WORLD-WIDE NOTES.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 24, Issue 17, 4 March 1913, Page 2

WORLD-WIDE NOTES.

A BURGLAR-PROOF SAFE THAT WORKS. With characteristic thoroughness thtf Gormans have devised a real bur-glar-proof safe, so cleverly designed that it. will baffle even the burglars who work with the latest of oxygen and acetylene blowpipes, It is called the carrousel, or "roundabout safe.” It exhibits a polygonal steel structure revolving freely on hall hearings. It is built into a wall, and when the outer door is closed a small, electromotor is set in motion, whereupon the safe starts revolving ceaselessly and noiselessly on its axis; within its stone chamber. Any ; tampering with its motions causes an alarm hell to ''ring. So long as the safe continues to revolve the blowpipe can have no effect upon it, since the flame cannot be applied long enough to any particular spot to make an impression, ;

ADVANCE STEP IN SURGERY. Surgery has taken another advance step at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where recently, three patients suffering from tuberculosis of the knee have been cured after the infected joints were cut away and substituted by the same parts of a body of a patient in normal health who died from an accident a few hours before. Surgeons in Germany have also found the operation successful and have succeeded In putting hack in place a huger which had been cut of! by a machine, and, after treatment, the finger grew again normally. Advanced surgeons are now trying to find a way to remove from the body lungs affected with tuberculosis and to put in their place good lungs taken from the body of a patient who had no infection, but who died from some other disease or from accident. In an operation of this character the surgeons have already found that one infected lung could be entirely removed without causing, the death of the patient, but prolonging life, though the other lung was slightly infected.

THE “ SACCHARIN ” DANGER. Saccharin is largely employed as a sweetening agent in place of sugar,, but the U.S.A. authorities controlling food adulteration have just stated with while the use of foods of saccharin in small quantities (up to O.S gram daily) is not injurious to health, if used in quantities ovei 0.3 gram per day for a considerable period is liable to disturb digestion. The Bureau of Chemistry reports that saccharin has been form! in more than fifty kinds of foods in common use, It is argued, therefore, that if the use of saccharin in foods be allowed, the consumer may very easily ingest, day by day, over 0.3 gram, the quantity which is liable to produce disturbances of digestion. In any case saccharin, we arc assured, wb'-n substituted for sugar,, lowers the quality of the food. The only use of saccharin in foods is as a sweetener, and when it is so used, it inevitably displaces the sugar of an equivalent sweetening power. Sugar has a food value and saccharin has none.

32,937 STITCHES IN A COAT, TAILOR SAYS. An enterprising tailor has taken the trouble to count the stitches in the last coat he made. He found 32,937—23,800 machine stitches and 9,137 hand stitches. The coat was of the jacket variety,' thirty-two inches long. A frock or evening coat would require many more stitches. This is how the counting was done : ■T kept a little tablet with me at my work, and every counted a hundred strokes of the needle I made a mark. On my machine, I found four and a half stitches were taken at every stroke of the pedal. That was forty-five stitches to ten strokes, and so I put down a mark at every tenth stroke.”

POLAR COLD AND WINGS. During the Polar expedition of the ‘ Belgilea,’ Captain Gulache noticed that many of the insects were without wings. It had been remarked .before that 'certain Alpine species had wings more or less atrophied. To find out whether the cold had anything to l do with ibis, Prof. Dewitz, of the University of Metz, placed some wasp nests for 48 hours in an ice box,, and was rewarded by seeing some of the insects emerge without wings. He did the same with the larvae of Hies, keeping them t’.vo months at a temperature just above freezing, and most, of the flies that developed had de- I fective wings.