Science: Solar Hoover

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Betty Jean Hoover, 4, learned last week that she would live in Washington. D. C. Not the daughter of President Hoover, or of his brother Dean Theodore Jesse Hoover of Stanford University, or of his White House Major Domo Ike Hoover or of Herbert W. (vacuum cleaners) Hoover, or of any one of a half dozen other important Hoovers (TIME: Dec. 24) who might seek to live there. Washington was only a word which brought smiles to the faces of Betty Jean's parents. Mr. & Mrs. W. H. Hoover and of chummy F. A. Greeley.

Betty Jean was born on a desert mountain in Argentine. The past three years she has played in the dead crater of an African mountain, Mount Brukkaros, near Keetmanshoop, South West Africa. Living there was necessary, for her father's job, and Mr. Greeley's, was to measure the sun's heat every day. That was to enable a Dr. Abbot (Charles Greeley Abbot, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and director of its astrophysical observatory) to compare the sun's heat at Mount Brukkaros with its heat at Table Mountain, Cal., and at Montezuma, Chile, where the Institution has other solar stations. Last week Dr. Abbot informed Betty Jean's father that he would go to comparatively cool Washington and work in his astrophysical laboratory. Mr. Greeley could go to Table Mountain. On the way to relieve them from their servitude to Science were Mr. & Mrs. L. O. Sordahl and Mr. A. G. Frolland.

The solar variations recorded at Mr. Hoover's station have been most valuable in aiding Dr. Abbot to recognize a remarkable periodicity of 25.66 months in the heat given off by the sun. If further observations show this periodicity to be real, meteorologists may be able "to fore- cast at least two years in advance the principal solar changes, and whatever of importance may prove to hang thereon," (Dr. Abbot), viz. crops, icebergs, baseball games.