Word: billionths
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Because of the great distance and the craft's weak 10½-watt radio transmitter, it took 8 hr. 35 min. to transmit the coded data that made up one picture. And by the time the signals reached a tracking station, they were no stronger than one-billionth of one-billionth of a watt. Those faint whispers were picked up by big-dish antennas and amplified a thousand times as they were piped through a liquid helium maser. So slow was the transmission rate that no complete picture could be received at any one tracking station. As the Earth...
...advantage is increased speed of operation. When a computer is working, a blizzard of brief electric pulses swirls through its innards. The transistors and other components react almost instantly, but the pulses cannot travel between them faster than the speed of light, which is about ten inches in one billionth of a second. If they must cover any considerable distance, they slow the computer down. System/360 is so compact that the pulses can reach their destinations and complete their work in a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second) instead of the microseconds (millionths of a second) that they once needed...
Machines at New Jersey's Sterling Drug Inc. have just produced their 100 billionth Bayer aspirin tablet for the in satiable U.S. market. All in all, U.S. industry now manufactures 27 million Ibs. of aspirin a year - enough to fill four 100-car freight trains, enough for the 16 billion straight, five-grain aspirin tablets that Americans swallow each year, plus an even greater amount for the children's miniature aspirin and such formulations as Bufferin, APC tablets, Coricidin and Alka-Seltzer...
...esoteric world of theoretical physics went into spasms of enthusiasm last week when Brookhaven National Laboratory announced the identification of a new elementary particle. It is not the biggest particle known or the smallest, and it lives only one ten-billionth of a second. But physicists all over the world were stirred up because it has almost precisely the mass that was predicted for it by long-range theory. It was rather as if Columbus, sailing across the Atlantic, had really found Japan just where he thought it would...
...quantum mechanics and beyond the understanding of the mathematically unanointed, but one of the predictions of the "way" was clear enough: a particle must exist that has a negative electric charge and a mass- of 1,676 million electron volts. It should have a life span of one ten-billionth of a second after it is formed, and then decay into a xi particle and a pi-meson...