Word: layer
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Thanks to the nation's miraculous eco nomic boom. West Germans today are more concerned with paychecks than with princely comings and goings. But the country's economic and social transformation has failed notably to produce a unified, national Fuhrungsschicht (leadership layer) in place of the old aristocratic ruling caste. The result is a confused and confusing society in which, says Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, there is not one class of Prominenz but "a multitude of competing groups." The "pyramids of power" include the church, the military, local government and such venerable universities as Tubingen, Gottingen and Heidelberg, where...
...very long, low-frequency waves from the universe never reach terrestrial receivers because they are blocked by the earth's ionosphere, the outer layer of the atmosphere composed of ionized, or charged, molecules and free electrons. These long radio waves convey a great deal of information--about the origin of cosmic rays, magnetic fields in space, the mechanism of solar flares, and radio storms on Jupiter, for example. To record these long waves, Harvard, in cooperation with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, has built and orbited a series of small radio telescopes above the opaque ionosphere...
...with Polaroid for the amateur snapshot market. But for some special applications, its lack of negatives or complicated chemical developers is a distinct asset. All that is necessary is to spray the film's photoconductive plastic top with an easily generated positive charge of static electricity. The bottom layer of the film carries an equal, but opposite, negative charge. Those two electric charges, although powerfully attracted to each other, are kept apart by the thin plastic film...
...microscopic holes into synthetics to enable them to "breathe." Both firms shy away from calling the synthetics plastics; Du Pont is calling its product a "poromeric material" (meaning full of microscopic holes) until it can decide on a trademark name. The shoe material is made in two or three layers: outside is a polyvinyl chloride film that can be treated to look like any leather, from cordovan to suede; next is either a layer of nylon or orlon (Du Pont) or one of polyurethane foam (Arnav); the shoe's inside layer is one of the standard lining materials...
With the help of the sea nymph Calypso, far-wandering Odysseus prepared to sail for home across the wine-dark sea. But when he had finished his boat, why did he cover the bilge with a layer of brushwood? Generations of scholars have sweated over the passage without producing a satisfactory answer. One theory holds that brush is only a mistranslation of ballast; some classicists argue that Odysseus was merely making a bed. A few despairing translators have ignored the brush entirely. Not until recently, when archaeologists learned to skindive. was the puzzling passage explained...