GREAT SOLAR ACTIVITY

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 12

GREAT SOLAR ACTIVITY

MANY SUNSPOTS OBSERVED THIS MONTH

(PRESS ASSOCIATION TELEGRAM.)

WELLINGTON, January 29

During January, the sun has .been showing signs of great There have been many groups oi sunspots and some of the individual spots have been of large dimensions. Whenever the limb of the sun has been examined with a spectroscope, many active prominences have been present. Yesterday the sun showed a verydisturbed appearance and in all 124 individual sunspots were counted by observers at the Dominion Observatory. Although many of them were small, the most active group was 86,000 miles in length and had one complicated spot composed of three large nuclei. The whole spot measured 29,000 miles in its greatest length. «

Living organisms can be frozen in ice for thousands of years and revived without difficulty,, merely by melting the ice in which* they are encased a Russian scientist, P. Kapterev,' has reported to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. While working at the ; task of thawing out the permanently frozen subsoil with steam he chopped out solidly-frdzen blocks 20 to 30 feet below the surface of the ground. These were kept sterile and taken to a laboratory, where they were placed in sterilised vessels. Pieces of the ice-en-cased soil were thawed under a variety of conditions, and in each vessel there came to life a variety of spores, grasslike plants and small animals Daphnae, or water fleas, were common objects. Others were shellfish, like mussels and shrimplike creatures. All of them are creatures which are known to survive in a frozen state over a winter period when they inhabit ponds that freeze right down to the bottom.