NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19376, 10 July 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

There aro now only 50,000 horses in New York. Chicago now has over a hundred fullsized golf courses. The old camel caravans are to be restored in the Sahara Desert. Spanish peasants aro now wearing shoes made from old motor-car tyres. An American locomotive just completed contains over 200 tons of steel. An all-night sitting of the House of Commons is estimated to cost £426. To help to pay off a church debt 200 farmers in a town of lowa each gave a pigKing Fuad of Egypt has given £SOO toward the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Fund. Last year more than 90 tons of reindeer meat was shipped from Alaska to the United States. " Mac," a dog which had collected nearly £250 for Lincoln charities in eight years, has died. The British Government is subscribing £70,000 during the present year to the League of Nations. Twenty-one nations were represented at the Girl Guides' International Conference held in America recently. This year £50,000 is available for the relief of the rates from Nottingham's gas department and tramways. Of the telephone lines in Great Britain four million miles are underground and one million miles overhead. It is estimated that every time a country issues a new postage stamp collectors buy at least £II,OOO worth. The Isle of Java is the spot in the world subject to most thunder, over 200 storms occurring each year. Forty thousand racing pigeons, mostly from Liverpool and district, were liberated at Bath on one day lately. Two bouses in tho Spanish village o! Poyuelo de Vidriaics have been destroyed by tho invasion of white ants. Stronger and moro clastic silk is obtained by treating it with organic compounds at a temperature of boiling point. Canadian and American fishermen catch about three million whitefisli in the Great Lakes every year, worth about £300,000. Scientists who aro piecing together tho skeleton of n dinosaur, estimate that it will take them two years to complete the task. . An artificial lake covering 500 acres has been formed on tho Danish island of Zealand for tho purpose of raising eels as food. A tame rabbit which escaped from its hutch at Hartlepool came home, after an absence of two days, with a young wile} rabbit. So fast does a machine that cuts up wood into matches operate, that in a single minute it will turn out 40,000 splints. • The British people are now spending nt the rate of ten million pounds a year on wireless, that is to say, about five shillings a head. Nearly a hundred schoolboys |rom Tilbury have had a sea trip to Marseilles and back through the kindness of a fellow townsman.' Crashing through level crossing gates at Hull, a motorist escaped death by a inches. A tram stopped only ono foot from the car, Duncan Soutar, a young Grimsby fisherman,- has received the Royal Humane Society's Stanhope Medal for the bravest deed of last year. v A Luton boy of eleven has travelled from his home to Bedford and back on a scooter. He covered the distance of 40 miles in 12 hours. * A large and elaborate house stands secure in America, although there is not a single nail in its construction. It is held together with wooden screws. A new metal called tantalum, expected to replace platinum in engineering, shows far greater resistance to heat and acids than platinum, and is cheaper. With assets amounting to over 600 million pounds, the American Telegraph and Telephone Company now takes rank as the biggest corporation in the world. The British Ministry of Transport has given permission for the maximum speed of the Metropolitan Electric Tramcars to be increased from 16 to 20 miles an hour. The Rockefeller Foundation has presented £15,000 for the building of new laboratories for the students of St. Thomas' Hospital Medical School in London. A new sound-absorbing plaster with great noise-deadening properties has been invented and is said to absorb seven times as much sound as ordinary plaster absorbs. A new method of pumping up car tyres has been shown at the Institute of Patentees. To the starting feandle is attached an air compressor, and the engine does the inflating., The King having suggested tho habits of tidiness to school children, tho London County Council has adopted lessons including orderliness, especially when visiting public parks. There are 140 million head of cattle in India, The United States has the second greatest quantity with 65 millions, and the Argentine comes next with a total of 40 millions. A Canadian professor claims that earth* quakes are only experienced because tho world is still comparatively young, and when it gets finally adjusted and settled, there will be no more. • There have been nearly seven thousand cases of sleepy sickness in England and Wales in the "last four years, more than three thousand of them fatal, and the number of cases is increasing, A traveller through Serbia will often notice dolls hung up outside cottage windows. The dolls are iput up as a sign to announce to wayfarers that a marriageable daughter dwells in the house. The wind is, perhaps, the most active disseminator of plant life over the globe. A Region devastated by fire will, in tie course of a few months, be restocked with many different kinds of plants. The man who discovered the process of making aluminium by electricity has presented two million pounds' worth of American Aluminium Company s stock to the small college in Ohio where lie learned chemistry. The total number of passengers carried during Whitsuntide by the railways, omnibuses, a fid tramways in the Underground group of companies in London, amounted to 16,745,750. of which the London General Omnibus Company carried 13,283,750 passengers over the three days. This latter figure breaks the pievious Whitsuntide record. Apparatus for dispersing fog is being developed at the Philadelphia Naval Aircraft Factorv. A simple charging screen, a transformer with rectifying device, an aeroolane propeller, and a meter, all mounted on a truck, it has beet, founo, "ill e ]ectrifv 700.000 cubic feet of air » mlit. £d cot . P.tb *»"• Md IOQOft, high through a fog. If life. Early Christians regarded it as ~. typifying resurre^ion. A