Academicians Assembled

Last summer Queen Astrid of the Belgians was killed when an automobile driven by her King slipped off a Swiss road, hurtled 95 ft. before it crashed into a tree (TIME, Sept. 9). That tragedy, said Physiologist Yandell Henderson of Yale last week, moved him to inquire into the behavior of drivers involved in such accidents. Many a driver explains: "The car went out of control." To Dr. Henderson it seemed rather that the motorist went out of control. When a driver is jounced off balance in his seat, a powerful reflex comes into play to restore his equilibrium. So strong is this that it obliterates the ordinary conditioned reflexes of good driving. Then, according to Dr. Henderson, the driver behaves as follows:

"He grasps the wheel with his whole strength. His arms stiffen, and he is as likely to steer off the road as along it. His legs are forcibly extended, and his feet are pressed down hard. It is the muscular act that Sherrington, who discovered it in the dog, named the 'extensor thrust.' . . . In so doing [the motorist] presses his foot hard down on the accelerator pedal. If then the first jump of the car sends it along a course where it meets other jolts and bumps in rapid succession, the driver tries in vain to recover the equilibrium of his own body. And, as part of this effort, he continues to press down on the pedal and thereby sends the car completely 'out of control.' "

The violent body contortions by which a sedate burgher tries to keep his feet when he slips on an icy walk are the results of a deep-rooted reflex possessed by all animals, fully developed in newborn babes, unshakable by training. Now that it imperils motorcar operators, Dr. Henderson thinks it could be successfully sidetracked by installing a pedal in the shape of a wide panel almost flush with the floor boards under the driver's left foot. When the "extensor thrust" shoots both his legs out, though the right foot may jam down the accelerator, the pedal pushed by the left foot will turn off the ignition or close the carburetor intake.

This suggestion Dr. Henderson presented last week to the National Academy of Sciences, convened in the stately halls of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. This most exclusive (membership limited to 300) of the nation's learned bodies was meeting in a Confederate State for the first time since it was founded in 1863. The savants had nothing to say about the War of the Rebellion, but they did discuss:

Abbot's Weather. When the National Academy met at Cambridge two years ago Charles Greeley Abbot, gaunt, assiduous secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and famed solar researcher, affirmed his belief, after long study, that weather on Earth tends to repeat itself in cycles of 23 years. Backing this up last week he showed the academicians how the 23-year cycle could be traced in the water levels of the Great Lakes, in yearly growth rings on trees, in the catch of codfish and mackerel, in deposits of clay laid down by Pleistocene glaciers. On the basis of his cycle Dr. Abbot in 1933 made temperature and precipitation predictions for 30 U. S. cities for 1934, 1935, 1936, stowed them away in a stout safe. With the danger of misleading anyone on the 1934 forecasts well past, Cyclist Abbot revealed how they turned out: excellent, 27%; good 42%; right about half the time, 17%; poor, 14%.

Lopsided Magnet. Since Earth is a vast magnet with North and South magnetic poles, it has a magnetic field which extends thousands of miles out into space. If cosmic rays are largely charged particles, as most physicists believe, their intensity should be affected by terrestrial magnetism. It has been discovered that, as the field is strongest near the poles and weakest at the Equator, so is the cosmic ray bombardment strong or weak with changing latitude. Later a longitude differential was found. Last week, with intensity figures for electroscopes carried on nine ships sailing the seven seas. Robert Andrews Millikan, Caltech's cosmic ray luminary, told the academicians that the rays are stronger in India and the Eastern Hemisphere generally than in the Western, interpreted this to mean that Earth, as a magnet, is lopsided.

Brain Batteries. It has been shown time & again that the cerebral cortex-- the part of the brain which can be educated--generates minute electrical currents at some 10-50 microvolts which can be measured with tiny electrodes, amplifiers, potentiometers. Dr. Joannes Gregorius Dusser de Barenne and Warren S. McCulloch of Yale coagulated the cortical tissue in anesthetized monkeys by a few seconds' application of temperatures of 150-175DEG F. This wiped out the electric currents. By selective coagulation of one or more of the six layers of the cortex, the scientists found that each layer generated its own current.

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