Word: titanium
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...Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum has hit Bilbao with the force of an architectural meteorite. No question that it's there. You are walking through the pleasantly undistinguished, mainly 19th century streets of its quarter; you turn a corner, and--pow!--an apparition appears in glass and half-shiny silver (titanium, actually), massively undulating, something that seems at first glance to have been dropped from another cultural world between the gray townscape and the green hills that rise behind it. Not since Joern Utzon's 1973 design for the Sydney Opera House has a building so dramatically imposed itself...
...rises--or rather, soars: a large ceremonial space with catwalks and walkways, branching off into galleries at its several levels. In it, the three surface types of the museum's construction can be taken in: white Sheetrock, plate glass hung on steel members with exaggerated joints and flanges, and titanium skin. (The titanium sounds like an extravagance, but wasn't. Gehry was able to lock up enough of it to cover the museum when the Russians, in 1993, started dumping their stocks of the normally ultraexpensive metal on the market.) Their forms swelling and deflating in a strongly rhythmical...
...watch is, to all appearances, an ordinary timepiece. But tucked into a small cylinder that blends with its gray titanium casing is a 2-ft. antenna. To activate the beacon, you unscrew the cap and unreel the antenna. Approved for use in Europe and Asia (and, pending FCC approval, in the U.S.), the $5,000 Swiss watch also keeps pretty good time...
...pilot a B-52, the one picked to fly the Air Force Secretary around on her visit to the base. Known as BUFF, for Big Ugly Flying Fellow (or a more colorful variant), the B-52 is the largest bomber in the Air Force, 488,000 lbs. of titanium, aluminum and steel, rigged with eight Pratt & Whitney engines and a 35-ton payload...
Some 3.2 million school-age children--and growing numbers of adults--have their crooked teeth wired to grow straight. Orthodontists now use a nickel-titanium alloy, developed for the space program, to hold braces together. The new wire is more flexible and longer lasting than earlier materials, which means fewer office visits for adjustment and tightening...