Life Without Germs In a Laboratory
At the University of Notre Dame there are some laboratory animals living in a world apart—a world without germs. Their world consists of a giant tank, large enough to hold 1000 animals, which has been made completely germfree. Attendants and scientists who must enter the tank to feed and examine the animals do so by diving through a germicidal solution. They also wear plastic suits and masks which completely enclose their bodies. The scientists hope to discover how much longer the animals will live if they are kept in a germfree atmosphere.

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Science Takes the Measure of Man

Strange instruments are pointing the way to the shapes of tomorrow—from hats to space cabins

By S. David Pursglove

FURNITURE for your future house, seats for next year’s cars, desks for new schools—all are being designed by scientists who specialize in studying man’s past. The Air Force is leading the way and business and industry are following close behind—in using anthropology to make clothing fit better, seats more comfortable and working conditions safer and more efficient. The Air Force started using anthropology, the science that led to reconstruction of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man, to design pressure suits and other space-age clothing and equipment. Read the rest of this entry »

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PRACTICAL AND MYSTIFYING HOME TESTS YOU CAN MAKE WITH IRON

By Raymond B. Wailes

MYSTIFYING and spectacular ‘effects give a keen interest to home experiments with iron and its compounds. The amateur chemist can make paint, produce molten iron from a simple mixture, and perform many other stunts that show why iron is man’s most useful metal.

Iron betrays its presence everywhere. Our blood gets its red color from the iron it contains. Soils, clays, bricks, and stones are colored by the iron in the earth’s crust.

A handful of ordinary nails or tacks will serve as the starting point for the home chemist’s experiments. From them he can produce several interesting iron compounds.
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And just last month, Columbia decided to get rid of the cyclotron.

Columbia Gets Cyclotron

Shown above is Columbia University’s new 150,000-pound cyclotron, the huge electrical apparatus which fires atomic “bullets” at a 25,000-mile-per-second speed to perform modern alchemy by changing one chemical element into another. Detailed study of nuclear forces, which are the ultimate forces that hold the materials of the universe together, will be one of the first tasks undertaken by Columbia physicists with the cyclotron.
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It seems sort of obvious to us that South America and Africa fit together but I’m guessing that they just couldn’t believe that they could have spread that far apart.

Here is a good animation that shows the history of continental drift.

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Scientists Find Traces of Two Lost Continents

DOWN through the ages, man has hung to the words of Plato. For Plato told of a great continent, Atlantis by name, which slipped under the waters of the sea, carrying with it an entire civilization.

Recent discoveries point to the fact that approximately 250,000,000 years ago, South America, Africa, India, Australia and a great portion of the Antarctic region were a single continent. Similar discoveries reveal the existence, until about the same period, of a North Atlantis, a sort of super-continent, which ran from the present western shores of North America to the British Isles, and possibly connected, by a few small peninsulas, with Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

“U-235″-Powerful New Fuel

That May Change the World

NEWLY discovered is a natural substance— a rare form of uranium known as “U-235″ —so powerful that one pound of it will give off as much energy as 3,000,000 pounds of gasoline or 5,000,000 pounds of coal! And if scientists can really harness enough of this substance and put it to work, human life may see a greater revolution than that caused by the steam engine.
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Hints for Beginners in Amateur Chemistry

Join in the Fun of Experimenting at Home! This Article Tells How Easy It Is to Start

By RAYMOND B. WAILES

IF YOU have been following this series of articles for some time, you probably have already set up a more or less complete chemical workshop in which to carry on your experiments. However, there is always a new crop of beginners coming along—newcomers who would like to join the fun and who need some simple advice on equipment and working methods. Old-timers surely won’t begrudge this space to help others get started in the fascinating pastime of amateur chemistry—and perhaps their own memories will be refreshed with a pointer or two.
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Queer Machine Checks Up on Ether Drift

SCIENTISTS at Jena, Germany, have constructed one of the most amazing and odd-appearing measuring devices on record. It is an apparatus to measure the drift of the ether, that impalpable substance which, according to one school of thought, fills the space in which the universe swims. Theoretically the motion of the earth, passing through this ether, should set up a drift comparable to the breeze generated by the motion of an automobile through the air.
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How can you not love an article with quotes like this:
“By the time you get down near Absolute Zero everything in the world is frozen harder than a pawnbroker’s heart…”

When this article was written the record low temperature achieved by scientists was .0015 K. The current record is 0.00000000045 K.

Actually things get MUCH weirder near absolute zero then they thought at the time. Check out these links for more.

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So You Think THIS Is Cold?

Teeth chattering? Fingers numb? Well it’s warm compared to what the lab boys call Absolute Zero.

By Lawrence Sanders

“Tis IS BITTER cold and I am sick at heart,” quoth Hamlet. And right now most citizens are hunching along, swaddled to the ears against the cold and muttering, “You said a mouthful, Bard.”

Is it cold enough for you?

As a matter of fact, it probably is cold enough for you—whether you live in Weeping Water, Neb. or Hiram, Ga. One man’s heat wave is another man’s cold snap and a Key Wester can be just as uncomfortable at 40° F as a Bald Eagle, Minn, resident when the mercury goofs off to—40 °F.
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How TO CONVERT OLD ELECTRIC LIGHT BULBS INTO CHEMICAL GLASSWARE

By Earl D Hay

EXPERIMENTS in an amateur chemical laboratory are much more interesting when they are made with the same kind of apparatus as that used in professional laboratories. As a rule, however, the home chemist experiences a great – shortage of flasks and endeavors to use various kinds of bottles as makeshifts, little realizing that he may make from burned-out electric light bulbs a great variety of useful flasks like those sold by chemical supply houses at from 20 to 75 cents each. The lamps used in the average home vary in size from 25 to 200 watts and are suitable for small Florence or boiling flasks. Larger flasks are made from 300-, 500-, and 1,000-watt lamps, which can be obtained from the janitors of stores and linemen of the city lighting companies.
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Dry Ice-Capades

Dry ice is very interesting stuff! Get yourself a chunk (handling it with gloves) and perform the simple experiments illustrated here.

DRY ice is solid carbon dioxide. It’s very interesting stuff. For one thing, it sublimes at room temperature; that is, although a solid, it evaporates to form a gas without passing through the liquid state. The mist you see formed by dry ice is water “squeezed” out of the air because it has been chilled below the dewpoint.
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Glass Making Easy for Home Chemist

By Raymond B. Wailes

BECAUSE of its importance in glass making and other industries, silicon opens a particularly interesting experimental field to the home chemist. In nature, silicon is almost as plentiful as oxygen. Yet, it hides itself well in its compounds. It never is found free and uncom-bined and can be separated from its associates only through clever chemical thievery in the laboratory.

Industrially, silicon is obtained by heating sand—a compound of silicon and oxygen—and coke to a high temperature in an electric furnace. The white-hot coke steals the oxygen from the sand to form carbon monoxide and frees the silicon. Although the amateur chemist will have no electric furnace in which to duplicate this process, he can obtain a similar result by heating sand and powdered magnesium over his ordinary laboratory gas burner.
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