50 Years Ago

Nobody has yet explained why large numbers of dead seabirds are being washed ashore along the west coast of Britain. Speculation has abounded — a sudden food shortage, a virus epidemic, chemical pollution — but even the emaciated condition of many of the birds, which at first sight suggests starvation, gives no indication of whether they were first immobilized by a cause other than a lack of food … One objection to the theory that disease is responsible is that infections are usually limited to one species; the casualties so far include cormorants, gannets, guillemots, puffins, razor bills and shags. Suggestions that there may have been a disruption of the food chain from algae to fish to birds are supported by reports that there were changes in the growth of plankton in the Irish Sea during the summer. A corollary is that there should be a scarcity of fish, the birds’ main diet … [A]lthough the peak death rate is past, enough birds have died to endanger several of the species, which have not recovered from the effects of oil in the past two years.

From Nature 25 October 1969

100 Years Ago

The following account of a dream which I had last night … may be of interest. The dream commenced by my, as I thought, hearing a drop fall on the laboratory floor; after a time there was another drop. I then realised that mercury was dropping on the floor from a small split in some rubber tubing in a gas-analysis apparatus. As I became more wakeful … the drops fell more rapidly until they were coming quite fast at the moment when I definitely awoke. I then realised that the dropping of mercury which I heard in my dream was in reality the ticking of the clock in my room. The point which interested me … is that of the time relations of the dream … As I dreamed it, the interval between the first two drops seemed to be of the order of five seconds, and the drops seemed to quicken until they were at an estimated rate of about one drop per second. Now the actual rate of ticking of the clock was one tick every quarter of a second ... On the assumption that each consecutive drop in my dream corresponded with one consecutive tick, it would appear that at the commencement of the dream the time interval between two consecutive ticks was exaggerated about twenty-fold in the dream, and that as I got more nearly awake the degree of exaggeration became reduced to something like four-fold.

From Nature 23 October 1919