Word: sizing
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...have a genetic institute for cockroaches." Instead, the researchers recruited some engineers to build them roach robots that would slip into the crowd and manipulate it from within. "It turns out," he says, "that roaches aren't very discriminating" - they'll accept anything of roughly the right size and smell. In the end, the engineers came up with little wheeled robots shaped like matchboxes and perfumed with eau de roach. They were programmed to have the same likes and dislikes as roaches - that is, to prefer crowds and darkness...
...Open University's Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute in Milton Keynes, England, Pillinger and his colleague Geraint Morgan have built upon research they originally did for the Beagle project in order to create a diagnostic tool with the potential to save countless lives. Their device - about the size of a microwave oven - may not look like much, but it detects tuberculosis (TB), the highly infectious, hard-to-diagnose disease that often infects the lungs and kills more than 1.5 million people worldwide each year...
...clinical tool took some ingenuity. Starting in the 1990s, Pillinger, Morgan and other researchers from the institute have worked to shrink a sophisticated piece of lab equipment used to identify and analyze matter: a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS). Their challenge was to make the device - sometimes the size of a small car - light enough and sturdy enough to be sent into space. Pillinger always planned to look for terrestrial applications of the mini GCMS once their space research was done, and at Wellcome's request, Morgan began in 2005 to design a version that could detect TB. The device...
...Though it is small (pop. 16 million), its GDP is $145 billion, one of Latin America's highest per capita, and is expected to grow more than 5% this year with little inflation (though recent labor and student protests indicate Chileans want a larger slice of that wealth). Its size precludes large-scale manufacturing, so it heavily promotes value-added industries for its myriad commodities, like copper and timber. Compañía Sud Americana de Vapores, Latin America's largest maritime-transport concern, reflects how Chile has turned itself from a hemispheric outpost into a bridge to the Pacific Basin...
Rather than looking for a stellar wobble, Charbonneau and others are watching red dwarfs for signs of their light subtly dimming as an orbiting planet passes in front of them--a sort of mini-eclipse known as a transit. "If an Earth-size planet in an Earthlike orbit passes in front of a star like the sun," he says, "it dims the star by 1 part in 10,000 or even less." Since a habitable planet around an M-dwarf is much closer--about 7 million miles (11 million km) away--the transit lasts significantly longer. And since the star...