From the October 23, 1937, issue

TWO-WAY ELECTRIC PLOW IN USE IN SOVIET RUSSIA

The large hydroelectric plan on the Dneiper River in Russia’s Dnepropetrovsk province makes it possible for them to use electric farm equipment like the two-way plow shown on the front cover of this week’s Science News Letter.

No tractor is attached to the plow, which can reverse and travel in either direction. It is particularly useful on large areas of flat ground without rock like that on which the implement is pictured.

RATS LOSE CANCER TENDENCY, RABBITS GAIN EXTRA RIBS

Cancer in rats, to which some strains appear to be highly susceptible and to inherit their susceptibility, has been all but suppressed in their descendants by carefully selecting the more resistant individuals and breeding them, it was reported before the meeting of the Genetics Society of America at Woods Hole, Mass., by a three-man research team from the University of Wisconsin. The group consisted of Prof. Michael F. Guyer and Drs. F.E. Mohs and P.E. Claus.

The original rat strain proved susceptible to transplantable cancer in over 84 percent. of its individuals. After the course of breeding, the “takes” amounted to only 6 percent in the eighth to thirteenth generations. Further experiments are planned to test the relative resistance of the two strains to other types of cancer and to cancer-causing chemicals.

Adam lost a rib in the process of getting a mate, Genesis tells us; but having selected mates with the proper Mendelian setup has given extra ribs to rabbits in the laboratories at Brown University, Dr. E.L. Green reported. Ordinary rabbits have 12 ribs apiece, but one family of Dr. Green’s rabbits has 13 ribs apiece as a regular hereditary trait. Extra joints in the backbone seem to go with extra ribs: the 13-ribbed rabbits have seven lumbar vertebrae, the 12-ribbed ones only six.

ARTIFICIAL FERTILIZATION USED ON GNAT-SIZED INSECTS

Artificial fertilization methods have been successfully applied for the first time to tiny fruit flies or Drosophila, insects no larger than gnats, by Dr. G. Gottschewski of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Biology, Berlin-Dahlem, at present working in the laboratories of the California Institute of Technology. Methods of this kind have been heretofore used to some extent with cattle, sheep, and other mammals; experimentally also with poultry; but the smallest animal hitherto artificially inseminated has been the queen honeybee—a creature gigantic in comparison with Drosophila.