Word: filaments
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first commercially viable lightbulb. As early as 1820, inventors were homing in on the principles that would lead to the first electric illumination. An English inventor, Joseph Swan, took their early work and developed the basis of the modern electric lightbulb in 1879 - a thin paper or metal filament surrounded by a glass-enclosed vacuum. When electricity runs through the filament, the bulb glows. Edison refined the design, trying filaments made out of platinum and cotton before eventually settling on carbonized bamboo, capable of burning for more than 1,200 hours. With Edison's design - and the settlement...
...later. By the late 1930s, the Rural Electrification Administration, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, had delivered electric lighting to nearly every corner of the country. Development on the bulb didn't stop either: researchers have modified Edison and Swan's design further, refining the filament by using tungsten and filling the vacuum with gas, both of which increase the life span of a bulb. Still, even modern bulbs are inefficient - less than 6% of the energy used by a bulb goes into producing light. The rest is given off as heat...
...things: "The largest object so far discovered in the universe is called the Sloan Great Wall...It is a filament of superclusters and clusters of galaxies about 1 billion light years away and almost 1.5 billion light-years long. It would take 250,000,000,000,000,000 copies of the Great Wall of China placed end to end to cover this distance...
...explosives "are sensitive to heat, shock, and friction, can be initiated simply with fire or electrical charge, and can also be used to produce improvised detonators," the report states. "For example, TATP or HMTD may be placed in a tube or syringe body in contact with a bare bulb filament, such as that obtained from inside a Christmas tree light bulb, to produce an explosion." The report doesn't mention anything about a terrorist assembling such a bomb on a plane, but it does warn that manufacturing such a device can be dangerous for the bombmaker. "Because of the instability...
...with a wireless transmitter that can read glucose levels once a minute and works for three days at a time before needing to be changed. The continuous sugar-level readings are sent to a small receiver kept in a pocket or purse, and originate from the patch's hairlike filament that penetrates ever so slightly beneath the skin. But it doesn't probe deep enough to draw blood. Instead it measures glucose levels in the body's interstitial fluid. These readings often lag behind actual blood-sugar levels by about 15 minutes, but experts say that's still plenty...