Word: gadget
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...principle, many private investors like to put their money into ventures they understand or industries in which they have unusual chances to spot a breakthrough product. Says Hugo Quackenbush, senior vice president of the Charles Schwab discount-brokerage firm: "Airline pilots, for example, may know some kind of gadget that is being made by a company that may escape the attention of the big guys on Wall Street...
Later, in April, scientists at Stanford and IBM announced that they had made thin films of the new substances, important for computer applications. The spotlight then shifted to IBM Researchers Robert Laibowitz and Roger Koch, who reported that they had made their own thin film into a working gadget called a SQUID (for superconducting quantum interference device). Such tools are already used in low-temperature versions to measure extremely faint magnetic fields. They are also employed by physicists in the search for elusive gravity waves and magnetic monopoles, predicted by some theories but not yet observed. Medical researchers use SQUIDs...
...California, some 2,000 motor vehicles -- from Michael Jackson's Mercedes- Benz to Palo Alto garbage trucks -- have been equipped with a gadget called the Navigator, which helps drivers get to a destination by displaying their vehicle's location on a glowing green map. And beginning next month, visitors to three hotels and six Budget Rent a Car stations in and around San Francisco will have access to counter-top DriverGuide units, which can calculate the shortest route between any two addresses in the Bay area and print out a concise set of directions. Later this year, DriverGuide will also...
Warning to bleary-eyed traveling executives: that gadget you thought was your electric shaver could be making a copy of your chin. Meet the incredible shrinking copy machine. The new, hand-held devices, priced from $250 to $350, are arriving from Japan and slipping into briefcases and little market niches , in the U.S. The battery-powered machines, when moved slowly down a newspaper column or across a passage in a book, can instantly produce a copy on a strip of paper about 1 3/4-in. to 3 1/4-in. wide. They use miniaturized thermal technology to transfer images onto the special heat...
...cocaine, eleven packs of heroin, a dinner plate used for dope cutting -- and three beepers. Such inventories highlight a trend that authorities are noticing around the country: the telephone beeper or pager, long used as a stay-in-touch device by doctors, plumbers and electricians, is now the gadget of choice for the dope industry as well. "Beepers," says Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Curtis Hazell, "are the single most common tool of the drug trade...