Working with 36 people on a sophisticated cookbook, he made his own ketchup out of mushrooms, and he ground meat using a special technique and different cuts of beef to enhance the juiciness of a burger that takes 30 hours to cook.

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In February this year Mark Swain of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and his colleagues reported that they had developed a new technique for calibrating data arriving at ordinary ground-based telescopes, allowing them to identify the components of an extrasolar atmosphere.

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The technique allows very precise measurements to be made of any ground displacement that takes place between the image acquisitions.

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The technique they developed, called hydraulic fracking, involves drilling 5, 000-9, 000 feet below ground (in the Marcellus shale), and then moving horizontally into the layers of shale rock where the hydrocarbons lie.

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