Word: metallers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into...
...Kendall Square Band, as the set of instruments is called, cost $90,000 to build and consists of three pieces with names befitting their location by MIT: Pythagoras, a series of chimes; Kepler, a ring-shaped gong; and Galileo, a vibrating sheet of metal...
Matisse explains that when a typical metal bar is struck and vibrates, several points on the bar—called “nodes” by physicists—do not vibrate, but produce two tunes that resonate from each bar. Matisse sawed nicks at these nodes on the bar so that the whole bar would be more flexible, setting the two tones a full octave apart and eliminating the discord...
...gong, called Kepler, is now broken but produced sound when a hammer hit its metal disc. The third instrument—dubbed Galieo—is a metal sheet that makes a loud, thunderous noise, sometimes irking commuters, when the handle is moved...
...home: Silly String. It seems that the neon plastic party streamers sprayed into an open doorway before a building search or across a darkened room can help detect nearly invisible trip wires attached to bombs and boobytraps. The old methods to detect trip wires - sweeping the space with a metal grappling hook or getting close enough for a visual inspection - just aren't as safe, Marines discovered...