Word: high-tech
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Randy and Betty Hyatt may not realize it, but their two-story ranch house in Cerritos, Calif., is a high-tech battleground. The Hyatts, along with 58,000 other residents of this affluent Los Angeles bedroom community, are testing a futuristic cable-television service that is years ahead of conventional systems. Linked by 2,500 miles of hair-thin optical fiber, the network not only offers 78 channels of TV but also lets subscribers browse through the Sears catalog, check their bank accounts and select from a large menu a movie of their choice anytime they want. Perhaps most surprising...
Most phone companies want to go even further. For them, video is the last link in their ultimate high-tech fantasy: the Integrated Services Digital Network. ISDN is the phone industry's grand scheme to be the dominant conduit for every conceivable communications service -- from faxes, newspapers and video conferencing to home shopping, radio broadcasts and TV. At least seven phone companies, including Pacific Telesis, Ameritech and BellSouth, are developing the ISDN software for special fiber-optic wires that can carry such multimedia information. But the companies need state regulatory approval for telephone-rate increases to cover installation costs. Public...
ARCHAEOLOGY A high-tech search for Arabia's fabled lost city...
...refrigerant it called Freon, chlorofluorocarbons have worked their way deep into the machinery of what much of the world thinks of as modern life -- air-conditioned homes and offices, climate-controlled shopping malls, refrigerated grocery stores, squeaky-clean computer chips. Extricating the planet from the chemical burden of that high-tech life-style -- for both those who enjoy it and those who aspire to it -- will require not just technical ingenuity but extraordinary diplomatic skill...
...bobsled competitions in the last four Olympic Games were mostly free of suspense. That's because the sleds, not the athletes, were the stars. Designed with the help of wind-tunnel testing and built of advanced composite materials, the sometimes secretly developed high-tech sleds enabled some teams to achieve a consistent advantage of a few crucial hundredths of a second. "If one person has a Ferrari and another has a Fiat, the Ferrari will win," says Ermanno Gardella, secretary of the International Bobsled Federation. "But if both have Volkswagens, the best driver will...