Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1893 — POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES. [ARTICLE]

POPULAR SCIENCE NOTES.

A Russian physician has been making some curious experiments to find out how far uuimals can count, lie declares that the crow can count up to ten and is hereby superior in arithmetic to certain Polynesian tribes of men, who eanuot get beyond five or six. Microscopic Screws. —The smallest screw in the world Is that used in the movement of a watch. Some of these are so minute that a box of them appears to the casual observer to be filled with fine black sand. With a strong glass, however, they are seen to be perfect in every part, though only 4-1000 of an inch in diameter. A thimble will hold over 100,000 of them. They are not counted, but sold by weight. The Size of the Sea. —One gallon of water weighs ten pounds, so the number of gallouß in the Pacific is over 200,000,000,000,000, an amount which would lake more than a million years to puss over the Falls of Niagara. Yet, put into a sphere, the whole of the Pacific would only measure 720 miles across. The Atlantic could he contained bodily in the Pacific nearly three times. The number of cubic feet is 117 followed by seven tcenoiphers; a number that would Ire ticked off by ftur million clocks in 370,000 years. Its weight is 323,000,000,000 tons, and the number of gallons in it 73,000,000,000,000. A sphere to hold the Atlantic wosild have to be 533£ miles in diameter. If it were made to fill a circular pipe reaching from the earth to the sun—a distance of 93,000,000 miles—the diameter of the pipe would be 1,837 yards, or rather over a mile; while a pipe of similar length to contain the Pacific would be over a mile and three-quarters across. Yet the distance to the sun is so great that., ns has been pointed out, if a child were born with an arm long enough to reach the sun it would not live long enough to know that it had touched it, for sensation passes along our nerves at the rate of 100 feet a second, and to travel from the sun to the earth at that rate would take a century aDd a half, and such an abnormal infant is an unlikely centenarian.—[Longman’s.

A New Way to Preserve Pictures. —A recent invention of W. 8. Simpson, which promises to do away with the dangers which all pictures, and especially water-color drawings,have hitherto undergone from the disastrous effect of light on pigments. Mr. Simpson has, by an exceedingly simple device, made it possible to frame all pictures, large or small, under this dcsiruble condition. The canvas or painting is placed in a chamber or box, either copper or aluminum, according to the siza and weight of the picture. The front of this chamber is of achromatic glasa, and by tbe use of an airpump all air behind the glass is exhausted and a vacuum created. The picture is then replaced in the original frame, the only difference being that the colors appear considerably brighter and every detail is more distinot, owjng to the absence of the air formerly imprisoned between the glass and the painting, and the substitution of achromatic for ordinary glass. Under these conditions the most delicate Turner water-color muy be exposed to the full light of the sun without any danger of fuding. A picture once inclosed in a vacuum needs no further cleaning or dusting.