Word: layers
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...horizontal and 120 vertical lines, these components form a graph-paper-like pattern in which there are 14,400 points of intersection. At each intersection, there are two transistors and one capacitor. If a signal is sent to a particular intersection, the components there will light up the layer of phosphorescent material immediately above them. That creates a dot that can glow with varying intensity. If a number of intersections are triggered simultaneously, an image is formed. In their current prototype, the Westinghouse engineers form images by using an external switching device to feed signals to the appropriate intersections...
...crops. Without the forests, which act as great sponges that sop up and hold rainfall, the water rapidly ran off the slopes. The accelerated runoff caused disastrous floods over the past year. In cleared jungles in Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil, heavy rains quickly leached the nutrients from the thin layer of topsoil, rendering the land infertile within a year or two. (The trees had both anchored and nourished the soil.) In other cleared jungles, the sun burned out the soil's valuable organic content...
Skin Cancer. Cicerone estimates that even if the use of aerosol sprays were halted immediately, the gases already in the atmosphere would cause a 10% reduction of ozone in the layer by 1990. That would result in a substantial increase of ultraviolet radiation on the earth, causing at the very least a greater incidence of skin cancer among humans. It might also disrupt the food chain by affecting food crops and plankton in the oceans. Lastly, the depletion of the ozone layer might have certain incalculable consequences like changing the earth's weather patterns...
Cicerone's report was based on earlier findings by two University of California scientists. It is further supported by Michael McElroy, a Harvard atmospheric physicist, who in independent calculations concluded that the projected 10% annual increase in the use of aerosols would reduce the ozone layer by 10% in 20 years and 40% by 2014, wreaking havoc on terrestrial life...
...also strip ozone of its third atom and reduce it to ordinary oxygen. Large amounts of nitric oxides are given off by the exhausts of supersonic aircraft, and a recent M.I.T. study (TIME, Sept. 9) indicates that a fleet of 500 SSTs flying regularly in or near the ozone layer would deplete it by 12% within 25 years. In the past few months, scientists have been emphasizing the even greater menace of nuclear explosions, which generate huge amounts of nitric oxides. A nuclear war, or atmospheric testing, they say, might at least temporarily wipe out the ozone layer. Thus...