Tag: technology

Breath analyzers

I’ve never really been sure why New Year’s Eve is considered a good time to have a wild party. Are we celebrating the fact that 1996 is finally over (was it really that bad a year?) or trying not to think about what 1997 will hold? Whatever, December 31 is a day known for parties, and hence …

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Computer viruses

There’s a virus going around. In fact there’s more than one. But don’t worry; these viruses don’t infect people–they infect computers. Just a couple of weeks ago there was a flurry of excitement surrounding one such virus, a flurry that may be repeated in a few more days. This virus, called Hare, activates itself on …

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Car sound

One of my earliest childhood memories is of sitting in the front seat of my father’s Studebaker, listening to the Beatles. Since those early days in Lubbock, Texas, I’ve listened to a great deal more music in many more cars. In the Studebaker, and in the ’63 Plymouth that followed it, if you wanted to …

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Olympic technology 1996

At a speed-skating meet in Norway in the 1960s, Canadian Paul Enoch smashed a world record by three seconds. He did it wearing a pair of his wife’s skintight nylon stockings–in an age when most skaters still wore flapping woolen garments. A year later, the first skin-tight nylon racing suit was released on the market. …

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Synchrotrons

  Saskatchewan could soon be home to Canada’s first synchrotron, and if your first reaction is, “So what?” then, dear reader, you must read on. Physicists are a lot like small boys: they like to see what makes things tick by smashing them up. In the case of small boys, those things may be clocks …

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Nanotechnology 1996

One of the first science-fiction movies I can remember seeing was Fantastic Voyage, the tale of a group of scientists in a submarine who were shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured man. Their mission: to vaporize a life-threatening but inaccessible blood clot in his brain. Among other things, the …

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ENIAC

Fifty years ago this month, a machine in the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering solved in 20 seconds an equation that would have required a human mathematician using a desk calculator 40 hours. The feat astounded the world, and launched the age of computers. The machine was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and …

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The science of tires

It happens to all of us sooner or later. We’re in a hurry, we head off in our car–and discover we have a flat tire. This happened to me twice in December, and got me thinking about tires, which is unusual, because usually we don’t think much about tires at all. After all, they’re pretty …

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Food preservation

As a kid, I found the kitchen a rather mysterious place, filled with exotic implements like the bizarre “colander,” the ominous “deep-fat fryers,” and the straight-out-of-the-mad-scientist’s-laboratory “pressure cooker,” as well as bizarre ingredients like “bouillon,” “baker’s chocolate” (real chocolate’s evil twin), “paprika,” “cloves,” and something called “pectin.” Both the pressure cooker and pectin mostly came …

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Future phones

When I was a kid (and though young whippersnappers may beg to differ, I’m not all that old now) pretty well all telephones were black and had rotary dials: no digital readouts, no push-buttons, no “recent callers” buttons or “redial” buttons or “recall” buttons or any of the other buttons that my current phone boasts. …

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Radar

With the end of the Cold War, a lot of previously classified military technology is making its way into civilian hands. Spy satellites whose very existence was top secret, for instance, are now being used to survey crops. This post-war transfer of technology from military to civilian use is not new: it happened after the …

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Special effects

  Motion pictures have always been largely illusion: artificial realities convincingly created by assorted designers, craftspeople, cinematographers and actors. But these days, what you see on screen is less “real” than ever. Today special effects rule the movies, thanks primarily to computers. That’s not to say there were no special effects before computers came along. …

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