Electroplating stout metals with aluminum was described at the Chicago Institute of the American Chemical Society last week. If the process should become practicable commercially, housewifery and industry will benefit by inestimable billions. Pots, pans, vats, machines exposed to corrosives will be protected by a skin of aluminum, metal highly resistant to mos.t acids and alkalies.Professor Donald Babcock Keyes of the University of Illinois told the chemists at Chicago that the process is practicable. He invented it, although other scientists academic and industrial have worked on the problem ...

Astronomers have used all sorts of tricks over the years to try to convey the mind-boggling scale of the universe to us ordinary folks. If you could drive your car from here to the nearest star at 60 m.p.h., they've told us, it would take 11 million years. If the Sun were a beach ball sitting on a football field's goal line, the Earth would be a pea on the 50-yard line. And so on. Things got a ...

No one likes to walk into work after just a few fitful hours of sleep. But now there's evidence that not getting enough sleep may have more serious consequences than dark circles under your eyes the next morning. Researchers at the University of Chicago report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that too little sleep can promote calcium buildup in the heart arteries, leading to the plaques that can then break apart and cause ...

Among musicians, cellists are known as incurable sentimentalists. This quality is half-humorously assumed, partly because of the tightlipped, tear-laden whine the instrument so easily develops in its upper register, partly because of the overenthusiastic use of that register by romantic composers. One cellist who does not deserve the description is the Chicago Symphony's Budapest-born Janos Starker, 31, who is unsentimentally aware that he is one of the world's finest cellists. He also knows why he gets so few chances to ...

One day last week bustling little Sociology Professor Ernest Watson Burgess adjusted his spectacles and began to read a long, technical paper to his class at the University of Chicago. As the 51-year-old bachelor proceeded, his marriageable students became more and more attentive. When he finished, he had given them a test-proof formula for choosing a wife or husband, for predicting whether a marriage would be successful.Professor Burgess was reporting what he and his colleague, Dr. Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., had learned in one of the most ...

The White House says Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to President Barack Obama, will resign his post as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers this summer to return to teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Goolsbee has been the face of the White House on economic news, and is a regular every first Friday of the month explaining the administration's take on the latest jobless numbers. Goolsbee served on the three-member economic council ...

As big as a football field and nearly as empty, Barack Obama's re-election headquarters looks like a start-up gone wrong. Wires sprout like weeds from the carpeting, legions of bookshelves stand empty, and the swing-state maps hastily pinned to the wall are freebies from the AAA auto club down the street. In one room that could fit hundreds of people, just a few dozen sit at long desks. Most don't look old enough to buy a beer. ...

Pennsylvanians had been clamoring for a new road between Philadelphia and Lancaster for years, but the government just couldn't afford it. So in 1792 the state chartered a company that would build the nation's first private turnpike--62 miles of stone and gravel--in exchange for the right to collect tolls. Today Pennsylvania finds itself in a similar bind, with the money it needs for roads and bridges far outstripping the money it gets from the gas tax and other revenue ...

It may be a functional space, but that hasn't stopped designers and architects from turning the humble toilet into a room of surprises. With breathtaking vistas, wacky themes or lavish materials, there are rest rooms out there that'll make you feel like a million bucks each time you spend a penny. SAPPORO Take a comfort break on top of the city's highest building. Toilets at the JR Tower's observation room are 160 meters above street level and walled with glass. According ...

When it comes to making important changes in interest rates, the big-time bankers of New York, Chicago and San Francisco have recently taken a back seat to Philadelphia's John R. Bunting, the controversial chief of the First Pennsylvania Banking & Trust Co. On two occasions in 1968 and 1970, Bunting was the first to cut the prime rate, and other bankers quickly followed. Last week, ignoring pleas and pressure from the Nixon Administration, Bunting acted again. This time he hiked the prime, from 5% to 5%. ...