Word: tweezer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...debt can lead you into ridiculous purchases: "My gym visits are now followed by eighty-dollar tennis lessons; my Dr. Bingblatz sessions are now followed by one-hundred dollar facial sessions, administered by a masked woman with a steam wand and a tweezer, who removes my blackheads one by one...I'm impressed that this service even exists. How do these leisure economy capitalists do it? How do they calculate the exact moment at which people are suddenly prepared to pay a hundred dollars for an hourlong blackhead-squeezing session...
Using an atomic force microscope and a quaint gadget called the laser tweezer, Bustamante found a way around such limits. The microscope reads the topography of molecules by trailing a fine needle over their surfaces--much as a phonograph reads the grooves of a record. Coat the needle with an appropriate chemical, however, and you convert it into a grapple for manipulating molecules. Laser tweezers, meanwhile, trap molecules and particles in a tightly focused beam of light. Move the beam and you move the object...