NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3829, 9 August 1928, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Radium is worth about £350,000 an ounce. London lias now about 900 defectives. There were only fifteen in 1877. American air-mail postage rates have been reduced to half the former rates. The production of eggs in England and Wales in 1927 amounted to 2,150,000,000. Over a quarter of a ton of broken glass has been picked up on the beach at Skegness. 'Rheumatism was responsible for the loss of 550,000 weeks’ work in England last year. If milk is properly sterilised and bottled it is claimed that it will keep .fresh for two years. India has between 20 and 30 principal languages . The most widely used is Hindustani. Users of push-bicycles in the British Isles are now estimated to number 6,000,000. Road competition in Britain has cost the Southern Railway about £500,000 a year for the past three years. It is now possible to leave New York by aeroplane at noon and 'reach San Francisco next day in time for tea. Cats exist in most Japanese towns in a proportion of eighty to every hundred houses, Avith the result that rats are very few. It is impossible to say how long the average sparrow lives in a Avild state, but authorities declare that it my live forty years. Milk made from soya beans can be used for every purpose to which the product of the coav is put, including cheese-making. Insurance against wet weather is groAving in favour in Britain. Race, teams, and aviation meetings are all insuring their gates. Combings from the hair of pet dogs such as “ChoAtfs” can be woven into garments, one pound of hair being sufficient for quite a long scarf. i x

A bell which could be heard a distance of from three to five miles on land would, if submerged in the sea, be heard over sixty miles under the water.

An enterprising New Plymouth resident recently heard there was money in supplying the Christchurch market with pungas, so he arranged to cut and send down a supply to Canterbury. The price they brought'was 5/- each, and the cost turned out to be 5/6. After looking at the question from all angles, the Taranaki man has come to the conclusion that he was indulging in an unprofitable enterprise and the business has been wound up. In the past agriculture had often depended upon chance for its profitable discoveries, declared Sir John Russell, when talking about the advances of scientific agriculture. He instanced as illustration the fact that Bordeaux mixture, the specific for potato blight and other curses which had annually caused enormous losses, owed its discovery to the action of a French farmer who prepared an unpalatable concoction which, whilst not injuring the fruit, would make them distasteful to marauding youngsters.