50 Years Ago

To many people nutrition means no more than the study of foods and their use by the living body. But with increasing evidence of widespread malnutrition throughout the world, and of a deteriorating situation in regard to world population and food supplies, much emphasis needs to be placed on the importance of work outside the laboratory on problems associated with providing people everywhere with an adequate diet. In many parts of the world an immediate problem is a means of conveying foods from one place to another. For example, fruit, the sale of which provides a livelihood for some people, may be rotting on the trees because there are no roads on which it can be transported to other people who might benefit by addition of fruit to their diet ... Lack of adequate means of distribution may seriously limit the use of fish, and while many people suffer the effects of protein malnutrition, fishermen not far away suffer economic disaster because they cannot get rid of harvest gluts.

From Nature 7 July 1962

100 Years Ago

Measurements of the temperature of flowing lava are so rare that some made by Prof. G. Platania during the eruption of Etna last September possess considerable interest ... His observations were made with a Féry's radio-pyrometer on a stream of lava flowing from the lowest of a string of craters in the neighbourhood of M. Rosso, a few days before the eruption ceased. The temperatures, in parts where the lava was still red, ranged from 795° to a maximum of 940° C.

From Nature 4 July 1912