SCIENCE NOTES & NEWS.

Matamata Record, Volume II, Issue 97, 29 August 1918, Page 4

SCIENCE NOTES & NEWS.

PRIZE FOR DOCTORS. The largest of the standing rewards offered for medical research is the Breant prize of four thousands pounds offered by the medical section of the French Academy of Sciences for the 'discovery of a means to cure Asiatic cholera. The entire sum will be given to the discoverer of a genuine cure, but the interest may be awarded from time to time in smaller prizes for work advancing the scientific knowledge of this disease. PRESERVING DOCUMENTS IN CONCRETE. A Berlin storage vault, designed especially for tracings of drawings, consists of earthenware pipes of a few inches in diameter imbedded in a mass of concrete. The tubes are closed with covers of stamped steel, and these have space for numbers o) other marks for indexing the contents. To avoid accumulation of water from the extinction of a fire or any other cause, the tubes are slightly inclined towards the opening. This vault was put in use about four 1 years ago, and tracings that have been stored in it ever since have been not only kept in safety but have been preserved in a perfect condition. A NEW ROAD MATERIAL. With a view to obtaining a road surface which will give a better resistance to motor traffic, experiments are being made in France with a roadbed material consisting of an intimate mixture of "iron straw'' or iron in the shape of a wiry or fibrous mass, together with cement mortar and sand. Such material is called "fcrrocement," and it appears that tests as to its fitness for road surface arc giving good results. But the iron is not the usual kind found in commerce, but is prepared specially for the purpose. It is claimed that the resulting material will not be an expensive one. THE MAKING OF MAGNETS The most powerful and permanent magnets are made from steels containing about six per cent, of tungsten and 0.0 per cent, of carbon. The magnet bars are to be long and narrow, and after forging at the lowest possible temperature should be heated to nine hundred degrees C, kept at seven hundred and fifty degrees for a time, then cooled off; and for hard ening are to be reheated, cooled gradually to seven hundred degrees, and plunged into brine at twenty degrees. Maturing is effected by boiling ten or twelve hours. The bars are magnetised by means of electromagnets, and when the magnetism if to remain extremely constant it is v< duccd five or ten per cent, by exposure to demagnetising forces ANIMALS' OF EARTHQUAKES. One of the mysteries still unsolvec is that of the sense by which th< lower animals become aware of tin approach of earthquakes. For three or four days before the severe earth quake at Guadalajara, Mexico, the many parrots of the city showed great and unusual restlessness, and durin the period of disturbance the incrca> ed cries of the birds gave warning o the nearness of tire worst shocks. Rati also became alarmed, fleeing from th< city before the earthquakes came Super-sensitiveness to faint shocksscarcely gives satisfactory explanation for modern seismographs are very sen sitive, and it is quite unlikely thai tremors too slight to be recorded would be felt so strongly as to give alarm. OFFICE PHONOGRAPH An invention that threatens to c' away with stenographers is causr consternation among Parisian sho hand and type-writing experts. This new correspondence devi' consists of phonographic records o prepared cloth, which may be poste< instead of a letter. The communica tion is simply dictated into a machine the result is posted and the recipicrt inserts the cloth record in his phono graph and listens. The invention was originally design cd for use as an exact record of tes timony in legal cases;- but <vith fir ther development the d'scovery err now be used'for- all correspondence and, as the records, can be put on tlv market very cheaply, the process if less expensive than the employment of stenographers. THE STENOTYPE. A new shorthand machine, called the stcnotypc, has made its appear ance at a competition in New York. It takes down 592 words a minute, and weighs 8 lbs. The working of it is based on phonetic spelling. Several letters can be printed by striking' one key, while it is possible to striketwo keys with one finder. keys represent seven consonants ,md every combination of sounds used in speech, together with about ISO standard abbreviations—the sole code that the operator must master. With the machine a speed of over ISO words a minute has been obtained. The machine is not being sold to the ffenerat public, the sale being restricted to students of business schools qualified as competent operators in order to keep the device from becoming a drug; on the market - '