American Association

Some 5000 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science spent the week in Manhattan, at their annual winter convention. Some data:

Preserved Sloth. Perhaps 1,000,000 years ago, certainly 500,000, a dumpy, pale yellow ground sloth, 8 feet long from its small head to its thick tail, lumbered terrorized near what is now El Paso, Texas. Some predatory beast was chasing it, perhaps a sabre-toothed tiger. The sloth was a plant-eating animal with soft teeth and did not know how to fight. So it could only lope towards a hole it knew. It reached the hole, scrambled over the ledge, fell 100 feet to the bottom. Bats who mat> the place their perch fluttered and squeaked fearfully, angrily. The preying beast went away. But the sloth could not climb out of the hole, which was a volcanic pit with vertical sides. Soon the sloth died and the indifferent bats dropped their guano on its dead body. Good for modern paleontology was their filthy covering. It preserved the sloth-bones, teeth, tendons, hide and even a food ball in its stomach. Recently one Ewing Waterhouse of El Paso descended the pit and found the remains, which forthwith went to Yale's Peabody Museum. It is the third and best-preserved ground sloth known, reported Yale's Richard Sivann Lull.

Synthetic Insulin. John J. Abel and H. Jensen of Johns Hopkins reported that they had reduced insulin (hormone which controls the body's sugar) to crystals of relatively simple chemical content. In the crystals they found 3% sulphur, considerable nitrogen, five different ameno-acids. They are working to identify remaining insulin crystal constituents. When that is done they feel that they can make synthetic insulin much cheaper than the present animal product. Insulin is one of the four hormones so far isolated. Of the others: adrenalin, thyroxin and pituitrin.

Hot-&-Cold Moon. One late afternoon when the Moon was early up, astronomers at Mt. Wilson observatory focused their 100-inch telescope on her and with a thermocouple found her heat, absorbed from the sun, to be 159DEG F. ( Water boils on earth at 212DEG F.) While they were measuring, Earth passed between Sun and Moon, causing an eclipse. Moon's temperature dropped to 196DEG below Zero. Less than an hour later the lunar temperature was 155DEG F. Edison Pettit and Seth Barnes Nicholson, who reported this, estimated that when no sunlight reaches the Moon, her temperature falls to 459DEG below Zero.

Genesis of Continents. Earth has a rind 2,000 miles thick, a core 4,000 miles in diameter. The core is a hot, viscous liquid, composed chiefly of iron and held within the mighty pressure of the rind. At times the central heat melts spots in the rind; asthenoliths or blisters result 30 to 600 miles below Earth's surface. The asthenoliths may be hundreds of miles wide, 10 to 20 miles thick. So theorized Leland Stanford's Bailey Willis.

Looking Backward. Despite general acceptance of Chicago's late Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin's planetesimal theory of Earth's origin, Oxford's Herbert Hall Turner opined that science can never tell the Earth's beginnings, nor the universe's. So look forward, said he. "Time's arrow points one way--to the future. It is a vain hope that we can ever learn of the beginning of things. To quote A. S. Eddington in his recently published Giford Lectures,* it is as vain as it would be to expect that all the monkeys in the world pounding on all the typewriter keys in the world would duplicate all the books in the British Museum."

How Man Came to Be. In few words, American Museum's William K. Gregory outlined how man came to be man. Pre-mammalian vertebrates supplied the spine, chest and hip girdles, arms and legs, skull. Early mammals built up the definitely mammalian skeleton, the beginning of the mammalian brain, a mobile face, adaptation to temperature changes. The early anthropoids, being climbers, modified the hands and feet, arms and legs, shoulder girdle, ribs, hips, skull, teeth, brain and facial musculature.

Publicity. "The unlimited use of coin alone does not guarantee satisfaction anywhere. . . . The adequate compensation for encouragement to continue research must include those tokens of appreciation which other creative people generally desire. The public they serve should know of the service. This is a strong survival principle for a race. Publication in some form to bring recognition by one's peers is the nearest equivalent to the artistic painting, the beautiful poem, the enduring sculpture and the splendid architecture of other creators." General Electric's Willis R. Whitney.

Vassar Laughers. Polyxenie Kambouropotdos, well-liked, dusky instructor of psychology at Vassar, showed her pupils, daisy chainers included, under 4,000 jokes and learned girls laugh most at humorous situations based on personal superiority, next at inferiority or predicament situations, next at incongruous situations. Those who laughed at fewest jokes were Vassar's brightest minds.

New President of the A. A. A. S. is Robert Andrews Millikan, 60, discoverer of the cosmic ray, 1923 Nobel Prize Winner, chairman of California Institute of Technology's Executive Council and director of its Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics. His colleague, Arthur Amos Noyes, 62, director of California Tech's Gates Chemistry Laboratory was president in 1927.

*THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD.--A. S. Eddington--Macmillan ($3.75). An admirably lucid, charmingly written interpretation of the modern hypotheses of relativity, time gravitation, quanta. Arthur Stanley Eddington, 46, is Plumian professor of astronomy at Cambridge. When he visits London, he is most often seen at the exclusive & intellectual Athenaeum Club, where Professor Turner is also member.

For a sound report on widely dispersed and uncorrelated scientific activities, see ANNUAL REPORT, The Smithsonian Institution, U. S. Government Printing Office.