Word: patent
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DIED. HEDY LAMARR, 86, sultry actress; in Orlando, Fla. The Viennese-born Lamarr (the star of Samson and Delilah) also shared a 1942 patent for a device that prevented radio-controlled torpedoes from having their signals jammed (see Eulogy...
...unable to find or pay for the necessary drugs, such as AZT and protease inhibitors. South Africa, where more than 25 percent of expectant mothers are estimated to be infected with AIDS, has been involved in a well-publicized tug-of-war with pharmaceutical companies keen to protect their patent rights for the most popular AIDS drugs. "At this point, pharmaceutical companies are doing everything they can to keep the drugs to themselves," says Dowell, who points out that even though the clinical trials for many AIDS drugs are funded by government agencies, the drugs' development and patents remain...
Einstein was aware of this difficulty in 1907, while he was still at the patent office in Bern, but didn't begin to think seriously about the problem until he was at the German University in Prague in 1911. He realized that there is a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. (This being before the age of Star Trek, Einstein thought of people in elevators rather than spaceships...
...certain size, called quanta. It was as if radiation were packaged like sugar; you cannot buy an arbitrary amount of loose sugar in a supermarket but can only buy it in 1-lb. bags. In one of his groundbreaking papers written in 1905, when he was still at the patent office, Einstein showed that Planck's quantum hypothesis could explain what is called the photoelectric effect, the way certain metals give off electrons when light falls on them. This is the basis of modern light detectors and television cameras, and it was for this work that Einstein was awarded...
...first patent, for an electric vote recorder, taught him a lesson that would guide the rest of his career. There was no demand, at the time, for electric vote recorders, and his device earned him nothing. Edison vowed never again to invent something unless he could be sure it was commercially marketable...