Word: beams
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Actually, agents both East and West have benefited enormously from far more modern devices. It is now possible to eavesdrop on a conversation held in the middle of an empty prairie by simply pointing a beam of light from 500 yards away. New cameras can take pictures in total darkness without the use of infra-red light. Finely ground lenses can zoom in from blocks away to pick up the fine print on an insurance policy. But the Soviets like the more old-fashioned and romantic gadgets, mostly, it seems, from a native passion for melodrama...
...have wondered for years why fish and other creatures that live at middling ocean depths carry rows of little searchlights on their bellies. The searchlights (photophores) are cup-shaped organs that are lined with highly reflective tissue and contain luminous cells whose light is concentrated into a downward-pointing beam. Biologists reason that since photophores evolved independently in fish (vertebrates), shrimps (crustaceans), and squids (mollusks), they must have important survival value. But what was it? The bright beams of the photophores shining downward would seem to be a disadvantage, serving only to draw the attention of predators...
...Raise High the Roof Beam, Salinger...
...Ride has 16 plastic bubbles orbiting 80 feet above the boardwalk. For downward exploration the Neptune Diving Bell encloses 30 people, drops them 35 feet down to an "ocean floor" where live porpoises play. Further along is the Double Sky Wheel, a king-sized dumbbell with gyratory center beam supporting two independent wheels that can't decide whether to plunge suicidally earthward or whiz away toward Mars...
Laser death rays would need even more power if they were based on the moon-where power is in short supply. Dr. Thirring figures that after traveling from the moon, even the best-focused laser beam would cover a circle on the earth two miles in diameter. Even the light of a 1,000,000-kilowatt moon-based laser would increase the natural sunlight on this large area by only 10% . To do appreciable damage to one earthly city would call for a lunar powerhouse many times larger than any that has ever been built on earth...