Word: x-rays
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...lacrosse player's build, handsome, funny, gregarious and kind. He loved (and still does, so keep reading) sailing but also, unlike many of his ilk, loved but one wife and one set of great kids. He had smoked, and back pain brought him to the doctor. The chest x-ray showed the oh-my-God shadow, the scans showed it everywhere. The next move is usually hospice - this one is just about impossible to stop, especially when this advanced...
Maybe you remember a guy named Armpit from Sachar's last book, Holes? Big, muscular, convicted of assault? You get to know him a lot better in Small Steps. He's out of juvie and trying to go straight as a landscaper-slash-high-school student. Unfortunately his buddy X-Ray (another Holes alum) gets him back into trouble over a ticket-scalping scheme. And when a chance meeting gets Armpit mixed up with a teen pop superstar (the tickets were for her concert), things get complicated. It's a fairy-tale setup, but Sachar gives his characters real emotions...
...Among the projects on the block to pay for the $3 billion cut is the NuSTAR satellite, which would have used x-ray detection to find black holes, galactic nuclei and supernovae; the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which, as its name suggests, would hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars; and a welter of small craft known as the Explorers-discount ships designed mostly by university groups and launched in cooperation with NASA. Narrowly focused and cheap to fly, they have in the past paid big scientific dividends on very little investment...
...hackers, never mind determined terrorists. Worse still, small improvements are often oversold as giant steps forward, lowering the guard of average citizens as they carry on their daily routine with an unwarranted sense of confidence. For instance, while the flying public is busy shedding shoes and bags at X-ray check-in points, the tons of air freight being loaded into the belly of most commercial airliners continues to fly the American skies virtually uninspected...
...pictures from an X-Ray studio...