50 Years Ago

  1. Humans

    From the April 12, 1930, issue

    MEDICAL WORLD HONORS DR. WELCH While the whole medical world united in honoring Dr. William Henry Welch on his 80th birthday on April 8, and the president of the United States delivered an address at the Washington celebration, few outside the world of science know who Dr. Welch is or why he was honored in […]

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  2. Humans

    From the April 5, 1930, issue

    SPARROW-SIZE KINGFISHER The Celebes Wood Kingfisher (Ceycopsis fallax), shown on the cover of this week’s SCIENCE NEWSLETTER, is a bird scarcely as large as an English Sparrow. Similar kingfishers of tiny dimensions are found in various tropical countries. They are hunters as well as fishers and feed on insects and other life as well as […]

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  3. Humans

    From the September 24, 1932, issue

    PREHISTORIC ROCK FORTS FOUND ON BARREN ARCTIC ISLAND Reports of finding inaccessible rock fortresses in the sea, used by people of the Far North many centuries ago, are brought back from Kodiak Island, Alaska, by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka of the U.S. National Museum. Dr. Hrdlickas discovery reveals for the first time that inhabitants of the […]

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  4. Humans

    From the March 29, 1930, issue

    WANTED: EARLY PLANET PHOTOGRAPHS With the discovery of the planet beyond Neptune, by Lowell Observatory astronomers, many months of observation will be needed before even an approximate idea can be obtained of the orbit in which it is moving. A planet like this moves in the ecliptic, the plane in which Earth itself revolves around […]

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  5. Humans

    From the March 22, 1930, issue

    THE SUN’S NEW TRANS-NEPTUNIAN PLANET The Lowell Observatory has made the discovery of a celestial body whose rate of motion and path among the stars indicate that it is a new member of the sun’s family of planets out beyond Neptune. Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Percival Lowell, director and founder of the Observatory at Flagstaff, […]

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  6. Humans

    From the September 17, 1932, issue

    ANOTHER GREAT WALL The Great Wall of China, winding like a mighty, protecting serpent along the old northern boundary of the Celestial Kingdom– Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of Britain, built and fortified to shut the barbarians of the north out of southern Britain in Roman days– And now, added to this small, select list […]

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  7. Humans

    From the March 15, 1930, issue

    LARGEST BOILER One of the three largest boilers in the world is shown on the front cover. The boilers were recently installed in the East River station of the New York Edison Company to run the largest single-unit electric generator in the world. If this 215,000-horsepower turbo-generator had been developed in 1906, it could have […]

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  8. Humans

    From the March 8, 1930, issue

    LEAVES OLDER THAN GRAND CANYON FOUND Fossil remains of plants found in the walls of the Grand Canyon show that many millions of years ago stunted vegetation of very singular aspect grew in a great, red, sandy floodplain under a semi-arid climate in northern Arizona. This great red land has been found by Dr. David […]

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  9. Humans

    From the September 10, 1932, issue

    COVER PICTURE PURSUED OVER NEW ENGLAND HILLS By chasing a blue hole in the screen of cloud that covered part of New England, a party of eclipse observers that included Prof. John Q. Stewart, Princeton astronomer, successfully saw the corona in clear sky and obtained the News Letter‘s cover picture. Originally they planned to view […]

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  10. Humans

    From the September 3, 1932, issue

    INSECT LARVAE MAKE MOSAIC JEWELRY Manufacturers of modern jewelry might well turn to the larvae of the caddis fly for effective models for small containers–tiny perfume bottles, say, or lipstick cases. These water-dwelling “worms” build mosaic coverings for the little cylindrical houses they spin for themselves, taking bits of sand and gravel from the streambed […]

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  11. From the March 1, 1930, issue

    BEAUTY IN A DITCH Among the photographs that attracted much attention at an exhibition of the London Salon of Photography not long ago was one that stood out as a gleaming example of the beauty to be found in common things–even in ugly things–by a sufficiently discerning eye. S. Uyeda saw a lot of big, […]

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  12. Humans

    From the February 22, 1930, issue

    THE “BARREL” OF CORONA When high voltage surges on electric transmission lines jump an ordinary string of insulators, arcs form from one insulator to the other and destroy them. But when both ends of the string are protected by metal grading shields, the arc jumps through the air from shield to shield and saves the […]

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