Word: developable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...right price. The parameters are simple: lonely kids should be able to "boot up" Dad or Mom on their home computer. "The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics," reads the Defense Department's solicitation seeking companies to develop the concept. "For instance, a child may get a response from saying 'I love you,' or 'I miss you,' or 'Good night.'" The goal: reassuring little ones whose parent has suddenly disappeared. "The children don't quite understand Mommy or Daddy being deployed," says Navy commander Russell Shilling, the experimental psychologist overseeing...
After studying the exotic wildlife of the Galápagos Islands, Charles Darwin surmised that animals can develop unique traits when they evolve in isolation. In the tennis world, Rafael Nadal is such an animal. Based on the island of Majorca, Nadal and his family shunned mainstream training programs as he grew up, preferring the more homespun methods of Rafael's uncle Toni, whose tennis credentials consist of a brief stint competing on the national circuit. Passing up funding from Spain's national tennis academy, and scholarship money from America's private academies, Rafael and Toni would travel...
...athletes develop their own mix of style and technique. But Nadal's peculiarity is quantifiable. San Francisco?based tennis researcher John Yandell has used video-capture technology to record the topspin of Nadal's forehand. He found that Nadal's shot rotates at an average of 3,200 times a minute. Andre Agassi, one of the game's great shotmakers, generated 1,900 rotations per minute in his prime, and current world No. 2 Roger Federer, whose forehand is considered among the game's best, generates 2,700. As U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe has said of Nadal...
Increasingly, nanoengineers are working to develop medical devices, batteries, electrical switches and more made up of microscopic parts that float above one another on thin films of other materials. This increases efficiency, reduces friction and allows the hardware to be built to finer tolerances and tinier sizes. Design them small enough, and you can put them in microscopically tiny places machinery could never go before. "When you understand the forces you're manipulating," says Parsegian, "you can design efficiently at the nanometer scale...
...animals on stock farms but also to those in the wild, is prompting Texas regulators to seek an increase in the penalty for smuggling from a misdemeanor to a felony, Williford says. Federal and state wildlife officials take smuggling cases seriously, but investigations take a long time to develop - a recent case was built over two years and then took 18 months to work its way through federal courts, where penalties are harsher...