Until puberty (and usually even throughout early adolescence), girls advance more rapidly in height, weight, dental growth, anatomical maturity, and physiological development. The female’s brain is smaller than the male’s but is heavier in proportion to the total body weight. Women’s hearts beat faster and their simple reflexes (like the knee jerk and the dilation of the pupil) are usually quicker. Men have larger muscles than women and excel them in endurance, physical strain, and athletic achievement.

  In the field of sensory discrimination, women test consistently faster in finding differences among colors and in rapidity of perceiving objects. Men endure pain better and usually judge differences in weight somewhat better than women do.

  In tests where the aim is to cancel designated items, women are consistently faster. Other tests of differences in motor and mechanical traits show that boys do better in performances where manipulation of objects, tracing mazes, or visualizing spatial relations are involved. Tests of mechanical aptitude, mechanical construction, and knowledge of mechanical things show, too, that boys do better than girls. In simple tests of tapping and tracing, no differences have been found.

  In tests of difference between the sexes in mental and emotional traits, several significant facts have been discovered. Women do better than men in nearly all measures of memory. They do better on vocabulary tests, on tests of language usage, and on other tests where verbal association and literal rather than numerical items are involved. Men, however, do better in tests involving numbers, geometric ideas, or arithmetic reasoning and computation. On general information tests, too, such as those on current events, scientific discoveries, and historical facts, men score consistently better.

  In mental traits, the male sex has been found to be more variable; hence there are more male geniuses than female geniuses—and, by the same token, more males in the feeble-minded class. Girls, as a rule, make higher school marks than boys. But this has been attributed to the slower physical development of younger boys and to the greater docility of the girls. Boy rebels make poor scholars!

  Studies in the realms of emotional and temperamental traits have reported women to be more interested in persons and personal problems, while men are more intrigued by mechanical things and abstract activities. Women’s thoughts were found to stray to subjects associated with personal ornament and to concrete, everyday problems, usually related to the individual human being. Men’s associations wander to business relations, to moneymaking activities, and to matters of general and abstract interest. In tests of honesty, no differences were found, although schoolgirls excelled schoolboys in tests of moral knowledge and social attitudes.

  When appraising these differences it must be remembered that when the words “is better” were used, the meaning intended was “is better on the average,” since overlapping occurs, of course. Even with this consideration in mind, let’s expect to have a more scientific argument tomorrow morning at the breakfast table when the wife says, “Men are dumbbells.” Many a home can restore its tranquility with Dr. Science at the helm, you see.

  Lynn Standish, “Scientific Oddities”

  Amazing Stories, December 1945

  AN AMAZING ANIMAL

  My friends and I got to talking about camels the other day (animals to you) and I really learned some facts about these strange creatures that I would like to pass on to you.

  The modern camel is a most remarkable case of adaptation to environment. The foot consists of two elongated toes, each tipped with a small nail-like hoof. The leg does not rest on this hoof but on the elastic pads or cushions under and back of them. In the Asiatic variety the toes are united by a common sole, thus presenting one broad pad for support on the loose sand of the desert.

  The thighbone is unusually long, and the hind leg lacks that powerful muscular connection with the barrel of the animal that is so prominent a feature in the anatomy of the horse. In fact, the leg is almost disconnected from the body. In consequence, if the sand under the rear foot of a camel gives away, his body is not dragged down with it, as that of a horse would be, unless the other foot is undermined.

  Still more wonderful as an adaptation is the stomach. The camel is a ruminant and chews the cud. Like all others of this order the digestive organ is divided into four parts or chambers. Two of these in the camel are connected by separate passages with the mouth, into one of which the animal sends the solid food it gathers in the field, and into the other the water it drinks, though it has also the power to pass water into either at will.

  Both of these divisions of the stomach, but principally the one to which liquid food is generally sent, are provided with a number of pouches or cells in their linings, with muscular walls, and with orifices that can be opened or closed as desired. When water is available in plenty these are all filled to distention, and when the liquid is needed it is allowed to exude and mingle with the solid food, until enough has been provided for the time being for digestive and other bodily functions. By this arrangement a camel can live and travel without too serious discomfort for from five to seven days without drinking.

  BERYLLIUM—NEWEST METALLURGY MIRACLE

  Perhaps you have never seen any beryllium, yet you probably have occasion to use it every day; and it makes a big difference in your comfort, safety, and pocketbook.

  Your new vacuum cleaner, refrigerator, or thermostat will last four or five times as long as the old one, because of beryllium.

  We think of the properties of a metal as being eternal, but all metals get tired under strain. Instruments and gauges of all kinds, in hospitals, laboratories, factories, electric power plants, and on ships, use springs and diaphragms made of beryllium-copper. Beryllium is beginning to be used in autos, radios, electric motors—wherever there are higher speeds or exceptional strains.

  Beryllium had been discovered as a chemical element and identified as a metal as early as 1827. Andrew J. Gahagan and J. Kent Smith experimented with beryllium in a small laboratory in Detroit.

  Since 1929 the price of beryllium has dropped from $200 to $15 per pound and will undoubtedly come down further to meet the popular demand. The ore occurs along scattered localities from Maine to Georgia, in North and South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Argentina and Brazil produce beryl and used to supply Germany before the war.

  The whole field of research in this metal is pregnant with latent marvels. Used mainly now as an alloy, the pure metal itself has countless untried possibilities.

  Pure beryllium is transparent to X-rays, and is used for windows in X-ray machines. The tube of your fluorescent lamp—the closest thing to sunlight man has produced—is coated with beryllium oxide. So is the magic screen of new television sets. And Dr. Sawyer has discovered that when kilns are lined with beryllium silicate bricks, the beryllium in some mysterious way imparts strength to porcelain.

  What surprises the future may hold with beryllium can no more be imagined than Fulton could have visualized an airplane operated from the ground by radio.

  VITAMINS FOR ALL

  We used to think of vitamin deficiency as the curse of people too poor or too ignorant to buy the lean meat, milk, vegetables, oranges, and cereals that prevent chemical famine. But this deficiency disease pops up among intelligent people with plenty of money to provide the so-called well-balanced diet. Many people are listless, forgetful, and jittery; they don’t know why but these symptoms have been diagnosed as vitamin deficiencies.

  Many doctors watched people develop deficiency disease, and tried to find the clues to this riddle.

  Our chemists were building crystal-pure B vitamins; their new chemicals—thiamin, riboflavin, and nicotinic acid, which soothed the hidden hunger of people in extreme agony of pain, saving them from the verge of blindness as well as rescuing those about to die. But this was only part of the strange power of these magic chemicals. Then the famine fighters began shooting huge doses of vitamins into human beings unaccountably sick but not suspected of malnutrition.

  Thus the magic chemicals became more than curative. The well-balanced diet, though good, may not be enough. You may eat the best-balanced diet in the world, and still be unable to absorb your food; or maybe you can absorb it, but the cells of your body cannot use it.

  If you’re not feeling well, go to your doctor for your vitamins; do not risk asking the drugstore clerk for vitamin preparations for loss of weight and pep because these symptoms may be the warning signal of a hidden malady.

  Doctors can try nicotinic acid on crackpots now referred to them by psychiatrists. They can test riboflavin on eye troubles that are the despair of eye specialists. They can follow the effects of this or that B vitamin on baffling digestive jangles. At worst, no harm done. At best, another triumph for vitamins.

  In the past, science has conferred on those people who have availed themselves of the newer knowledge of infectious diseases better health and a greater average length of life. In the future it promises to those races that will take advantage of the knowledge of nutrition greater vigor, increased longevity, and higher cultural development.

  Laura Moore Wright, “Sunlight”

  Amazing Stories, May 1946

  There are myriads of light-reflecting particles all through the air. They are not dust, but are of a substance that is not ordinarily visible to human eyes, as they would interfere with the clearness of our vision. There are, without doubt, many things around us that our eyes are not adjusted to see. However, these light-reflecting particles can be seen by focusing one’s eyes on the air—not looking through it as we naturally do.

  The best place to observe these light-reflecting particles is from an open veranda. Standing well back under the roof, look towards the sky, but at the air a short distance away, as though the veranda were closed in and you could not see beyond the edge of it. Shortly, you will see tiny circles. Watch these circles, and observe their motions, as that will help you to focus your eyes on the air. Within a very few minutes, you will perceive specks of light in the air.

  As you observe these specks of light, you will see that they extend far into the distance—as far as the eye can see. At first they are almost too bright for one’s eyes. They should not be looked at too much, as they would interfere with one’s ordinary vision.

  These specks of light seem to be possessed of independent motion, and dance about hither and thither in the air. When the sun is shining, they look like specks of light. When the sun is not shining, they are of a silver color.

  The brighter the sunshine, the larger are the flame-like specks, or perhaps it is the other way around. On a very bright day, a flame like a shooting star may shoot across the air—evidently a number of them clash together. Perhaps that may be the cause of many mysterious fires.

  The existence of these light-reflecting particles is a scientific fact, which I have felt should be made known, if it is not already known among scientists. I am now wondering if it may not contain the answer to the control of the Atomic Bomb?

  L(UCILE) TAYLOR HANSEN (1897–1976) was a pioneering SF author and science popularizer, as well as one of the first women to intentionally masquerade as a man in the genre community (for more details about her life, see the entry on Hansen in chapter 1, “Authors,” of this anthology). Hansen’s scientific interests and penchant for self-creation came together in her SF science journalism. This is particularly true of the fifty-five “Scientific Mystery” articles she produced for Amazing Stories between 1941 and 1949, in which she marshals both firsthand observation and secondary research to challenge popular notions of white superiority. Over the course of her eight years as the author of this column, Hansen drew on her knowledge of anthropology, archaeology, and geology to contend that Indigenous Americans (rather than Eurowestern Caucasians) were the true source of humanity’s physiological and cultural development.6 As she built this argument, Hansen also built a particular image of herself as a visionary male scientist-adventurer. She was careful to steer clear of gendered pronouns in her writing, describing herself in “Footprints of the Dragon,” for instance, as simply “the present writer.” However, she regularly presented herself as engaged in masculine scientific activities with male experts of all races, creeds, and colors. Accompanied as they were by detailed illustrations of these experts, it would have been natural for readers to assume that Hansen was also a man.

  Meanwhile, Hansen’s editor and good friend, Ray Palmer—who enjoyed making up false author biographies, complete with pictures of himself in whatever costume seemed appropriate—perpetuated the ruse more aggressively. In an exchange between Hansen and a group of irate fans led by H. Malamud (reprinted in this anthology), Palmer announces that Hansen will defend “himself” against his detractors, and then, when Hansen does just that, Palmer responds with an enthusiastic “Atta-boy!” Elsewhere, Palmer describes Hansen as a rugged scholar-adventurer who has traveled to the four corners of the earth in the quest to discover humanity’s true origins (Nadis 111). The picture of Hansen that emerges at the intersection of all this authorial, artistic, and editorial activity is that of what Brian Attebery describes as the “typical” early magazine SF hero: a “youthful scientist” who is “undervalued by society” but who wins the day “by dint of his ingenuity and scientific knowledge” (“Cultural” 347). Given that Palmer grew up on this image of the heroic scientist and that Hansen herself helped shape it in her earlier fiction writing, it seems entirely appropriate that the two would collaborate to present her in this light.

  Even as Hansen was cast (or allowed herself to be cast) as a variant of the early SF magazine hero, she wrote as a modern science journalist. Like her Science Service counterparts, Hansen employed the conventions of modern science writing to both entertain and inform her readers. If the title of her monthly column, “Scientific Mysteries,” was not eye-catching enough to draw in an audience, provocative subtitles such as “The White Race—Does It Exist?” and “Footprints of the Dragon” were sure to do so. Once she had her readers’ attention, Hansen carefully led them through current debates over the issues at hand before adding her own field-based observations and hypotheses to the mix. Furthermore, she asserted her authority to speak about anthropological and geological issues through engagement with established scholarly traditions. Indeed, as Hansen’s arguments grew more controversial, her scientific references grew more elaborate. Early articles such as “The White Race” rely on in-text citations and the occasional editorial note to connect Hansen’s ideas with those of the greater scholarly community, while later ones such as “Footprints of the Dragon” include extensive reference lists and footnotes to do the same.

  3.1. Illustration by Joe C. Sewell that accompanied L. Taylor Hansen’s “Scientific Mysteries” column in the July 1942 issue of Amazing Stories.

  Finally, like SF science journalists Ellen Reed, Henrietta Brown, and Lynn Standish, Hansen strategically modified the conventions of science journalism to appeal to an audience that was eager to participate in scientific debate on its own terms. After carefully laying out her theories of human evolution in “The White Race—Does it Exist?” the author concludes by asking, “What do you think?” As the response from H. Malamud, I. Berkman, and H. Rogovin indicates, some readers did not think very much of Hansen’s arguments at all, dismissing them as “harebrained” and “unbelievable.” On first glance Hansen’s tart reply—which promises that she will take “the keenest delight in crossing swords” with her detractors and then ruthlessly dismantles their arguments as “delightful fallacies”—seems to reassert the authority of the science writer over her audience. But the arch language employed by all the parties involved in this exchange is not, ultimately, that of scientific debate. Rather, it is the kind of lively if somewhat juvenile interaction common among first-generation SF fans. By responding in kind rather than retreating into the neutral academic language she employs elsewhere in “Scientific Mysteries,” Hansen speaks to SF readers on their own terms, treating them as serious (if, in this particular case, seriously mistaken) partners in the construction of scientific knowledge.

  L. Taylor Hansen, “Scientific Mysteries: The White Race—Does It Exist?”

  Amazing Stories, July 1942

  When we speak of the races of the Earth, is there really such a race as the white race? Is the color of a man’s skin indicative of his origin?

  There is no subject upon which more scientific nonsense, or rather let us say nonsense purporting to be science, has been written than upon the subject of race. The reason is not hard to find. Each man prefers his own type and considers his to be the highest. It is a subject that is more bound up with emotion than with reason, and the average man is still essentially an emotional animal.

  Since the start of history, the question of a desirable racial type has run through as many fashions as women’s clothes. The Germans, in preferring blonds, are not the first peoples to set a racial style. The Mayans admired slanting foreheads (and strangely enough, their ironed-out foreheads, done in infancy, did not affect their intelligence), the Incas admired large ears, certain African tribes large lips, the Turks once admired excess fat, and the Medieval artists thought excessively long necks were desirable.

  The ideas of race that were popular during the days of our fathers are at a present giving place to other standards of differentiation. If the tendency continues to its inevitable conclusion, we are going to discover that there is no such thing as a white race. For the standards of color by which our parents learned to classify mankind are far too superficial for the most advanced anthropologists. Today the scientists are busy pointing out that skeletal differences are far more important than the shade of the subject’s skin.