... tasks are accomplished with ease. It would be a fine thing, Dr. Mills concludes, if musicians and other performing artists could schedule their public appearances for such weather: Audiences would invariably hear them at their best.

Apparently a great many organisms respond in some fashion to changes in humidity and atmospheric pressure. Farmers claims that the behaviour of their animals warns them as much as a day in advance when a storm is approaching: Normally docile horses and cows turn perverse and unruly. Dogs are said to be able to "smell" a storm coming; they grow restless and edgy and may run away. Fishermen claim that fish bite better just before a storm. And ants, responding to some mysterious detection system of their own, scurry about as the pressure drops, shoring up their tunnels against the approaching deluge.

Some people also appear to have a sixth sense about a coming storm: It seems to function with special sharpness in the aged, the allergic, the overweight, the chronically ill and the hypersensitive. They feel it in their bones, their joints, their muscles, their sinuses, the palpitations of their hearts. They even feel it in the scars of old football injuries.
Imagination? Not necessarily. Scientists have detected measurable changes within the body that correspond to changes in the atmospheric pressure -- especially in the old, infirm and emotionally unstable whose biological processes may be unusually sensitive. Changes in pulse and respiration rates, blood pressure, blood consumption and various physical processes systematically reflect the transit of the low-pressure and high-pressure air masses that regularly precede and follow a storm.

Arthritic pains on order

In a two-year-long study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, 30 arthritic patients were sealed in room-sized climate chambers for periods of two to four weeks. Temperature and rate of air movements were changed without producing any effect on the patients. But when -- in an effort to simulate approaching storm conditions -- researchers dropped barometric pressure while boosting humidity levels, they obtained striking results. Eight out of 10 patients reported stiffness and swelling in their joints, some within minutes of the change. They improved as soon as conditions were stabilised.

There are equally dramatic examples of the elation that appears to follow the breaking of a storm. Dr. Huntington reports the experience of a group of freshmen at Massachusetts State College at Amherst, who were taking an intelligence test ant the time of the New England hurricane of 1938. Outside the wind howled at 80 miles per hour (129km/h), the sky turned dark, trees crashed to the ground, electric power lines snapped. It was, college officials thought, the worst kind of weather for an examination, and they expected it to be mirrored in the marks. And yet, when the results came in, they showed a jump in percentile averages from 75 to a staggering 95. Apparently the storm had acted as a powerful mental stimulant, and perhaps the stimulation came from atmospheric turbulence.

Is it true that changes in the atmospheric pressure affect out thoughts and feelings? If so, how does it happen? Science does not know the answer to either of these questions, but some scientists think they may have a clue.
They think that the key may lie in ions -- tiny, electrically charged particles of matter that exists in the atmosphere.

Some ions are positively charged, and some are negatively charged. Usually they exist in the air in a ration of 5 positive to 4 negative. And to some scientists this is a critical balance. Negative ions are partly composed of oxygen, which can be beneficial to the human body; positive ions are partly composed of carbon dioxide, which can be harmful.

For a number of years ionisation researchers have speculated on the possibility that a greater-than-normal number of positive ions in the air might exert a measurable effect on the body's functions by slowing down its responses. Significantly, among the agents that are known to produce an imbalance of positive ions are smog and certain kinds of heating and air-conditioning equipment.

In an experiment conducted at New York University's College of Engineering, volunteers were exposed to streams of negative ions, and then given a series of tests which showed that their visual responses had perked up measurably and that they could work much harder without showing fatigue. In a similar study at the University of California, Dr. Albert P. Krueger found that an excess of negative ions caused the body's respiratory system to function better.

Two other ion researchers -- Dr. C.W.Hansell, and RCA research scientist; and Dr. Igho Kornblueh, of the Graduate Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- suggested that various conditions on the atmosphere itself may produce an imballnce of ions. Perhaps the air just before a storm is overloaded with positive ions, and therefore with carbon dioxide. And perhaps the ballnce tips the other way when the storm breaks, dumping an overload of negative ions -- and oxygen -- into the air. The carbon dioxide could account for the depressing biological effects, and the oxygen for the feeling of elation -- since oxygen, taken straight, is a heady stimulant.

Machine-made moods

Dr. Hansell first became aware of these effects accidentally. Back in 1932 he noticed that one of his fellow scientists at RCA, who was working with a device called an electrostatic generator, went through strange reversals in mood. Sometimes the scientist finished the working day in

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