1. Geoff Marcy, finder of planets around other suns, but a human like the rest of us.
"With the next two years they found 10 more planets, generating headlines but also bruising controversy, as if Dr. Marcy had never gotten out of that shower. Some prominent astronomers argued that the Marcy-Butler team was confusing starspots or double stars for planets. The systems they were discovering were too unlike our solar system to be taken seriously. 'For three or four years, nobody believed us,' Dr. Marcy said. At one point he was invited to give a talk at a prominent meeting in Houston, home of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. But when he got there he was ushered into a small room where half a dozen scientists interrogated him. 'It sent me into a tailspin,' Dr. Marcy said. 'I was back to feeling stupid.'"
"Parrot Bebop Drone delivers the best performances without sacrificing battery life: 8x times more powerful than Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 onboard computer, Bebop Drone navigation computer features a Parrot P7 dual-core CPU, quad-core GPU and 8 GB of Flash Memory. All are fixed on a magnesium shelf that acts as electromagnetics shielding and as a radiator. Runs on Linux with SDK available for Developers."
3. Laser cleaning an Egyptian monument in Central Park.
"It’s at the atomic level that things get interesting. 'What happens is that layer absorbs the laser light,' he says. 'The atoms absorb the energy and they expand rapidly from the accumulation of energy, and by expanding so fast, they get blasted apart and they eject off the surface.' Imagine a beach ball inflating at the speed of an airbag, says Dajnowski. In other words, explosive. In the swirling atomic aftermath, dirt is obliterated leaving only Egyptian artwork in its place."
4. Prohibition pushed good scientists out of oenology, in effect jumpstarting food technology.
"As Prohibition was coming on, I went into other work. I started a course in the preservation of fruits for making various nonfermented products. I studied also the production of canned fruit. That's how the food technology work was started... Out of that has come the large building at Davis for the study of unfermented food products fruit and vegetable products like preservation by freezing and canning... There was some work at the University of Oregon. That is, at the College of Agriculture in Corvallis. When Prohibition went into effect, they built up their research on various products like loganberry juice canning and so forth. Their work and ours were more or less simultaneous."
"The team soon assembled for an all-day ideation session at Taco Bell headquarters, where 30 different product concepts were considered, Perdue says, including new forms of burritos, nachos, and taquitos. But one idea, from Doritos-maker Frito-Lay, stuck out: a Doritos-based taco shell pocketed with Taco Bell ingredients. 'It was basically an image [of this taco] on a piece of paper, with a written description. I don't know what technology they use. We didn't even taste it; it was just more of, 'Hey, this is what it could look like,' Perdue says. 'It was like, 'Holy crap!' Nobody had ever done this before: turning a Dorito into a taco shell. It was just mind-blowing at the idea stage.' Steve Gomez, Taco Bell's food innovation expert, recalls seeing the first mock-up. 'Every day I see a lot of concepts--sketches on paper, written words about products--and my job is to turn those products into reality,' he says. 'But in all my years as a product developer, I've never seen a concept like this. The product didn't even exist yet, and already people knew this idea was going to be huge.'"
Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip:
betide means happen, NOT betoken or presage, and is in modern usage only 3rd person sing. pres. subj.: woe betide you.
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Basically an Image [of This Taco] on a Piece of Paper
