Word: fibers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...secret electronic and chemical weapons tested during the Gulf War. Cruise missiles generating devastating electromagnetic fields will knock out power plants and transmission towers as they fly over them, while destroying all data stored in tapes and disks at the targets. Other missiles will release showers of carbon-fiber dust to short out electrical installations. A CIA chemical, sprayed on roads or airfields, will rot tires. And if operatives can get close enough, a new microbe, dropped into fuel tanks of jets, tanks and trucks, will be brought into play to turn the fuel into useless jelly...
...palm-size disk could hold 17 hours of programming. It works like other magneto-optical disks: a laser heats and magnetizes the disk surface, then another laser reads the magnetized spots. But while current systems use lenses to focus the laser, this one funnels the light through an optical fiber that has been stretched 1,000 times as thin as a human hair -- a much tighter focus than a lens can achieve. The main stumbling block: the laser that reads these disks is too slow for commercial applications...
People are born with different proportions of the two fiber types, and athletes tend to excel in events for which they have the best muscle endowment. Sprinters, such as track star Carl Lewis and swimmer Dana Torres, have muscles containing a large majority of fast-twitch fibers. So, surprisingly, do shot putters and weight lifters, who need not only strength but power too. "They have to move a heavy weight very quickly," explains U.S. Olympic Training Center physiologist Steve Fleck. "Weight lifters in the clean-and-jerk event can move as fast as a sprinter." Distance runners and swimmers...
Maybe engineers and designers should get Olympic medals. In the pole vault, heights jumped 30% with the switch from bamboo to fiber-glass and carbon- composite poles. Tracks have been resurfaced to give runners more bounce and speed, and pools have been designed to dampen wave action that buffets swimmers. Some athletes fear their events could become contests of equipment and facilities, but as any coach would admit, it still takes a great swimmer to bring out the best in a great pool...
...cable-TV systems are jockeying for position in what each views as a potentially vast market but which neither is ready to create. Stuart Brotman, a communications specialist in Lexington, Mass., estimates that cable operators would have to spend $20 billion to $30 billion on digital-compression and fiber-optic technology to prepare their systems for interactive programming. The telephone companies, for their part, would have to invest $300 billion to $500 billion in fiber-optic networks before they could deliver TV-quality pictures into every American's home...