Spectrum

P: California's Calico Mountains have yielded fossilized aquatic insects 25 million years old--the oldest ever found. Discovered by a U.S. Geological Survey team, the specimens included mites, dragonfly nymphs, fairy shrimps. Almost all were perfectly preserved, showed only minute differences from their modern counterparts. One scientific explanation of bugs' slow evolution: more adaptable to climatic change than mammals, insects have rarely been found to change their bodies to survive ice ages and warm spells.

P: The slow, multi-purpose military transport plane is obsolete. So declared Lieut. General Joseph Smith, U.S.A.F., boss of the Military Air Transport Service, at a meeting of aeronautical engineers in Seattle. Two different aircraft are needed: 1) a 550-m.p.h. jet transport (range, 3,500 miles; payload, 15 tons), to lift key personnel and vital supplies; 2) a slower, turboprop cargo plane with a 25-ton payload and a range of 3,500 miles. Boeing's experimental 707 jetliner (TIME, March 8) roughly satisfies the first requirement; a suitable U.S. turboprop transport has yet to be put into mass production.

P: Mysterious low-energy particles have been detected in the ionosphere, 66 miles above the earth. A seagoing Navy scientific team in the North Atlantic sent up rocket-carrying Skyhook balloons; at 70,000 ft. the rockets, loaded with instruments, were shot another 280,000 ft. higher, where the particles were encountered. The Navy's find supports the results of a similar experiment last year, but the Navy has yet to pin down and identify the nature and origin of the particles.

P: In Honingham, England, while hoeing his beets. Farmer Percy Rolph unearthed 300 corroded silver coins, sent them to the British Museum for analysis. The museum's experts were delighted; the coins, adorned with figures of horses and wild boars, were probably part of the hitherto hidden treasure of the fierce Iceni, an ancient British tribe, famed for their heroic but ill-fated revolt under Queen Boadicea against the Roman conquerors in A.D. 61.

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