Word: electronically
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Castruccio's lunar power plant (which he calls an "electron farm") is nothing but a thin plastic sheet coated with cesium or some other material that gives off electrons when struck by light. On earth these electrons would get nowhere; they would be captured immediately by atmospheric atoms. On the airless moon the electrons could be collected by a wire mesh. Flowing out of the mesh, they would form a direct electric current...
According to Dr. Castruccio, a one-acre electron farm will produce 1,200 kilowatts, enough to run 20,000 60-watt light bulbs. The plant will weigh 1.7 Ibs. per kw. and cost (on earth) $3.50 per kw. Since the farm can have any desired acreage, Dr. Castruccio feels that power supply should not be a principal problem for a lunar colony...
...prize to date goes to Japan's optical and sewing-machine industries. Optics last year accounted for more than $8,000,000 of exports to the U.S. and Hitachi, Ltd., Japan's biggest producer of electron microscopes recently walked off with the grand prix at the Brussels Fair. As for sewing machines, the payoff on quality was never better demonstrated than by Fukoku Machine Co. In the last several years it has taken the lion's share of a $21 million U.S. market for Japanese sewing-machine heads, is swamped with U.S. orders for a new zigzag...
...model built at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute. The grey balls represent carbon atoms; blue is phosphorous; yellow is nitrogen; red is oxygen; white is hydrogen. Molecules do not look like this, of course. The atoms in them are much too small to be seen, even with an electron microscope. The pattern shown is a small part, somewhat simplified, of the DNA molecule, which geneticists now believe is the carrier of heredity and the chemical master of all life. If all of this seems to bring up some questions about the unfolding mysteries of heredity, see SCIENCE, The Secret...
...crash-priority psychology, which often achieves spectacular results, also produced absurdities. Though lavish, laboratory equipment is apt to be overengineered, clumsy and wasteful. Says a British physicist of one laboratory: "The men in charge just sat down with a catalogue and ordered whatever they wanted. There was one fine electron-microscope that they said they hadn't gotten around to using yet, though it had been there a year...