SAVING THE FRENCH SILK INDUSTRY

Once again the silk growers of France have had to call in the aid of science to rescue an industry that, in these days of slender silhouettes and diaphanous garments, gives that country an important source of income.

Though attempts to produce silk commercially in the United States have resulted in a complete flop, the recent setback in French sericulture and the ensuing research has a closer bearing on home affairs than the price of silk stockings. The secret lies in an interesting point in insect epidemiology: The disease of the silkworms, responsible for all the havoc among the nurseries of the Midi, is very closely related to a malady that attacks in epidemic form three well-known members of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology’s Rogues’ gallery; namely, the army worm, the tent caterpillar, and the gypsy moth.

HYDROGEN SHOWN TO HAVE TWIN

The whirling heart of an atom was displayed to the members of the American Chemical Society by a youthful German physicist, Dr. K.F. Bonhoeffer. The revelation of the state of affairs in the inmost core of the microcosm of matter was more than a stunt of delicately manipulated physical apparatus, too: It was a revolutionary demonstration that the hydrogen atom, the basic unit with which chemists reckon as mathematicians begin with the figure 1, is not one, but two. There are two kinds of hydrogen. The second kind, whose existence was unsuspected until Dr. Bonhoeffer proved it, is called para-hydrogen.

There is not much difference between the two types of hydrogen atom. They are both built up of the same thing: One electron, or particle of negative electricity, revolving around a central particle or nucleus as the moon goes round the Earth. The hitherto unsuspected secret lies in the nucleus. The hydrogen nucleus is made up of two parts, which are in constant rotation. In the atom of ordinary, "plain" hydrogen these two parts spin in the same direction, just as the two ends of a doorknob turn in the same direction. But in para-hydrogen they spin in opposite directions, like the front wheels of a wagon slewed around on a sharp turn.

GREENEST PLANTS GROW MOST EFFICIENTLY

Plants whose leaves contain the most chlorophyll, the stuff that makes leaves green, are the most efficient at the business of making new plant tissues—which is, from the farmer’s point of view, the chief end and object of plant existence.

Ever since pioneer plant physiologists found out what chlorophyll is, and learned that its function is to capture carbon dioxide out of the air and with the help of sunlight to combine it with water to make sugar, it has been taken for granted that the more chlorophyll a plant has per square inch of leaf surface the faster it can make new stems and leaves.

It has remained for Dr. H.B. Sprague and Dr. J.W. Shive of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station to determine the relation accurately, using the exact analytical methods of the chemical laboratory.