Word: silicones
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...once defined it: the global economy and the future of technology. The annual Japan dinner attracted a bigger crowd than it has for years; the high-tech heroes had more of a spring in their step. (One leading indicator for tech-stock bulls: vintage '95 Taittinger champagne at the Silicon Valley reception.) But there were other signs of optimism, notably the scores of young business leaders from the Arab world who spoke eloquently of their desire for real political and economic reform...
Another good reason to go is the one disdained by straight-to-Mars boosters: learning how to live off the land--manufacturing some of what we need from soil that contains oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium and titanium, plus a dusting of helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon deposited by solar winds...
...some dreamers, the presence of silicon, especially, suggests a way to make a return to the moon pay--and maybe even save the environment back home. If you could set up automated lunar factories to extract the silicon and turn it into solar cells, says David Criswell, director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston, the moon could become a solar power station, beaming clean energy via microwaves back to Earth. "If you want to provide sustainable energy for 10 billion people by 2050," he says, "there is no other...
DIED. PHILLIP GOLDMAN, 39, Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded WebTV, a company that enabled people to surf the Internet from their television sets; of undetermined causes; in Los Altos Hills, Calif. After selling WebTV in 1997 to Microsoft for $425 million, he went on to create Mailblocks, a service to block junk e-mail...
...been converted into a lab. His task was to use an atomic force microscope to get a "snapshot" of the DNA molecule. All he seemed to be getting, though, was a headache. The microscope, which detects the con-tours of molecules by dragging a flexible sliver of coated silicon over them, was malfunctioning. After puzzling through his problem for months, Thundat realized one rainy day during a rare midday foray outdoors that the microscope's probe was warping as it sponged up moisture from the air. Intrigued, he ran a simple experiment and discovered that the probe was a marvelously...