Is there a tenth planet?

Is there an undiscovered tenth planet circling the Sun, as big as Earth? Many St. Petersburg astronomers believe so. Their opinion is based on a complicated mathematical analysis of the flight trajectory of a comet know in the astronomical catalogues under the index number of 1862-3.

The comet's orbit seems to be distorted by a large unknown gravitational center.

If, as they think, it is a planet, it would have a diameter of 5,000 to 7,500 miles and a similar mass and volume as Earth. It would be very much farther out, however-circling the Sun at a distance of about 5,000 million miles, some 54 times the distance of Earth from the Sun.

If the orbit coincides with the one calculated, it will be certain proof of the existence of the unknown planet.

Mystery of lake solved

One of the mysteries of Lake Balkhash, in eastern Kazakhstan, has been cleared up. This salt lake, as large as half a dozen English counties, always stays at the same level, though it stands in a desert which rarely gets any rain and is fed by only a few surface rivers.

It has now been discovered that there are, however, huge rivers underground.

The largest of them carries some 176,000 million gallons a year.

Hippo was ten million years old

Remains of an extinct hippopotamus have been discovered in the Gobi desert by a party of paleontologists.

This is the first such discovery in the Gobi - hitherto such fossils have been discovered only in North America. The Gobi hippo lived about seven to ten million years ago. At that time the Gobi desert was a hot marshy plain covered with rich vegetation.

The legend

A legend has long been current that the town of Yangikent in the Syr-Daiya delta in Central Asia was abandoned by its inhabitants because of a plague of snakes.

The ruins of the town were first discovered by Russian travellers in 1741, but there was no clue to why it had been abandoned. There were no traces of conquest. The most recent tombstones were dated 1362.

Graveyard of giants

A rich grave, almost 5,000 years old, has been found inside а hill in the Northern Caucasus.

It is made of slabs of volcanic rock, some of them weighing over a ton.

It contained the bodies of a man and a woman, together with household utensils and golden ornaments and jewellery, possibly of Sarmatian and Hunnish origin.

One of the most interesting points was the height of the man: over 7 ft 2 1/2 in.

He would have been a giant today, let alone 5,000 years ago, when most researchers suggest that men and women were generally very much shorter than at present.

Robot zaan sorts out the rejects

A robot recruit to British industry was shown to the public in London. The creature's name is Zaan, and its talent is for sorting out small objects by their colour. In particular, for the food industry to pick out foreign bodies and sub-standard candidates from rivers of beans or nuts or potato flakes. It can separate rejects at the rate of 200 rejects a second.

This sort of work has been done in the past by four or five men sitting alongside a conveyor belt picking out tiny or bad fried potato flakes from satisfactory ones. Men can pick out rejects at a rate of about one a second; it is tedious work. It costs $ 50 a ton to sort dehydrated food flakes by hand.

There are machines which can sort small objects by size and shape, for instance rejecting a bean with a maggot hole which is detected by intelligent needles. But Zaan Colour Sorter inspects the small particles with photo-electric eyes and casts out any which are the wrong colour or the wrong brightness.

Unlike human sorters, the machine is unaffected by emotional problems, fatigue, eye-strain, the tea-break, or the conversational next door. The inventors claim that it is cheaper, more hygienic, and more accurate than traditional methods of sorting.