NEWS IN BRIEF

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21804, 19 May 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF

Britain has now 2870 fliers registered as civilian air pilots. . A marriage takes place on an average every three minutes somewhere in the British Isles. Professional life-savers in France receive 6s 3d for saving a life and 2s 6d for recovering a body. Of the 17,882,465 licensed owners of wireless receiving sets in Europe, 6,125,000 are in Britain. About 2,000,000 snails aro taken to Britain by aeroplane every year for the benefit of the London gourmet. An uncut sapphire worth £SO has been found bv a British farmer in the cfop of a turkey he was dressing. Page boys at some of London's big hotels are said to make as much as £7 a week in tips at the height of the season. There are 74 municipal hospitals, with 39,000 beds, as compared with 15,000 beds in voluntary institutions, in London. The world's oldest cab-rank is to be found opposite Somerest House, in the Strand, London. Hackney coaches were stationed there 300 years ago. It takes a swarm of 15,000 or more bees to produce about 401b. of honey in normal season. The working life of a bee only lasts some six weeks. Some cold-blooded animals, can livo without food for unbelievably long periods. Snails sometimes do not eat anything for five years at a time. Bandsmen of the Salvation Army total up to 46,000. Not only are unpaid, but they have to provide their own uniforms, which cost about £5 each. Old chinaware, which has lain at the bottom of the sea in Table Bay, South Africa, since 1648, may shortly be salvaged. It lies in the wreck of the Haarlem. British manufacturers of railway material of all kinds are receiving orders from scores of countries, including Persia, China, Poland, Belgium, and India. Animals vary considerably in intelligence. The ten " brainiest" are the chimpanzee, orang-outang, elephant, gorilla, dog, beaver, horse, sea-lion, bear and cat. ' Two unemployed men in Britain have established a new amateur cycling record by. completing 52,108 miles in twelve months on a tandem machine in search of a job. Politeness in Tibet requires one, when greeting a stranger, to grasp his right ear with the right hand, and then stick out the tongue as far as it will conveniently stretch. Osmium, a very hard metal used largely in making gold pen-points is the heaviest substance in the world, tt weighs 14041b. per cubic foot, or 9S per cent more than lead. Public telephone boxes are to be installed in the section houses of the London Metropolitan police for the use of the unmarried constables who are quartered in these houses. Wine of almost any type —bock, sauterne, sherry, etc. —can now be obtained from Empire sources. At a recent wine tasting held in London 216 different Empire wines were available.. In a recent test in Britain, of the wearing quality of various textiles it was found that for every 100 days of wear given by cotton, linen gave 43 days, wool 23, silk four, and rayon two. Over 10,000 children from the elemontary and secondary schools of Britain will go abroad in the coming summer for educational holiday trips arranged by the British School Journey Association. Vampire bats are terrorising outlying settlements in Trinidad. They exact a continuous toll of cattle and have claimed a number of child victims, their bites inducing a deadly form of creep- . ing paralysis. Britain's largest ordnance survey map contains 51,500 sections and ' shows every house, building, fence, lamp-post, fire-plug, and isolated tree in every city, town, village, and farm in England, Scotland and Wales. Professional readers entertain workers in factories in Jamaica. Good books are preferred by the management, but employees work best to the accompaniment of a witty commentary on the day's news and local gossip. At his nail forge in the Black Country, Mr. C. Williams turns-out, in an eight-hour day, half-a-hundred-weight of giant nails for use in the construction of canal barges. He is the last of Britain's hand-made nail makers. * Nations have stamped or printed many kinds of things for use as money. In addition to paper and various kinds of metals, including platinum, they have used animal skins, glass, rubber, porcelain, wood, clay, cardboard, and satin. Traffic in human contraband is still rife in the East Indies. Smugglers in Malaya recently landed 165 Chinese coolies from one junk to avoid payment of fees under the aliens' ordinance law, and so increase their profits on the sale of slaves. Diamond thieving by natives employed in South African mines is now thwarted by X-rays. If a man has swallowed a stone or secreted one beneath his skin, its presence under the ray is immediately revealed by a soft greenish glow. More than 1,000,000 plants are grown every year for the decoration of London's Royal parks, which include Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, St. Jariies's Park and the Green Park. A staff of 40 gardeners is permanently engaged on this work. In Davao, a province of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, the ancient sport of horse-fighting—in which two fiery stallions are pitted against each other —is still continued, but more or less surreptitiously, by the Mohammedan princes. With one smoke bomb, costing 300 francs or £3 12s, vintners in France can throw a smoke screen, thirty feet high, over twenty acres of vines. Such a cloud guards the vines against spring frosts, and because of its sulphate of ammonia content, assists fertilisation. A mechanical nose, perfected by Professor Fair, of Harvard University, detects a smell 100,000 times earlier than it can be found by chemical analysis. It is designed for x-esearch workers to save their own noses from undue fatigue, as the organs of smell, the professor states, tire quickly. ' Stone-crushing with, water is made possible by a system of high-pressure pumps designed by Mr. Chijikov, a Russian engineer, who intends adapting his invention for ice-breakers to carve a path through the ice by bombarding it with jets of water shot out at enormous speed and force. Realistic stage meals are now the fashion. In Mr. Priestley's " Laburnum Grove," running in London, the cast, up till recently, had consumed 301b. ot ham, 301b. of tongue, 30 gallons of beer, 601b. of tomatoes, 120 lettuces, 800 bananas, and large quantities of milk, bread, mustard, cheese, butter, tea, and sugar.