Word: lay
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...Fairchild, Noyce used a new chemical etching method not only to print transistors on silicon wafers but also to lay down tracks between them. Besides eliminating expensive wiring, the new integrated circuits operated much faster. Six months earlier Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had produced a similar chip, but it was made of germanium, required external wires and was tougher to manufacture. Noyce's chip won the ensuing patent race, but the two friendly rivals were content to regard themselves as co-inventors...
...pursued his medical researches, he came to the conclusion that the most intriguing mysteries lay concealed in the complex operations of the mind. By the early 1890s, he was specializing in "neurasthenics" (mainly severe hysterics); they taught him much, including the art of patient listening. At the same time he was beginning to write down his dreams, increasingly convinced that they might offer clues to the workings of the unconscious, a notion he borrowed from the Romantics. He saw himself as a scientist taking material both from his patients and from himself, through introspection. By the mid-1890s...
...professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., had published an arid little paper on an outrageous topic, rocket travel. Unlike most of his colleagues, Goddard believed rocketry was a viable technology, and his paper, primly titled "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," was designed to prove it. For the lay reader, there wasn't much in the writing to excite interest, but at the end, the buttoned-up professor unbuttoned a bit. If you used his technology to build a rocket big enough, he argued, and if you primed it with fuel that was powerful enough, you just might...
...change...There was a strange stillness...The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh...
...Bell Labs, Shockley recognized early on that the solution to one of the technological nightmares of the day--the cost and unreliability of the vacuum tubes used as valves to control the flow of electrons in radios and telephone-relay systems--lay in solid-state physics. Vacuum tubes were hot, bulky, fragile and short-lived. Crystals, particularly crystals that can conduct a bit of electricity, could do the job faster, more reliably and with 1 million times less power--if only someone could get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this...