Quiz

Most engineers will confidently tell you this five-letter word is an acronym, expanded the same way as its radio-wave ancestor from WWII. They're wrong, or at least late; the first published use, in James Ring's 1963 article "The Laser in Astronomy," about measuring the distance to the Moon, treats it as a portmanteau — the same species of word as "motel" and "smog." The backronym came later and stuck.

In 2018, the technology this word describes made front-page news in a field about as far from electronics as possible: fired downward from an aircraft over the Petén jungle in Guatemala, it digitally stripped away the tree canopy and revealed over 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures, including a seven-storey pyramid that archaeologists had walked right past. What is this word?

CLUES

• Your phone might have one; since 2020, Apple has put this sensor on the back of every iPhone Pro to improve low-light autofocus and AR.

• Elon Musk dismissed this technology as "a fool's errand," declaring that anyone relying on it was "doomed."

SPOILER ALERT: ANSWER BELOW

Answer: Lidar; a blend of "light" and "radar," (from the 1963 article) with "light detection and ranging" as the retrofitted expansion.