Word: atomic
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...Pakistan's role in Iran's nuclear development has been more than passive spectator, however; Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb, admitted five years ago that he passed nuclear secrets to Tehran and Libya. The disclosures stung Islamabad and forced then President Pervez Musharraf to act against Khan, before issuing a pardon and confining the proliferator, who is still hailed as a national hero in Pakistan, to house arrest. (See pictures of Pakistan's vulnerable North-West Frontier Province...
...astronomer royal. Herschel went on to pioneer the idea of a vast and unimaginably old universe. After looking through Herschel's telescope, Byron wrote, "It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated...
...very cool one (see: Star Trek). For scientists, it's just very, very complex, so much so that at this point, teleportation is not a matter of moving matter but one of transporting information. Already, physicists have been able to exchange information between light particles - or photons - or between atoms, so long as they were right next to each other. The current experiment marks the first in which information has traveled a significant distance - 1 m, or a little more than 3 ft. - between two isolated atoms. It's also the first time the powers of a photon, which...
Using a pair of ions, or charged particles, group leader Christopher Monroe and his team place each in a vacuum and keep them in position with electric fields. An ultra-fast laser pulse triggers the atoms to emit photons simultaneously. If the photons interact in just the right way, their parent atoms enter a quantum state known as entanglement, in which atom B adopts the properties of atom A even though they're in separate chambers a meter apart. When A is measured, the information that had been previously encoded on it disappears in accordance with the quirky rules...
Without the unerring measurement provided by atomic clocks, we couldn't have landed a rover on Mars, the Internet wouldn't be able to process data superfast and GPS navigation would be a fantasy. These clocks are so precise that they literally redefined time: Once tied to the mean solar day, the official measure of a second was changed in 1967 to refer to the duration of more than nine billion periods of radiation between two levels of the cesium 133 atom...