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Rattlesnakes, and such venomous relatives as copperheads and water moccasins, have in their heads two small organs called "pits." Scientists have long known that the pits are sense organs which respond to heat, but they did not understand clearly how they work. In last week's Science, Drs. Theodore H. Bullock and Raymond B. Cowles of the University of California, Los Angeles, told how they hooked up a rattlesnake's pits and studied their actions as if they were microphones...
...nearby air had no effect. Warm objects could be detected by the pit organ even through the cold air of a refrigerated room. But when a sheet of glass, opaque to long infra-red rays, was placed between the snake and a warm object, it "blinded" the pit. Drs. Bullock and Cowles conclude that the pit is a sort of "heat eye," sensitive to the infra-red rays that come from warm objects. It detects cold objects by giving less response than it does to the snake's room-temperature surroundings. A glass of water only one degree above...
...Johns Hopkins and Yale, Dr. David Bodian and Dr. Dorothy M. Horstmann had conducted almost identical tests and reached the same conclusion: there is a step missing in the widely held theory that polio passes directly from the alimentary tract to nerve fibers and thus to the nervous system. Drs. Bodian and Horstmann think there is a transient middle phase: that the virus goes from the digestive system to the blood stream, and from there, if not destroyed by antibodies, to the nervous system...
...disease is that so many promising trails, seeming to lead toward a cure, suddenly come to a dead end. Two researchers in Boston (where the disease is inexplicably commoner than in most cities) thought they had the answer in unbalanced iron and vitamin rations given to prematures. In Baltimore, Drs. William and Ella Owens seemed to get good results in arresting the disease with a vitamin E preparation (TIME, Aug. 29, 1949), but other doctors could not duplicate their results. Some eyemen report
...patient lived only two months after the treatment, but in that interval she was up & about, talked almost normally, and enjoyed movies and baseball games. This epoch-making treatment has been used so far on only half a dozen patients. All that Drs. Sweet and Farr will say is that the results in the last two cases were most encouraging...