From the July 20, 1929 issue
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Flashes of light in summer skies. "A shooting star," we say. A meteor, a dead fragment of a star, has burned itself out in our atmosphere. But someday there may be the roar of a million express trains. A massive chunk of sky dust may project itself out of space and land in the middle of a great city. Thousands would perish, the effects of aerial bombs will fade into insignificance. More terrific than war would be the effect of a single large meteorite that smashed into civilization. Such possibilities lie in the minds of enthusiastic amateur astronomers, who have taken as their pleasure the increase of knowledge about meteors. Without telescopes, with bare eyes and keen senses, they chart the meteoric flashes of the night. More interesting to them than possible world disaster is the hint that meteors contain of the existence of other solar systems, other groups of planets surrounding the stars of the sky. NEW X-RAY MENACE X-ray therapy, one of the blessings of modern science, can, in exceptional cases, produce feeblemindedness and deformity in human beings. This possibility has been discovered through investigations by Dr. Douglas P. Murphy of the University of Pennsylvania. He emphasizes, however, that the danger is limited to treatment with X-rays, which does not include the taking of an ordinary X-ray picture. Mothers shortly before the birth of their children are sometimes treated with X-ray irradiation for malignant growths. If the growing child is subjected to the irradiation from the X-ray machine at the same time that the therapeutic measures are undertaken, it has been determined that there is about one out of three chances that it will be feebleminded. Malformations of the head and dwarfing of the limbs may occur under such conditions. Dr. Murphy has studied over a hundred instances of X-ray treatments under such conditions, and he found that serious results had followed in one-third of the cases. There is no danger in an ordinary X-ray picture if it is taken of the mother before the birth of her child. Neither has Dr. Murphy been able to discover any injurious effects upon subsequent children from X-ray treatments that were given before pregnancy. |
