50 Years Ago
- Humans
From the September 27, 1930, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> NEW MEASURES MAY REVEAL BIGGER STARS After 8 years of preparation, the 50-foot interferometer at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California has been completed. Francis G. Pease, who used the smaller one, 20 feet in length, designed the new instrument and supervised its construction. The smaller one was attached to […]
- Humans
From the September 20, 1930, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> KITCHEN IN POMPEII Pompeii and Herculaneum, most famous of tragic cities, are still showing the modern world new evidences of what everyday life was like 2,000 years ago. The new policy of excavators at Pompeii is to leave everything where it is found, if possible. The cooking stove shown on […]
- Humans
From the March 18, 1933, issue
CAMERA PICTURES BEAUTY AND PROGRESS AT HOOVER DAM The photographer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has caught the spirit of the beginnings of Hoover dam in the picture reproduced on the front cover of this week’s Science News Letter. He was looking upstream toward the dam site when he snapped his camera. The structure […]
- Humans
From the September 13, 1930, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> SQUATTY STEEL TANK If you fill a rubber balloon with water, put the inside under about 15 pounds pressure, and set it down on a table, it will assume a shape very much like that of the huge metal tank shown on the front cover. In fact, that is the […]
- Humans
From the September 6, 1930, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> LIONS IN ALASKA Alaska, with its vast herds of caribou, its foxes and beaver, its mountain sheep and goats, and its great bears, black, brown, grizzly, and white, is one of the world’s game paradises; but 100,000 years ago, long before the slow-witted men who inhabited Europe thought to follow […]
- Humans
From the August 30, 1930, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> IN COTTON CLOTHING Wolves in the clothing of sheep have been familiar, at least as metaphors, for a couple of millennia. More lately, since we have begun to pay close attention to our trees and shrubs, have we become acquainted with a tiny wolf disguised as a tiny tuft of […]
- Humans
From the August 23, 1930, issue
alt=”Click to view larger image”> STRICTLY AMERICAN Indian architects and sculptors of the American tropics in prehistoric times had strikingly original ideas. On the cover you see the entrance to the beautiful Temple of the Warriors at Chichen Itza, in Yucatan. The Toltecs, who conquered the Mayas at Chichen Itza, remained in the city and […]
- Humans
From the August 16, 1930, issue
MILLION VOLT GLOBE The shiny metal globe which the front cover pictures was spun on a lathe from two flat sheets of copper one-eighth inch thick. It will be used with another by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company to measure man-made lighting of 2,000,000 volts and greater. When high potentials are measured by sphere […]
- Humans
From the August 9, 1930, issue
A FISH WITH HANDS A fish of more than ordinary piscine talent is sometimes found in the drifting masses of gulfweed or Sargassum in the great mid-Atlantic eddy. It is only a little fish, a couple of inches long, but it can use its two pectoral fins for some of the functions of hands. It […]
- Humans
From the August 2, 1930, issue
SHOOTING STARS, THE STORY-TELLERS OF THE UNIVERSE Of fortunate rarity are celestial visitors like the huge meteoric mass that dug the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona about 2,000 years ago. This scar on the face of the earth near Winslow, Ariz., is four-fifths of a mile across and 450 feet deep. It is shown on […]
- Humans
From the July 26, 1930, issue
DID THE MOUNDBUILDERS COME FROM MEXICO? Were the Indians who built the mysterious mounds of the great interior valley of our country kinsmen to the Mayas of Yucatan and the other highly cultured peoples of the Mexican plateau? Are the decidedly Maya- and Aztec-like sculptures taken from mounds in the Southeast really witnesses to an […]
- Humans
From the March 11, 1933, issue
GREAT LION OF LA BREA Bigger by a fourth than the proudest lion that walks the veldt today were the tallest of the great lions of California a hundred thousand years ago. Rivaled in size only by the short-faced bears whose bones have been found with theirs in the La Brea tar-pits, they could confidently […]
