Word: laser
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would-be buyer, a Colorado company that wanted to ship the device to West Germany. U.S. Customs in Washington confirmed that the document was a fake. Agents began watching the officers of the Denver concern, Norman Cormerford and Bruce Adamski, who had ordered a $54,000 krypton laser from another manufacturer. That device, used to etch computer microchips, was also bound for West Germany...
Customs agents suspected the real buyer: the Soviets. Aided by West German customs officials, they found a manifest for the laser with a most incriminating address: a physics lab in Moscow. Cormerford and Adamski, charged last week, each face up to seven years in prison. Prankish federal agents decided to send along the Soviet-bound parcels-sort of. They filled the crates with 700 Ibs. of concrete and, inside one, tucked a two-word note, in plainest English...
...Celluloid, by comparison, is a laissez-faire baby sitter. It asks only that the viewer believe what he sees, that he go with the flow of seductive images and return to intellectual infancy as a passive, pacified fun sucker. The young audience that makes hits these days out of laser shows and locker-room frolics seems bored with the notion that the mind has a life too. And few moviemakers, even the smart ones, are choosing to exercise their craft for the benefit of anyone old enough to vote...
Angioplasty works best on patients with only one blocked artery, but fails when the deposits are too hard to be compressed or cannot be reached with the catheter. For such cases another technique may soon be available. Taking his inspiration from the laser swords in Star Wars, Cardiologist Garrett Lee, of the Western Heart Institute in San Francisco, has developed a catheter similar to the one used in angioplasty but with the addition of a pinpoint laser...
Once the catheter is in place, the laser is carefully aimed and fired at the obstruction. The lumps of fat "melt like butter," says Lee. The debris is swept up through a vacuum tube. The so-called laserscope has been tested on animals, and Lee hopes to begin trials involving humans within six months...