Word: billionths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...such a timepiece would be virtually useless today: computers, communications satellites, global-positioning receivers and telephone-switching systems need a precision beyond anything conceivable even 50 years ago. Time technology long since abandoned mechanical devices and even the hum of quartz crystals. For true precision--accuracy to a billionth of a second--you need to travel, virtually at least, to a place like the perfectly circular, well-guarded park that sits in northwest Washington. There, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, a nondescript concrete building houses the nerve center of the U.S. Directorate of Time...
Such are the dreams of the nanotechnologists, engineers at places like M.I.T., Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon, who are already redefining the meaning of the word miniature. The prefix nano- refers to a billionth part of a unit--the size range these visionaries are talking about. Already, nanotechnologists have built gears and rotors far thinner than a human hair and tiny molecular "motors" only 50 atoms long...
...bounce a signal off so distant a target, he called on Donald Campbell, the chief scientist at the world's largest radiotelescope, the 1,000-ft. dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Campbell agreed to try, although he estimated that the power of the returned signal would be about a billionth of a watt...
...techniques of choice for this sort of cartography are x-ray crystallography and protein nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), which take a snapshot of a protein at a resolution of less than a billionth of a meter...
...must be hard being a teen idol. This must have been the thought on Leonardo DiCaprio's agent's mind when he or she urged DiCaprio to take the starring roles in what must be the billionth (the Internet Movie Database lists six previous versions) adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask (L'homme au masque du fer), the sequel to the even more well-known The Three Musketeers. "Leo, baby," one can almost hear the agent saying, "you need a break after Titanic. Why don't you take this film? You'll hardly have...