Soundings

Highlights of last week's convention of the National Academy of Sciences at Brown University (Providence, R. I.): Totipotency. When a flatworm (Planaria maculata, which inhabits fresh water) is cut into pieces, each piece will grow into a healthy and flawless new flatworm. Just how this marvelously convenient process of regeneration in lower animals works, no one knows. One theory is that their bodies contain undifferentiated, "totipotent" cells capable of growing into any organ under some unexplained architectural guidance. Professor James Walter Wilson of Brown University hazarded the guess that higher animals, perhaps even man, may harbor these cells, but that they have become so feeble in the process of evolution that they yield to the quicker-acting, wound-healing mechanism which covers a wound site with scar tissue. If this mechanism could be halted, so as to give the totipotent cells a chance to rebuild, it might be possible in the future for doctors to grow a new eye or a new leg on a man who has lost one.

Super-Galaxies & Cepheids. Astronomer Harlow Shapley of Harvard, who loves to systematize the universe, was the first man to find that stellar galaxies like the Milky Way, each containing billions of stars, were sometimes huddled in groups which he calls "super-galaxies." Last week he reported the discovery, made by astronomers at Harvard's observatory in South Africa, of two new, far-off super-galaxies, each of which is about 1,000,000 light-years in diameter (one light-year equals approximately six trillion miles). Another discovery, nearer home, concerned the Cepheid variables--a class of stars, mostly yellow supergiants, which fluctuate regularly in brightness. The Harvardmen noticed that in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way, the bigger Cepheids were mostly concentrated toward the centre of the galaxy. This may mean that they were brought there by the operation of galactic gravity over a long time, or that when the stars originally were formed from the parent nebula, conditions favored the formation of big stars in the region of greatest density. In either case the Cepheid variables seem destined to shed further light on cosmic history.

2,000 Tons? Ernest Orlando Lawrence, the jovial University of California physicist who invented the cyclotron (spiral atom-smasher), recently completed a new 220-ton cyclotron, so far the world's biggest, most powerful. Last week he gave a progress report on this monster in operation. With a power input of only 50 kilowatts (more than enough to run a good-sized radio station), he and his crew have obtained beams of 16-million-volt heavy hydrogen particles and 32-million-volt helium particles. With the 32-million-volt beam, new radioactive substances throwing off electrified helium gas have been discovered. The machine has performed so well that Dr. Lawrence now wants a bigger one. He considers it entirely feasible to build a 2,000-ton cyclotron -- costing only $750,000--which will hurl atomic bullets at energies up to 200,000,000 volts. Atom-smashing, once the purest of pure sciences, is already edging toward practicability, especially in cancer therapy and other biological research (TIME, July 10). A 2,000-ton machine, manufacturing radioactive chemicals in large quantities, might even turn atom-smashing industrial.

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