AMERICA'S GAME BIRDS AND ANIMALS COMING BACK

Pronghorn antelope on the Wichita National Forest, Oklahoma. These beautiful animals, whose herds used to outnumber even the vast masses of bison, are struggling to keep their hooves on the up-grade from near-extermination which they faced a decade ago.

BERYLLIUM TO RIVAL ALUMINUM

Airship frames and light-weight pistons may soon be made from beryllium or its alloys, and this hitherto unknown metal may soon achieve the household familiarity that aluminum has won during the last two or three decades.

Beryllium is a metal about a third lighter than aluminum, but it is very much harder, scratching glass easily, like hard steel. According to H.S. Cooper, industrial chemist of Cleveland, Ohio, it is one of the most remarkable of all metals in its elasticity. It is over four times as elastic as aluminum, and 25 percent more elastic than steel. And while aluminum corrodes easily on contact with salt water, beryllium shows very high resistance to this as well as to other metal-destroying liquids and fumes. It is light gray in color, and takes a polish like that of high grade steel.

GENES AND GENOMERES

Just as the atom, the standard "indivisible particle" of the earlier chemistry, has been split up into electrons, so the gene, the standard carrier of a given hereditary quality, is now split into new subdivisions called genomeres, to satisfy the requirements of phenomena which the orthodox genetical concepts of the present day can not explain.

At the Fifth International Genetics Congress at Berlin, Professor William M. Eyster of Bucknell University told how his studies of variegations, or contrasting colors appearing in the leaves and flowers of plants, led him to the adoption of the genomere hypothesis. The standard concept, that genes were indivisible hereditary units, could not account for these stripings and spottings, and the only thing to do was to think of the gene as cut up into sub-units, which usually hang tightly together, but which on occasion can come apart and rearrange themselves. When they do this, they form a sort of genetical mosaic, which expresses itself in the mosaic appearance of the plant itself.