SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Now We Know Where We Stand, and It's About Time
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
America has seen its last Lost Generation. Thanks to an invisible armada of incessantly broadcasting satellites, collectively called the Global Positioning System, and to the explosive proliferation of GPS receivers in gadgets from dashboard map units to cellphones to dog collars, even the cartographically clueless are now good to go.
The same technology that allows the military to drop precision-targeted bombs on terrorists has become a $30 billion worldwide market, spawning devices that lead hikers through the trackless wild, recover itinerant tykes with GPS units sewn into their backpacks, let golfers see the distance to the next hole, stamp the location on digital photos and show the nearest pizza joint on a PDA screen.
Very soon it may be possible to find your lost keys as receivers shrink to the size of a dime and smaller. It has all happened deliriously fast. Modern GPS has been fully operational only since 1995.
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