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Blindfolded Spiraling. Professor Asa Arthur Schaeffer of the University of Kansas blindfolded persons and set them walking on a level patch of ground. Invariably they walked straight ahead for 50 or 100 steps, then they began curving their paths into great spirals, which at first were 60 to 180 feet in diameter and then as the promenading continued gradually decreased to curves 15 to 18 feet in diameter. The same blindfolded spiraling occurred whether the promenaders walked on prairies, race tracks, or ice. It occurred when people swam blindfolded, and when, blindfolded, they drove automoblles. Skin & Feathers. Dr. Charles Haskell Danforth of Stanford University, grafted on a Plymouth Rock chick a patch of skin from a White Leghorn chick. The feathers that grew on the patched part of the Plymouth Rock were Leghorn feathers. Dr. Danforth decided that skin alone and not general constitution was the determining factor in feather-making. However glandular secretions have some effect. The Plymouth Rock hen on which he grafted skin of a Leghorn cock developed Leghorn hen feathers.
Electron Waves. One of the most important as well as abstruse experiments of the year, reported at those Nashville meetings, was conducted by Dr. Clinton Joseph Davisson of the Bell Telephone laboratories. Professor Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago, who recently received the Nobel Prize for Physics (TIME, Nov. 21) had described x-rays as moving like corpuscles or bullets. This supports the quantum theory of matter, i. e. that all matter is made up of rapidly moving but separate particles. And it supported a theory that electrons popped away from hot objects, such as filaments in an incandescent lamp or vacuum tube, in a straight line. Dr. Davisson has just discovered that those electrons leave their parent body in radiating waves as well as in separate particles.
Dinosaurian Pains. Enlarged joints and diseased bones indicate that paleolithic animals suffered from toothache, rheumatism, tuberculosis and other diseases still current. Said Dr. Arthur Sterry Coggeshall, chief paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, to illustrate the apathy of the dinosaurs: "His brain [a dinosaur's] was about the size of a man's thumb—in fact the telegraph system of his great body was so impotent that if somebody had stepped on his tail his brain, 80 feet from the injured member, would never have received the message."