SCIENCE OF THE DAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20508, 8 March 1930, Page 5 (Supplement)

SCIENCE OF THE DAY.

AMAZING FACTS ABOUT MAN.

Dr. Ronald Campbell Macfio, in his recently delivered Thomson Lectures, made many interesting statements. According to the report in the Aberdeen Press, Dr. Macfie said:— " All the teeming life of our globe—all its forests and meadows and gardens, all its myriads of fishes, birds, and beasts, is in material bulk so small that it might all bo buried in tho Pacific Ocean without appreciably raising the sea level; while if it were all made up into a ball and flung into the crater of a sunspot it would be licked up like a speck of dust in a roaring furnace. ... I, who stand before you now, clothed in flesh and cloth—l, who look fairly solid—am really a hollow ghost, for though according to physics I consist of quadrillions and quadrillions and quadrillions of invisible, infinitesimal particles, yet they aro so small in themselves that I am actually emptier than a vacuum tube. If some terrific grasp were to squeeze the particles together as they have been squeezed together in some dead suns, they would not fill a split pea. llow much do you think the half-pea full of materiality would weigh ? It would weigh about 1601b., and if y§u managed to lift it in your hands you could not throw it more than a few inches, and if you let it fall it would go through the floor. " If they analysed man's body quantitatively they would find in a man of medium size at least enough hydrogen to fill a lOgal. barrel, enough oxygen nearly to fill 900 9gal. barrels, enough carbon to make 10,000 lead pencils, enough phosphorus to make 9000 boxes of matches, enough hydrogen to fill a balloon capable of lifting a man to the top of Ben Mac Dhu, enough iron to make five carpet tacks, enough salt to fill six ordinary salt cellars, and four or five pounds of nitrogen. Chemically, man is mostly gas and water." A POWERFUL TELESCOPE. If an elephant on Mars showed up the size of a toothpick through the present largest telescope, its sizo through the 200 in. instrument now under construction would be increased to that of a 2ft. ruler. While elephants may not inhabit Mars, the comparision indicates the added visibility that will be attained with the telescope being built for the California Institute of Technology.

MUSIC IN INDUSTRY. Prof. E. Sachsenberg, of Berlin, has been investigating tho possibility of increasing •workers' output by means of rhythmical sounds or by elimination of disturbing noises. In ono packing warehouse the workers' movements were carefully analysed. Then humming noises by various instruments were introduced so that the duration of each noise corresponded to a movement. Almost at once tho output rose sharply, in some cases by more than 20 per cent. When the noises were changed so as not to bo in time with the movements, output decreased. Experiments in a spinning mill resulted in a 15 per cent., increase of output. Tho most interesting case was in a factory manufacturing heat regulators. It had been found that in one lot of 80 regulators there were as many as sixty faulty ones. It was found that a coppersmith working in tho same shop made a terrible noise. Ho was removed and the output of regulators in a given iinio went up from 80 to 110, while the faulty pieces dropped to 7 out of 110 instead of 60 out of 80. LIGHT FROM WIND. There was a Dutchman in London recently who says that in time everyone who can find space for a windmill in a country or, for tho matter of that, a town garden, will bo able to gener tin their own electricity. All that is needed is a cheap storage battery, a thing Mr. Edison has been trying to invent for a great many years. In Holland they avo doing all they can to preserve their windmills, and this is the use to which eventually they arc expected to bo put. The Dutch enthusiast begs us to keep our windmills, too.