NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2096, 28 February 1920, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Australia has nearly 300,000 acres of untouched forests. There are said to be great rainstorms in the Colorado desert, during which a man may be out and Hot get wet. The rain can be seen falling from the clouds high above the desert, but when it reaches the layer of hot, dry air beneath the clouds it is entirely absorbed before falling half the distance to the ground. The temperature during these rainstorms of “dry rain” often ranges as high as 128 degrees, Fahrenheit, in the shade-! One of the most unique and exclusive clubs that ever existed in New YorkjWas the “Society of the Pointed Beards,'’ which nourished I in the metropolis some years ago. No one was eligible to membership unless he had a carefully-cultivated beard of natural and personal growth, and terminating in one symmetrical point half an inch from the apex of the chin, of surticicni; evidence to preclude controversy. At the annua! club dinners everything as far as possible was made to harmonise with the objects of the society, even the menu-cards giving' evidence of the beard mania, and the celery was even served with its leaves trimmed to a point. One of the oddest houses in the world is that erected at Yokohama by a noted bacteriologist. It is a dust-proof, air-proof, microbeproof building of . gla.ss. Large panes of glass one-balf inch thick, and about four inches apart, are set in iron frames, so as to form the sides of a cellular building block. Of these blocks the walls are constructed. There are no window sashes, the air-escape being throned! the several small openings around the upper part of the second story, but through which no air from outside is admitted. The air supply is obtained from a considerable distance,--forced-through a ppm, ‘and carefully tillered through cotton wool to cleanse it of bacteria. To ensure further sterilisation the air is driven against a glyec'vine-coated plate of glass, which captures all the microbes the wool spares. The few microbes brought into the house in the clothes of visitors soon dm in the warm sunlight with which the place is Hooded.