SCIENCE NOTES & NEWS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 552, 22 March 1913, Page 7

SCIENCE NOTES & NEWS.

DIAMONDS FROM THE SKY.

Doctor Lacour, a noted chemist, advances the theory that diamonds fell from the skies. He argues as follows —"Spectroscopical investigations show that the particles of comets, secured by scientists, are impregnated with carbon. This carbon is in the form of crystals. In days gone by the earth must have come repeatedly into contact with comets, either the nucleus —head— or the tails. These cometic particles became diamonds in the course of ages, but were buried during the various transformations of the earth." The above theory is strengthened by the fact that diamond chips have been found in mete •r».

PECULIARITY OF. BIRD VISION.

It has been slowly brought to our understanding that the world is not the same to all creatures, and 1 probably no experiments have tended more to make this clear than those by Professor Karl Hesz, of Wuerzburg, on the color-sense of chickens, pigeons, owls, and kestrels. Men with hungry chickens and pigeons were first kept an hour in a bright room to become accustomed to the light. The floor was then spread with a smooth black cloth, evenly covered with grains of wheat, a strong spectrum was thrown on it from the ceiling, and the Irungry animals were turned loose. They picked the wheat first from the bright red, then the ultra-red, next the yellow, and finally the green. They touched nothing in the blue and violet, because they saw nothing : but, on' the other hand, they saw the grains in the ultra-red that were invisible to the men. This proved that for chickens and pigeons the spectrum is shortened at the violet end of short-wave length and extended at the red end or long-wave length. This is the effect one might expect from wearing orange-colored glasses, and Hesz demonstrated that fowls see through such spectacles in the form of yellow and orange oilglobules embedded in the light-sen-sitive, layer. To kestrels and buzzards the brightest zone was the green instead of the red, the blue being visible. To owls the colors were as men see them.

x ABSORBING HEAT

An interesting instance of the application on a large scale of the principle that black colored ' substances readily absorb the 'heat of the sun, has been noted in the case of a toll road in California. This toll road from Truckee to Lake Tahoe is closed early every winter by the immense snowfall, which in places is twenty to thirty feet deep. At the beginning of spring the owner of the fine has black dirt scattered along the surface of the snow where he knows that his hidden road runs. The layer of dirt is not made so thick as to cut off the sunlight from the snow completely. The effect is described as wonderful. In a short time a-long depression is formed in the snow, and days before the ground is clear on either side traffic is running on bare ground.

v DRIVERLESS TRAINS.

Germany possesses a miniature but most useful- railway, of which the chief peculiarity is that its trains have no drivers- It is used for carrying salt from the salt mines at Stassfurt, and the trains consist of thirty trucks, each carrying half a ton of salt. The engines are electric, of 24 h.p. each. As the train approaches a station, of which there are five along the line, it automatically rings a bell, and the station attendant turns a switch to receive it. He is able to stop it at any moment. To start it again he stands on the locomotive, switches the current, and then descends before the engine has gained speed.

THEORIES OF RAINFALL.

Adducing instances to show how uniformity prevails throughout the cosmos, Chjambers, in "Vestiges of Creation," remarks incidentally that in any given place the aggregate rainfall for every ten years is the same. But scientists like doctors, are prone to differ, and more recent pronouncements "of meteorologists seem to afford a complete refutation of the theory. Statistics show that throughout Europe, though there have been dry as well as abnormally wet seasons, there is a steady increase in the rainfall. Since 1689 records have been kept at Paris. Until the end of the ■ ; ghteenth century no group of years showed an average as high as soin. But since 1800 the average has exceeded this figure invariably, and for the seventeen years, 1893-1909, it was actually 23 inches. Another theory, with which the whole of the foregoing seems inconsistent, is that the water of the earth is becoming gradually decomposed, and that in the moon we may see what the earth is coming to —a planet without moisture, and hence without fife. ®Herr Kernbaum, a German savant, declares thai v.:.'.or is decomposed by radium or the ul-tra-violet rays of light, and that the hydrogen so formed rises to the upper rern; l : l .- of the atmosphere, never to unite with oxygen and re-