Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 November 1891 — SCIENTIFIC WAIFS. [ARTICLE]

SCIENTIFIC WAIFS.

An astronomer estimates that the globe is annually pelted with 140,000,000 meteoric projectiles. The great telescope of Lord Rossu has a speculum six feet iu diameter and fifty five feet focus. The French manufacture a paper linen so cleverly that it is almost impossible without examination to detect the difference between it and damask. A philosophical statistician calculates that in the year 2000 there will he 1,700,000,000 people who speak English, und that the other European languages will be spokeu by only 500,000,000 people. Liquid oxygen turns out to be blue. Hitherto it has been described as colorless. M. Olszowski, of Moscow, who has just made the discovery, suggests that the color of the sky may be due to the atmospheric oxygen. Molds for casting iron can only be made in sand. Iron or other metallic molds chill the iron, and it does not fill well. The great heat at which iron melts will burn any other material, or will stick so as to break the mold. One of the recent inventions for life saving apparatus is the Irvine pneumatic gun for throwing a line to ships iu distress or to persons in a burning bouse. The air is admitted from a reservoir to the chamber behind the projectile at a pressure of 2,400 pounds on the square inch. Dr. Kikodze, a specialist, has been devoting his attention to the condition of blood in the human body during pneumonia, and found that during the course of this disease the white corpuscles increase in number as much us three times what they are in healthy persons.