SCIENCE SIFTINGS

New Zealand Tablet, 23 January 1919, Page 46

SCIENCE SIFTINGS

By “Volt.”

Peat-Coal Fuel. The Belfast correspondent of the Irish Times writes: “Mr. S. C. Davidson, the founder and chairman of the Sirocco Engineering Works, Belfast, has patented a method of dealing with peat and forming from it a synthetic coal, which should relieve the situation due to the coal shortage. Mr. Davidson’s method is the simple one of putting back into the peat some of the oil substances which have been washed out owing to its greater proximity to the surface of the ground. The peat is first disintegrated and mixed with about 15 per cent, pitch dust. This mixture is placed in the hydraulic press, and comes out in a solid block of what looks like polished hardwood. The fuel burns readily. The Coldest Spot on Earth. The coldest spot on the earth’s surface is near Werkhojansk, Siberia. There, it is said, “the . culminating point of excessive climate in all the world is reached.” In other words, it is the pole of the greatest known cold. The lowest reading of the thermometer, taken by Sir George Nares, was noted thereßl degrees below zero Fahrenheit. For a long time it was supposed that Yakutsk, 400 miles from Werkhojansk, was the coldest place in the world ; recent observations, however, have exploded that notion. The soil at both places above mentioned is frozen to a depth of nearly 400 feet. It is believed to have been deposited in a frozen state during the glacial epoch, as no amount of cold could penetrate the earth to such an enormous depth. Earth’s Crust not Rigid. To the layman nothing may seem more rigid than the crust of the earth, but men of science say that it bends and buckles appreciably under the pull of the heavenly bodies. Observation has shown that the shores on opposite sides of a tidal basin approach each other at high tide. The weight of water in the Irish Sea, for example, is so much greater at that time that the bed sinks a trifle, and in consequence pulls the Irish and English coasts nearer together. Thus the buildings of Liverpool and Dublin may be fancied as bowing to one another across the channel, the deflection from the perpendicular being about one inch for every 16 miles. It has also been shown that ordinary valleys widen under the heat of the sun and contract again at night.