Word: beaming
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...computerized plays etched on the screens to ever more intimate camera angles, are only enriching the NFL's small-screen legacy. Television thrust football, more than any other pro-sports league, into the national psyche when in the 1960s NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle negotiated deals with the networks to beam his game, just once a week, into living rooms across the country on fall and winter Sunday afternoons. The sport has maintained its allure ever since: Fox and CBS each average more than 19 million viewers a week for their Sunday games, placing football in the Top 10 highest-rated...
...home. Although households, especially in the U.S. and Asia, are increasingly popular places for wireless networks, wi-fi has difficulty handling large video files. That's because its speed is not always fast enough to transport movies without glitches; you may have noticed the problem when trying to beam Bridget Jones's Diary from the computer in your living room to your TV in the corner. Several companies are working to develop another wireless technology called UWB (ultra wide band) that provides 10 times the bandwidth of wi-fi. Although UWB signals don't travel...
...cold Chicago day in the late 1990s, physicist David Grier was fiddling around in his laboratory with a cheap piece of plastic and a laser. Grier and a graduate student named Eric Dufresne were trying to build a new kind of "optical trap" - a device that splits a laser beam and uses it to capture particles of a single substance. Multiple traps, used in tandem, could let the scientists play traffic cop on a molecular level, separating a substance into component parts - removing bacteria from blood, for example. But first they had to make it work. For a year, Grier...
...Soon after that jaw-dropping development, Grier co-founded Arryx. With a product called BioRyx, Arryx has now perfected the laser-beam splitting technique into what it calls a set of "optical tweezers." But we prefer the traffic-cop analogy: picture a busy time-lapse video of crisscrossing highways, bridges and underpasses, and you get an idea of what matter looks like in a BioRyx under a microscope. BioRyx picks up different substances and tells them where to go. The technology today is used for everything from analyzing blood to separating the sperm cells in bull semen that produce bulls...
...true that they were not the first to develop an optical trap. This has been a hot area of scientific inquiry at least since 1986, when Bell Labs invented one. (Grier had done a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs.) Back then, Bell Labs scientists invented a single-beam "optical tweezers" that trapped just one substance. That was a monumental breakthrough, but scientists began to ponder traps that could catch multiple substances and move them from one point to another. Since their plastic fantastic moment gave Grier and Dufresne 16 separate optical traps, that was enough for the University of Chicago...