Science Siftings

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 45, 25 November 1925, Page 62

Science Siftings

(By Volt)

Radium’s Rival. Radon, a new discovery, costs £1,000,000 an ounce. Although it is the most expensive substance in the world, its use will make the treatment of cancer cheaper. It is' a gas-like emanation of radium and will be cheaper to use than radium because it is 160,000 times as active. Radon is put up .in tiny glass ‘seeds” the thickness of a human hair. The supply is inexhaustible, but it has the disadvantage of short life. It loses half its activity in about four days, while radium maintains half of its weight at the end of 1700 years. Perils of Anger. Both anger and grief have a mental basis, and indulgence in both produce marked illeffects on the body, says a writer in The Times. Sir James Paget and Dr. Murchison, for example, considered that protracted grief and anxiety were the cause of cancer in certain organs of the body. Further investigations into this subject tend to prove the truth of their assumptions. Anger, which, like grief, is a mental quality, is known to provoke indigestion, headaches, and neuralgia. Seeking relief in .tears, therefore, when the feeling of anger is sought to be overcome, would be tantamount to jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. Both anger and grief, therefore, ought to be shunned by all right-thinking people, and this modern applied psychology teaches one how to do it. In Eighty Seconds . At luncheon at the Savoy Hotel recently a party of guests saw an interesting new film which is going to show the world at the cinema houses how a submarine cable is made and laid. The making of a modern cable is a most ‘elaborate affair, and some very clever machinery is used for giving the precious wire its protective coatings. These composite cables vary in their make according to the kind of sea bottom on which they are to lie —there is, for instance, a special cable for iceberg regions. The film takes us aboard the cable-ship and shows the experts hooking up the damaged cable from the depths by the. use of about six different' kinds of grapnels, each one a marvel of ingenuity. - One of the cable’s greatest enemies is a submarine insect called the “teredo,” which seems to have a special appetite for guttapercha, jute, and pitch, which form the protective layers of the core. When the King opened Wembley this year, it was known all round the globe in eighty seconds. • Human Wireless. Though he did not know it, through the aeons of man’s existence, it was to a “receiving set” —more complicated and miraculous than that other kind of receiving set that man owed his precious gift of vision. The eye is a receiving set that works on wave lengths of incredible minuteness, and can instantaneously and automatically “time in” to. stations, however near or far.

It is no bigger than a boy’s marble. - The • filmy aerial, though less than a square inch in size, will effectively pick up incoming signals from the nearest object or the most distant star. Each eye works at one and the same time on hundreds of different wave-lengths without undue “jamming.” Each has its own telephone exchange with thousands of “landlines” connecting with the brain. Ceaselessly, silently, and swiftly these receiving sets of Nature work/ often sixteen hours a day, year in and year out, with no rest but a momentary wink during their hours of receiving. So it is no wonder that they need occasional repair and tuning up; and, if they are overworked, like all machines they break down. - When this happens the brain gets bad reception, it makes errors of judgment, -and . * it makes miscalculations which may have unhappy results for the individual.