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Fifty years ago this week, a chemist in what is now Silicon Valley published a paper that set the groundwork for the digital revolution.

You may never have heard of Moore's law, but it has a lot do with why you will pay about the same price for your next computer, smartphone or tablet, even though it will be faster and have better screen resolution than the last one.

Most of us are used to the cycle of technology. I visited a Best Buy in San Francisco to find shelves stacked with the latest digital gear, and asked a few customers about what they expect from their new devices — whether it's a laptop, a smart phone or tablet.

"Thinner, lighter, faster," says Zeplin Lui.

"I want better resolution," Josie Meng tells me.

Ivo Mijak wants "higher processing speed."

Yet, the same group of customers did not know why their new gadgets would be faster, lighter, and have better screen resolution. When I asked them if they'd ever heard of Moore's law, they looked perplexed.

Mijak took a guess. "Diminishing returns ...?"

Wrong. It's actually the opposite. What became known as Moore's law was initially laid out in a paper by Gordon Moore. He was one of the founders of the giant computer chip maker, Intel, and of Fairchild Semiconductor, where the first commercial silicon chips were made.

Moore, who comes off as the humble, low-key boy from Pescadero, Calif., that he is, says he had an observation back in 1965 about the way each generation of silicon chips had more transistors than the last.

"It had kind of doubled every year — two, four, eight, 16, 32," says Moore, looking back. "So I said, 'Ok it's gonna double every year for 10 years — go from 60 components to 60,000 components on a chip.' "

Moore published his prediction in Electronics Magazine. It was as much about science as it was about the economics of the growing electronics industry.

"I wanted to get across the idea that this is the way we're going to make cheap electronics. The nature of the whole industry is the more stuff you can put on a chip, the cheaper it is per unit of stuff," Moore says.

One way to think about what Moore meant is to refer to the 1989 film Field of Dreams. The main character Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) hears a voice that tells him, "If you build it, he will come." The voice in the film is referring to building a baseball field that will attract deceased baseball stars.

But, for Moore, the "he" that will come was all the inventors who will find ways to use the growing power of silicon chips and the consumers who will buy the products.

"That's what he was saying," says David C. Brock, who has just released a biography of Gordon Moore. "He was making the case that, if the chip makers invested in the chemical printing and made microchips that embodied cheaper electronics, that those chips would be met with these ballooning markets as chips suffused every area of society."

Over the years, Moore revised his prediction a bit — instead of doubling every year, the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years. And it takes more money to keep it going.

Last year, Intel spent $11 billion on research and development and another $10 billion to update the chip factories.

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Mark Bohr has been at the company for 37 years and is a leading scientist on the team that keeps the process going. "I'm afraid Moore's law is in a sense a relentless boss," he says. "We have to continually learn how to make transistors smaller to achieve these benefits — improved performance, lower power and lower cost per transistor."

And the market continues to find new uses for the power and efficiency of those chips. At the center of an exhibition on the history of computing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., is a big display explaining and commemorating Moore's law.

"This whole museum is about miniaturization and Moore's law. It really is," says Dag Spicer, the senior curator. Spicer told me to look at a really recent computer and it's actually hard to see. "We're looking at a display of probably the smallest computer in the world right now," he says.

And when he says small — he really means it.

The display shows a thimble with a bunch of little computers in it. Each one is about the size of a grain of rice.

"The vision they're trying to achieve is: What would happen if we had computers that were so cheap and so small that we could just put them anywhere we wanted to gain information?" Spicer explains. "So this could be in a forest or in a lake or in the human body, in a spacecraft."

The point is you keep getting smaller and inventors and entrepreneurs will find uses — and so it has been for the past 50 years. The question is, how much longer can this go on?

"I think we're running out of gas here with Moore's Law," Spicer says. "Because no physical process can continue doubling every year forever — it's physically impossible."

Scientists at Intel think they can keep it going another 10 years. Other experts are less optimistic.

You may be wondering exactly how many transistors are on the latest chips. Chips vary, but let's start with the one inside the latest iPhone. I put that question to some customers at the San Francisco Best Buy.

Matteo Capratta guessed 400. Josie Meng thought it might be 100. Daniel Sayre came closest with a guess of 10,000. Jordon Bhulma on the Best Buy sales staff, says, "They don't pay me enough" to know.

In fact, the chip on your iPhone that's the size of your thumb holds 2 billion transistors. And that isn't the most powerful chip — there are chips with 8 billion transistors.

So, it does make you wonder how much longer this can last. And if it stops — if our computers no longer get faster and cheaper with each upgrade — will the digital revolution continue?

Maybe it will — maybe we will just find new ways to take the technology we have, and innovate.

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It's been 20 years since a bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.

As Oklahoma City prepares to look back on the bombing, one thing is clear — downtown is a far different and much better place than it was in 1995. And it's hard to deny the role the bombing played in the area's resurgence.

Even on a weekday, visitors line up in downtown Oklahoma City to take a tour of the area.

Chad Huntington ferries tourists up and down a scenic canal as a water taxi driver. He winds through rehabbed, old brick buildings in an area called Bricktown that's now a cultural and gastronomical center of downtown. In 1995, Huntington worked at a car dealership five blocks from where the bomb went off.

"You'd rather it never have happened at all, but I think that it's good that so many positives came out of it," he says.

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Today, cranes dot the horizon as private development fuels a boom in construction. Huntington has experienced downtown Oklahoma City at its worst and can see the silver lining in the tragedy — all this new construction has made the place a destination.

"We let downtown slip away to the point where it was — where it didn't matter, where downtown was inconsequential in the overall picture of the city," Huntington says. "I think that the bombing made a lot of people realize, you know, downtown is important."

And you can see it almost every night, as city-goers mill around the redeveloped area's restaurants and shops, as well as the Oklahoma City Thunder arena. But 20 years ago, before the bombing, downtown was a dead zone. There was no professional basketball team, and Bricktown was in decay.

"When I first moved to Oklahoma City, if people wanted to have lunch, they drove out of downtown to go and have lunch," says Russell Claus, who served as Oklahoma City's planning director from just after the bombing until he returned to Australia this year.

"At that point in time ... there was no expectation that anything was going to happen. There was no willingness to make things happen," Claus adds. "A lot of that area that was impacted was owned by speculative property owners. They had no intent to do anything in the short term. So once you had the bombing, it sort of kicked people into a different thought process."

Before the bombing, residents had already voted to approve several new downtown projects, and the bombing sharpened the desire to improve the area. More than $50 million in federal grants flowed in, and a federal loan program continues today.

Oklahoma City's downtown YMCA now has a new campus not far from where it once was — across the street from the Murrah building. The YMCA facility was already outdated when the bomb went off. President Mike Grady had been looking to sell just before the bombing damaged the structure, but the prospects weren't good.

"Certainly the bombing served as an unexpected impetus ... it forced us to have some conversations much more quickly than we were prepared to have them," Grady says. "It forced our hand, if you will."

The bombing forced a lot of change. Even today, the legacy of what happened is still very much a part of downtown Oklahoma City, 20 years later.

Oklahoma City

Welcome back Bouvier's red colobus monkey. It's been awhile.

The African primate hasn't been seen since the 1970s and was assumed to have become extinct.

But, in a statement released late last week, the Wildlife Conservation Society says two primatologists working in the forests of the Republic of Congo were successful in a quest begun in February to confirm reports that Bouvier's is still out there. They returned with a first-ever snapshot of a mother and infant.

"Our photos are the world's first and confirm that the species is not extinct," Lieven Devreese, one of the field researchers, was quoted in the WCS statement as saying.

Live Science says: "There are several species of red colobus monkey. Until now, scientists only knew of the Bouvier's red species from a few museum specimens collected more than 100 years ago."

According to WCS: "The small primate lives in groups in swampy forests along the Congo River, in the Republic of the Congo. Hunting and logging decimated its population, leading some scientists to suggest the monkey was extinct."

The society notes that in recent surveys (in 2007 and 2014), audio recordings thought to be Bouvier's red colobus were made in Ntokou-Pikounda National Park, "but they were very rarely encountered and no photograph had been taken.

"The new sighting and photograph confirm the presence of this threatened primate in Northern Congo. However, red colobus monkeys ... typically do not flee from humans but look down at them from the trees, an unfortunate behavioral characteristic that has led to them becoming very rare wherever hunters are active," the statement says.

As NPR reported in 2012, another monkey, new to science but known as the lesula to locals was confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Democratic Republic of Congo

The Shroud of Turin, an artifact that many people believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, goes back on public display for the first time in five years in the Italian city that bears its name.

The shroud can be seen by the public until June 24 at the cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin. Anyone who wants to view it can do so for free, but must first sign-up online. Already a million people have done so, according to the BBC.

One visitor who no doubt did not have to go online for a chance to see the relic is Pope Francis. The pontiff is scheduled to view the shroud during a June 21-22 visit to Turin.

The 14 x 3.5-foot cloth, allegedly discovered in Turkey during one of the Crusades, made its first documented appearance in 1355 in a chapel in Lirey near Troyes, France. By the late 16th century, it had made its way to Turin.

Ever since, though, it has been the subject of an intense dispute over its authenticity.

The first serious scientific analysis, done in the 1970s, determined that the image on the cloth, which appears to be of a bearded man with crucifixion-like wounds, was not made with any artificial pigments.

However, in 1988, a radiocarbon dating of a sliver of the shroud came back with a date of origin of between 1260 and 1390, more than 1,000 years after Jesus is believed to have been crucified – a result that led scholars to conclude it is a hoax.

Since then, various teams of researchers have made conflicting claims – many supporting the hoax theory, others attempting to debunk the debunkers.

In 2009, NPR's Mark Memmott wrote that a researcher in the Vatican's secret archives claimed "that the fragments of words written in Greek, Hebrew and Latin suggest the shroud was placed over 'Jesus of Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth.'"

By contrast, last year a researcher concluded that none of the early descriptions of the shroud predate 1355 and that its purpose "is likely to have been as a prop in a kind of medieval, theatrical ceremony that took place at Easter."

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