Word: quartz
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Visitors to the University's 20 museums have access to millions of dollars in artifacts ranging from priceless paintings like Max Beckman's self-portrait to valuable gold and quartz crystals...
...creator of products, kingdoms and empires," he says -- but he does have expertise at taking a luxury product downscale while preserving its cachet. It was he who came up with the strategy that saved the prestigious Swiss watchmaking industry from succumbing to the Japanese hegemony in the quartz-watch business. In 1983, when he was approached for advice by a group of Swiss banks, the country had seen its share of the global watch market drop from 43% in 1974 to less than 15%. More than half the Swiss manufacturers had gone under, and creditor banks had taken over...
...then merged them, effectively taking control of one-third of the Swiss watch industry, including such famous brands as Omega, Longines, Blancpain, Tissot, Rado and Hamilton. But his big coup was figuring out that a product invented before his arrival could be the high-quality, low-price, plastic quartz watch that would challenge the Japanese at the lower end of the market. The $35-to-$40 Swatch, which reduced by half the usual number of parts by building them directly into the casing on automated assembly lines, was an instant success, enabling the Swiss watchmaking industry to command...
...scientists at the University of Genoa, Italy, noted that the rays coming from unshielded quartz-halogen lamps can induce mutations in the DNA of bacteria. Since genetic mutations are one cause of cancer, they decided to move up a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder. They subjected specially bred hairless mice to the lights 12 hours a day for a year and found that every one developed skin tumors -- most benign, but some cancerous. The research, reported in the British journal Nature, involved only a handful of mice, so it was labeled a pilot study. But the results were...
...OZONE LAYER THINS, PEOPLE MAY SPEND more time indoors to avoid the skin cancers and cataracts likely to result from more ultraviolet light reaching the earth's surface. That strategy could backfire. Like the sun, the high- intensity quartz-halogen lights used increasingly in homes and offices emit ultraviolet as well as visible light, and there is now evidence that they, too, can cause skin cancer...