Word: sonically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bats v. Moths. Bats, owls and porpoises all navigate or find their prey by sonic devices that are much more delicate and effective than anything man can build. More delicate still is the microscopic ear of a kind of moth that is often a prey of bats. It is tuned to the ultrasonic squeaks that bats send out, so the moth can take evasive action if a bat comes close. Biologists have already used this marvelous instrument. When electrodes are attached to its nerve, it makes the best known microphone for listening to bats...
...near-pinpoint hit of a nuclear weapon. Their guidance systems would know exactly where they were, so they could be programed to strike in any desired direction. If an all-out war started, the high-flying minefields should be able to rise from the sea, triggered by electrical or sonic code signals, and carry their megaton warheads to far parts of the earth...
...nothing more than the point at which the noise is turned on. Air is a fluid, and, above the speed of sound (about 760 m.p.h.), it reacts much like the surface of a lake when a speedboat rips across it: waves go out and roll toward land. The sonic boom occurs when the shock wave from a jet hits the nearby ground. It follows the plane wherever it goes, and the pressure may make a sound equal to ten thunderclaps...
...sonic boom was never so explosive as it was last August, when a U.S.A.F. fighter pilot demonstrated his Lockheed F-104 Starfighter to Canadian officials at Ottawa's Uplands Airport. It was a trial run. Next day the pilot was to put on a show at the dedication of the airport's new terminal building, a great, shiny green-glass cavern with an aluminum and stainless-steel structure. Answering an official's request to see him buzz the field, the pilot swung the Starfighter out in an arc, then leveled and came in low and flat. Like...
...Force public relations men, the sonic boom is a splitting headache, without apparent remedy. "We must learn to live with it," said one recent Air Force release, "for in today's unsettled world we cannot live without it. The boom is unavoidable. It is the sound of security." Even the residents of Deerfield could agree that the point was sound-but that didn't make them like the boom much better...