Word: crystallic
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Sometime next year, when the Soviets launch one of their Proton rockets toward their space station Mir, a pharmaceutical experiment on board could mark a new cooperative era in space. The package, a crystal-growing project, will be the first commercial payload put into orbit for a U.S. company by the Soviets. Glavkosmos, the Soviet civilian space agency, has agreed to conduct several such experiments aboard Mir under a contract with Payload Systems, a Wellesley, Mass., consulting firm. American firms that want to explore low- gravity manufacturing and other space-based technologies are turning to the Soviets because...
Stankard could barely afford to destroy his work because he was desperately short of crystal. In 1975 he solved the problem by ordering $15,000 worth of glass from a Pennsylvania optical glass company. He was earning only $7,000 a year at the time, and he had no savings. To pay the bill, the Stankards renegotiated the mortgage on their house...
...profusion of wild-flower paperweights: painted Trillium, black-eyed Susan, loosestrife, lady's slipper and prickly pear cactus. Sometimes they were shown in their entire life cycle: bud, blossom and seedpod on a single stem. Sometimes their root systems were shown beneath the earth on the underside of the crystal globe. Even as a child, he had a passion for wild flowers. Now, as a working artist, he improved his knowledge of their shape and form by studying flowers he found growing behind his house or on long walks in New Jersey's wild and beautiful Pine Barrens. The idea...
...flowers' appeal, though, was restricted to paperweight collectors; not a world of the arts, but more one of solid, practical investment, rather like that of collecting Christmas plates. Eight years ago, Stankard began encasing his flowers in a crystal block about six inches high, three inches wide. As this new form evolved, he began laminating the blocks with translucent dark green glass on three sides, giving the impression that the plants and their roots are suspended in space, released from their glass prison. The form, which Stankard calls a cloistered botanical, brought his work to the attention of collectors...
...Stephen, who has difficulty swallowing, gently held his head forward and poured the beverage, a sip at a time, into his mouth. Meanwhile, Hawking was responding to a question from a student who knelt to read the answer as it slowly took shape on the dim liquid-crystal screen. The conversation shifted to creativity and how mathematicians seem to reach a creative peak in their early 20s. Hawking's computer beeped. "I'm over the hill," he said, to a chorus of laughter...