Word: sizing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...naked eye, the object mounted on a postage stamp-size wafer and held aloft by a pair of tweezers is all but invisible. Even under a bright light, it looks like nothing more than a speck of dust. But magnified 160 times in an electron microscope, the speck begins to take on shape and function: a tiny gear with teeth the size of blood cells. "You have to be careful when handling these things," warns Kaigham Gabriel, an engineer at AT&T Bell Laboratories . "I've accidentally inhaled a few right into my lungs...
Welcome to the world of microtechnology, where machines the size of sand grains are harnessed to do useful work. Huge numbers of microscopic sensors are already employed to measure the temperature, air pressure and acceleration of airplanes and automobiles. Delco Electronics alone sells 7 million silicon pressure sensors a year to its parent company, General Motors, for use in power-train controls and diagnostics. But scientists at Berkeley, Stanford, M.I.T., AT&T, IBM and a handful of other research centers around the world see much broader possibilities for minuscule machines. They envision armies of gnat-size robots exploring space, performing...
...enormous size of this newest group of galaxies, the result of a 12-year search, has precipitated excitement among astronomers concerned with determining the age of the universe...
...strangeness of those processes that seems distinctively his own. In The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), a volume of page-size charcoal drawings accompanied by short captions, a suburban house blasts off into the night sky. Beneath it are the words "The house on Maple Street. It was a perfect lift-off." Van Allsburg has a gift for adopting unusual vantage points. After spotting two ants in his kitchen one day, he dreamed up Two Bad Ants (1988), in which the adventures of a pair of the insects -- being buffeted inside a garbage disposal and nearly getting cooked...
...When Motorola developed Micro TAC, the first pocket-size cellular phone, engineers made the device sturdy enough to be dropped from a height of 4 ft. onto a concrete surface without breaking...