From the October 7, 1933, issue
ANCIENT MAP SHOWS HOW WORLD LOOKED TO COLUMBUS
Startled to find the name Columbus mentioned on an old Turkish map of the Atlantic Ocean, Paul Kahle has subjected the map to closest study, finding on it important new clues to the discovery of America.
In a report on his investigations, to appear in the forthcoming issue of the Geographical Review, official organ of the American Geographical Society, Dr. Kahle announces his belief that for the first time geographers have an idea of the appearance of the map that served to guide Columbus on his first voyage.
We are now in a position even to reconstruct this map to a certain extent, he declares.
No maps indisputably drawn by Columbus himself are known to be in existence. The maps that he undoubtedly drew to show the King and Queen of Spain where lay the fine lands he had found in their honor have vanished. Nor have searches ever revealed any chart by which the navigator steered his course on the worlds most famous voyages of discovery. Hence the importance of the Turkish map, which appears to be a direct copy of one of the lost maps by Columbus. By translating the long Arabic inscriptions on the map, Dr. Kahle found that it was made for the Sultan Selim I, in 1513, and it specifically states that new lands are included, as added lately by the “Genoese infidel Colon-bo.”
BETTER CANCER TREATMENT MAY RESULT FROM POWERFUL X-RAYS
When science is able to produce X-rays of 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 volts, these short-wave radiations will pick out with more deadly aim the cancer cells and thus be more effective in the treatment of cancer than the X-rays and radium radiation now used.
This was predicted by Dr. Robert H. Millwee, roentgenologist of the Dallas, Texas, Methodist Hospital, at the American Congress of Radiology in Chicago, upon the basis of a theory as to how the normal, relatively old cells of the body have acquired resistance to X-rays and radium.
Cosmic rays which continually plunge through our bodies are credited by Dr. Millwee with developing a hardiness of the normal cells that allows them to go through a bombardment of X-rays without harm, while the cell “upstarts” that compose the dangerous cancerous growth are damaged because they have not developed this resistance.
Dr. Millwee studied the influence of the age of cells upon their resistance to X-rays and radium.
DEUTONS CREATING NEUTRONS PROMISE TO SMASH ATOMS
Two particles recently discovered by science, the neutron and the deuton, promise to play an important role in atomic disintegration as the result of experiments just made at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, Calif.
Radium has been definitely superseded as the most effective generator of neutrons, those neutral particles which since the discovery of their existence two years ago have assumed an increasingly important place in experimental physics. Recently, H.R. Crane, a graduate student, Dr. C.C. Lauritsen, and Dr. A. Soltan, an international research fellow from Poland, using the large, million-volt X-ray tube developed by Dr. Lauritsen, showed that the hearts of helium ions could be speeded up sufficiently to knock neutrons out by beryllium atoms. In this way they produced twice as many neutrons as any radioactive source ever did.
Now they have tried deutons, the hearts of the double-weight hydrogen atoms, as the projectiles flung by high voltage at various substances. They were astonished to find that deutons used instead of helium hearts release from beryllium 500 times as many neutrons as ever before obtained.
