Remains of an extinct hippopotamus have been discovered in the Gobi desert by a party of paleontologists.
This is the first such discovery in the Gobi - hitherto such fossils have been discovered only in North America. The Gobi hippo lived about seven to ten million years ago. At that time the Gobi desert was a hot marshy plain covered with rich vegetation.
THE LEGEND
A legend has long been current that the town of Yangikent in the Syr-Daiya delta in Central Asia was abandoned by its inhabitants because of a plague of snakes.
The ruins of the town were first discovered by Russian travellers in 1741, but there was no clue to why it had been abandoned. There were no traces of conquest. The most recent tombstones were dated 1362.
GRAVEYARD OF GIANTS
A rich grave, almost 5,000 years old, has been found inside hill in the Northern Caucasus.
It is made of slabs of volcanic rock, some of them weighing over a ton.
It contained the bodies of a man and a woman, together with household utensils and golden ornaments and jewellery, possibly of Sarmatian and Hunnish origin.
One of the most interesting points was the height of the man: over 7 ft 2 1/2 in.
He would have been a giant today, let alone 5,000 years ago, when most researchers suggest that men and women were generally very much shorter than at present.
ROBOT ZAAN SORTS OUT THE REJECTS
A robot recruit to British industry was shown to the public in London. The creature's name is Zaan, and its talent is for sorting out small objects by their colour. In particular, for the food industry to pick out foreign bodies and sub-standard candidates from rivers of beans or nuts or potato flakes. It can separate rejects at the rate of 200 rejects a second.
This sort of work has been done in the past by four or five men sitting alongside a conveyor belt picking out tiny or bad fried potato flakes from satisfactory ones. Men can pick out rejects at a rate of about one a second; it is tedious work. It costs $ 50 a ton to sort dehydrated food flakes by hand.
There are machines which can sort small objects by size and shape, for instance rejecting a bean with a maggot hole which is detected by intelligent needles. But Zaan Colour Sorter inspects the small particles with photo-electric eyes and casts out any which are the wrong colour or the wrong brightness.
Unlike human sorters, the machine is unaffected by emotional problems, fatigue, eye-strain, the tea-break, or the conversational next door. The inventors claim that it is cheaper, more hygienic, and more accurate than traditional methods of sorting.
CANCER STUDY
The mechanism by which by which spreads from one place in the body to many, has been the subject of intensive research scientists for many years. What may be an answer to that question - and a suggestion as to how metastasis might be inhibited - came from the Institute for Cancer Research.
Speculation on haw cancer spreads throughout the body has included the possibilities that it does so through the migration of whole malignant cells from the primary tumour mass, or through viruses that are released from dying cancer cells.
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The report in the journal Science suggests a third possibility. This is that cancer cells or viruses leak their genes - in the form of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA - into the bloodstream, and the DNA then travels to places where it invades normal cells and transforms them to malignant ones.
To test this hypothesis scientists injected mice with DNA from polyoma cancer virus and from a pneumococcal bacterium and compared the results.
They found that DNA from tumor viruses was much more resistant body defences than the bacterial DNA. The reason for this, they said, may have had something to do with the closed-ring form of the tumor-type DNA molecules. They said results indicated that this DNA could still produce its cancerous effects.
Thus, the report said that "tumor-inducing DNA can be transported in biologically active form from one part of the body to another."
From The New York Times
MANIPULATING THE BRAIN
Some persons were disturbed last week over a report of experiments in which the behaviour of animals and people was influenced by electrical stimulated of selected regions of their brains.
According to the report, weak currents made to flow through electrodes implanted in the brains of monkeys and cats enabled scientists to "play" the animals like little electronic toys. They yawned, climbed, ran, turned, slept, mated and changed their emotional states from passivity to rage an vice versa, all on electrical command.
In one of the most spectacular experiments, a Spanish fighting bull was stopped in fall charge by a stimulus radioed to an electrode implanted in its brain, which inhibited aggressiveness.
People, too, have undergone such stimulation's in the course of diagnosis and therapy for severe cases of epilepsy. Electrical stimulation's of certain regions of their brains have produced feelings of intense pleasure and of severe anxiety, a loss of ability to think or express themselves a sudden increase in word output and profound feelings of friendliness.
The scientists who reported these findings was Dr. Jose Delgado of Yale University's School of Medicine. In a lecture, Dr. Delgado discussed some aspects of this work that might worry persons outside this field of research.
He emphasized, first, that the implantation of electrodes in the brain ah the passage of weak currents through them neither hurts (brain tissue is insensitive) nor causes any functional damage.
Such studies, Dr. Delgado believes, may enable scientists to discover the "cerebral basis of anxiety, pleasure, aggression and other mental functions, which we could influence in their development and manifestation through electrical stimulation's, drugs, surgery and especially by means of more scientifically programmed education".
Dr. Delgado believes that control of human behaviour on a large scale would not work because the effect of a stimulus can be changed or even overridden by the subject's own desires, emotions, etc. This has been shown in experiments on both animals and people. For example, monkeys in which aggressive behaviour was electrically stimulated did not just attack any other member of the colony, but made "intelligent" attacks only on rivals, sparing their "friends".
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Dr. Delgado thinks it will be necessary to develop new theories and concepts to explain the biological bases of social and anti-social behaviour. These, he said, "for the first time in history can be explored in the conscious brain".
From The New York Times
FISH STORY
A special kind of fishing expedition was organized in Ohio. Its goal was to collect specimens, most of them known as placoderms, that lived some 300 million years ago.
What had brought about the project was the cutting of a highway into Cleveland. Giant earth-moving machines would cut through a formation of worldwide fame, the Cleveland shale. For more than a century it had been known as a rich source of fossil fish from the Devonian period. Specimens, collected where rivers had cut through the shale, were prized possessions of the British in New York and other centres.
Cleveland's Museum of Natural History conducted the new hunt which, it was hoped, would provide the first complete with movable jaws. Some of these species had been partially reconstructed into creatures of frightening appearan-ce.
From The New York Times
TRAINS HALTED BY PROTEST
Eastern region rail services were halted last night after drivers stopped work in sympathy with a driver who was dismissed.
The driver, who is based in Leeds, was acting in line with a decision by Eastern Region staff not to implement changes in working schedules arising from British Rail's economy measures.
After refusing to take out a train in accordance with a new schedule, he was sent home, and 400 drivers at the Leeds Holbeck depot decided to stop work until be was allowed to start work again. The action was supported by drivers in the London area.
On the Southern Region, the National Union of Railwaymen is recommending members to stop work for part of Thursday afternoon to coincide with the funeral of a guard 0 who was stabbed to death.
From Morning Star
