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The Mystery of the Shrinking Oranges

A Sad Story from Southern California

by John Devaney

California’s Valencia oranges are shrinking. The Golden State’s summer orange, which provides the entire nation with orange juice from July to November, has become little larger than a golf ball. And nobody in California knows why. Read the rest of this entry »

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COMPUTERS: THEIR BUILT-IN LIMITATIONS

ARTICLE BY MAX GUNTHER “OH, MY GOD” croaked a network-TV director in New York. He seemed to be strangling in his turtle-neck shirt. It was the evening of Election Day, 1966, and the director’s world was caving in. Here he was, on the air with the desperately important Election Night coverage, competing with the two enemy networks to see whose magnificently transistorized, fearfully fast electronic computer could predict the poll results soonest and best. Live coverage: tense-voiced, sweating announcers, papers flapping around, aura of unbearable suspense. The whole country watching. And what happens? The damned computer quits. Read the rest of this entry »

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NEW in SCIENCE

MECHANICAL RUG CLEANER designed by a carpet cleaning company in West Berlin, Germany, is a popular innovation in the trade. Device beats the dust and dirt from the rugs, then vacuum-cleans them—right on the street where customers can watch job being done. Housewives can also phone for service and company will oblige them.

DURABLE DENTURES invented by Doctor Irving L. Cook of Suring, Wis., were designed to cut and shear food the same as a meat grinder. The molars and the bicuspids in the lower plate have holes in the tops and two channels down the outside where the food is forced through. Chap using them might be said to have an iron bite, eh?
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SAN FRANCISCO FIGHTS FOR ITS CABLE CARS

“Save our cable cars,” say Frisco’s citizens. But the City Hall boys have other ideas.

By Louis Hochman

SAN FRANCISCO shakes again! In 1906 it was Nature that rocked the infant town into a mass of ashes and rubble. Today it’s human nature that is giving this Golden Gate City the shakes with a wave of public sentiment that has spread far beyond the city’s own boundaries. Once again the people of San Francisco have gathered in force to go fight City Hall. It’s a battle between practicality and sentimentality and the object of this latest uprising is once again the dinky little cable car—that ding-dong relic of the Gay Nineties that continues to clang its merry way up and down the precipitous hills of San Francisco in blissful defiance of modern science and the forces of progress. Read the rest of this entry »

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COMPUTERS: THEIR SCOPE TODAY

ARTICLE BY ERNEST HAVEMANN

AT THE Massachusetts Institute of Technology there sits a giant computer, its lights constantly blinking and its dials endlessly churning out new numbers, on which some unknown technician has fastened one of the buttons now so popular among the hippie set. The button reads:

I AM A HUMAN BEING.
DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR MUTILATE

Newcomers to the laboratory spot the button, move in for a closer look and nod—yet seldom smile. To most people who deal with computers, the button seems not funny, not ridiculous, not cynical but oddly appropriate.
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Check out the predictions at the end of the article.

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COMPUTERS THAT ARE REALLY PORTABLE

By Philip L. Harrison & Margaret A. Taylor

IN 1946, the first American electronic digital computer, ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), was unveiled. It ran on 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 6,000 switches and 10,000 capacitors. It weighed more than 30 tons, occupied 1,500 square feet of floor space and consumed 140,000 watts of electricity. Commercial versions of this machine ran to the tune of $5 million.
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Exploring the Science of Shaving

WHAT could science possibly know about your beard that you don’t already know? Surely, your knowledge of how to shave that beard—gained from long and painful experience—would be more accurate than any theories scientists might have on whisker cutting. Or would it?

The chances are, you might find (as we did) that a little study on the subject of beards, can produce much more comfortable shaves. It also makes a fine topic for conversation with the boys in the back room when the poker game lags.

There is even, for instance, a correct technical name for the science of shaving. They call it pogonotomy, whether it’s done by carving whiskers off with lather and a blade razor, or chopping them off dry with an electric razor. We’ll discuss both methods, starting with the lather-and-slice routine. Read the rest of this entry »

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NEW in SCIENCE

Real One-Armed Bandit was hand carved by Sundance Cravat of Reno to raise money for a Shrine fund. Like its less worthy brethren, this slot machine took in much more than it paid out.

Pedestrian Glasses are equipped with a rear-view mirror for spotting lady and Sunday drivers. Inventor Emil Meyer showed them at Munich’s Inventor Fair, insists they are no gag.
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Rubber from the SUN – and Power Too!

Amazing experiments conducted on the American desert point the way toward the day when the sun will be the universal source of power for industry—and also the manufacturing source of rubber, nitrates, and other organic compounds. This authentic article explains how such results were achieved, and describes probable future developments.
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Personology—Science of Success

Bob Whiteside, Personologisf, is startling the scientific world with an amazing new system for determining a person’s aptitudes by his physical appearance.

By Lee Edson

THE man and woman standing in front of the studio audience at a recent San Francisco radio show were plainly skeptical. And so was the audience itself.

They stared at ex-newspaperman Bob Whiteside with a show-me attitude that for a lesser person might have been disconcerting. But Whiteside, who was on the program to demonstrate what he could reveal about a person merely by looking at him, was used to skepticism. He looked his subjects over carefully. He had never seen them before and there was little about them that could distinguish them from thousands of others. Read the rest of this entry »

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INDUSTRY GIVES A LABORATORY TO AMERICA’S YOUNG SCIENTISTS

YOUTHFUL, IMAGINATION, an inexhaustible national resource, is being developed along scientific lines by the American Institute of the City of New-York. This organization, chartered in 1828 and devoted throughout its existence to the promulgation of science and the encouragement of American industry, established its junior branch in 1928 and recently has intensified its efforts in this direction through the American Institute Laboratory at 310 Fifth Avenue, New York.
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