Word: caltech
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During a study of air pollution, Caltech's Claire Patterson decided to investigate the historical worldwide distribution of lead. Knowing that lead was obtained in ancient times as a byproduct of silver mining, he made a study of silver mining and stockpile records and discovered a significant fact: accidental loss diminishes a country's stock of silver at a rapid rate unless the metal is continually replenished from mines. Rome's silver, much of it used for coins, was abraded by handling, lost by corrosion and reworking, covered by soil or ashes, sunk in shipwrecks or buried...
...Resolving Power. Other astronomers have also looked for extragalactic molecules, but without any luck. Lacking sufficiently sensitive radio telescopes, they could not detect the faint "signatures" left by such molecules in the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. To overcome that obstacle, Weliachew, now a visiting astronomer at Caltech, hooked up the school's three big antennas in California's Owens Valley-two 90-ft. dishes and a 130-ft. dish -so that any two of them could be used simultaneously. That technique gave him the resolving power of a huge single antenna with a diameter equal...
...most fundamental life processes, but he may soon be able to manipulate and alter them?curing such killer diseases as cancer, correcting the genetic defects that account for perhaps 50% of all human ailments, lessening the ravages of old age, expanding the prowess of his mind and body. Says Caltech's Robert Sinsheimer, one of the architects of the biological revolution: "For the first time in all time, a living creature understands its origin and can undertake to design its future...
...cannot wait for natural selection to change him, some scientists warn, because the process is much too slow. Yale Physiologist José Delgado likens the human animal to the dinosaur: insufficiently intelligent to adapt to his changing environment. Caltech Biophysicist Robert Sinsheimer calls men "victims of emotional anachronisms, of internal drives essential to survival in a primitive past, but undesirable in a civilized state." Thus, by his own efforts, man must sharpen his intellect and curb his aboriginal urges, especially his aggressiveness...
...case, the black hole itself could never be observed. The only thing a dedicated scientist might do, muses Caltech Physicist Kip Thorne, long a black-hole theorist, would be to ride down the surface of a collapsing star and into a black hole. "Of course, he could never get back out, or communicate his results to the outside. But who is to deny a man the right to his own personal pursuit of knowledge...