the case was food poisoning. But just what kind, puzzled them. True enough, it was learned that all the victims had eaten chocolate eclairs, cream puffs or Boston cream pies. However, none of the custard-filled pastries appeared to be “spoiled” although it was suspected that contaminated custard filling might have been the source of the poisoning.

Therefore, the city officials turned over samples of the pastry to the New York office of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration. These Government experts in turn sent the pastry to the Washington laboratories of the Administration.

Very quickly, the Federal investigators, aided by local authorities cleared up the situation by tracing the source of the spoiled food to one manu- facturing bakery in Westchester County, seizing and destroying all shipments sent out on the same day as the food poisoning outbreak, and identifying the deadly bacteria that caused the large-scale illness.

Thrills are commonplace to these health sleuths, who are known unofficially as Uncle Sam’s “Poison Squad.” Their job is to guard the safety of your pantry by tracking down, armed with ingenious laboratory and field methods, outstanding cases where moldy fruits and vegetables, contaminated sea foods, spoiled canned goods, and doubtful-looking imported edibles offer a serious menace to the health of the nation.

Just a few of the Poison Squad’s recent achievements, besides the settlement of the poisoned pastry case, include: the rounding up, during a three months period, of nearly a quarter million shipping cases of canned salmon, an appreciable percentage of which was spoiled; the investigation of a food poisoning outbreak in Philadelphia somewhat similar to the one at White Plains; and the discovery of the cause of a strange “epidemic” of the parasitic disease known as trichinosis, at Williamsville, N. Y.

Seizure of poisonous, decomposed or filthy foods is like stopping a murderer’s bullet in flight, says Dr. A. C. Hunter, chief bacteriologist of the Poison Squad. Oftentimes such seizure has been criticized as only a worthless gesture that may be compared to the arrest of a murderer’s revolver after it has slain its victim. Dr. Hunter does not agree. He says it is better to protect the public health by confiscating dangerous foods before they can cause injury than it is to prosecute after the damage is done. Seizure is the prompt and effective weapon which is the first reliance of the Food and Drug Administration.

Were it not for the vigilance of the Poison Squad your family right now might be eating apple butter or apple jelly containing lead or arsenic. Recently a jury, after studying a thorough investigation by the Federal food sleuths, found a big fruit company in the state of Washington guilty of a violation of the Food and Drugs Act in shipping interstate stocks of apple scrap which contained residues of poisonous lead and arsenical sprays. About 46,000 pounds of the scrap had been seized by the undercover men assigned to the case.

Surprisingly enough, nearly one-third of the time, money and effort expended by Uncle Sam’s food policemen is being devoted to protecting the public from the danger of poisons used in sprays to combat insect pests and diseases that attack fruits and vegetables. Every year thousands of carloads of fruits and vegetables are given painstaking laboratory examination to detect traces of such health-destroying residues. However, many of the states are cooperating and the situation is improving rapidly from year to year, officials say.

But, to complete the story about the White Plains poisoned pastry case. Aided by local health officers, the Federal food sleuths, as mentioned earlier, traced the source of the spoiled food to a single manufacturing bakery in Westchester County and rounded up and destroyed all shipments sent out on the same day as the food poisoning outbreak.

Meantime New York agents of the Food and Drug Administration made a thorough inspection of the bakery that made the pastry and found not a single trace of any unsanitary conditions. To this day the case is somewhat enshrouded in mystery, but it is believed by the Government scientists that the cream-filled pastry became poisonous mainly because it became unduly exposed to warm temperatures without proper refrigeration.

This outbreak and many other somewhat similar ones emphasizes that cream-filled pastries, since they are ideal for the growth of bacteria, should be produced, handled and refrigerated with extraordinary care if they are to be held any length of time before consumption.

A good many months ago New York City members of the Poison Squad tracked down 15 cases of the parasitic disease known as trichinosis, at Williamsville, N. Y. The outbreak, like others occurring in the United States, was traced to the eating of raw, or improperly cooked pork that was infested with the parasite known as Trichinae. Although 8 of the 15 persons affected were confined to hospitals, no deaths were reported. This fact is attributed to the prompt action of the Federal health sleuths, aided by Dr. Myron Metz, local health officer, who obtained a list of the buyers of the infected pork and advised each person to call a physician in case he felt sick.

A case of food poisoning in North Dakota, in which 12 persons died from eating home-canned peas, has prompted the United States Department of Agriculture to call attention again to a method of canning non-acid vegetables in the home to guard against the deadly botulinus poison.

In the canning of non-acid vegetables—peas, asparagus, beans, corn, beets, and spinach—the only safe course is to destroy all bacteria that may be present by canning under steam pressure, according to the Bureau of Home Economics. In the case of acid vegetables and fruits, such as tomatoes, apples, peaches, and gooseberries, the bacteria are killed at boiling temperature (212° F.) but with non-acid vegetables there is no assurance that the botulinus organisms will be killed by processing in boiling water unless the material is heated for six hours or longer. Obviously, a 6-hour treatment of peas or similar vegetables would result in a very unattractive product. A much shorter heating time is required at a temperature of 240° or 250° F., such as may be obtained in a pressure cooker.

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Getting a Line on the Aurora

ON A clear, moonless night a diffuse glow or a well-defined arch of pale pearly light is seen low over the northern horizon. Gradually the light grows brighter and presently long beams shoot up in great fan-like sheaves. In ghostly procession they shift back and forth across the sky. At times they shake with a tremulous motion, and again rapid flashes or pulsations of light roll up toward the zenith. Such is a typical display of the aurora, or northern lights, as beheld from middle latitudes of the north temperate zone.

These weird exhibitions of nature’s fireworks have been the subject of many superstitious beliefs. The Norsemen fancied them to be the Valkyries, in flashing armor, riding through the night. The rare displays seen in low latitudes inspired the tales of phantom armies warring in the sky that abound in ancient and mediaeval chronicles.

What is the aurora? And where is it? Let us answer the second of these questions first.

It is common to think of an auroral display as a local event—like a thunderstorm, for example, and to regard the displays seen at different places on any one night as separate and distinct “auroras.” This conception is erroneous. If we could view the earth from some point several hundred miles out in space, we should see that the aurora forms two semi-permanent belts encircling the polar regions of both hemispheres. That of the northern hemisphere is the aurora borealis, and that of the southern, the aurora australis.

Brilliant and widespread displays of aurora occur chiefly at times when the sun is in a state of great turmoil, as shown by the presence of many sunspots and great “prominences” of incandescent gas shot out from the solar atmosphere. These displays are also accompanied by so-called magnetic storms on earth, and interfere with the operation of telegraph lines and radio.

The best answer science is able to give at present to the question “What is the aurora?” is that this phenomenon is a glow discharge of electricity through the rarefied gases of the upper atmosphere, more or less similar to the glows seen in neon tubes, mercury-vapor lamps and the like. The exciting cause of the discharge is supposed to be the bombardment of the atmosphere by electrified particles from the sun.

The solar particles, on approaching the earth, follow the magnetic “lines of force surrounding the earth” which eventually bring them down through the atmosphere in two belts surrounding the magnetic poles. These are the auroral belts.

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Uncle Sam’s Poison Squad Safeguards Your Food Supply

by C. MORAN

Poisoned food epidemics are becoming increasingly rare, thanks to the eternal vigilance waged by government squads of “poison chasers” who relentlessly track down contaminated food shipments. This article tells you how to guard against poisoned food in your home.

“TELEGRAM for the chief,” sang out an office boy, dropping the message on the secretary’s desk. It read: “Twenty people poisoned; two dead. Community fear running high. A fiend must be at work.”

Within an hour, members of the Government “Poison Squad” were speeding to the scene of the outbreak. They interviewed victims on sick beds; samples of foods eaten were obtained and subjected to chemical and bacteriological analysis. Nothing poisonous whatever was found in the suspected foods.

Then the daughter of one of the victims told an investigator of her father’s habit of drinking old maid’s tea,—sugar and water. She recalled now that the water had momentarily turned pink when she added the sugar. The •cup ? Examination of the dregs showed unmistakable traces of arsenic.

The grocer who sold the sugar said he had no arsenic, but a local druggist was found who had sold him an arsenical poison six months before. The poison was in a paper sack inside a pasteboard box labeled “POISON”. Customers complained upon seeing this package on an upper shelf, whereupon the grocer removed the outer wrapper and returned the inner sack to the shelf. Subsequently this sack got mixed with some one pound packages of sugar that had become soiled, and the grocer had dumped the lot into a barrel for repackaging.

Thus another of the scores of perplexing food poisoning outbreaks that occur annually in the United States was solved by the “Poison Squad”— a group of Government Food chemists and bacteriologists whose job it is to investigate every case of food poisoning, not only to run down the case in hand but in order that the entire supply of the poisonous substance may be seized.

Most poison cases, according to Inspector G. P. Larrick, of the Federal Poison Squad, who recently conducted an international chase after a poisonous fruit cake destined for a Canadian family, are the result of negligence in the preparation and handling of foods in the home. Hence, poison outbreaks are most frequent following community picnics, club suppers, and other forms of get-together feasts where the food is contributed by various participants. This type of case is difficult to solve because of the many sources from which the food is derived.

The solution of criminal poison cases, on the other hand, is comparatively easy, inasmuch as the motive usually is readily ascertained and the sale of the poison can usually be traced. In a typical case, a family in Ohio became ill with gastric trouble, and one member of the family died. The Poison Squad analyzed samples of food eaten but found nothing of a poisonous nature. A canvass of retail drug stores disclosed that the family cook had recently bought some rat poison. The cook confessed that she had dumped this poison into the coffee, and she was subsequently convicted of murder.

The prevention of nation-wide poisoning epidemics is the primary interest of the Federal government in running down food poisonings. An extensive system of cooperation between Federal, State and local health authorities has been developed to this end, whereby prompt seizures of poisonous goods are made wherever the products may be in the channels from manufacturer to consumer. For administrative purposes the nation is divided into ten sections, to each of which is attached a member of the Federal Poison Squad. Only men who have had long experience in food and drug law enforcement are assigned to this duty. Immediately upon notification of a food poisoning case, an inspector rushes to the scene, gathers all available samples of food, dispatches these to a government laboratory, and interviews the victims.

When a food in general distribution is found to be poisonous, it is trailed back to the grocer who sold it, to the wholesaler, and to the manufacturer. The distribution of every lot is ascertained, and local and State health officers are furnished the names and addresses of the food handlers involved in their immediate jurisdictions. If necessary, the foods are trailed to the ultimate consumers, and depending on the seriousness of the case, a general alarm may be broadcast throughout the community by means of radio or the daily press.

The efficiency of this system is exemplified by the so-called Chicago onion poisoning case. In this case, investigation of the death of one man and the serious illness of another in the Windy City disclosed that the victims had eaten imported canned onions which contained the virulent toxin that causes botulism, one of the most dangerous forms of food poisoning known. The onions had been packed in Italy and distributed by a New York representative to. many cities and towns in the East and Middle West.

The Poison Squad obtained the names and addresses of all dealers to whom shipments had been made, and the telegraph wires were soon singing with seizure orders. Shipments were located in twenty-five cities. The bacteriologists examined 368 cans taken as samples and found 22 cans so highly toxic as to cause death when fed to guinea pigs; 30 others yielded cultures that produced toxin fatal to guinea pigs. The case was cleaned up within forty-eight hours.

The Federal officials explain that it is possible to seize goods before they have gone into consumption on a nation-wide scale because usually the first poison case is located close to the source of original distribution, and in most instances the case is solved while the bulk of the supplies are still en route to distant markets. Legitimate food processors and packers lend every cooperation in this work. The only exception to this situation in recent years was the epidemic of ginger Jake paralysis last summer, which could not be run down promptly because of the “bootlegging” elements in the case.

In the laboratory, foods are subjected to every known chemical and bacteriological test; they are fed to guinea pigs; recently a glass stomach has been invented in which digestive processes simulating those of the human stomach may be observed. The chemists use this artificial stomach in which to determine the digestibility of the protein in foods. The proteins to be tested are placed in glass containers in a dilute solu- tion of hydrochloric acid similar to that found normally in the human stomach, the proper quantity of pepsin is added, and the mixture is placed in an incubator where the temperature is kept at the same point as that of the human stomach, about 37 degrees centigrade.

After a certain number of hours the contents of the container are sampled and analyzed. The digestive effect is measured by the ratio of what is known as amino nitrogen to total nitrogen. After the food has been acted upon by the pepsin and hydrochloric acid, it is treated with trypsin and a dilute alkaline solution, as nearly as possible like the digestive juices found in the small intestine. This process tells the investigator what the probable digestive action on any particular food will be in the intestine.

A specimen of fruit cake which was said to have made four people in Virginia violently ill were sent for inspection to the laboratories of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration. Samples of the cake were fed to animals in the laboratory and these animals promptly showed symptoms of poisoning. Chemical analysis showed the cake to be heavily loaded with arsenic; nearly 2,000 times the amount which is regarded as being within the limit of safety. The cake had been purchased from a housekeeper who conducts a small retail business in home-baked fruit cakes for the holiday season.

Inspector Larrick, assigned to the investigation, discovered that the arsenic contaminated cake was one of nine baked for the Christmas trade, three of which had been sold. One cake had made six people ill; another had poisoned four people. The third cake had been bought by a house-to-house agent whose identity and whereabouts were unknown, but who had stated that the cake was to be sent to relatives in Canada.

Larrick tried to locate this agent in Washington and New York through the manufacturers and distributors of the commodity sold by the agent, without success. Then he canvassed each house in the neighborhood where the cake had been sold, and two days before Christmas he found a colored woman who told Larrick of another colored woman in a nearby town, who “might know the agent”. The inspector was informed by this second person that the agent had lived in that neighborhood but had moved some time previously without leaving a new address; however, that the agent had a relative, back country.

Larrick located this relative, and told him that at the time the cake was bought, the agent had said something about sending the cake to relatives in Canada. The Canadian relatives were called by long distance telephone, and the cake was found,—the night before Christmas. Larrick’s job was not finished, however, until he should run down the source of the poison.

Inquiry in the home where the cake was made showed that whenever the flour from a certain sack was used, the symptoms of poisoning recurred. Chemical analysis showed the flour to be heavily contaminated with arsenic, and the significance of this discovery, if the flour was representative of other flour of the same brand which had been commercially distributed, was appal- ling. The prospect of wholesale poisoning of flour users was visualized by the inspector, who took immediate steps to investigate the mill, the warehouse, and the stores from which the flour had probably been obtained. No contamination with arsenic was uncovered at any of these points.

A second search of the premises disclosed an empty sack containing minute quantities of a white powder which proved to be calcium arsenate, the same substance found in the flour and fruit cakes. It was later established that the calcium arsenate, bought for garden use, had become mixed accidentally with the flour.

“Poison Squad” officials lay down a few simple rules for safeguarding against food poisoning. All poisons should be plainly labeled and stored in a safe place away from food products. Arsenical insecticides may easily be mistaken for flour. Food to be eaten raw should be fresh, clean, free~from abnormal odors, rotting areas and from mold, and should be washed in clean water fit for drinking purposes. Cooked foods should be heated to the boiling point.

Foods such as meat pies, scalloped fish or oysters, hash, some salads, puddings, custards and cream pie fillings may cause illness because in the process of preparation insufficient heating is used to destroy the bacteria or their toxins. Never use food from cans showing springing, flipping or swelled lids. Throw away, without tasting, any food from glass jars showing leaks around the rubber rings, cloudiness of the liquid, or spurting of the contents when the bottle is opened. Sound food freshly and thoroughly cooked does not cause food poisoning.

How to Guard Against Food Poisoning Label all poisons plainly and store away from food products.

Wash food to be eaten raw in clean water; make sure the food has no rotted or moldy areas.

Heat cooked foods to the boiling point.

Keep left-over foods in a refrigerator.

Don’t use food from cans showing swelled lids or cloudy contents.

Faster Than Light!

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT may come as a shock, to most students of science, to learn that there are still in the world some scientists who believe that there are speeds greater than that of light.

Since the advent of Einstein, most scientists and physicists have taken it for granted that speeds greater than 186,300 miles per second are impossible in the universe. Indeed, one of the principal tenets of the relativity theory is that the mass of a body increases with its speed, and would become infinite at the velocity of light. Hence, a greater velocity is impossible.

Among those who deny that this is true, there is Nikola Tesla, well known for his hundreds of important inventions. The induction motor and the system of distributing alternating current are but a few of his great contributions to modern science. In 1892, he made his historic experiments in Colorado; where he manufactured, for the first time, artificial lightning bolts 100 feet long, and where he was able, by means of high-frequency currents, to light electric lamps at a distance of three miles without the use of any wires whatsoever.

Talking to me about these experiments recently, Dr. Tesla revealed that he had made a number of surprising discoveries in the high-frequency electric field and that, in the course of these experiments, he had become convinced that he propagated frequencies at speeds higher than the speed of light.

In his patent No. 787,412, filed May 16, 1900, Tesla showed that the current of his transmitter passed over the earth’s surface with a speed of 292,830 miles per second, while radio waves proceed with the velocity of light. Tesla holds, however, that our present “radio” waves are not true Hertzian waves, but really sound waves.

He informs me, further, that he knows of speeds several times greater than that of light, and that he has designed apparatus with which he expects to project so-called electrons with a speed equal to twice that of light.

Coming from so eminent a source, the statement should be given due consideration. After all, abstract mathematics is one thing, and actual experimentation is another. Not so many years ago, one of the world’s greatest scientists of the time proved mathematically that it is impossible to fly a heavier-than-air machine. Yet we are flying plenty of airplanes today.

Tesla contradicts a part of the relativity theory emphatically, holding that mass is unalterable; otherwise, energy could be produced from nothing, since the kinetic energy acquired in the fall of a body would be greater than that necessary to lift it at a small velocity.

It is within the bounds of possibility that Einstein’s mathematics of speeds greater than light may be wrong. Tesla has been right many times during the past, and he may be proven right in the future. In any event, the statement that there are speeds faster than light is a tremendous one, and opens up entirely new vistas to science.

While it is believed by many scientists, today, that the force of gravitation is merely another manifestation of electromagnetic waves, there have, as yet, been no proofs of this. There are, of course, many obscure tilings about gravitation that we have not, as yet, fathomed, At one time, it was believed by many scientists that the speed of gravitation is instantaneous throughout the universe. This is simply another way of putting it that there are speeds greater than light.

Yet, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, no one today has any idea how fast gravitational waves—always providing that the force is in waves—travel. If the moon, for instance, were to explode at a given moment, how long would it be before the gravitational disturbance would be felt on earth? Would the gravitational impulse or waves travel at the speed of light—that is, 186,000 miles per second—or would the effect be instantaneous? We do not know.

The entire subject will no doubt arouse a tremendous interest in scientific circles. It is hoped that other scientists will be encouraged to investigate Dr. Tesla’s far-reaching assertions; either to definitely prove or to disprove them.

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Inventions Needed in Field of Electrochemistry

An interview with Professor Colin G. Fink
Head, Division of Electrochemistry Columbia University

by Richard H. Parke

“THE young inventor looking for new worlds to conquer would do well to investigate the vast but little-explored domains of electrochemistry. Hundreds of new products and inventions difficult or impossible to discover during the countless ages of the past with mechanical skill alone are today readily possible through the combined power of electricity and chemistry Thus Professor Colin G. Fink of Columbia University presents an invitation — and a challenge—to inventive minds everywhere.

He sees no reason why young men with courage and imagination should not play an important part in future scientific development and he believes his own field offers unlimited possibilities for advancement.

When I called on him in his laboratory at Columbia, I told him the readers of Modern Mechanix were particularly interested in needed inventions and I asked him to name a few of the problems which, in his opinion, demanded the greatest attention at this time.

“Our basic engineering metal is iron,” he began. “It is the most abundant and has the most valuable properties, such as high tensile strength, high fatigue value, etc. The world produces more of iron and steel than all the other metals put together. For every 100 tons of iron and steel, only 2 tons of copper are produced—and copper occupies second place in quantity and importance among metals!

“With ever rapidly increasing utilization of steel in railroads, automobiles, bridges, buildings, high transmission towers and other articles, the problem of eliminating rust and protecting steel products and costly structures against corrosion is undoubtedly the biggest problem confronting the chemist and engineer. Metals rust as a result of electrochemical action. If we eliminate this, we eliminate rust! The young men of the coming generation will solve this problem; marked progress towards a solution already has been made.

“We are also badly in need of an electric source of illumination suitable to our eyes which will operate at 90 per cent or better in efficiency instead of less than 10 per cent as at present. Electricity is modern man’s indispensable and versatile servant; eliminate it and civilization would drop back 100 years, But, although electricity has increased the efficiency of old hand-operated machines and innumerable devices a thousandfold or more, it has so far not accomplished anything near as much for artificial light.

“The tungsten lamp in the average man’s home furnishes but 5 cents’ worth of light for every dollar’s worth of electricity. The balance, 95 cents, is lost as useless heat. Modern homes and towns need a lamp that will furnish at least 90 per cent light and only 10 per cent heat. The little firefly, or glowworm, operates its light at figures even better than 90 per cent. The lamp of the future may very well be based on principles similar to those of the firefly’s glow.

“A simple means of electrically controlling rainfall—keeping it out of the cities—is another important problem to solve. The Cottrell electrical precipitation process is used at factories all over the world to precipitate fumes, dusts, smoke and vapors of all kinds. It requires very little development to apply this same process to the precipitation of rain in localities outside of towns and cities. Millions of dollars’ worth of shoes, clothing and other goods are annually destroyed in the cities on account of rain.

“We should systematically investigate the application of electric currents in the stimulation of the growth of living cells and the formation of many organic compounds. The production of fruits, vegetables and other food materials in a few localities and then shipping them half way around the globe appears to us an awful economic waste and extravagance. With the aid of electricity, truck farms located in the outskirts of cities, or on the roofs of skyscrapers, will produce any, or all, fruits and vegetables. Why not?

“One other important problem is a means to convert ores into finished metal products easily and efficiently. Metals occur in nature combined with other elements, notably sulphur. The old process that dates back at least 5,000 years consists in roasting the sulphur compounds, thereby producing oxides; and then mixing these oxides with coke or charcoal and heating to high temperatures to reduce the oxides to metal— usually very impure at that. Electrically, it will be commercially possible some day to produce pure metals free from sulphur, phosphorus and other deleterious or objectionable impurities.”

Dr. Fink is, himself, working on two important developments at the present time. He is experimenting on a way to convert the sun’s rays into electric power and he is trying to find a satisfactory method of extracting gold from the seas.

In explaining his “power from the sun” theory, he told me that mankind was rapidly approaching the need for additional power resources.

“There is not enough water power on earth to supply more than 10 per cent of our energy demands,” he said, “and since coal, oil and gas necessarily produce most of the remaining 90 per cent, a substitute must be found. I believe this can be accomplished through the use of photo-electric generator cells and I predict that the day will come when these cells will be placed, for example, on the roofs of large apartment buildings and will be used to operate electric refrigerators, flat irons, toasters, vacuum cleaners and other appliances. Still greater uses will of course eventuate.”

Dr. Fink’s new photo-electric generator cell produces about 25 per cent more current than devices formerly used and also is more sensitive to light. The current obtained is still far too small to be practical for commercial power generation but he expects a vast improvement will be made in the near future.

Pointing out that this cell is not the “electric eye” of the motion picture and television, he said it was composed of a sheet of metal in a salt solution or in contact with a salt which, like silver bromide, is sensitive to the sun’s rays. Opposite to this sheet of metal, but kept in the dark, is a second sheet of metal. While the sun shines on the first an electric current flows from one sheet of metal to the other.

“It has been known for a long time,” he explained, “that some chemical compounds are changed in composition upon exposure to the sun. Now certain of these compounds change in one direction only. Thus white silver bromide is converted to a black product when exposed to the sun, as all amateur photographers know. Another well known case, especially for the Sunday hiker, is the way green pop bottles will be found to have changed to a lavender shade after having been discarded and left to lie on the ground exposed to the sun’s rays.

“The chemical salts or compounds we are particularly interested in at the present are those that will change to a new compound in the light but will change back to the original when placed in the dark.”

The “gold from the sea” problem is one that has baffled scientists for many years. One of the main difficulties in this field has been the fact that the gold particles, or ions, that carry a positive charge of electricity, are unable to get close enough to be deposited on the negative electrode, or cathode, because the alkaline film surrounding the cathode is too thick. This alkaline film is brought about by the decomposition of sodium chloride (ordinary table salt) at the cathode, the sodium ions being converted to sodium hydroxide (lye).

Dr. Fink has succeeded in overcoming this film obstacle by rotating the cathode at high speed, an action that reduces the thickness of the alkaline film.

He uses a copper disk for his cathode, which is electrically propelled and spins around at a terrific speed.

It is interesting to know that his original apparatus was the familiar malted milk stirrer. He took off the little nut at the end of the rod and replaced it with a copper disk the size of a half dollar.

But the speed of the malted milk machine was not high enough and he substituted his present apparatus which, while considerably larger and heavier, looks not unlike its smaller counterpart in any drugstore!

In a typical experiment, Dr. Fink employed a disk of 5-centimeter diameter, spinning at the rate of 8,500 revolutions per minute. The disk was set in three liters of a 3 per cent salt solution containing three miligrams of gold. At the end of a half hour, more than 90 per cent of the gold was plated out on the disk.

Dr. Fink pointed out, however, that hope of recovering billions from the seas must be dispelled for the present because the cost of the electricity to operate the cathode is about five times the value of the gold recovered.

He added that at the same time this procedure was more profitable in the case of radioactive metals. The metal polonium, for example, can readily and profitably be recovered from waste solutions.

We Change But Little

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT is a curious fact that the average layman has an idea that we change biologically during the course of a few generations.

Nothing could be more erroneous. The changes that take place in the characteristics of the normal human being within the course of such a small time interval— geologically speaking—as 5,000 years, are insignificant.

It should always be remembered that even a stretch of 5,000 years, which we human beings may consider long, represents only a couple of hundred generations; which is much too short a space of time to get any positive results, one way or another.

Measurements made from mummies of Egyptians who died 5,000 years ago shows that in every essential respect they were the same as we are today. They had ;>. similar stature to present-day Egyptians; their brain capacity was the same; the skeleton was in every respect a duplicate of the present-day bone structure; and they had to contend with the same diseases that we have today.

From a biological standpoint, it is impossible to find any fundamental change in the human race over a stretch of 5,000 years.

The same holds true of other characteristics; it may be said that the mental equipment of the old Egyptians was at a par with ours today. In other words, the ancient Egyptian had the same type of brain that we have and, if he were transported into the Twentieth Century, he would soon adapt himself, most likely, to his new environment, which is the only thing that has changed. We must go back more than 50,000 years, or roughly, two thousand generations, before we can find much of a biological change.

As we go further back, however, we are struck immediately with the difference in the human skull, which was originally flatter in front, and of thicker bone structure; but otherwise, comparatively few changes are found. To find a radical difference, a much greater time-interval, biologically speaking, must take place; we have to go back to such remains as are scientifically termed “Neanderthal man”, which flourished some 500,000 years ago.

It is the same in the animal and insect world where the changes—biologically speaking—run over a like amount of generations.

Ants have been found imbedded in amber, the age of which has been calculated to be at least half a million years; this shows us that the ants of that time were practically the same as those living today. Yet, since an ant lives a very much shorter time than a human being, it can be seen that literally billions of generations of ants have succeeded each other and yet, there has been no change to speak of.

It is most likely that, in the higher types of mammals, evolutionary changes take place only when certain conditions to which they are exposed change radically.

One of the most important biological factors is found in certain radiations coming to us from space. Cut off, for instance, the ultra-violet rays; and immediately the animal world, along with the human beings, begins to suffer in many ways.

It has been found that excessive volcanic disturbances throw up into the upper strata of our atmosphere a very fine dust, which cuts down the percentage of solar radiation received, and a proportional amount of ultraviolet light.

Conditions such as those which produced the several last “ice ages” must have had a profound effect on the animal world; although science, today, does not know exactly whether these changes were to our advantage or our disadvantage.

One thing is certain, however, that changes in the typical human being take place at such a slow rate that it is impossible to know anything about the subject from one generation to the next.