 388  THE LEGEND A legend has long been current that die town of Yangikent in the Syr-DarjJ delta in Central Asia was abandoned by its inhabitants because of a plague 4 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 a hill in the ^orthem 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 Hun-inish 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 Ipresent. ROBOT ZAAN SORTS OUT THE REJECTS I A robot recruit to British industry was shown to the public in London. rThe 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 lones. 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 ne-ledles. But Zaan Colour Sorter inspects the small particles with photo-electric leyes and casts out any which are the wrong colour or the wrong brightness. Unlike human sorters, the machine is unaffected by emotional problems, fa-fcgue, 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. CANCER STUDY 388 |
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