Word: x-rayed
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...strangely absent. His skin is as baby-smooth in "The Blue Lotus" (set in 1930s Shanghai) as it is in his final adventure, "Tintin and The Picaros" (set in 1970s Latin America). Forty years without a single zit or wrinkle! That's as amazing an ability as Superman's X-ray vision...
...conference in Naples, Watson saw a vague, ghostly image of a DNA molecule rendered by X-ray crystallography. DNA, he had heard, might be the stuff genes are made of. "A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind," he later wrote. "It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who had never risked a thought...
Fatefully, such amity did not prevail at a laboratory over at King's College, London, where a woman named Rosalind Franklin was creating the world's best X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA. Maurice Wilkins, a colleague who was also working on DNA, disliked the precociously feminist Franklin, and the feeling was mutual. By Watson's account, this estrangement led Wilkins to show Watson one of Franklin's best pictures yet, which hadn't been published. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open," Watson recalled. The sneak preview "gave several of the vital helical parameters...
...military, however, hasn't given up trying to make the laser into a weapon. Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars program called for orbiting X-ray lasers to zap enemy missiles, and the Army is still experimenting with battlefield lasers. While they won't slice enemy soldiers in half, they can temporarily blind troops...
...British chemist Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photographs of DNA show that the molecule has a helical structure...