Like the copper cable, it would be buried in the ground--but a strand the diameter of a human hair could carry thousands of times more information than the copper wire.

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To calculate this, the team took data from patches of forest studied on the ground, in which every tree's diameter has been recorded, and combined them with images from MODIS and with data from an instrument called GLAS, which bounced laser beams off the Earth's surface between 2003 and 2009.

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The game is played with 49 glass or ceramic marbles grouped together on a 2m-diameter concrete cylinder raised 7cm off the ground and covered in sand.

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The men have been trapped in the desert copper-and-gold mine since an August 5 cave-in and are surviving on supplies funneled to them from above ground through three bore holes, each about 4 inches in diameter.

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In ground-based images, the patch of sky (just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon) is largely empty.

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Rasat has a ground resolution of about 7.5 meters, meaning it can detect objects of that diameter and larger.

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