Science Sittings

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1, 4 January 1906, Page 29

Science Sittings

By ' Volt '

A Rare and Valuable Substance. Over three*/ hundred and thirty milligrams of radium, worth £2000, has just been received by Mr. W. Martilndale, Ph.D. At the (London Medical Exhibition a portion of the radium, amounting to eighty milligrams, is being shown. This little pineh — scarcely more than a grain — is alone worth £480. It is stated that this consignment is by far the largest that has ever reached England. The Coldest City. The coldest city in the world is Yakutsk, Eastern Siberia, in the Empire of the Czar of Russia. It is the great commercial emporium of East Siberia, and the capital of the province of 'Yakutsk, most of whoso area of 1,5175,063 square miles is a desert, the soil of which is frozen to a great depth. Yakutsk consists of about 400 houses of European structure, standing apart. The intervening spaces are occupied by winter yoorts, or huts of the Northern nomads, with earthen roofs, doors covered with hairy hides, and windows of ice. " Potal Employees. Some interesting statistics have recently been published by the Universal postal Union ,3s to the number of postal employees in the different countries composing the union. Germany heads the list with 242,000, the United States comes next with 239,000, and Great Britain is third with 181,000. None of the other States in the Postal Union possesses 100,000 postal employees. France has 81,000, Austria 59,000, Russia, 57,962, and Japan 5|7,,985. Every other country falls below 50,000. Durability of Posts. Convincing evidence of the relative durability of posts set in natural position and those inverted has been given by Andrew Whiton, an American mechanic. Posts set in Connecticut in botla positions were carefully marked, and after nine years the inverted ones were found to be practically sound while others were much decayed. The ' Mountain-High ' "Waves. The size of the Atlantic waves has been carefully measured for the Washington Hydrographic Bureau. In height the waves usually average about 30 feet, but in rough weather they attain from 40 to 48 feet. During storms they are often from 500 to 600 feet long and last ten (or eleven seconds, while the longest yet known measured half a mile and did not spend itself for twenty-three seconds. In a storm the average speed of waves is 81 feet per second, and this may increase when the wind reaches a cyclone to 91 feet. It is about 56 feet in an ordinary high wind, 34 in a good breeze, and only 23 when the breeze is gentle. The Cost of Coal Mining. Lecturing rat Newcastle (England) on the increased cost of coal-raising, Alderman Briggs remarked that everything that could throw light upon what to do and what not to do in the introduction of electricity to mining must be of the greatest use to all who were interested in the mining industry. It would follow in an increasing extent from the much higher price of labor which ruled to-day, and which was likely to rule, for a long time to come, that they would be driven tothe use of machinery more largely in coal mining opera" tions than they had been in the past. When he looked to the cost of mining fifteen or twenty years ago, without machinery at all, and labor only, raising coal in small quantities by primitive' methods, he found they/ were then able to get coal at 2s a ton less than they could get r day. That was accounted for entirely by the increased cost of labor in coal-get-ting—-not only by the higher remuneration which miners had obtained, but by their doing less work than they used to do, and the consequent employment of more men. This only showed that the use of machinery would be forced upon them whether .they liked it or not, and among the agencies they would have to use electricity was the foremost one.

The Very Rev. Dean Phelan'in a letter to the managing editor of ' The Austral Light ' states', that he will : leave London on January 19, and will probably arrive - in Melbourne about February 23.