By HASKIN

Here are some of the questions being asked by newspaper readers today. Many more questions are answered daily by direct mail to the person sho asks.

A reader can get the answers to any question of fact by writing Charleston Evening Post Information Bureau, 635 F St., N.W., Washington 5, D. C. Please enclose five (5) cents for return postage.

Q. How many judges has the International Court of Justice?
F.B.

A. The International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, consists of 15 judges. They are elected for nine-year terms by the General Assembly and the Security Council, voting independently.

Q. Why do liquids make varying noises when they boil – that is, noises that change in pitch or in loudness?
G.T.

A. Scientists say that the sound of boiling is a function of the heat-transfer rate during boiling, and of the temperature difference between the hot solid (the container) and the boiling liquid. An article in the journal “Science” says that the sound of boiling “is influenced either by the smoothness of the hot solid or by the dissolved gas content of the boiling liquid.”

Q. Who were the Wee Frees?
N.L.

A. In 1900, a minority of the Free Church of Scotland stood apart when the main body of that church amalgamated with the United Presbyterian Church to form the United Free Church. This minority was nicknamed the Wee Free Kirk, Kirk being Scottish for church.

Q. Were some of President Lincoln’s in-laws on the Confederate side during the Civil War?
O. T.

A. Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother, George Rogers Clark Todd, was a surgeon in the Confederate Army and three of her half-brothers fought for the Confederacy. These were: Samuel B. Todd, killed at Shiloh, Tenn.; David H. Todd, who died from wounds received at Vicksburg, Miss.; and Alexander H. Todd, killed at Baton Rouge, La. Mrs. Lincoln also had three brothers-in-law in the Confederate Army.

Q. Drug firms employ “detailmen.” What is their work?
L.A.

A. A detailman in the pharmaceutical industry is a salesman. He calls on doctors and hospitals to introduce his firm’s drugs, to describe their history and purposes and to try to influence doctors to prescribe his company’s products. Detailmen are usually college graduates trained in chemistry, biology, pharmacy, or related sciences.

Q. What were the “June Days” in labor history?
F.P.

A. This name is given to the insurrection of the working classes in France in June 1848. Workingmen had expected the new republican government of that year to guarantee them the right to to work by establishing national workshops. When it failed to do so, workmen rose in an armed rebellion that included four days of desperate street battles in Paris before troops could stop the insurrection.

Q. An opossum under attack will go limp and “play dead.” Is this a ruse to get rid of attackers, or is the animal scared out of its normal senses and into some kind of cataleptic state?
A.D.

A. Folklore has it that the animal intentionally or instinctively “plays possum.” Scientific investigators have concluded that this folklore has a basis in fact. In 1964, hospital researchers implanted electrodies on the skulls of a group of opossums to record their brainwaves before and after subjecting them to the kind of shaking a dog gives the animal. Researchers first used artificial shaking devices, accompanied by recorded barks, and later let real dogs shake opossums. In each case, there was no difference in brain waves (brain activity) before, during, and after the “dead” time of five or six minutes, as there would have been it the animals had been in a cataleptic state. One Kansas opossum received nationwide publicity earlier this year: he not only played dead when a hunter’s dog started shaking him but stayed that way while the dog buried him. As the dog trotted off, according to the hunter as quoted by the Associated Press, “the opossum wriggled out of his shallow grave and walked away.”