Word: specking
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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...
...machines presents special challenges to scientists. Not only do they risk inhaling their tools or scattering them with a sneeze, but they also have to cope with a new set of physical laws. The problem of friction, for instance, looms ever larger as parts get smaller. The tiniest dust speck can seem like a boulder. Rotating a hair-width dynamo through air molecules, says AT&T's Gabriel, "is like trying to spin gears in molasses...
...main harbor of the Dutch West Indian island of St. Eustatius. Legitimizing the rebels with this ritual act was particularly galling because the Caribbean port was used, despite repeated British protests, to supply American troops with gunpowder and shot. St. Eustatius was Holland's "Golden Rock," a neutral speck devoted entirely to commerce...
...pushing penalties to unheard of lengths. Zero tolerance, as the two-month-old policy is called, directs the Coast Guard, Customs Service and other arms of the Federal Government to enforce existing laws to the utmost degree. That means seizing vehicles, boats and planes if just a speck of any controlled substance is found on board. By last week the Coast Guard and Customs had grabbed some 1,700 conveyances, including the $2.5 million yacht Ark Royal and the good ship Monkey Business, famed as the holiday vessel of Gary Hart and Donna Rice. Those two ships were also returned...
Alas, another irony: while gentrifiers as they first venture into an old neighborhood may be democratically inspired -- The diversity! The grit! -- they attract mobs of merely stylish followers who diminish the diversity and sweep away every last speck of grit. The old-line residents and the anchors of their communities -- the hardware stores, the cobblers, the taverns -- are driven out by suddenly high rents. Gentrification is not fun for everyone. Walter Reinhaus, a white graduate student, is renovating a Charles Addamsesque mansion in the middle of an all-black Chicago neighborhood. "With gentrification," he says, "it's easy...