Word: apparatus
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...Michelson and Edward W. Morley tried to measure this ether wind. Their idea was to measure the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) against the speed of the earth's motion on its orbit around the sun (18.5 miles per second). They set up their apparatus, an affair of many mirrors, in a lab in a downtown Cleveland building. Once a day the earth's rotation aligned the apparatus with the earth's path around the sun. If there were an ether wind, the light flashing across their lab floor should be slowed...
...that gave them exquisite pleasure when it was stimulated by a feeble pulse of electricity. Their eyes lit up and the muscles around their blowholes "smiled." They became addicted to electrical delight and worked hard to get more of it. Dolphins learned in one demonstration how to operate an apparatus that yields a pleasure-giving jolt. Chimpanzees, which are probably the brightest land animals, need dozens of tries, and even humans do not always get the idea right...
Once when Dr. Lilly was stimulating a dolphin, the electrical apparatus broke down, but a tape recorder kept on running. When he played the tape, he heard his own voice saying, "three hundred twentythree" (the footage on the tape). Then from the dolphin came the same words in a quacking, Donald Ducklike voice, but unmistakable. They were followed by a creditable imitation of the buzz of a transformer and the rattle of a movie camera. The dolphin had associated all these sounds with the pleasure-giving stimulation, and was trying to trigger it again...
...that the ground near Geneva trembles measurably every month or so. "It was found," says CERN's Canadian-born Jack MacCabe, "that these tremors were caused by Atlantic storm waves pounding on the beaches of France." To insulate the accelerator from French surf, the massive (3,800 tons) apparatus had to be mounted on a suspension system...
Slicing the Tree. The pathologists removed the whole breathing apparatus ("tracheobronchial tree") from the bodies of 402 men who died in Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange and in eleven New York hospitals (mainly in nonindustrial towns to reduce bias that might result from air pollution). It turned out that 63 of the men had died of lung cancer and 339 from other causes, but the pathologists did not know this until after they had finished their findings. Each "tree" was cut into 208 portions and embedded in paraffin. Fifty-five of these portions, chosen for microscopic study, were then...