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"It's also important to vary your stimuli. I always look for new things to shock the system. Just as you make muscles grow by shocking them, you make the mind grow by shocking it."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Diveskin | ||
| Special wetsuit that allows a diver to function at extreme depths. |
Most of the action in Starfish takes place much deeper in the ocean than a person could venture unprotected. Extremes of temperature and very high pressure would make it impossible. One of the technological adaptations is the skinsuit, a special form of wetsuit.
| She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the [dive]skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They are almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these reflexes, changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis. |
| Technovelgy from Starfish,
by Peter Watts. Published by Tor Books in 1999 Additional resources -
|
It is made out of a copolymer that can withstand temperatures of 150 degrees centigrade.
The wetsuit, which the skinsuit is modeled on, was invented in the early 1950's. The basic idea is that a small amount of water is allowed into the suit, and is then trapped against the body; the neoprene insulates this warm layer. That's why a wetsuit has to be skin tight.
Compare to skin suit from Dinosaur Beach (1971) by Keith Laumer, transkin from Parasite Planet (1931), by Stanley G. Weinbaum, kloraderm from Old Man's War (2005), by John Scalzi and skintight from War Dogs (2014), by Greg Bear.
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Diveskin-related
news articles:
- Breathable Carbon Nanotube Membrane For 'Smart Uniforms'
| Is There A Subterranean Ocean? |
| The Robotic Shopping Cart Of The Future |
| Arctic Resource Jackpot An Old Wish |
| Marie Curie's Papers Still Radioactive |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
