NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19910, 31 March 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The Tower of Pisa leans 165 ft. out of the perpendicular. London spends more than £12,500,000 annually on education. Glow-worms are more brilliant just before an approaching storm than at any other time. The Suez Canal is 103 miles in length. Its average depth is 36ft., and its greatest width 350 ft. Fuel oil weighing 5000 tons is burned on the Aquitania in one trip across the Atlantic. Domestic fires are claimed tc be responsible i'or depositing 3,000,000 tons of solid matter on the soil of Britain every year. Mars rotates on its axis in 24 hours 37 minutes 22 seconds, so that its day is only slightly longer than that of the earth. American shopkeepers advertised their Christmas presents for men as " English aristocratic " and for women as " French chic." Greyhound racing companies to the number of 131 were registered in Britain last year, (.<ne having a capital of £1,000,000. Of the 72 fatal accidents in Manchester streets last year more than 50 per cent, were directly due to carelessness 011 tlie part of pedestrians. square islands with electricallyheated metal footplates for traffic policemen to stand on in cold weather have been installed in Riga. Tottenham, London, schoolchildren received 2213 swimming certificates last year. Of these, 1301, or more than half, were secured by girls. With a total capital of £.1,716,915, no fewer than 115 companies to promote dogracing had been registered in England at the beginning of this year. An eight-year-old Holstein cow at a farm near Peterboro', Ontario, has established a record by producing 19,6631b. of milk and 8191b. of butter-fat in 305 days. A pedestrian of Southampton has attached to his walking stick a noisy motorcar horn which he sounds when about to cross a street to inform drivers of his rights. Of the ten million homes in Britain, seven millions are situated in areas supplied with electricity, but only one and a-half' million houses are wired for the purpose. Madagascar's surplus crocodiles are to be skinned for bookbinding and shoo leather. Their fat is to be used in the treatment of rheumatism and other diseases. Wood and fabrics dipped into a metal bath can, by a patent process, be coated with practically any desired metal, making them immensely stronger than in their natural state. The Polytechnic Institute of Zurich has a clock which does not need winding. Its power is provided by a mechanism set in motion by every change of two degrees in temperature. The first " Babel " newspaper has appeared in Paris. It is called " L'Arlequin," and the first insue contained articles in German, Spanish, Italian, English and French. Funnels were, fitted to motor-ships because when the first of these, the Selandia, was put into service in 1912 many emigrants refused to sail in her because she lacked funnels. The smallest screws in the world are those used in the production of watches. They are four one-thousandths of an inch in diameter, and an ordinary thimble would hold 100,000 of them. Fashion, both male and female, affect industry.- Short skirts for women, it is stated, increased unemployment in Britain, while turned-up trousers for men benefited the fancy sock trade. Flints are still cut, or " knapped," at Brandon, in Norfolk; near this town is Grimes Graves, wher? there are flint mines and the dwellings used by the miners who worked in them 300 years a g°- ' . , More than 730 miles of the German railroads, 2.3 per cent, of the whole system, had been electrified by the close of 1927, of which about seventy miles were made up of urban and inter-urban lines.

The prosperity of the United States continues on the upgrade. In a recent period of 12 months, over the entire country, there were only 545 trade disputes, and of these over 71 per cent were adjusted. Constable Truelove, of the {loyal Canadian Mounted Police, recently returned to Cochrane, Ontario, after a thousand-mile trip on snow-shoes, taking with him »n Indian prisoner from a trading post in the far North. Among the groups of women studied during an investigation, undertaken by the British Industrial Fatigue Research Board, one of the finest had been born and brought up in one of Glasgow's worst slum areos. Professor M. Hahn, director of the Berlin Hvgenic Institute, has recently performed experiments with mechanical ironing machines whereby overcoats, trousers, and blankets were completely sterilised of disease-producing bacteria. Free passes to visit the War graves in France and Belgium, issued to certain relatives and others, had recently numbered tip to 18,000 since September, 1921. They permit the user to travel, without a'passport, thus saving a fee of 7s. fid. A newly-tapped hot spring in Niederbreisig, on the bank of the Rhine between Bonn and Coblenz, maintains an uninterrupted gush of hot water richly impregnated with carbonic acid gas. It is the biggest geyser of its kind in Europe. What is claimed to be the deepest electric furnace in the world has just been put into operation in a South African mine. This surface, which is being worked at a depth of 6300 ft., has been installed for the heating of carbon drill steel. Australia is about 24 times as large as England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales together. The population is one-eighth of the population of these four countries—that it, two people to the square mile instead of 628 to the square mile as in England and Wales. Excavations in a gravel pit near St. Georgen have broug:.. u> ! : .-.! t numerous shards of baked, pottery, originally parts of jugs. The figure of an animal has also been fou-idL The remains come from an early Celtic Christian settlement. The accidental locking of a pair of handcuffs prevented an actress taking her part in a, London theatre recently. During an interval sho slipped on the handcuffs to test them, and then found the key had been mislaid. Her understudy had to finish the play for her. Every person who takes up the cards at a game of whist holds one out of 635,013,559,600 possible hands. If a man could be engaged dealing cards at the rate of one deal a minute, day and nigm» for a million years, he would not ex na us the possible variations of the cards. For the purpose of making a concrete road in Colorado, ore from dump ot a local gold mine was used. It Vv" s J® most suitable material available, auhougft it contained about six shillings' worth ot gold per ton. There is .£6OO worth ot precious metal in every mile of the roa The gold output of the Transvaal last year amounted to 10,130,630 fine ounce > valued at £42,548,092, and compares win an output of 9,962.582 ounces, valned £41,745,420. for 1926. The total duct ion of the Rand from 1884 175 including the past year is 218,W } ounces fine gold, valued at £949,9