Astronomer Walter Sydney Adams had already contributed significantly to the study of white dwarfs when he applied some of his methodology to planets, thus determining in 1932 that the atmosphere of Venus is rich in carbon dioxide.

Naturalist Charles William Beebe decided to explore ocean depths by building a heavy steel shell, a bathysphere, that in 1934 helped him reach a record depth of 1,001 meters.

In 1937 botanist Albert Francis Blakeslee discovered that the alkaloid colchicine, obtained from the autumn crocus, could cause mutations in plants, an important step in identifying chemical influences in heredity.

In 1934 P. W. Bridgman, a Harvard professor of mathematics and physics, received the National Academy of Sciences Comstock Prize for devising and using various apparatuses to apply pressures of up to six hundred thousand pounds per square inch to determine how materials behave under high pressure.

Successful in developing the...