Word: coppers
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...time of its independence from Britain in 1964, Zambia was the richest black country in Africa south of the Sahara. It had $1.1 billion in foreign reserves, plus the world's second largest copper-mining industry. It also had emeralds, other gemstones and immense fertile areas. It had the potential to become southern Africa's breadbasket, and President Kenneth Kaunda promised every Zambian a pint of milk...
...mortification, and lusted to harvest souls. They strove to break down native sexual and religious customs, but, as Vollmann tells it, were more tolerant of the Indians' prolonged and joyous ritual torture of captured enemies. Tribes sold their souls (literally) as dearly as possible, in return for iron hatchets, copper cook pots, measles and smallpox, a few guns and, rather late in the game, brandy. When they could, they caught the Jesuits and tortured them, thus increasing the clerics' chances of canonization. (Pere Jean de Brebeuf, one of the murdered Jesuits, was made a saint...
...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...