Word: drexler
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FREEHOLD, New Jersey: The biggest question surrounding the case of Melissa Drexler was answered as the high school senior was charged with murder after an autopsy concluded her baby born while she attended prom was strangled or suffocated. Prosecutors had waited to file charges until they could determine whether the baby could have survived independently of his mother. Officials have not yet said whether they will seek the death penalty...
...defined downward last week, six months after two New Jersey teenagers--who had been given everything but a conscience--delivered a baby boy and briskly disposed of him in a Dumpster before heading to the White Glove Car Wash to rinse off the blood. Now we have Melissa Drexler, who slipped into the bathroom at her senior prom, delivered a 6-lb. 6-oz. baby boy and tossed him in the trash basket with the soiled paper towels in time to get back to the party. She asked the disk jockey to play her favorite Metallica song and danced with...
...more of them being reported, if not more of them happening. No one keeps comprehensive statistics on abandoned babies, but in Los Angeles County last year, there were 10 newborns left to die; two summers ago, three were discarded in Southern California beach communities. In Monmouth County, N.J., where Drexler left her baby, there were 12 abandoned babies in the past 10 years. But four New Jersey teenagers have abandoned babies in the past six months alone...
...people of the future what only the wealthiest can buy today. Where the rich now hire chauffeurs to drive them to work, for example, the working stiff of the future will be transported to work in his robocar. None of these advances are without their costs and risks. Drexler's assemblers, for example, could create bounties of goods and services -- or they could unleash artificial pests of unimaginable destructiveness. One nightmare creature from Drexler's book: an omnivorous bacteria-size robot that spreads like blowing pollen, replicates swiftly and reduces the biosphere to dust in a matter of days...
Robot probes no bigger than bacteria will eventually be possible. According to K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation, they will use nanotechnology to assemble devices atom by atom or molecule by molecule. His colleagues have already made motors smaller in diameter than a human hair. Drexler believes a bundle of nanorobots, weighing practically nothing, would be the perfect interstellar emissaries. Having arrived at a planet or asteroid around some distant star, perhaps in a solar sailship pushed to high speeds by a powerful laser beam from earth, they would go to work, antlike, building radio transmitters and other...