Word: iridium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Iridium is rarer, costlier and even more resistant to corrosion than platinum, and its name comes from iris, the rainbow, from the lovely play of color in iridium salts. I would love to carry an iridium credit card. --Dr. Oliver Sacks, author...
...Iridium is falling to earth. The global satellite-telephone network that was supposed to let even jungle-trekking CEOs keep in touch has been bleeding money and racking up disappointments since its launch last fall. Now its investors are threatening to hang up. A day after Motorola, which owns an 18 percent stake, said that the company might have to declare bankruptcy unless its partners chip in more money, Lockheed Martin announced Thursday it wouldn?t be upping its 1 percent investment any time soon. Iridium will miss its next interest payment to bondholders, and its bankers have given...
...think everyone sensed that this type of product was going to be cheaper - and better - in the near future," he says. "Iridium costs something like $2,000 up front and $7 a minute - they?re having too much trouble attracting subscribers." Mass-market appeal may have been doomed by a rather shocking deficiency: the phones don?t work inside buildings and in urban areas. So Iridium has been forced to rejigger its target audience from globe-trotting yuppies with big egos and bigger expense accounts to a decidedly different niche: mariners, oil-rig workers and the military. That glamour hemorrhage...
That's grim news, given the $17 billion U.S. taxpayers are spending on the Milstar satellite system. Maybe the Pentagon should consider using Iridium satphones instead. They're only $3,000 each...
...inch across, that was extracted from a 65-million-year-old geological layer under more than 50 yds. of sediment at the bottom of the Northern Pacific. In a report in the current issue of Nature, Kyte notes that the little chunk contains concentrations of metals (such as iridium and nickel) and mineral textures that clearly show that it is extraterrestrial and that it probably was once part of a much larger asteroid...