To get around this, researchers piped water through sealed tubes just 50 microns (millionths of a metre) in diameter, between individual layers.

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If the collecting area is in pieces, the effective diameter (the distance between the two most widely spaced pieces) can be several thousand kilometres.

ECONOMIST: Radio telescopes

These pores are between 100 and 200 nanometres in diameter perfect for trapping the rods and thus marking the tumour.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

The Diameter protocol enables functions such as billing, subscriber management, and interoperability between core IP systems and carriers.

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Mr. Scharf makes vivid the mind-boggling nature of the universe by noting, for instance, that the space between a star like the sun and its nearest neighbor is 30 million times the diameter of the sun itself and that there are 10 billion stars in the universe for every human being who has ever walked the Earth.

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Even if experimenters bounce the beams to and fro to increase the effective length of an interferometer's arms to more than 100 kilometres, the expected difference in length between the two beams' paths still amounts to less than a hundred-millionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

ECONOMIST: Fundamental physics