Alaska sentinel., 1905-07-13
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Bees are attracted to flowers by the bright colors. The experiments of Miss J. Very, a Belgian naturalist, prove that perfume has much less at traction, and that honey has none at all.
 Scopolamine, the new anaesthetic from Japanese plant, Is administered by hypodermlc injection and. induces deep sleep for eight or nine hours. It Is claimed to have absolutely no after effects.
 China has just granted its first pat ent. It is for an electric lamp. the in- ventor of which is an inhabitant of Nankin, the old capital of the Chinese empire, who calls his lamp the bright moonlight' and asserts that 1t is far superior to foreign glow lights that hitherto have been sold at Shanghai and other Chinese cities.
 Certain French astronomers have re gently come to the conclusion that the qualification of the moon extends from the surface to the center, and not, as the American scientists think, from the center to the periphery. This view would modify various existing the ories. Their conclusion is drawn from the examination of photographs exc cuted at the observatory for reproduc- ton in the new lunar atlas.
 The British postoffice has entered into an agreement with the Marconi company whereby messages are now received at any telegraph office in the United Kingdom for transmission from the wireless coast stations to ships at sea fitted out with the Mar conf apparatus. The cost Is sixpence less than twelve words Is accepted, making the minimum cost for mes sage 6s. Cd. No one can use a wire less telegraph system in Great Britain without authorization by the postmas- ter-general.
 A gramophone which, 1t is said, can be heard at distance of three miles is a late invention. The instrument Is named the auxetophone and Is worked by means of compressed air. This Is pumped in by small engine at pres sure which can be adjusted up to over eight pounds, through a small valve which takes the place of the ordinary diaphragm, into the trumpet. The valve consists of a number of small slots, covered with a fine comb, not unlike a mouth organ, and the vibra- ton of this comb produces the sound. On a calm, windless day 1t is esti- mated that, with high pressure, the record could be distinctly heard three miles away.
 The ability of some of the most mi- mute of the earths inhabitants to pro- duce striking changes on the face of the land, which Darwin showed was characteristic of earth worms, has re- gently been appealed to in attempting to account for the curious natural mounds seen In Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. The creatures to whose agency these mounds are provisionally ascribed are white ants, or termites, supposed to have abounded in the south central United States at some former period when a warmer and moister climate prevailed there. In Cuba, the alta, or leaf-cuttng ants, at present build mounds ten or twelve feet high, and in western Texas their mounds are sometimes forty or fifty feee in diameter, although only one or two feet in height The ant theory is regarded by Mir. A. s. Veatch as, upon the whole, preferable to the sugges- tions which have been made that the mounds in question were formed either by springs and gas vents, or by the action of the wind.