50 Years Ago
- Humans
From the October 15, 1932, issue
THE SABER-TOOTH STRIKES The artist has made a sketch of a dramatic scene involving a horselike hornless rhinoceros. It shows the poor animal attacked by a long-tailed saber-toothed tiger. The great cat is pictured as attacking much as a modern tiger or lion sometimes attacks: gripping a hard hold with its forelegs, slashing at its […]
- Humans
From the April 26, 1930, issue
FLOWERS FROM STEEL The same fascinating sparks that the village children used to watch “flying like chaff from a threshing floor” are now used to save industry thousands of dollars, for they have been found to be an index to the many kinds of modern steels, which differ from one another only slightly in carbon […]
- Humans
From the October 8, 1932, issue
AUTUMN BRINGS NOBILITY EVEN TO CORNFIELD WEEDS Autumn is the time of the Truce of God. Even as a beggar may assume a certain dignity when he is about to die, so the commonest weeds often take on beauty when all things pause to make last salute to the retreating sun, before the hora novissima […]
- Humans
From the April 19, 1930, issue
TRAVEL TO THE MOON BY THE YEAR 2050 By the year 2050, Earth-dwellers will probably be able to travel to the moon and to communicate with their terrestrial home by telephoning over a beam of light. They will get there by traveling in a rocket ship at a speed of some 50,000 miles an hour, […]
- Humans
From the October 1, 1932, issue
WARNING SPOTS OR TARGETS? Eye-spots, like those on the wings of the Cecropia moth on the front cover, are commonly interpreted either as warning markings, to scare off enemies, or as “targets” to draw the enemy’s attention to a non-vital spot. But moths get eaten anyway.–(Photo by Cornelia Clarke). COSMIC RAYS BOMBARD EARTH WITH 40,000 […]
- Humans
From the April 12, 1930, issue
MEDICAL WORLD HONORS DR. WELCH While the whole medical world united in honoring Dr. William Henry Welch on his 80th birthday on April 8, and the president of the United States delivered an address at the Washington celebration, few outside the world of science know who Dr. Welch is or why he was honored in […]
- Humans
From the April 5, 1930, issue
SPARROW-SIZE KINGFISHER The Celebes Wood Kingfisher (Ceycopsis fallax), shown on the cover of this week’s SCIENCE NEWSLETTER, is a bird scarcely as large as an English Sparrow. Similar kingfishers of tiny dimensions are found in various tropical countries. They are hunters as well as fishers and feed on insects and other life as well as […]
- Humans
From the September 24, 1932, issue
PREHISTORIC ROCK FORTS FOUND ON BARREN ARCTIC ISLAND Reports of finding inaccessible rock fortresses in the sea, used by people of the Far North many centuries ago, are brought back from Kodiak Island, Alaska, by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka of the U.S. National Museum. Dr. Hrdlickas discovery reveals for the first time that inhabitants of the […]
- Humans
From the March 29, 1930, issue
WANTED: EARLY PLANET PHOTOGRAPHS With the discovery of the planet beyond Neptune, by Lowell Observatory astronomers, many months of observation will be needed before even an approximate idea can be obtained of the orbit in which it is moving. A planet like this moves in the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth itself revolves around […]
- Humans
From the March 22, 1930, issue
THE SUN’S NEW TRANS-NEPTUNIAN PLANET The Lowell Observatory has made the discovery of a celestial body whose rate of motion and path among the stars indicate that it is a new member of the sun’s family of planets out beyond Neptune. Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Percival Lowell, director and founder of the Observatory at Flagstaff, […]
- Humans
From the September 17, 1932, issue
ANOTHER GREAT WALL The Great Wall of China, winding like a mighty, protecting serpent along the old northern boundary of the Celestial Kingdom– Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of Britain, built and fortified to shut the barbarians of the north out of southern Britain in Roman days– And now, added to this small, select list […]
- Humans
From the March 15, 1930, issue
LARGEST BOILER One of the three largest boilers in the world is shown on the front cover. The boilers were recently installed in the East River station of the New York Edison Company to run the largest single-unit electric generator in the world. If this 215,000-horsepower turbo-generator had been developed in 1906, it could have […]
