Word: optic
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Spinrad's estimate may be conservative. Corporations and national research organizations around the world are now spending billions of dollars to harness the new optical technology. The first fruits of their efforts are already apparent in such conveniences as fiber-optic telephone lines, laser printers, hot-selling compact disc players, credit cards bearing holograms, and laser price-tag scanners in supermarkets. Says Thomas Hartwick, head of TRW's Electro-Optics Research Center, near Los Angeles: "Every area that light touches will see technology advance by several generations...
...optical technology is moving rapidly into place. Communications companies have started to lay new transoceanic cables that can compete handily with space satellites. Fiber-optic links are allowing far-flung corporations to install networks of private video hookups and connect office buildings into a new kind of "optical city." Optical technology is providing sensitive nerve endings for devices like smoke detectors and blood analyzers. Meanwhile, scientists in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan are pushing hard toward a still much-in-the-future optical computer that uses photons rather than electrons for number-crunching efficiency. The massively powerful optical brain...
...dreams, bigger than life: a red fingernail the size of a mudguard, a slough of squirming orange spaghetti, a girl whose perfect, impersonal beauty has to advertise something other than herself, the black void of outer space, a paper clip, crinkled silver Mylar and bristling sheaves of fiber-optic cables and the Ford in your future...
...promising component of the system, which the Army originally balked at including, is the so-called FOG-M (for fiber-optic guided missile), a groundlaunched missile with a television camera in the nose. Steered toward its target by an operator who sees through a gossamer fiber-optic thread that spins out from behind as the missile flies, the weapon's 6-lb. warhead spells almost certain destruction to an enemy tank...
...confirm that a patient has endometriosis, doctors look for the telltale tissue by peering into the pelvic cavity with a fiber-optic instrument called a laparoscope. After diagnosis, a number of treatments can be prescribed. One is pregnancy--if it is still feasible; the nine-month interruption of menstruation can help shrink misplaced endometrial tissue. Taking birth- control pills may also help, but more effective is a drug called danazol, a synthetic male hormone that stops ovulation and causes endometrial tissue to shrivel. But it can also produce acne, facial-hair growth, weight gain and other side effects...