Word: help
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1980
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...official death toll stood at nearly 3,000-a fraction, it was feared, of the actual total. More frightening still was the realization that a dread dimension of human failure had been added to an accident of nature: many who died of shock and exposure might have lived had help reached them more quickly...
Some of the international assistance was stalled by Italy's infamous bureaucracy. Two Red Cross planes loaded with relief supplies were reportedly forced to wait 24 hours for clearance to enter the country. Local help encountered comparable problems. Some of the first rescue teams arrived little better equipped than the people they were sent to help. Eventually, shortages in the quake zone gave rise to a ghoulish black-market trade in everything from coffins to mineral water. The result was widespread bitterness, as Pertini discovered on Tuesday during an inspection tour of the stricken region. "How dare you stroll...
...hospital hundreds of miles away. Fighting crime? The Advanced Robotics Corp. is advertising a mechanical sentinel that can speed to the site of any breakin, sternly ask an intruder, "What are you doing here?" and temporarily blind him with its spotlight while its siren calls for help...
...jobs that a sufficiently muscular and adroit five-year-old could do admirably. At Pratt & Whitney's automated casting factory in Middletown, Conn., ten of Unimation's Unimate 2000s are building ceramic molds for the manufacture of engine turbine blades. The company expects the new molds to help increase production from 50,000 to 90,000 blades a year. No less important, the robot-made molds are so much more uniform that their blades last twice as long as blades molded by humans...
...starts killing the astronauts who interfere with its plans. In a 1976 MGM effort titled Demon Seed, a presumptuous robot goes even further and fulfills the sinful ambition of making Julie Christie pregnant. But then came Star Wars, in which the cutely diminutive Artoo Deetoo and See Threepio help to rescue the imprisoned Princess Leia. Thus Hollywood found ways to reduce Frankenstein's heirs to figures of camp, reproducible in plastic. Inside their wired metal brains, the robots nourish greater ambitions than that...