soil nailing n.— «He estimated that roughly two-thirds of the steep walls required extra attention to shore them up, using an engineering technique called soil nailing.» —“Museum opening delayed to 2010″ by Tracie...
throw n. the distance that a key or button can be pressed, as on a computer keyboard. Etymological Note: Directly related to “throw” in mechanical engineering, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action or motion of a...
vom n.— «The stage at Le Rêve is a 27-foot-deep circular pool of water. At three points on its circumference—the 12 o’clock, 4 o’clock, and 8 o’clock positions—are vomitory lifts (not vomitory as in “a place where you puke”...
bio-ink n.— «A printer that generates a scaffold onto which new bone can grow has been developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Bone Tissue Engineering Center (BTEC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.…Alongside fibrin, the...
pain point n.— «At some point, putting things into a subset of the machine becomes too painful to do with conventional technologies.…What frequency or pinout you have to change at is hard to tell; people push technology until it...
dirt-hustle v.— «He used to press up his own CDs and hand them out for free, just to get a buzz going. The practice of “dirt-hustlin,” as it’s called, is a time-honored tradition in the Bay Area music industry. With no major...