Word: transistor
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Shockley--who won a Nobel prize for inventing the transistor in 1956--has studied the hereditability of intelligence off and on since 1964. The most controversial of his many theories on the subject is a belief that nature has "color-coded" the human race: the darker someone's skin, says Shockley, the lower his intelligence is likely to be. "Every percentage point of black blood a person has in him lowers his I.Q. one point," he maintains...
...search quickly led to the same technology that produced that tiny workhorse of modern electronics, the transistor, which owes its success to a class of materials called semiconductors. These are crystalline substances that will readily conduct an electric current only if they are contaminated -or, in technical jargon, "doped" -with other substances that give them either a surplus or deficit of electrons. Moreover, if two dissimilar semiconductors are joined together-one with a shortage of negatively charged electrons (known as a P-type because it has a positive charge), the other with an electron abundance (or N-type because...
...Often only 1/32 of an inch wide, they have advantages that many of the older optical displays lacked: a longer lifetime (up to 100 years in the opinion of some scientists), very low power consumption (much less than that needed even by a tiny flashlight bulb) and, like the transistor, a high resistance to shock and other abusive treatment. Most important of all, they can be easily assembled into miniature electronic displays that form numbers in a flash...
...instance. At a banquet in Shanghai, he studied the menu to make sure that changes he had ordered had been made. Chou may, in fact, have been a little too attentive to detail. After American reporters discovered that the well-dressed, cheerful Chinese milling about the Ming tombs with transistor radios had been planted there to impress the visitors, he told Nixon by way of apology: "We don't claim to be perfect. We shouldn't have done...
...school has its own miniature transistor factory. In small, whitewashed rooms, the kids hunch over the tiny things, putting them together in silence, with determination. A visitor asks a 15-year-old girl what she wants to be when she graduates. "I wish to be a successor to the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat," she says. She carries an open copy of Mao's little red book. Yes, yes, says the questioner, but how does she want to do that? "I want to do what is beneficial to the people," the girl responds...