The Wanganui Chronicle. “NULLA DIES SINE LINEA." FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1924. SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18975, 28 March 1924, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. “NULLA DIES SINE LINEA." FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 1924. SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE

Whether it be due to Britain’s Socialist Government and the hopes of a newer and better world which Socialist Governments are supposed to engender, the Old Country is reputed to be at the moment ‘ ‘ the of numerous visionary and practical schemers who threaten great changes in\he near future.” Report has it that one wellknown scientist, Professor Burstall, dein of the Faculty of Science at Birmingham University, has even suggested that the men and women of the future should be redesigned and manufactured afresh in a spherical form, and provided with wings and feathers. In Professor Burstall’s opinion man Is the weakest and most imperfect of the animals, and his present shape prevents him from doing really useful work. A spherical configuration, on the contrary, would enable man to establish a four hours’ day and get through as much work as he now does in eight hours. Human spheres would also be able to move with greater facility and much money would be saved in clothes. Less revolutionary are the dreams of Professor A. M. Low, who, looking in|o the future, sees men and women clothed in one-piece garments, which will be electrically warmed. Illuminated kerbstones and the “ringing up” of New York by a combination of land 'lines and radio-telegraphy are other possibilities of the immediate future. Professor Low, who is an authority upon radio-television, is also convinced that in a short time, perhaps a year, perhaps 10 years, it will be possible to telegraph pictures of actual happenings. People sitting in their drawingrooms in Britain, for example, may be able to witness a submarine disaster at sea or watch a horse race in «the United States. With seeing machines, writing machines, and talking machines, Professor Low thinks most men should be able to run a business from home, and there should no longer be any necessity for the daily journey to the city or other places where men of business congregate. Professor Low even looks forward to a time when thought transference- will become an effective substitute for human speech, and thought will no longer be transferred by the “unbusinesslike and inartistic process of puffing blasts of air

through the varying orifice of the mouth.” Leaving the more imaginative flights of science and fiction, we are told of a discovery with big possibilities made ffiy Professor Buergi, a Swiss scientist of repute. He has been working for many years in the State laboratories at the University of Berne upon the problem of distilling the potential energy of the sun. Realising that the nutrition of all nature, plant, animal, and human) was from the sun, Professor Buergi got to work, and he secured his first gleam of insight into the solution of the problem from the terrible condition of the interned soldiers brought from Germany to Switzerland during the war. All of them were suffering from wasting diseases, and astron and other drugs, proved useless, Professor Buergi turned’ to vegetable extracts. The vegetables themselves could not be eaten by those weakened men in sufficient quantities to restore sufferers to health. Finally the Professor found (that an extract, bearing a close kinship to human blood, could be obtained from plants, and established the remarkable fact that the blood stream of plants is remarkably similar in structure to the blood-stream in man. Sir Arthur Shipley, lecturing at the Royal Institution, described Professor Buergi’s extract as “the substance which makes the whole world go round; without it the earth would be as dead as the moon.” Phyllosan, as the extract is called, is restoring ■men to health and activity who must have died without its aid, and instances of rejuvenation by this “bottled sunshine” are on record which eclipse any of the wonders claimed on behalf of the more advertised “monkey gland cures.”