Word: electronics
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...Electron microscopes are much more powerful than microscopes using light, but conventional models have a great disadvantage: they cannot be used on living cells or organisms. Their pictures of bacteria, for instance, show dried-up husks that do not resemble living bacteria any more than ancient Egyptian mummies resemble living men. But last week a new-type electron microscope in Toulouse, France, was taking pictures of bacteria that are still alive and reasonably healthy...
...electron microscope works by shooting electrons through an object and bringing them to a magnified focus on the far side. The object shows as a shadowed picture because some parts of it stop more electrons than others. Since electrons are scattered by air, the interior of the instrument must be an almost perfect vacuum, which would dry up and kill almost instantly all living bacteria...
...French microscope at the Toulouse Electron Optics Laboratory is housed in a shining aluminum sphere 78 ft. in diameter. Professor Gaston Dupouy, head of the laboratory and the microscope's chief operator, explains that he protects bacteria by enclosing them in a tiny air-filled cell that fits on the microscope's stage. The cell has two windows, one on the top, the other on the bottom, which are covered with collodion film less than four-millionths of an inch thick. The windows are so small (four-thousandths of an inch in diameter) that this gossamer stuff...
...then and there impetuously offered two $1,000 prizes. One was to go to the first person to reduce the information on one page of a book to one twenty-five-thousandth of the linear scale of the original "in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope"; the other would go to the inventor of an electrically powered rotating motor no bigger than a cube one sixty-fourth of an inch high...
...Harvard clock a thin trickle of hydrogen gas flows through an apparatus that splits its two-atom molecules into single atoms. Each of these atoms has one proton and one electron, but some of them have slightly more energy than the others because their electrons are spinning in a different way. When the atom stream shoots through a system of magnets, the low-energy atoms in it are deflected sideways while the high-energy ones converge, pass through a small hole in a 6-in. quartz bulb. The bulb is lined with paraffin which does not affect the atom...