Word: detectable
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wall." But it will be no ordinary wall: instead of a Maginot line of concrete and steel, great tracts of rugged, mountainous jungle will be guarded by hidden electronic devices. Some, no larger than a silver dollar, can be seeded by aircraft; once in place, they will detect the movement of the smallest enemy groups and transmit warnings to gun crews miles away. "We are getting better and better at this sort of thing," says Charles M. Herzfeld, until recently director of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. "I think that it is really our secret weapon...
Recognizing the difficulties of putting out huge fires, scientists at the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, established at Missoula, Mont., in 1960, are concentrating on prevention and early detection techniques. Their most dramatic accomplishment to date is the perfection of an aerial infrared scanner that can detect fire in a small bucket in a forest 15,000 feet below. Installed aboard a Convair, it has been flown over areas recently struck by lightning and has already picked up 220 fires-which show up as white spots in an infrared photograph. Forest rangers discovered that many were...
Beating the System. Holt has noticed that children react by employing clever stratagems to beat the system and find that right answer. They detect the way a teacher unconsciously leans toward the correct answer of several on the blackboard; a student looks confused or stays silent until the teacher keeps asking leading questions and almost answers himself; other students mumble answers, aware that the teacher is attuned to the right answer, and will assume it was given. They fence-straddle, avoid commitment, live for the teacher's approving "yes." It becomes so automatic, Holt writes, that when he selects...
...Eugen Kielbasa, a German U-boat commander, torpedoes an Allied freighter in the South Atlantic. The skipper then orders his young gunnery officer, Emil Kummerol, to destroy all "floating wreckage"-including a dozen helpless survivors. Otherwise, he explains to his shocked crew, Allied planes and subchasers would detect and destroy the U-boat. One of the helpless seamen survives machine-gunning, grenade tossing, ramming, and torturous exposure to the sea. Because of his testimony, Kielbasa and Kummerol are eventually brought before an international war-crimes tribunal. The captain's defense is that the slaughter was "an operational necessity," essential...
...event that a civilization exists on some planet orbiting a nearby star, and has been able to detect transmissions from Earth, it is unlikely that any of its saucers have yet arrived to investigate. Even the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away. And because presumably no spaceship-or any matter-can travel at or beyond the velocity of light, which is the universal speed limit according to the Einstein theory of relativity, it would take considerably longer than 4.3 light-years to reach the earth from its nearest stellar neighbor. At the 17,500 m.p.h. that astronauts...