Word: wafer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life, mixed now with my memories of school and home and church: my classmate Peggy, on the morning after one of Frank Hague's victorious elections, offering me a glance at a large white mint wafer on which was written in green sugar script, "From Uncle Frank." "Uncle" Frank! What glory! Of course she was no more Hague's niece than I was, but her father belonged to the inner political circle and mine...
...manner of Communion reflects the new theology as well. The Host-traditionally, in the U.S., a small white paper-thin wafer-is now supposed to be more breadlike, so that it can be broken and shared by priests and people in a more vivid re-enactment of the Last Supper. The wine may be drunk directly from the chalice, sipped from a spoon, taken by "induction" (dipping the bread in wine), or even sipped through silver straws...
Brancusi had found his own style. From then on, he began those drastic reductions of natural shapes that left the human head an egglike form on which the features are barely traced, that found in a delicate wafer of blue, mottled marble the poetic essence of fish, that outlined in metal and stone the soaring flight of a bird...
...several years, Bell scientists have been experimenting with thin wafers of crystalline materials known as orthoferrites, which are compounds of iron oxides and such rare-earth minerals as ytterbium, thulium and samarium-terbium. They found that when a strong enough magnetic field is applied, orthoferrites display an extraordinary property: tiny cylinder-shaped areas, or "bubbles," of magnetism are formed in the wafer, their polarity opposite to that of the surrounding material. Often smaller in diameter than a human hair, the magnetic bubbles can be maneuvered and positioned into an almost endless variety of patterns...
Therein lies the secret of their usefulness. Because their presence or absence at specific points in the wafer can be precisely controlled and electronically detected, bubbles can be used to carry coded messages in the on-off binary language of the computer, store reams of data and perform myriad mathematical calculations. Moreover, controlling the position of the bubbles is relatively simple. One method is to send small electric currents through tiny circuits printed on the surface of the crystalline wafer; the currents generate magnetic fields that cause bubbles to form at predetermined locations in the wafer. Currents passed through different...