Word: billionths
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...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...
Embedded in the stories of World War II is the legend of Spam, the manufactured ham substitute put out by the Hormel Co. in Minnesota. Spam was a wartime triumph, but the legend is mostly wrong. Several months ago, Hormel celebrated the production of the 5 billionth can of Spam and tried again to explain that the stuff was not included in G.I. rations or fired, as cartoonists claimed, at the enemy or dropped from planes to neutralize hostile populations. Spam -- 15 million cans a week -- went to feed the British and the Russians through lend-lease, the $50 billion...
...quarks emerged from the primordial radiation "around a thousandth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang," estimates University of Michigan theorist Gordon Kane. But as the early universe expanded and cooled, they vanished. Their fleeting existence left behind a fundamental puzzle that physicists are struggling to solve: What makes some particles so massive while others -- photons, for example -- have no mass at all? Because of its boggling heft, the top quark should help illuminate what mysterious mechanisms -- including perhaps other, still weightier particles -- are responsible for imparting mass, and hence solidity, to the physical world...
...chemical reaction that is the first step in visual perception. This reaction, triggered when light hits the retina of the eye, had never before been directly observed. And with good reason. The reaction was clocked by the L.B.L. team at 200 femtoseconds, which are millionths of a billionth of a second. How fast is that? Well, in little more than a second, light can travel all the way from the moon to the earth, but in a femtosecond it traverses a distance that is but one hundredth the width of a human hair. "This sort of time scale is almost...
Matej Gaspar, born last week in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, officially became the world's 5 billionth human. The baby boy received that designation rather arbitrarily. No one knows for sure when the earth's population, which hit 4 billion in 1974, actually topped the 5 billion mark, though demographers suspect it happened in July. Zagreb was picked as the location by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities largely because U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar happened to be in that city when the chosen day rolled around. In a speech marking the occasion, Perez de Cuellar drew attention...