Word: faintly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dutch Sea Captain Jan Drent, now 59, never imagined that learned astronomers would ever take serious note of his lifetime hobby. While studying navigation at the Kweek School voor de Zeevaart (a merchant marine academy), he heard about the zodiacal light, a faint, wedge-shaped glow that reaches into the sky near the plane of the earth's orbit. It is best seen in the tropics just after dusk or just before dawn. Astronomers now believe that it is sunlight reflected from small particles revolving around the sun like miniature planets, but in Drent's youth the experts...
...Clouds (small, comparatively nearby galaxies) seemed to be much fainter intrinsically than similar clusters in the Milky Way. This offended the astronomers' sense of order. They felt that the clusters in both galaxies should be about equally bright. When clusters in the great Andromeda galaxy also proved too faint, the astronomers suspected their calculations...
...first few weeks were not so bad: the wind kept up, pushing him westward day by day, and life on the raft had not yet become grey, leaden monotony. But then the wind died away. For the next 27 days he just drifted, only now & then catching a faint breeze. Cheerful by nature, he often sank into deep troughs of depression as he looked out at the ever-empty horizon. Fortunately, there were daily chores to be done: fishing, keeping the log, plotting his position, measuring and recording his blood pressure and corpuscle counts. Fish were plentiful, especially flying fish...
...estimated 150,000 people in the U.S. who are not truly blind have to be treated as if they were, because they have so little useful vision that ordinary spectacles yield them only a faint, blurred image. This week, Columbia University's inventive optometrist, Dr. William Feinbloom, announced that he had found a way to restore workaday vision to about half these patients so that they can read newspapers, watch TV or even do precision work in factories...
...first germanium transistor, they knew they had found a long-awaited short cut through the great glass jungle of the electronics age (TIME, Feb. 11). With the ease of the old-fashioned carborundum crystal, it can change alternating current to direct; and like a vacuum tube, it can amplify faint, fluctuating currents. But where the vacuum tube is often bulky, fragile and uses large amounts of power, the rugged little transistor, no bigger than a thumbnail, works on minute amounts of energy. Last week in Princeton, N.J., the Radio Corp. of America demonstrated just how far transistors have come toward...