THE WONDER AGE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18323, 13 August 1921, Page 10

THE WONDER AGE

PROBLEMS STILL UNSOLVED. The new electric force discovered by the Danish engineers Johnson and Knud, described by a scientific correspondent of the Daily Mail, is a milestone in the new road which is being traversed by science to-day. Hie war forced every country concerned to concentrate its scientific energies on discovering new ways and means of providing raw materials and fighting appliances. The great impetus has borne fruit, and to-day the services ef the chemist, the physicist, and the engineer ere fully recognised, and with every laboratory agog with experimental work we shall see progress during the next few years made at a rate never known before in the history of the world. Some of the unsolved problems on which the best brains of tho world are now at work include; Secrets of tho upper atmosphere. Everyday wireless telephony. Flying straight up (helicopter). The causes and cure of cancer and other malignant diseases. The world’s fuel and power supply. Structure of the atom. Television —seeing over the telegraph wire. The mystery of sunspots. The great wireless problem, on the verge of solution, is that of really practical telephony, where the household or office telephone can be directly connected to the wireless station, and by tho two systems we shall lie able to talk to anyone, whether at sea or abroad on land. Tho solution of this problem is nearer than many of us realise, but it is entailing a vast amount of research work, and hundreds of men are engaged on it. We are on the verge of finding out many of tho most intimate pecrets of nature. The wonder microscope gives us a new power — photographing with the ultra-violet rays through modern microscopic apparatus can reveal such structures as those of the minutest bacteria never seen before. Tho new X-raya, on tho other hand, will penetrate ami lay to view the minutest flaw in the heavy case of a large shell. Work now going on with the X-rays is giving wonderful information about the structure of matter—it has onfy recently shown that all substances are composed of the mother substance of which hydrogen is formed—negative electrons "cemented” together by charges of positive electricity. This means that the transmutation of one element into another may he found ultimately to be as feasible os the old alchemists dreamed it hundreds of years ago. Fuel is cue of 1 lie pressing questions of the day. Chemists are working busily on the problem of extracting the sulphur from shale, and, once done, this would give us enormous supplies of shale oil for fuel purposes—oil which has been computed to bo of more value than all tho gold in tho Rand. Fuel of every description is being sought, from the alcohol obtained by distilling wood pulp to the newer motor oils recently extracted from flowers in India and to palm oil in Africa,