98-TON BUTTERFLY VALVE, A SIMPLE DEVICEA good place for a photographer to take a picture, this penstock will be serving an even better purpose when it begins to carry water through the dam to turn the huge turbines of the Ruskin power plant, British Columbia.The flow of water through this 19-foot-diameter intake pipe is controlled by the butterfly valve just behind the workman in the photograph. The entire valve weighs 98 tons and its moving disk, 47 tons. It is operated hydraulically by a rubber tube carrying water under pressure.UNIVERSE’S OUTPOSTS MAY BE FOREVER BEYOND REACH OF MAN“The larg...

AIR VIBRATIONS IN ORGAN PIPES REVEALED BY PATTERN IN SMOKEMaking smoke rings in organ pipes, to show up the little cyclones that whirl in them when obstacles are placed in the openings, is the curious mode of research adopted by a London physicist, Prof. E.N. da C. Andrade of University College. These little cyclones, or vortices, have important effects on the tones of the pipes. By photographing them in smoke, Prof. Andrade is able to check the accuracy of mathematically calculated theories never before tested.His smoke method is an improvement on the one previously in use, which was devised ...

HOT WAVES BRING NORTHWEST GRASSHOPPER INVASION MENACEGrasshopper outbreaks in Nebraska and South Dakota may be only the advance guards of a much worse and more widespread insect horde to arrive before very long if hot waves continue to sweep the country. So say entomologists of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The coming of these insects in June was in a sense premature, they state, for even in bad grasshopper years the pest does not ordinarily assume serious proportions until July.Just how bad the grasshoppers can be expected to be in the West this year it is impossible as yet to estimate....

MAGNIFYING EYE WOULD SEE STRANGE THINGSIf we could only convert our eyes into magnifying glasses at will, we would see a lot of astonishing things that escape us now because they are too small. The little walking gargoyle shown on the cover of Science News Letter, for example.It is a juvenile stage of a very common insect, which we ordinarily pass by as just another “bug.” But here he is, magnified only 16 times by Cornelia Clarke’s camera, and he assumes an appearance more bizarre than the imagination of a Persian artist, more impossible than the figures in a medieval bestiary.PICTURES OF SPI...

LARGER MERCURY VAPOR ELECTRIC GENERATING UNIT BEING BUILTA new and larger turbine electric generator that will use mercury vapor instead of steam and will consume less fuel than corresponding modern steam plants is being constructed in the General Electric Company plant at Schenectady, N.Y.This 20,000-kilowatt turbine will have twice the output of the mercury vapor engine and generator that General Electric engineers claim has already proved its superior efficiency over steam turbines during a year’s test at Hartford, Conn. The new plant will be even more efficient than the Hartford station, i...

HUGE ELETROMAGNET INSTALLED AT LEIDENA huge electromagnet weighing 14 tons, about two-thirds as much as a street car, just erected at Leiden, Holland, by the Siemens Halske Company of Berlin, will enable scientists to wrench atoms apart as never before. This marks the realization of a dream of the late Dr. H. Kammerlingh Onnes, the first man to liquefy helium, who designed the magnet.The joint action of intense magnetic force with intense cold is likely to yield new secrets about atoms, is the belief of Prof. Onnes’ successor, Prof. W.J. Haas, who completed the work. Dr. Peter Kapitza, of the ...

TWIN ALBINO ROBINS HATCHED WITH NORMAL BIRDTwo albino robins, highly interesting and rather rare oddities in the bird world, have been watched from hatching to early maturity at the home of H.D. Shaw of Grinnell, Iowa, and had their pictures taken by Miss Cornelia Clarke, nature photographer.“The nest was built high up on the ledge of the porch where it wad sheltered and partly hidden by the vines,” Miss Clarke writes. “There were three eggs in the nest. Two hatched the albinos and the third an ordinary brown robin. The parents were normal in every respect except that the mother robin had two ...

LARGEST WIND TUNNEL AND TOWING CHANNEL FINISHEDAeronautic research took a stride forward when two outstanding pieces of apparatus for testing and improving aircraft—both the largest of their kind in the world—were officially put in operation last week by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at its Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Langley Field, Va.One is a wind tunnel big enough to hold full-sized airplanes between its yawning jaws. The other is a seaplane towing channel nearly half a mile long through which a model of a boat hull can be pulled as fast as a mile a minute....

LIFE IS RARE IN UNIVERSE, ASTRONOMER BELIEVESLife is a rare phenomenon in the universe, Sir James Jeans, British astronomer, assured the Franklin Institute meeting at which he was presented the Franklin Medal, one of Science’s highest awards.“I leave it to you to be pleased or not,” Sir James said, “at a large fraction of the life of the universe being concentrated on our planet.”His theory is that the planets were formed by the close approach to the sun of another star that pulled out of the sun by tidal action a great cigar-shaped streamer of gas, which condensed like drops of steam into the...

TOUCH OF SPRING FEVER MAKES WHOLE WORLD KINIn the spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of another nap even more often than it does to amative imaginings, Tennyson to the contrary notwithstanding. “Spring fever,” that drowsiness and mild lassitude that comes of warmth and well-being rather than of the crabbed winter of fatigue, has never received the serious attention of research workers in pathology—and it is to be hoped it never will. They might turn up a cure for it, which would be most deplorable.Whatever spring fever is, it is no monopoly of the higher primates. Its benign afflicti...