The gift of one twenty-eighth of an ounce of radium, worth $100,000, made by the women of America to Madame Curie in 1921 has been instrumental in establishing and proving a new law of nature.
Mme. J.S. Lattes, a worker in Mme. Curie's laboratory . . . was able to confirm definitely, using the American radium, a law discovered by Georges Fournier in the same laboratory, according to which there is a simple mathematical relation between the absorption coefficient of a material and its atomic number.
She also . . . learned how to avoid the destruction of the flesh, or necrosis, which occurs when a radium tube is improperly used. Essentially, her method is to use first a thin sheath of a dense metal, such as platinum, around the radium, and then to wrap the tube in many layers of light material, such as gauze, to absorb the secondary rays issued from the platinum.
Changes on the sun, previously perceptible only in photographs, may now be watched visually with a new instrument called the spectrahelioscope, invented by Dr. George Ellery Hale, honorary director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory. This device is a modification of the spectroheliograph, which he invented a number of years ago for photographing the sun as a whole or individual features of it in the light of a single color or wavelength. The visual device is advantageous, however, because actual changes can be watched as they take place, even though they are invisible when the sun is viewed through the telescope in the ordinary way.
The growing medical practice of treating paralysis with a counterattack of malaria or rat-bite fever may be superseded by a much simpler process of injection with protein substances.
The latter, according to a report to the American Medical Association by Drs. M.M. Kunde, George W. Hall, and F.J. Gerty of Chicago, presents the advantage of not introducing a disease-producing organism into the system of the patient and is much more conveniently managed.
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