Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 06.djvu/7

Rh when it comes to the readers who like to pick up your errors and rub them in your hair!

HILE science in America is trying desperately to solve the rubber situation, it seems to your editor that Mr. America who drives down to work each morning is demonstrating that he could use a little more common sense, and at the same time help those said scientists a bit. We refer to (in Chicago in particular) the amazing fact that seven out of ten cars driving an average of seven miles each morning, are occupied by only one person, the driver, while buses and "L" cars are jammed to unsafe capacity.

Why can't these drivers, cooperating with local "block captains," arrange to drive someone in their block down to work in the morning?

Which may not be science, but why leave it to science to do all the thinking?

USSIAN scientists have taken one from ! They have succeeded in grafting the corneas, taken from the eyes of corpses, onto living eyes. These corneas have been preserved by refrigeration and can be grafted more successfully than corneas from the eyes of living persons.

Injury to the cornea, the transparent tissue in front of the eye lens, causes blindness, but vision can be restored by grafting a healthy cornea onto the impaired one.

Until this significant discovery the cornea for grafting was donated by an older person wishing to help a young person, or from patients suffering from other diseases. The remarkable knowledge that corneas from the eyes of dead persons can be preserved for future needs makes the performance of this sight-restoring operation an easy one—even if an amazing one.

ALKING about such things, here's one for the asthma sufferer who can find no relief from morphine and adrenalin. You can play dirigible, and take on a load of helium (mix 80% with 10% oxygen and inhale deeply).

Because helium is so light, weighing one-third as much as air, the lungs do not have to work so hard inhaling. This treatment's specific benefits lie in the fact that it rests the fatigued muscles used in breathing, thus aiding them to recover their ability for normal breathing.

VER watch a magician do his stuff with his "wand"? Well, that's not anything new, and it isn't such a hot trick today. Egyptian history carries many tales of the great magicians who performed wondrous miracles before their Pharaoh.

One such remarkable feat was throwing a stick on the ground and then changing it into a live snake. Today we know that secret. For example, a cobra can be grasped deftly, kept from moving, and then be induced to pass into a state of catalepsy wherein the reptile will become stiff and straight as a stick. But we don't think modern magicians are using cobras for "wands"!

ET'S blow up the joint! And just to make sure we do a good job, let's not fool around with something so petty as trinitroglycerine.

Science has found that inositol, the sugary material which is found in minute amounts in the human muscle and liver tissues, can be made from cornstarch and converted into an explosive more powerful than nitroglycerine.

If the expenses can be reduced, the little kernels of corn may prove an invaluable factor in our defense (oops, we mean offense) program. Inositol is the basic substance in this new all-powerful substitute for dynamite. The waste water in which corn is soaked in the process of manufacturing cornstarch renders the valuable inositol which can be converted into an explosive containing six nitrogen atoms known as hexanitroisitol. Trinitroglycerine, familiarly known as nitroglycerine has but three of these nitrogen atoms. Hexanitroinositol surpasses nitroglycerine for use as an explosive insofar as it is a solid compound and not a liquid—thus allowing it to be used directly as an explosive such as dynamite.

Dynamite is so useful because of its solidity making it easier to handle than a liquid explosive. The main disadvantage of dynamite is that it must be soaked up by non-reacting, sponge-like rare earths—the solid dynamite is only part nitroglycerine—the rest is an absorbent substance.

This waste material, inositol, will, in all probability, some day be the basic substance for all our powerful blasting agents.

With that we'll blast off until next month!