Word: caterpillar
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...ripples across the roughest terrain like a huge, double-jointed caterpillar. It can cling to 60° slopes, climb over boulders and fallen timber, push its way through water, mud or snow. On less rigorous straightaways, it can whip along at speeds of up to 65 m.p.h. Built by Lockheed engineers as a high-performance, wheel-driven answer to the tank, the curious transport is fittingly called the Twister...
...exactly welcomed the new machines. The robot, complains a United Automobile Workers official, can "even be programmed to shake hands. Presumably it could be set up to shake hands to say goodbye to the people it replaces." Yet in many cases, the people the robots replace are glad. Caterpillar Tractor Co. uses a Unimation-made robot to feed steel pins into furnaces, a tedious task that workmen heretofore had to perform with long-handled tongs. "The work is hot and repetitive," says a Caterpillar spokesman. "For the worker, it was just not desirable." For the robot, it's just...
...cell differentiation. Through other scientists' research he found that different species of moths had various means of escaping from their cocoons. He found that, for example, one Australian species has a hard, pointed structure at the front of its head that it uses as a saw and that the caterpillar of one kind of silk moth leaves an exit hole when it builds the cocoon. The species Kafatos chose to work with, the Chinese Oak Silk Moth, however, had no such obvious method...
WHILE dissecting pupae in search of the liquid's production site, he noticed a pair of long, very thin tubes in the front part of the pupa. These were the remains of the silk-producing tubes of the caterpillar. They led to a single opening on the moth's face just underneath the mouth. It was impossible to tell exactly where the liquid comes from since the first drop appears suddenly and covers the face. Yet the mouth and the old silk tubes were the only two openings and the mouth could be discounted because Kafatos had already shown that...
Despite their misgivings, most businessmen predict rising sales next year. "We are backing up our forecast by increasing production," says Chairman William Blackie of Caterpillar Tractor Co. "Most businessmen I meet feel we're going to succeed-in spite of Government." Optimism, however, is often tempered with worry over strikes, rising labor costs, and, inevitably, squeezed profit margins...