From the November 21, 1936, issue
WILD TURKEYS, NEARLY EXTINCT, PENNED TO KEEP THEM WILD
As if carved from stone in bas-relief is the giant domestic turkey from the Winewood plantation shown on the front cover of this week’s Science News Letter. To obtain the strange three-dimensional effect, Science Service Photographer Fremont Davis made an extra transparent positive and superimposed it on his negative. By offsetting the positive and negative slightly and making a single print from the two, the effect of sculpture is obtained.
CAN EXTEND “PRIME OF LIFE” BY SUITABLE DIET
Old age can be held at bay and life itself prolonged some 7 years by dietary means. Evidence for this has been obtained in nutrition studies with rats, made by Dr. Henry C. Sherman, Mitchill professor of chemistry at Columbia University and research associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
The diet that extended the prime of life in rats had an increased proportion of milk, making the diet richer in vitamins A and G, calcium, and protein, Dr. Sherman reported in a lecture at the Carnegie Institution.
This diet “expedited growth and development, resulted in a higher level of adult vitality as shown by several criteria, and extended the average length of adult life, or improved the life expectation of the adult.”
Extension of life expectation has heretofore been made for lower age levels by hygienic means which reduced the chances of death by diseases of infancy and childhood. By applying the new knowledge of nutrition, Dr. Sherman believes it is now possible to extend life during “the period of the prime.”
Because eminent men usually attain their positions of “fullest opportunity” at an age when only the last third of their years remain to render “fullest service to the world,” Dr. Sherman believes that the possibility of extending the prime period of life has greater than biological significance.
LINER USES BEAM RADIO TO “SEE” THROUGH FOG
Little mentioned and still in experimental use on the S.S. Normandie are ultrashort radio wave devices that can detect fog-obscured obstacles in the path of the vessel up to a distance of 4-and-a-half miles.
The French society of radio electrical engineers developed the experimental equipment, which looks like two searchlights mounted about 20 feet apart.
What appear to be searchlights, high on the forward part of the Normandie, are in reality the transmitting and detecting mirrors of the ultrashort radio waves. Idea behind the apparatus is that the radiation emitted in a beam will strike the obstacle ahead, and that the small part of the reflected energy will be detected by the receiver in the other mirror.
The special vacuum tube wave generator produces radio waves whose length is only 12 centimeters, or about 5 inches.
