Academy

The National Academy of Sciences held its annual meeting in Washington. There were celebrated speakers, striking subjects.

Time. Dr. E. W. Brown, Yale astronomer and mathematician, discoursed on his tables of the moon and data collected during the 1925 total eclipse (TIME, Nov. 24, 1924, et seq.). He could show that the moon is lopsided, heavier at the bottom than on top.

Six-Foot Children. Drs. Thomas B. Osborne and Lafayette B. Mendel of Yale reported dietetic experiments on rats which, if applied to humans, would produce six-foot six-year-olds. The diet: liberal proteins;lettuce; liver; yeast.

Sex Test. An exhibit showed the high accuracy of a Russian test for determining, from a drop of blood or sap, an organism’s sex. In nearly every case, the female was chemically more active than the male.

Calcium. Dr. Weston A. Price of Cleveland reported data furthering scientific knowledge of the effect of the ultraviolet ray in aiding calcium assimilation (bone growth). This knowledge, already applied to the treatment of rickets, definitely relates influenza epidemics with city smoke-palls; definitely benefits gravid women, who, according to the old rule, sacrificed “a tooth for every child.”

Bombardment. Professor William D. Harkins of Chicago reported negative results from efforts to duplicate experiments by which Professor Miethe of Berlin and Professor Nagoaka of Tokyo have claimed they obtained gold from mercury. Mercury was bombarded with streams of electrons from an X-ray tube at 140,000 volts, but not so much as one part of gold in a hundred billion of mercury was afterwards detected. Nitrogen bombarded with helium atoms going 12,000 miles an hour was built up into fluorine atoms, which then disintegrated into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.

Millikan Rays. Histories of science will refer to 1925 and 1926 as the years when “universal rays” were reported by Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, Pasadena, Calif. Dr. Millikan, at a session of the American Geophysical Union, again described how he had detected, by observing their effect upon delicate instruments scabbarded against other influences, rays with a wave length one ten-millionth that of light rays; rays which can penetrate six feet of lead and which impinge upon the earth from the surrounding universe in all directions (TIME, Jan. 11).