A. A. A. S. at Cambridge

With 25,000 scientific journals in the world in which to exhibit their new discoveries and theories, members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rarely save breathtaking news for the annual meetings of that body. Nevertheless they find it helpful to assemble for a few days during the winter to take stock of themselves and their ideas. At such meetings the lay Press often gets first wind of things which Science has had on the fire for some time. Last week 3,000 U. S. and Canadian American Association members gathered in Boston for their 93rd meeting. They were welcomed by Massachusetts' Governor Ely and by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's President Karl Taylor Compton on behalf of M. I. T., Harvard and eight other Greater Boston institutions acting as hosts. Then in scores of sectional meetings the scientists settled down to read 1,500 papers. Among them:

War. Pacifists say that as civilization progresses, war should decrease. To prove that, in the past, the reverse has been true, a historical war chart was exhibited by two Russian expatriates. The chartmakers plotted the amount of war in the Occidental world from 500 B. C. to 1925 A. D. They surveyed 902 wars, gave each an index number based on duration, number of combatants, number of casualties, number of participating countries, proportion of combatants to noncombatants. From this they computed index numbers for each of the 24 whole centuries examined and for the fractional 25th.

The war curve receded from the ancient highs of Greece and Rome to the 12th Century, when the index number was 2.7. As Christendom, galvanized by the Crusades, moved toward the Renaissance, the war indices started to climb by leaps & bounds. The index of the 15th Century was 31.12. of the 18th, 567.5. There was a slight downswing in the tranquil 19th; but in the first quarter of the World War century the number was 13,735.98--eight times the total of all preceding centuries.

Corollary surveys of separate countries showed that a nation is most warlike in periods of territorial expansion and economic power, that when a nation is "great" it makes war. Holland, the chartmakers pointed out, long stagnant while other countries scrabbled for land & trade, has doggedly refused to fight since 1833. They concluded that bigger & worse wars are in store, that those who believe otherwise are believers in miracles.

Bespectacled Chartmaker Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was born in Russia 45 years ago. His studies of violence have not been entirely academic. He was imprisoned thrice under the Tsarist regime for radicalism, thrice by the Bolshevists for conservatism. Sentenced to death, he was awaiting execution when the Communist Government relented, chased him out in 1922. Next year he came to the U. S., taught at the University of Minnesota, was naturalized in 1930, is now head of Harvard's Sociology Department. Chartmaker Nikolai Nikolaevich Golovine, 58, distinguished World War historian, was once a general staff officer of the Imperial Army and professor at the Imperial Military Academy. He makes his headquarters in Paris, has lectured at the French Military Academy, the U. S. War College.

2,000-In. Telescope. Mt. Wilson Observatory's 100-inch mirror is the world's biggest telescope mirror now in use. Two hundred inches is the diameter, $12,000,000 the cost of Mt. Wilson's new mirror, still incomplete after years in construction. Plans for an "electronic" telescope, equal in magnifying power to an instrument equipped with a 2,000-inch mirror, were outlined by Dr. Francois Henroteau of Ottawa's Dominion Observatory. The projected telescope will be electrical, not optical. Dr. Henroteau and his aides have discovered how to deposit 25,000,000 minuscule silver dots on a square inch of thin mica plate. Starlight falling on the silvered mica will be scanned by photoelectric cells, which will convert the image into feeble electric current, which in turn will be amplified tremendously by three-electrode vacuum tubes. The result will be a photograph clear enough to bring remote stars into Earth's "back yard."

Star Wind. Dr. Otto Struve, director of Yerkes Observatory, told of discerning by spectroscopic observation what seemed to be furious hurricanes in the atmosphere of some stars. On one hitherto inconspicuous star the wind seemed to be blowing at the rate of 144,000 m.p.h. Dr. Struve added that, despite the surface turbulence visible in hydrogen photographs, the sun's atmosphere is practically windless.

Star study was a natural groove for dimple-chinned Dr. Struve, 36. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father were astronomers. Like War Student Nikolai Golovine, he is Russian-born and a one-time Imperial soldier. After the Revolution he fought with the White Armies, fled to Constantinople in 1921, a year ago succeeded blind Professor Edwin B. Frost as boss of Yerkes.

Milky Way. An estimate 600% higher than any previous census of stars in the Milky Way (the galaxy to which Earth belongs) was given by Drs. J. S. Plaskett and J. A. Pearce of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory at Victoria, B. C. Their total was 170 billion stars. The Milky Way is apparently rotating round a centre once every 220,000,000 years. From this centre they find the solar system 30,000 light years away.

"Disordered Universe." An outstanding player in astronomy's game of juggling and revising figures is tousle-haired Director Harlow Shapley of Harvard Observatory. To him last week the American Academy of Arts & Sciences presented its Rumford Medal for research in physics. Dr. Shapley responded with a talk on "The Anatomy of a Disordered Universe."

His disordered universe was not the cosmologist's all-embracing universe but the Large Magellanic Cloud, nearest galaxy to the Milky Way. With a microphotometer, a special camera and an able staff, he found in the Cloud more than 500 new variable stars and enough star clusters in its neighborhood to make its diameter seem 20,000 light years, double the previous estimate. His present objective is to locate, by measuring the amount of cosmic material in different directions and at different distances, the centre of the all-embracing universe -- if such a centre exists.

Unitarian Defense. What happens when a man or animal is immunized to a specific infection from outside? Bacteriologists have long known that in the blood are produced antibodies which kill off the invading organisms. They have supposed that in this struggle fixed tissues like the skin are helpless bystanders. Dr. Reuben Leon Kahn, director of the University of Michigan's clinical laboratories, questioned this theory. He has harried hundreds of immunized rabbits by injecting toxins and antitoxins into their skins, muscles, bellies, brains, blood. Last week he made known results and conclusions indicating that, though current immunization procedure need not be changed, immunization theory must be drastically overhauled.

When a bacterial suspension is injected into the skin of an animal previously rendered immune to that bacterium, the local inflammation is much more than in the case of a nonimmune creature. This, according to most bacteriologists, is because the skin is hypersensitive and is the prey of toxic products thrown off in the battle between the bacteria and blood-borne antibodies. Wrong, said Dr. Kahn. Independently of the circulating antibodies, possibly even before they get into action, the skin cells themselves locate and combat the invader, and that combat causes inflammation. Dr. Kahn found that this pugnacity of the skin is ten times that of the blood; that other fixed tissues such as the peritoneum, muscles and brain are also, and in that order, more active in defense than the blood; that the skin reaction persists after the combative quality of the blood has disappeared.

Said Dr. Kahn: "One should necessarily be cautious when discussing the significance of data which tend to upset accepted views in a field of science." Dr. Kahn was cautious because his rabbits are not men. Nevertheless the same phenomena attend the immunization of rabbits and men. According to Dr. Kahn, the conclusion is inescapable that immunization is not a mere production of antibodies in the blood, but, through an actual change in other tissues, is a "unitarian" response in the whole body. So impressed was the Association by these findings that to Lithuanian-born Dr. Kahn, 46, went the eleventh annual award of $1,000 for the meeting's most noteworthy paper.

Sideshow. The scientists had something on tap besides talk. Through the stained-glass windows of Harvard's murky old Memorial Hall light streamed in on a great array of exhibits. Among them:

P: Stereopticon slides brought by airplane from Caltech by Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, making visible in three dimensions the paths of positive & negative electrons kicked out of atomic nuclei by cosmic rays.

P: Bell Telephone Laboratories' automatic telephone-message taker. The sender's voice activates two small magnets which impress a varying magnetization on a moving steel ribbon. The ribbon gives up its message when it is played through a second magnet set.

P: A centrifuge, microscope & camera hookup from Princeton's biological laboratories which photographs minute bits of germ plasm being whirled at 24,000 r.p.m.

P: The "Visagraph," which enables the blind to enjoy books printed in ordinary type. A photoelectric cell scans the page, controls a mechanism which reproduces the type in raised form on aluminum foil.

P: A radio attachment which silences the set when music stops playing and someone begins to talk. The "robot" takes advantage of the fact that talkers must stop for breath. When it detects a quarter-second of silence it turns the set off for ten seconds, tries again & again until it gets continuous sound.

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