Word: modern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...idea and set out to develop commercially viable versions of the device. New ways to create Shockley's sandwich were invented, and transistors in a vast variety of sizes and shapes flooded the market. Shockley's invention had created a new industry, one that underlies all of modern electronics, from supercomputers to talking greeting cards. Today the world produces about as many transistors as it does printed characters in all the newspapers, books, magazines and computer and electronic-copier pages combined...
...many ideas and technological advances converged to create the modern computer that it is foolhardy to give one person the credit for inventing it. But the fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine...
...hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus calculated that the world's population would soon outstrip its food-growing capacity. What he didn't anticipate was Norman Borlaug. Working in Mexico from 1944 to 1960--long before the advent of modern biotechnology--the U.S. biologist developed a hybrid strain of wheat that was enormously more prolific than its natural cousins. Borlaug's "miracle wheat" allowed Mexico to triple its grain production in a matter of years, and when his hybrid was introduced in south Asia in the mid-1960s, wheat yields there jumped 60%. Miracle strains of rice...
...even the millennium) ahead. The pace of discovery is sure to be even faster than it is today and the social and ethical dilemmas created by the exploitation of new knowledge even more haunting. Our understanding of the world has deepened at an accelerating rate since the beginning of modern science 500 years ago. Our century, for example, has had the wit to ask how the universe is constructed, how even the tiniest particles of matter move and how life manages to exist in the face of all the odds against...
...great apes had a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. The genes of the two groups differ hardly at all, but some of them are differently arranged. By using that information, along with hominid fossils, we shall learn what genetic changes made it possible for the ancestors of modern people to stand upright (about 4 million years ago) and then to speak. As a by-product, we shall be able to trace the migration routes of our human ancestors who emigrated from Africa and came to populate the surface of the earth. A half-century from now, we shall...