From the June 3, 1933, issue
TWO MECHANICAL MEN EXPLAIN BODY’S MECHANISM
Mechanical men reveal to the visitors of the Century of Progress exhibition the physiology and chemistry of the human body.
The famous transparent man, manufactured in Germany, as a life-sized display of the vital organs of human anatomy is a central exhibit in the medical section of the Hall of Science. He is illustrated on the front cover of this week’s Science News Letter.
The life-sized model transparent man obtained by the Century of Progress from the famous Hygiene Museum at Dresden has his exterior made of a synthetic transparent material. Heart, lungs, the stomach, liver, and other interior organs are lighted in rotation to show vividly to the visitor their relation to the surface of the skin.
An American robot, 10 feet high, who speaks and gestures, and explains an illuminated interior view of himself is a part of the chemical exhibit.
RADIO IMPULSE FOUND COMING FROM HEART OF MILKY WAY
To the cosmic rays, the light of the stars and other detected radiations from outer space, there has now been added a mysterious Milky Way static or radio impulse that seems to come from the vicinity of the very heart of the Milky Way.
Karl G. Jansky, of Bell Telephone Laboratories, discovered this cosmic “hiss” while working with an extremely sensitive receiving set at Holmdel, N.J. Disentangling this particular kind of static from other sorts that are heard in radio sets, Mr. Jansky noted that the hiss was always a little stronger coming from one direction than from all other directions and that this direction of maximum static hiss was continually rotating around the horizon.
Mr. Jansky made many observations, attempting to check the idea that the hiss had something to do with the sun’s position and the Earth’s daily motion. He discovered that the direction of this hiss progressed slightly in position in the sky with each day. For a year he gathered observations daily, without making any scientific announcement. Apparently the hiss was not following the sun, but something that gained on the sun 4 minutes a day or a whole rotation of the heavens in a year. This is exactly what the stars do, as every amateur astronomer or stargazer knows.
The cosmic static was therefore seemingly hitched to a given place in the heavens or the Milky Way. It is a stream of radio impulses coming from some fixed point outside the solar system in the great aggregation of stars, known as they Milky Way, in which our sun is a mere minor star.
APES WORK FOR “MONEY” AND SPEND IT IN SLOT MACHINES
Apes can be taught how to use “money” to buy the food delicacies they enjoy, to choose a small white token rather than a larger one with less purchasing power, and even to “hoard” more of the tokens than they can spend at one time and to discard worthless brass checks. They will work just about as hard to earn the “money” as they will for a direct reward of food.
This ability of animals lower in the scale than man to realize the significance of symbols was revealed in Washington when Dr. John B. Wolfe, National Research Council Fellow, reported to the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the Council experiments he had been making, under the direction of Dr. Robert M. Yerkes, with chimpanzees in the Laboratories of Comparative Psychobiology at Yale.
