Word: coppers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stretching the copper-cored, shoelace-thin tether within the earth's magnetic field, NASA scientists expected to generate up to 5,000 volts of electricity. Ultimately, such tethers could not only power spacecraft but also secure counterweights that could be set spinning to create artificial gravity...
...world's smallest battery; it is one one-hundredth the size of a red blood cell and puts out twenty one-thousandths of a volt. Its terminals are pillars of copper and silver atoms piled 100,000 high by scientists using a scanning tunneling electron microscope...
...another room was the top-secret Bomb Alarm, a system of sensors and copper wires that crisscrossed the country and reacted to overpressure, heat and brilliance. On a huge U.S. map dotted with hundreds of tiny light bulbs, a red light would go on to mark the site of a nuclear explosion. Atop the mountain a series of remotely operated cameras and radiation sensors monitored the area. A nearby nuclear hit would vaporize those devices, but the site was equipped with backup radiation sensors that could be pushed out of the mountain. There were also human "probers" from among...
...prototypes of a certain kind of Japanese aesthetics (the Japanese Book of Tea reads almost like a pure invention of Wilde's, with its "cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence"). Yet Wilde also saw that silver generalities conceal basic copper truths: "The actual people who live in Japan," he wrote, "are not unlike the general run of English people...
Since the first videophone was unveiled at the New York World's Fair in 1964, doctors have dreamed of healing by wire. But the reality of transmitting a detailed picture over a 1-mm-thick (.04 in.) copper cable proved elusive. Then in the 1980s engineers working with a technique called digital signal compression managed to boost the data-carrying capacity of ordinary phone lines 30-fold...