The method, created by Ada Lovelace for Babbage's Analytical Engine, is widely credited as the world's first computer program.

Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer.
(Acknowledgement)

These are the subjects of the four papers that he published in 1905 that are called the Annus Mirabilis papers.

These four articles contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, mass, and energy.
(Acknowledgement)

First person whose name was given to a chemical element.

Samarium (62).
(Acknowledgement)

Wollemia

In both botanical and popular literature the tree has been almost universally dubbed the Wollemi Pine, although it is not a true pine nor is it a member of the pine family.
(Acknowledgement)

Io (Jupiter)

(Acknowledgement)

San/ Bushmen

The obvious way to think about this is to think of Africa and go south. The project found modern Africans had the most diverse DNA of all racial groups in the world, confirming the idea that Africa is the birthplace of humanity, said Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania.
(Acknowledgement)

Moon rock

Lunar basalt 70017 is a moon basalt that was last collected by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on the last manned moon landing, Apollo 17. NASA still has about 80 percent of the original rock.
(Acknowledgement)

Rings of Saturn

(Acknowledgement)

Trapdoor function

An example would be saying that a large number is a product of two primes. Without knowing one of the two, it would be very difficult to find the numbers.
(Acknowledgement)

Wilhelm Röntgen

Needless to say, concerning x-rays.
(Acknowledgement)

Ebola

(Acknowledgement)

Bird-of-paradise

The majority of species, known for their plumage, are found in New Guinea and its satellites, with a few in the Maluku Islands and eastern Australia. The family has forty-one species in 14 genera.
(Acknowledgement)

Naming hurricanes after people

Originally, hurricanes were given the names of saints who were honored on the day they occurred, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The practice of using first names started when the usage of appending latitude-longitude positions to the names proved confusing. Now, hurricane names are determined by the World Meteorological Organization headquartered in Geneva.
(Acknowledgement)

Nikola Tesla

Funding for the project dried up before completion and Wardenclyffe was shut down by 1905.
(Acknowledgement)

Tailor (sartorius muscle)

There are four hypotheses as to the genesis of the name. One is that this name was chosen in reference to the cross-legged position in which tailors once sat. Another is that it refers to the location of the inferior portion of the muscle being the "inseam" or area of the inner thigh tailors commonly measure when fitting a pant. A third is that the muscle closely resembles a tailor's ribbon. Additionally, antique sewing machines required continuous cross body pedaling. This combination of lateral rotation and flexion of the hip and flexion of the knee gave tailors particularly enlarged sartorius muscles.
(Acknowledgement)

Darkness of the night sky

The scale ranges from Class 1, the darkest skies available on Earth, through Class 9, inner-city skies.
(Acknowledgement)

Edwin Hubble

This paved the way for understanding that the universe is composed of innumerable galaxies spread out in space, farther than the largest telescope could see.
(Acknowledgement)

She was an astronaut

A Maximum Absorbency Garment (MAG) is a piece of clothing NASA astronauts wear during liftoff, landing, and extra-vehicular activity (EVA) to absorb body excretions. It is worn by both male and female astronauts. It is used because astronauts cannot remove their space suits during long operations, such as spacewalks that usually last for several hours.
(Acknowledgement)

Leaded gasoline (or) Freon

Midgley died three decades before the ozone-depleting effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known. Another adverse effect of Midgley's work was the release of large quantities of lead into the atmosphere as a result of the large-scale combustion of leaded gasoline all over the world.
(Acknowledgement)

Sardines/pilchards

Every year the small, silvery fish leave the cold depths off Cape Agulhas, Africa's most southerly point, during the southern hemisphere's winter and swim north, swarming the beaches of KwaZulu-Natal.
(Acknowledgement)

Cured of HIV

(Acknowledgement)

Johannes Kepler

As of June 2014, Kepler and its follow-up observations had found 977 confirmed exoplanets in more than 400 stellar systems, along with a further 3,277 unconfirmed planet candidates. Kepler of course is best known for his laws of planetary motion
(Acknowledgement)

Nuclear fission

A natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions have occurred. This can be examined by analysis of isotope ratios.
(Acknowledgement)

Flat earth

It has been used to represent a supposedly medieval cosmology, including a flat earth bounded by a solid and opaque sky, or firmament, and also as a metaphorical illustration of either the scientific or the mystical quests for knowledge.
(Acknowledgement)

Quantum computing

He pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. With a fraction of the hardware of a laptop, a quantum computer can store as many bits of information as there are particles in the universe.
(Acknowledgement)

Aurochs

Controversy revolves around methodology and success of the program.
(Acknowledgement)

The Lasker Awards

Eighty-six Lasker laureates have received the Nobel Prize, including 32 in the last two decades.
(Acknowledgement)

Atmospheric pressure/ vacuum (Otto von Guericke)

When the rims were sealed with grease and the air was pumped out, the sphere contained a vacuum and could not be pulled apart by teams of horses. The hemispheres became popular in physics lectures as an illustration of the power of air pressure, and are still used in education. A pair of the original hemispheres are preserved in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
(Acknowledgement)

Noah (Noah's Choice)

Earth's magnetic field

Earth's magnetic field changes over time because it is generated by the motion of molten iron alloys in its outer core. In the course of the planet's history, it has flipped hundreds of times.
(Acknowledgement)

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Organised by John McCarthy and formally proposed by McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, the proposal is credited with introducing the term 'artificial intelligence'. McCarthy was very influential in the early development of AI.
(Acknowledgement)

Encephalization

Recent research indicates that whole brain size is a better measure of cognitive abilities than EQ for primates at least. Other factors, like the evolution of the recent cerebral cortex and different degrees of brain folding, which increases the surface of the cortex, is positively correlated to intelligence in humans.
(Acknowledgement)

Coltan

It is used primarily for the production of tantalum capacitors, used in many electronic devices. Many sources mention coltan's importance in the production of cell phones, but this is an over-simplification, as tantalum capacitors are used in almost every kind of electronic device. Its mining has been cited as helping to finance serious conflict, for example the Ituri conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(Acknowledgement)

The ape to man progress

Scientists have noted that early human evolution did not progress in any linear, sequential fashion nor did it move along a "road" toward any predetermined "ideal form"; they have faulted the image with being misleading in implying these things. Although the context of the original drawing indicates that it was not the authors' or illustrator's intent to imply a linear ancestor-descendant parade, as the popularity of the image grew and achieved iconic status, the name "March of Progress" became attached to it.
(Acknowledgement)

Galileo

It was the first published scientific work based on observations made through a telescope, and it contains the results of Galileo's early observations of the imperfect and mountainous Moon.
(Acknowledgement)

Gregor Mendel

He conducted his experiments on pea plants in the monastery garden. His experiments brought forth two generalizations which later became known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.
(Acknowledgement)

Yuri Gagarin

By January 1959, the Soviets had begun preparations for human spaceflight. At the Gromov Flight Research Institute, a spacecraft simulator had been built, and due to the inefficiency of training all 20 cosmonauts in the simulator, it was decided they would select six men who would go through accelerated training. This group came to be known as the Vanguard Six.
(Acknowledgement)

(Rocky mountain) locust

It is an extinct locust species that ranged through the western half of the United States and some western portions of Canada until the end of the 19th century. Sightings often placed their swarms in numbers far larger than any other species of locust, with one famed sighting estimated at 198,000 square miles (510,000 km2) in size. Less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct.
(Acknowledgement)

Trojan

The bodies do not collide because of the way they orbit.
(Acknowledgement)

Bell's theorem

It states: No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
(Acknowledgement)

Dr. (James) Parkinson

The page volume describes a series of six cases, three of whom were never actually examined by Parkinson but rather observed casually.

Solar System

It proposes the migration of the giant planets from an initial compact configuration into their present positions.

Meteorites

Stony meteorites are rocks, iron meteorites that are largely composed of metallic iron-nickel and stony-iron meteorites contain large amounts of both metallic and rocky material.
(Acknowledgement)

Erwin Schrödinger

Fruit fly

It is typically used because it is an animal species that is easy to care for, has four pairs of chromosomes, breeds quickly, and lays many eggs.
(Acknowledgement)

Big Crunch

It was briefly considered by Albert Einstein in 1930 when he theorized a universe following an eternal series of oscillations, each beginning with a big bang and ending with a big crunch.

Enigma machines

Several different Enigma models were produced, but the German military models are the most commonly discussed.

Cholera

It occurred near Broad Street (now renamed Broadwick Street) in Soho district of London, England in 1854. This discovery came to influence public health and the construction of improved sanitation facilities beginning in the 19th century.
(Acknowledgement)

Tuning fork

It divides regular galaxies into 3 broad classes - ellipticals, lenticulars and spirals - based on their visual appearance (originally on photographic plates). A fourth class contains galaxies with an irregular appearance.
(Acknowledgement)

Hurricanes

Energy from the sun heats up the surface of the ocean. As that heat irradiates up and fuels storms, they can become ever more dangerous hurricanes. Reducing their destructive potential is possible if we can just cool off the surface of the ocean. The Salter Sink works as a wave powered pump. Waves push hot water into the top of the cylinder, which pumps the water inside down.
(Acknowledgement)

Stanford prison experiment

The guards and prisoners adapted to their roles more than they were expected, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations.
(Acknowledgement)

Infertility

Parkinson's disease

Erwin Schrödinger

Sickle

He described sickle-cell anemia which occurs because of a mutation in the hemoglobin gene.

Bone Wars

Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. From 1877 to 1892, both paleontologists used their wealth and influence to finance their own expeditions and to procure services and dinosaur bones from fossil hunters.
(Acknowledgement)

Prime numbers

It does so by iteratively marking as composite (i.e. not prime) the multiples of each prime, starting with the multiples of 2.

Physics

Ironically, he won a Nobel for chemistry!

Space/ low Earth orbit

It was proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade-each collision generating space debris which increases the likelihood of further collisions. The movie is of course Gravity.

Lewis and Clark expedition

The expedition took with them fifty dozen of Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills, laxatives containing more than 50% mercury, which the corps called "thunderclappers." Their meat-rich diet and lack of clean water during the expedition gave the men cause to use them frequently.
(Acknowledgement)

Rats in mazes

Rats have been used in experimental mazes since at least the early 20th century. Thousands of studies have examined how rats run different types of mazes, from T-mazes to radial arm mazes to water mazes. These maze studies are used to study spatial learning and memory in rats.
(Acknowledgement)

Europa

Life could exist in its under-ice ocean, perhaps subsisting in an environment similar to Earth's deep-ocean hydro-thermal vents. Life in such an ocean could possibly be similar to microbial life on Earth in the deep ocean.

The inimitable Dr. Richard Feynman (1918-88)

He won the Nobel Prize for developing QED and many think he deserved two more for his contributions to QCD and gravity.

"Finch"

The central family in the book are the Finches and Darwin is known for his research on the finches of Galapagos.

Bacteria that caused the plagues of the Middle Ages

One of its infections caused the Black Death that accounted for the death of at least one-third of the European population between 1347 and 1353.

Neptune

It is a series of dark spots. Like Jupiter's spot, they are anticyclonic storms and were observed by Voyager 2.

Periodic table of elements

Ytterby has the distinction of lending its name to more elements than any other place or person. These elements are yttrium (Y), erbium (Er), terbium (Tb), and ytterbium (Yb). In addition, three other elements, holmium, thulium, and gadolinium can also trace their discovery to the same quarry of the village that was the source of the aforementioned elements.

Doppler effect

It is defined as the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source.

Gilbert Lewis

He was nominated 35 times but lost out for various reasons including his enmity with members of the committee.

Chemical origins of life

The experiment used water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen.

Mitochondrial Eve

She was not the only living human female of her time. However, her female contemporaries failed to produce a direct unbroken female line to any living woman in the present day.

Four-color map theorem

It states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of the map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. Surprisingly, the theorem is not of particular interest to mapmakers.

Gravitational constant (the big G)

Not to be confused with 'little g' (g), which is the local gravitational field (equivalent to the free-fall acceleration).

African lion (Panthera leo)

However, lions have experienced at least a 50 percent population decline over the past three decades.
(Acknowledgement)

Cesium (use in atomic clocks)

A cesium clock operates by exposing cesium atoms to microwaves until they vibrate at one of their resonant frequencies and then counting the corresponding cycles as a measure of time.
(Acknowledgement)

Jumping genes

A transposable element (TE) is a DNA sequence that can change its position within the genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genome size. This discovery earned McClintock the Nobel Prize in 1983.

Pinocchio effect, obviously!

Lazarus

Rheobatrachus silus was a bizarre gastric-brooding frog that swallowed its eggs, brooded its young in its stomach and gave birth through its mouth. The frog species became extinct in 1983.
(Acknowledgement)

Ivory

(Acknowledgement)

Venus flytrap

It is a carnivorous plant native to subtropical wetlands on the East Coast of the United States.

Monty Hall problem

It is stated as: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? The advantage lies in switching. The puzzle attracted academic interest because the result is surprising and the problem is simple to formulate.

Gram staining

The method differentiates bacteria by the chemical and physical properties of their cell walls and is named after its German inventor.

Curare

It is a common name for various arrow poisons originating from South America.

Sky or space

It is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a non-static universe such as the Big Bang model.

Euler

The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was reported to have commented that if this formula was not immediately apparent to a student upon being told it, that student would never be a first-class mathematician.
(Acknowledgement)

Matter and antimatter

The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter and there should have been total cancellation of both. In other words, protons should have cancelled with antiprotons, electrons with antielectrons (positrons), neutrons with antineutrons, and so on for all elementary particles. This would have resulted in a sea of photons in the universe with no matter. Since this is evidently not the case, after the Big Bang, some physical laws must have acted differently for matter and antimatter. There are competing hypotheses to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance but no one consensus theory to explain the phenomenon.
(Acknowledgement)

Anthropocene

To date, the term has not been adopted as part of the official nomenclature of the geological field of study.

Dugong

The dugong's current distribution is reduced and disjunct, and many populations are close to extinction.

Spacecraft propulsion using nuclear explosions (nuclear pulse propulsion)

Project Orion was the first serious attempt to design a nuclear pulse rocket. The design effort was carried out at General Atomics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The system appeared to be entirely workable when the project was shut down in 1965, the main reason being given that the Partial Test Ban Treaty made it illegal.

Seven particle detector experiments constructed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

ATLAS is considered the world's biggest scientific experiment.

'Silver Bullet'

HeLa cell line

Henrietta Lacks was the source of cells (from her cancerous tumor) which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research.

Moons of Jupiter

The first certain observations of Jupiter's satellites were those of Galileo Galilei in 1609. By March 1610, he had sighted the four massive Galilean moons with his telescope: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. As of 2012, Jupiter has 67 confirmed moons.

(Pinta Island) tortoise

He was the last known individual of the subspecies. George served as a potent symbol for conservation efforts in the Galápagos and internationally. Over the decades, all attempts at mating Lonesome George had been unsuccessful, possibly due to the lack of females of his own subspecies.

Space shuttles

The Canadarm was first used on STS-2 in 1981, on board Columbia, and has subsequently been used on over 50 shuttle missions. Arms have been installed on the four other shuttles. Since the installation of the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, the two arms have been used to hand over segments of the station for assembly from the Canadarm to the Canadarm2. The Canadarm's 90th and final shuttle mission was in July 2011 on STS-135.

Thylacine/ Tasmanian tiger

It was the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times. Native to continental Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea, it is thought to have become extinct in the 20th century.

Shape of the Earth

Early results seemed to prove the Earth to be flat, but most later attempts to reproduce the observations firmly supported the established view that the Earth is a sphere. The most famous of the observations, and the one that was taught in schools until photographs of the Earth from space became available, involved a set of three poles fixed at equal height above water level along this length. As the surface of the water was assumed to be level, the discovery that the middle pole, when viewed carefully through a theodolite, was almost three feet higher than the poles at each end was finally accepted as a new proof that the surface of the earth was indeed curved.
(Acknowledgement)

Extra-terrestrial civilizations

The basic line of thought of Fermi suggests that the Earth should have already been colonized, or at least visited long ago owing to the young nature of the sun/Solar System.

Region in which its satellites can be found

To be retained by a planet, a moon must have an orbit that lies within the planet's Hill sphere. That moon would, in turn, have a Hill sphere of its own. Any object within that distance would tend to become a satellite of the moon, rather than of the planet itself. In more precise terms, the Hill sphere approximates the gravitational sphere of influence of a smaller body in the face of perturbations from a more massive body. It was defined by the American astronomer George William Hill, based upon the work of the French astronomer Édouard Roche. For this reason, it is also known as the Roche sphere.
(Acknowledgement)

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, for which he is best known.

Kidney stone

From the Latin ren, 'kidney' and calculus, 'pebble.'

Charge of an electron

In 1923, Millikan won the Nobel Prize in physics in part because of this experiment. Aside from the measurement, the beauty of the oil drop experiment is that it is a simple, elegant hands-on demonstration that charge is actually quantized. Thomas Edison, who had previously thought of charge as a continuous variable, became convinced after working with Millikan and Fletcher's apparatus. This experiment has since been repeated by generations of physics students, although it is rather expensive and difficult to do properly.
(Acknowledgement)

Jane Goodall

The park is most famous as the location where she pioneered her behavioral research conducted on chimpanzees.

Caves or dark places

Loss of under-used senses is apparent in the lack of pigmentation as well as eyesight in most troglobites.

Isaac Newton's

Extinction of dinosaurs and other living things

Evidence indicates that the asteroid fell in the Yucatán Peninsula, at Chicxulub, Mexico. In March 2010 an international panel of scientists endorsed the asteroid hypothesis, specifically the Chicxulub impact, as being the cause of the extinction.
(Acknowledgement)

Extraction of wisdom teeth

In the Universal Numbering System adopted by the American Dental Association, number 1 is the tooth farthest back on the right side of your mouth in the upper (maxillary) jaw. Number 17 is the tooth farthest back on the left side of your mouth on the bottom. If you are missing your wisdom teeth, your first number will be 2 instead of 1, acknowledging the missing tooth. If you've had teeth removed or teeth are missing, the missing teeth will be numbered as well.
(Acknowledgement)

"Play dice"

It prompted Neils Bohr to reply, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."

Diving bell (or) water spider

It breathes air which it traps in a bubble held by hairs on its abdomen and legs.

Poincaré conjecture

It is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1,000,000 prize for the first correct solution. Perelman's work survived review and was confirmed in 2006, leading to his being offered a Fields Medal, which he declined. The Poincaré conjecture is the only solved one in the list of seven Millennium problems.

Transits of Venus

It takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth (or another planet), becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. The duration of such transits is usually measured in hours (the transit of 2012 lasted 6 hours and 40 minutes).

Medusa

The stages are egg and sperm, planula larva, polyp, polyp hydroid colony, ephyra and medusa. The term medusa was coined by Linnaeus in 1752, alluding to the tentacled head of Medusa in Greek mythology.
(Acknowledgement)

Thalidomide

The drug introduced in the late 1950s and was used to treat morning sickness. It was sold from 1957 until 1961, when it was withdrawn after being found to be a cause of birth defects.

Entropy

From the second law of thermodynamics.

René Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope

He discovered that his invention was superior to the normally used method of placing the ear over the chest, particularly if the patient was overweight. A stethoscope also avoided the embarrassment of placing the ear against the chest of a woman.

Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto

Although he is best known for discovering Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper Belt, he also discovered many asteroids.

Two prime numbers

Galaxies

Hubble's scheme divides regular galaxies into 3 broad classes - ellipticals, lenticulars and spirals; a fourth class contains galaxies with an irregular appearance. To this day, the Hubble sequence is the most commonly used system for classifying galaxies, both in professional astronomical research and in amateur astronomy.

"Star"

The formal title of the paper is Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, but the article is so famous that it is typically referred to only as "B²FH."

White and black (species of rhinoceros)

Both African species (white and black) and the Sumatran rhinoceros have two horns, while the Indian and Javan rhinoceros have a single horn.

Silver Spring monkeys

The monkeys had been used as research subjects by Edward Taub, a psychologist, who had cut ganglia that supplied sensation to the brain from their arms, then used arm slings to restrain either the good or deafferented arm to train them to use the limbs they could not feel. The conditions under which the experiments were performed caused significant unrest and the ensuing battle over the monkeys' custody saw celebrities and politicians campaign for the monkeys' release, an amendment in 1985 to the Animal Welfare Act, the transformation of PETA from a group of friends into a national movement, the creation of the first North American Animal Liberation Front cell, and the first animal research case to reach the United States Supreme Court.

Yuri Gagarin

The Kármán line that lies at an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level is commonly used to define the boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. The line was named after Theodore von Kármán, (1881–1963) a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He first calculated that around this altitude the Earth's atmosphere becomes too thin for aeronautical purposes.

Miasma theory

It was eventually displaced in the 19th century by the germ theory.

Galapagos (the Galapagos penguin)

The species can survive due to the cool temperatures resulting from ocean currents. The islands are of course well-known for their association with Darwin.

Organ transplants

Ciclosporin is used to prevent organ rejection as it reduces the activity of the immune system by interfering with the activity of a type of white blood cells. The effects of ciclosporin were discovered in 1972 at Sandoz (now Novartis) in Basel, Switzerland.

Nosebleed

In Japanese and Chinese folk belief nosebleeds are signs of sexual excitement. Nosebleeds are very rarely fatal.

Comets

They are often popularly described as 'dirty snowballs', though recent observations have revealed dry dusty or rocky surfaces, suggesting that the ices are hidden beneath the crust. This theory is considered an important contribution to Solar System studies.

Wormhole

It is fundamentally, a 'shortcut' through spacetime.

'Little Green Men 1'

While the hypothesis that pulsars were beacons from extraterrestrial civilizations was never taken very seriously, some discussed the far-reaching implications if it turned out to be true. A pulsar (portmanteau of pulsating star) is a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation.

Ernest Rutherford

Describing the famous Geiger-Marsden experiment (also called the Gold foil experiment or the Rutherford experiment) that was conducted to probe the structure of the atom performed by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, under his direction at the University of Manchester.

Ig Nobel Prizes

The name is a play on the word ignoble and the name Alfred Nobel. They are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

Gorilla

It was classified as a World Heritage Site in 1979. In later years it has become known for its mountain gorillas, although poaching and the Congo Civil War have seriously damaged its wildlife population.

Nuclear weapon testing

Underground nuclear testing made up the majority of nuclear tests by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War; other forms of nuclear testing were banned by the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. When the explosion is fully contained, underground nuclear testing emits a negligible amount of fallout.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronauts from their splashdown

President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, and their first steps on Earth are marked on the hangar deck of the craft.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Ozone layer

Due to its widespread adoption and implementation it has been hailed as an example of exceptional international co-operation and it is believed that if the international agreement is adhered to, the ozone layer is expected to recover by 2050.

Vitamin C

He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937.

Frank Drake, of the namesake Drake equation

The equation is used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. It is used in the fields of exobiology and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Fish

Anadromous fish like the salmon live in the saltwater and travel to fresh water sources to spawn. Catadromous fish like the eel spend most of their lives in fresh water and migrate to the sea to breed.

"temperature"

The theory that the universe has existed forever is in serious difficulty with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law, states that disorder always increases with time. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature. In an infinite and everlasting universe, every line of sight would end on the surface of a star. This would mean that the night sky would have been as bright as the surface of the Sun.
(Acknowledgement)

IVF (in vitro fertilization)

He is often called as the 'father of the test tube baby.'

Java (thus Java Man)

It was one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus. Dubois, called it Pithecanthropus erectus, which means 'upright ape-man' according to Greek/Latin roots. Subsequently, older human remains were discovered in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya.

Beetles

About 40% of all described insect species are beetles (about 400,000 species) constituting almost 25% of all known life-forms. The name Coleoptera is from the Greek for 'sheathed wing.'

Tim Berners-Lee

The inventor of the World Wide Web.

Strain impacts a muscle, and sprain a ligament

A strain is also called a pulled muscle, and occurs when muscle fibres tear as a result of over-stretching.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Pierre de Fermat

After centuries, the proof came from Andrew Wiles in 1995.

Tree-rings

Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year.

Gamma-ray bursts

Bursts can last from ten milliseconds to several minutes, although a typical burst lasts 20-40 seconds. A typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifetime. Most observed GRBs are believed to be a narrow beam of intense radiation released during a supernova event, as a rapidly rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a neutron star or black hole.

Tulips

Positions and motions of the planets and satellites of the Solar System

"Hello world"

In general, it is simple enough that people who have no previous experience with computer programming can easily understand it, especially with the guidance of a teacher or a written guide. Using this simple program as a basis, computer science principles or elements of a specific programming language can be explained to novice programmers. Experienced programmers learning new languages can also gain a lot of information about a given language's syntax and structure from a hello world program.

Neutrino (original name - neutron)

Enrico Fermi did the renaming.

V-2 rocket (V is 'Vergeltungswaffe', German for 'reprisal weapon')

It was a ballistic missile that was developed at the beginning of the Second World War in Germany, specifically targeted at London and later Antwerp. It was the progenitor of all modern rockets, including those used by the United States and Soviet Union space programs.

Galvanization

Methuselah

It is named after the Biblical figure reputed to have lived 969 years. Methuselah's exact location is undisclosed as a protection against vandalism.

Maxwell's demon

It was created by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to "show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty." In the experiment, an imaginary container is divided into two parts by an insulated wall, with a door that can be opened and closed by what came to be called "Maxwell's Demon." The hypothetical demon opens the door to allow only the "hot" molecules of gas to flow through to a favored side of the chamber, causing that side to spontaneously heat up while the other side cools down.

Burgess Shale

It is one of the world's most celebrated fossil fields and is famous for the exceptional preservation of the soft parts of its fossils.

Ptolemy (c. AD 90-c. AD 168)

The model was accepted as correct for more than a thousand years in Islamic and European societies through the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The book is the most important source of information on ancient Greek astronomy.

God particle

The name came from the the title of a book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman. While use of this term may have contributed to increased media interest in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider, many scientists dislike it, since it overstates the particle's importance.

Urea (produced by the Wöhler synthesis)

This chemical reaction was discovered in 1828 by Friedrich Wöhler and is considered the starting point of modern organic chemistry. This synthesis was a landmark in the history of science as it undermined the Vital Force Theory, which was believed for centuries to be true.

Reverse Turing test

Since a computer administers a test to determine if the subject is or is not human.

Lek

The term was originally used most commonly for Black Grouse and for Capercaillie, and lekking behaviour is quite common in birds of this type, such as Sage Grouse, Prairie Chicken, and Sharp-tailed Grouse.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)

His journeys established South America as a field for scientific exploration.

Ice ages

Orangutan

Honeybee

By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations.

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"

There are several examples of embryonic stages showing features of ancestral organisms, but a 'strong' formulation of the concept has been discredited.

Oxygen

Hydrogen and helium are estimated to make up roughly 74% and 24% of all matter in the universe respectively.

Stainless steel

Kübler-Ross model

It describes, in 5 discrete stages (Denial-Anger-Bargaining-Depression-Acceptance), a process by which people deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss. In addition to this, the book brought mainstream awareness to the sensitivity required for better treatment of individuals who are dealing with a fatal disease.

Jesus Christ lizard

When startled, the Common Basilisk escapes by speeding to the nearest edge of water-and continues sprinting. The lizard runs on only its hind legs in an erect position, holding its arms to its sides. This basilisk is so adroit on water because its feet are large and equipped with flaps of skin along the toes; when moving quickly, the lizard can cross a surface of water before sinking. On water it runs an average speed of 8.4 kph (or 5.2 mph), which is just a little slower than its speed on land.

Uranus

With the exception of earth, all the other planets take their names from Roman myth. Uranus is the third-largest and fourth most massive planet in the Solar System. It is named after the ancient Greek deity of the sky. Sir William Herschel announced its discovery on March 13, 1781, expanding the known boundaries of the Solar System for the first time in modern history. Uranus was also the first planet discovered with a telescope.

The distance within which a celestial body will disintegrate due to a second body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction.

Inside the Roche limit, orbiting material will tend to disperse and form rings, while outside the limit, material will tend to coalesce. The term is named after Édouard Roche, the French astronomer who first calculated this theoretical limit in 1848.

Fractals

A fractal is 'a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole' a property called self-similarity.

Sluice

For example, a millrace is a sluice that channels water toward a water mill. Sluice gates are commonly used to control water levels and flow rates in rivers and canals. They are also used in wastewater treatment plants and to recover minerals in mining operations, and in watermills.

Punctuated equilibrium

In 1972, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould published a landmark paper developing this theory. Eldredge and Gould proposed that the degree of gradualism commonly attributed to Charles Darwin is virtually nonexistent in the fossil record, and that stasis dominates the history of most fossil species.

Celluloid

Celluloid is highly flammable and also easily decomposes, and is no longer widely used. Its most common uses today are in table tennis balls and guitar picks.

Lunar eclipse

An eclipse's rating on the Danjon Scale is denoted by the letter L and ranges from 0-4 (0 is Very dark eclipse - Moon almost invisible, especially at mid-totality and 4 is Very bright copper-red or orange eclipse.)

Phalanges (from phalanx)

In primates such as humans and monkeys, the thumb and big toe have two phalanges, while the other fingers and toes consist of three. Phalanges are classified as long bones.

Antimony (anti-monos means not-alone)

Asbestos

Most people who develop mesothelioma have worked on jobs where they inhaled asbestos particles, or they have been exposed to asbestos dust and fiber in other ways.

Lise Meitner

A 1997 Physics Today study concluded that Meitner's omission was "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist" from the Nobel.

Hayflick limit

Prior to Hayflick's discovery it was believed that vertebrate cells had an unlimited potential to replicate.

Operation Lindbergh

The name was derived from that of American aviator Charles Lindbergh, because he was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, although the operation occurred strictly over telecommunications lines, and no aircraft were involved, other than those used to transport medical services persons.

Children

Calor, dolor, rubor and tumor

Trinity nuclear test

It was the first test of technology for an atomic weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945 at a location in New Mexico. These words were uttered by J. Robert Oppenheimer who is remembered as "The Father of the Atomic Bomb."

Pregnancy

The original test actually used mice. The test consisted of injecting the tested woman's urine into a female rabbit, then examining the rabbit's ovaries a few days later, which would change in response to a hormone only secreted by pregnant women. It is a common misconception that the injected rabbit would die only if the woman was pregnant. This led to the phrase "the rabbit died" being used as a euphemism for a positive pregnancy test. In fact, all rabbits used for the test died, because they had to be surgically opened in order to examine the ovaries.

Tomogram

Tomography achieves this remarkable result by simply moving an x-ray source in one direction as the x-ray film is moved in the opposite direction during the exposure to sharpen structures in the focal plane, while structures in other planes appear blurred. The tomogram is the picture; the tomograph is the apparatus; and tomography is the process.

Paraffin

Paraffin wax refers to the solids with 20 ≤ n ≤ 40.

Pluto

Pluto was demoted from the list of planets in 2006.

Spores

Spores are the units of asexual reproduction, because a single spore develops into a new organism. By contrast, gametes are the units of sexual reproduction, as two gametes need to fuse to create a new organism.

Small openings that usually lead to respiratory systems

For example, in sharks and rays, a spiracle is found behind each eye, and is often used to pump water through the gills while the animal is at rest.

Chandra

Of these satellites, only the Compton is not operating; one of its gyroscopes failed, and NASA ordered it to be de-orbited on June 4, 2000. Spitzer was the only one of the Great Observatories not launched by the Space Shuttle.

Astringent

Two common examples are calamine lotion and witch hazel.

Hitchhiker's thumb

People who do not have this condition are able to extend the thumb straight out with little backward bending. Neither condition appears to have any ill-effect on the thumb's function. While most people have either "hitchhiker's thumb" on both thumbs or neither, in some people the condition only presents itself on one thumb.

Colloid

For example, Milk is an emulsified colloid of liquid butterfat globules dispersed within a water-based fluid.

Epinephrine

Marine science

Gnomon

Heavy water

It helped him win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934.

Pica

It is named for the magpie as it is reputed to eat almost anything. Pica is seen in all ages, particularly in pregnant women and small children, especially among children who are developmentally disabled, where it is the most common eating disorder.

Incandescence and luminescence respectively

The incandescence of a theoretically perfectly black object is known as black body radiation. Luminescence can be caused by chemical reactions, electrical energy, subatomic motions, or stress on a crystal.

Colostrum

Most species will generate colostrum within one day of giving birth.

A harmless species imitating the warning signals of a harmful species.

Lowest level of a body of water

Organisms living in this zone are called benthos. Because light does not penetrate very deep ocean-water, the energy source for the benthic ecosystem is often organic matter from higher up in the water column which drifts down to the depths. This dead and decaying matter sustains the benthic food chain; most organisms in the benthic zone are scavengers or detritivores. In their habitats they can be considered as dominant creatures. Many organisms adapted to deep-water pressure cannot survive in the upper parts of the water column.

From Dolly Parton, the famously busty country singer

USA, Liberia, and Myanmar

Syphilis

In addition, the Dutch called it the "Spanish disease", the Russians called it the "Polish disease", the Turks called it the "Christian disease" or "Frank disease" (frengi) and the Tahitians called it the "British disease." These 'national' names are due to the disease often being present among invading armies or sea crews, due to the high instance of unprotected sexual contact with prostitutes. It was also called "Great pox" in the 16th century to distinguish it from smallpox. The signs and symptoms of syphilis are numerous; before the advent of serological testing, precise diagnosis was very difficult. In fact, the disease was dubbed the "Great Imitator" because it was often confused with other diseases, particularly in its tertiary stage.

Haber process (also Haber-Bosch process)

The Haber process is important because ammonia is difficult to produce on an industrial scale. Even though 78.1% of the air we breathe is nitrogen, the gas is relatively unreactive because nitrogen molecules are held together by strong triple bonds. Ammonia was first manufactured using the Haber process on an industrial scale in Germany during World War I to meet the high demand for ammonium nitrate (for use in explosives) at a time when supply of Chile saltpetre from Chile could not be guaranteed because this industry was then almost 100% in British hands. It has been suggested that without this process, Germany would not have started the war.

Ayahuasca, and also called yage in Columbia and caapi in Brazil

"Ayahuasca tourist" is a pejorative term for those who quest for a transcendent experience through using ayahuasca, implying an insincere Westerner wanting a taste of an exotic ritual.

Concorde (only supersonic passenger airliners)

Tupolev was the first supersonic transport aircraft (SST), constructed under the direction of the Soviet Tupolev design bureau headed by Alexei Tupolev (1925-2001). Western observers nicknamed the plane Concordski (sometimes Konkordski), sounding Russian yet still very close to the Concorde, to which the Tu-144 was visually similar. A prototype first flew on 31 December 1968 near Moscow, two months before Concorde.

Dementia

Although dementia is far more common in the geriatric population, it may occur in any stage of adulthood.

Gaia hypothesis

Named after the Greek earth goddess, this hypothesis postulates that all living things have a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that promotes life overall.
(Acknowledgement)

Daguerreotype by Louis Daguerre

The daguerreotype is a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the image and makes it appear positive in the proper light. Thus, daguerreotype is a direct photographic process without the capacity for duplication.
(Acknowledgement)

Nebula

Originally nebula was a general name for any extended astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. In these regions the formations of gas, dust and other materials 'clump' together to form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually will become big enough to form stars. The remaining materials are then believed to form planets, and other solar system objects.
(Acknowledgement)

Cartesian geometry

In mathematics, the Cartesian coordinate system is used to determine each point uniquely in a plane through two numbers, usually called the x-coordinate or abscissa and the y-coordinate or ordinate of the point. The idea of this system was developed in 1637 in two writings by Descartes and independently by Pierre de Fermat, although Fermat did not publish the discovery.

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)

Vesalius had the work published at the age of 28, taking great pains to ensure its quality. Many of the illustrations were made by commissioned artists-those in the first two books were done by Johannes Stephanus of Calcar, an employee/student of the great Venetian artist Titian-and were greatly superior to the illustrations in anatomical atlases of the day, which were often made by anatomy professors themselves.
(Acknowledgement)

Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto

As a result of improvements Galileo Galilei made to the telescope, he was able to see celestial bodies more distinctly than ever before in human history. As a result, sometime between December 1609 and January 1610 Galileo Galilei discovered what came to be known as the Galilean moons although a Chinese historian of astronomy, Xi Zezong, claimed that the Chinese astronomer Gan De observed one of Jupiter's moons in 362 BC, nearly 2 millennia earlier than Galileo.

Towers of Hanoi

The puzzle was invented by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas in 1883. There is a legend about an Indian temple which contains a large room with three time-worn posts in it surrounded by 64 golden disks. The priests of Brahma, acting out the command of an ancient prophecy, have been moving these disks, in accordance with the rules of the puzzle. According to the legend, when the last move of the puzzle is completed, the world will end. The puzzle is therefore also known as the Tower of Brahma puzzle.

Canada

Occasionally, Alouette 1 is misrepresented as the third satellite successfully put in orbit, rather than being from the third country ever to do so, but numerous Sputnik and Explorer program missions preceded it. The name "Alouette" came from the French "skylark" and from the title of a popular French-Canadian folk song, "Alouette."

Taser

The trademarked name Taser is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle." Tasers were introduced as a less-lethal weapon with the intention to be used by police to subdue fleeing, belligerent, or potentially dangerous suspects, often when a lethal weapon would have otherwise been used. Tasers have not proven unequivocally to reduce gun usage and there are a number of growing controversies surrounding them.

Flashbulb memory

For example, a great many people can remember where they were when they heard of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 or the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., or musician John Lennon. The most pronounced difference between ordinary and flashbulb memory is that people believe flashbulb memories to be more accurately and vividly remembered.

Activity of winds and the winds' ability to shape the surface of the Earth and other planets.

Winds may erode, transport, and deposit materials, and are effective agents in regions with sparse vegetation and a large supply of unconsolidated sediments. Although water is much more powerful than wind, æolian processes are important in arid environments such as deserts. The term is derived from the name of the Greek god, Æolus, the keeper of the winds.

Backdraft

Backdrafts are very dangerous situations, often surprising firefighters, regardless of their level of experience. The most common tactic used by firefighters in defusing a potential backdraft is to ventilate from the highest point, allowing the heat and smoke to escape without igniting explosively.

Satellites of Uranus are named after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Pope's The Rape of the Lock.

Boundary that separates the zoogeographical regions of Asia and Australasia

West of the line are found organisms related to Asiatic species; to the east, mostly organisms related to Australian species. The line is named after Alfred Russel Wallace, who noticed the apparent dividing line during his travels through the East Indies in the 19th century. The line runs through the Malay Archipelago, between Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes); and between Bali (in the west) and Lombok (in the east).

Fever tree

It grows naturally in Zimbabwe and South Africa near the Limpopo River, as immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories. It is unique as it is the only tree where photo-synthasis takes place in the bark of the tree as the leaves are very small. It also grows a "sacraficial limb" which appears as a dead branch, and is used to dump unwanted nutrients from the soil.

Soft spots on a newborn's skull

Fontanelles are soft spots on a baby's head which, during birth, enable the soft bony plates of the skull to flex, allowing the head to pass through the birth canal. Fontanelles are usually completely hardened by a child's second birthday, and will eventually form the sutures of the neurocranium. The fontanelles allow the infant brain to be imaged using ultrasonography. Once they are closed, most of the brain is inaccessible to ultrasound imaging, as the bony skull presents an acoustic barrier.

Protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts.

The word derives from Mithridates VI, who so feared being poisoned that he regularly ingested small doses, aiming to develop immunity. Having been defeated by Pompey, legend has it that Mithridates tried to commit suicide using poison but failed because of his immunity and so had to resort to having a mercenary run him through with his sword. Mithridatization has been tried with success in Australia and Brazil and total immunity has been achieved even to multiple bites of extremely venomous cobras and pit vipers.

Health of a newborn child

The Apgar score is determined by evaluating the newborn baby on five simple criteria on a scale from zero to two and summing up the five values thus obtained. The resulting Apgar score ranges from zero to 10. The five criteria are Heart rate, Respiration, (Reflex) irritability, (Muscle) tone and (Skin) color - the mnemonic being 'How Ready Is This Child.'

Island gigantism

It is a form of natural selection in which bigger size provides a survival advantage. Large size in herbivores usually makes it harder to escape or hide from predators, but on islands, these are often lacking. Thus, island gigantism is not an evolutionary trend due to fundamentally new parameters determining fitness (as in island dwarfing), but rather the removal of constraints. With the arrival of humans and associated predators (dogs, cats, rats, pigs), many giant island endemics have become extinct.

Any infectious disease that is transmitted from animals to humans or from humans to animals (the latter is sometimes called reverse zoonosis).

Many serious diseases fall under this category. The simplest definition of a zoonosis is a disease that can be transmitted from other animals to humans. A slightly more technical definition is a disease that normally exists in other animals, but also infects humans.

Ricin

Ricin is poisonous if inhaled, injected, or ingested, acting as a toxin by the inhibition of protein synthesis. While there is no known antidote, the US military has developed a vaccine. The best-known documented use of ricin as an agent of biological warfare was by the Soviet Union's KGB during the Cold War. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by Bulgarian secret police who surreptitiously 'shot' him on a London street with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg.

Nitric acid

Nitric acid has long been used to confirm the presence of gold in items, and this is the origin of the colloquial term "acid test," referring to a gold standard test for genuine value.

Homeopathy

Homeopathy is based on a vitalist world view, which sees the underlying causes of sickness as imbalances in a hypothetical vital force, and claims that homeopathic treatment can harmonize and re-balance the vital force in the body, so restoring health - a spiritual doctrine not found in modern biology or conventional medicine. The medical efficacy of homeopathic treatments is disputed both by experimental studies, and on scientific and medical grounds, and it is considered by most scientists to be ineffective.

Great Barrier Reef

It is composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for 2,600 kilometres (1,616 mi) over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres (132,974 sq mi). The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland in northeast Australia. This reef structure is composed of and built by billions of tiny organisms, known as coral polyps.

Yellowcake

Embolism

This can be contrasted with a "thrombus" which is the formation of a clot within a blood vessel, rather than being carried from somewhere else. Blood clots form the most common embolic material by far: other possible embolic materials include fat globules (a fat embolism), air bubbles (an air embolism), talc embolism (often following drug abuse), septic emboli (containing pus and bacteria), or amniotic fluid. Emboli often have more serious consequences when they occur in the so-called "end-circulation": areas of the body that have no redundant blood supply, such as the brain, heart, and lungs.

Conjecture

Once a conjecture is formally proven true it is elevated to the status of theorem and may be used afterwards without risk in the construction of other formal mathematical proofs. Until that time, mathematicians may use the conjecture on a provisional basis, but any resulting work is itself conjectural until the underlying conjecture is cleared up.

Depleted uranium

It is primarily composed of the isotope uranium-238. Since depleted uranium contains less than one third as much uranium-235 as natural uranium, it is weakly radioactive and an external radiation dose from depleted uranium is about 60% of that from the same mass of uranium with a natural isotopic ratio. Depleted uranium behaves in the body as does natural uranium.

The act whereby an animal severs one of its own appendages to elude a predator's grasp.

The animals that are captured by the tail will shed part of the tail structure and thus be able to flee. The detached tail will continue to wriggle, creating a deceptive sense of continued struggle and attracting the predator's attention away from the fleeing prey animal. The animal can partially regenerate its tail over a period of weeks. The new section will contain cartilage rather than bone and the skin will have different colouration, typically darker and with little or no pattern.

Ants

Ants have colonized almost every landmass on Earth. The only places lacking indigenous ant species are Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, and the Hawaiian Islands. Individuals are divided into sub-fertile, and more commonly sterile, females ("workers"), fertile males ("drones"), and fertile females ("queens"). Colonies can occupy and use a wide area of land to support themselves. Ant colonies are sometimes described as superorganisms because the colony appears to operate as a single entity.

Seahorses and pipefishes

Seahorses reproduce in an unusual way: the male becomes pregnant. "The female inserts her ovipositor into the male's brood pouch, where she deposits her eggs, which the male fertilizes. The fertilized eggs then embed in the pouch wall and become enveloped with tissues." New research indicates the male releases sperm into the surrounding sea water during fertilization, and not directly into the pouch as was previously thought. Most seahorse species' pregnancies lasts approximately two to three weeks.

Unlike noble gases, an inert gas is not necessarily elemental and is often molecular.

Helium and neon are the only true elemental inert gases, because they do not form any (known) true chemical compounds, unlike the heavier noble gases (argon, krypton, xenon and radon).

Arthur Eddington

Eddington helped to experimentally verify the theory of general relativity by observing the appearance of stars around the region of a solar eclipse.

Parthenogenesis

It is a form of asexual reproduction in which females produce eggs that develop without fertilization. It occurs naturally in some species, including lower plants, invertebrates (e.g. water fleas, aphids, some bees and parasitic wasps), and vertebrates (e.g. some reptiles, fish, and, very rarely, birds and sharks). It is sometimes also used to describe reproduction modes in hermaphroditic species which can self-fertilize.

Collagen

Collagen has been widely used in cosmetic surgery, as a healing aid for burn patients for reconstruction of bone and a wide variety of dental, orthopedic and surgical purposes. Collagens are widely employed in the construction of artificial skin substitutes used in the management of severe burns, as well as for a wide range of dental, orthopedic, and surgical purposes. These collagens may be derived from bovine, equine or porcine, and even human, sources and are sometimes used in combination with silicones, glycosaminoglycans, fibroblasts, growth factors and other substances.

Saltwater or estuarine crocodile

A healthy adult male saltwater crocodile is typically 4.8 to 7 metres (15.75 to 21.6 ft) long, and weighs up to 770 kg (1697 lb), with many exceptions being much larger than this.

Boabab

Baobabs store water inside the swollen trunk (up to 120,000 litres to endure the harsh drought conditions particular to each region.

Cellulose

Cellulose was discovered and isolated in the mid-nineteenth century by the French chemist Anselme Payen. Cellulose is not digestible by humans and is often referred to as 'dietary fiber' or 'roughage.'

Menlo Park

It was in the Menlo Park Laboratory that Thomas Edison came up with his most famous inventions, including the phonograph and a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament and he is sometimes referred to as "the Wizard of Menlo Park."

Sulphur

Vulcanization refers to a specific curing process of rubber involving high heat and the addition of sulfur. It is a chemical process in which polymer molecules are linked to other polymer molecules by atomic bridges composed of sulfur atoms. This makes the bulk material harder, much more durable and also more resistant to chemical attack. It also makes the surface of the material smoother and prevents it from sticking to metal or plastic chemical catalysts.

Nikola Tesla

After his demonstration of wireless communication in 1893 and after being the victor in the "War of Currents", Tesla was widely respected as America's greatest electrical engineer. The SI unit measuring magnetic flux density or magnetic induction (commonly known as the magnetic field ), the tesla, was named in his honour. Aside from his work on electromagnetism and engineering, Tesla is said to have contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics and theoretical physics.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy."

Tsar Bomba ('Emperor Bomb')

The bomb had a yield of about 50 megatons of TNT and it was codenamed Ivan by its developers. The detonation qualifies as being the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity. The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Sea. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout.

Silver

Galapagos tortoise

Adults of large species can weigh over 300 kilograms (660 lb) and measure 1.2 meters (3.9 ft) long. Although the maximum life expectancy of a wild tortoise is unknown, the average life expectancy is estimated to be 200 years.

Oleic acid

If a drop of oleic acid were to be added to a live bee, it would be dragged off, kicking and screaming, as if it were dead.

Walk or stand without falling

Some animals are better in this than humans, for example allowing a cat (as a quadruped using its inner ear and tail) to walk on a thin fence. All forms of equilibrioception can be described as the detection of acceleration. It is determined by the level of fluid properly called endolymph in the labyrinth - a complex set of tubing in the inner ear.

Gaboon viper

Their venom itself is not considered particularly toxic but their venom glands are enormous and produce the largest quantities of any venomous snake.

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan (721-c.815), best known as Geber

His ethnic background is not clear; although most sources state he was an Arab, others describe him as Persian. He introduced many methods such as the syntheses of hydrochloric and nitric acids, distillation, and crystallisation.

Aluminum

It is very rare in its free form, occurring in oxygen-deficient environments such as volcanic mud. Aluminium has been produced in commercial quantities for just over 100 years.

Arsenic

As the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were somewhat ill-defined, it was frequently used for murder until the advent of the Marsh test, a sensitive chemical test for its presence. (Another less sensitive but more general test is the Reinsch test.)

Zircon

Their oxygen isotopic composition has been interpreted to indicate that more than 4.4 billion years ago there was already water on the surface of the Earth. This spectacular interpretation has been published in top scientific journals, but is the subject of debate.

Vitamins

In humans there are 13 vitamins: 4 fat-soluble (A, D, E and K) and 9 water-soluble (8 B vitamins and vitamin C).

Siberian tiger

The Sumatran tiger is the smallest.

Archimedes

The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians not over 40 years of age at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union, a meeting that takes place every four years. The Fields Medal is widely viewed as the top honor a mathematician can receive.

Chinook

Described and enthusiastically eaten by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the chinook salmon is spiritually and culturally prized among certain Native American tribes.

Superconductivity

At the temperature of 4.2 Kelvin, he observed that the resistance abruptly disappeared. In subsequent decades, superconductivity was found in several other materials. In 1913, lead was found to superconduct at 7 K, and in 1941 niobium nitride was found to superconduct at 16 K.

Radiocarbon dating

Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring isotope carbon-14 (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years.

Cassowary

They are very large flightless birds native to the tropical forests of New Guinea and northeastern Australia. Normally cassowaries are very shy but when disturbed can lash out dangerously with their powerful legs. They are also considered to be one of the most dangerous animals to keep in zoos, based on the frequency and severity of injuries incurred by zookeepers.

Extinct in the Wild

The other categories are Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN), Vulnerable (VU), and Near Threatened (NT).

Mars

The central edifice stands 27 kilometres (around 17 miles) high above the mean surface level of Mars (about three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level and 2.6 times the height of Mauna Kea above its base). It is 550 km (342 miles) in width.

Oxygen

From 'oxys' (acid, literally "sharp", from the taste of acids) and (-genēs) (producer, literally begetter).

Cluster headache

Nicknamed "suicide headache", it is a neurological disease that involves, as its most prominent feature, an immense degree of pain. The cause of the disease is currently unknown.

Rapidly moving one

It is often used to gain control of very fast descents, including those of spacecraft during atmospheric reentry, or nuclear bombs. When used as a method of decreasing the landing distance of an aircraft below that available solely from the aircraft's brakes, the device is called a drag parachute or braking parachute.

Möbius strips

The number zero

His Brahmasphutasiddhanta is the earliest known text to treat zero as a number in its own right. It goes well beyond that, however, stating rules for arithmetic on negative numbers and zero which are quite close to the modern understanding. The major divergence is that Brahmagupta attempted to define division by zero, which is left undefined in modern mathematics. His definition of zero was quite accurate except he wrongly believed that 0/0 was equal to 0.

When it is dormant in the summer, as opposed to winter

Animals that estivate spend a summer inactive and insulated against heat to avoid the potentially harmful effects of the season (such as the increase in temperature, or relative lack of water), or to avoid contact with other species with which they may otherwise be in competition, or for which they are prey. Animals that estivate include North American desert tortoises, crocodiles, salamanders, and lungfishes.

Adverse effect associated with a medical practitioner or treatment

Iatros means physician in Greek, and -genic, meaning induced by, is derived from the International Scientific Vocabulary. Combined, they become iatrogenic, meaning physician-induced.

Merino

Event horizon

Light emitted from inside the horizon can never reach the observer, and anything that passes through the horizon from the observer's side is never seen again. A black hole is surrounded by an event horizon, for example.

Saffir-Simpson scale

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is used only to describe hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean and northern Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line. Other areas label their tropical cyclones as "cyclones" and "typhoons", and use their own classification scales.

Butterfly effect

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or prevent a tornado from appearing). The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Five

The first orbiter, Enterprise, was not built for actual space flight, and was used only for testing purposes and is not considered an operational vehicle. It was followed by four operational space shuttles: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis. Challenger was destroyed on launch in 1986, and Endeavour was built as a replacement. Columbia was destroyed on re-entry in 2003.

"Ramanujan"

A definitive example of an autodidact prodigy, Ramanujan compiled an estimated 3,900 theorems during his short lifetime. Although a small number of these results were actually false, most of his statements have now been proven to be correct. His deep intuition and uncanny algebraic manipulative ability enabled him to state results that were both original and highly unconventional, and these have inspired a vast amount of research.

Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), or Micropsia

The condition is in terms of perception only; the mechanics of the eye are not affected, only the brain's interpretation of information passed from the eyes. The syndrome is associated with, and perhaps in part caused by, the classical migraine headache. The disorder is named after Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the title character experiences many situations similar to those of micropsia and macropsia. Because Lewis Carroll recorded at least one episode of classical migraine, scholars have speculated that he may have experienced this syndrome himself.

Argentinosaurus, a herbivorous sauropod

Not much of Argentinosaurus has been recovered: just some back vertebrae, tibia, fragmentary ribs, and sacrum. One vertebra had a length of 1.3 metres and the tibia was about 155 centimetres (58 inches) However, the spectacular proportions of these bones and the familiarity of the species' sauropod relatives allows paleontologists to estimate that full-grown specimens reached some 35 metres (115 feet) in length. Weight was perhaps 80 to 100 tonnes. It is the largest dinosaur that there is good evidence for.

Relationship where one organism benefits and the other is unaffected

It is derived from the English word commensal, meaning the sharing of food, and used of human social interaction. The word derives from the Latin com mensa, meaning sharing a table. An inquiline is an animal that lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.

pH scale

pH is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution. Solutions with a pH less than seven are considered acidic, while those with a pH greater than seven are considered basic (alkaline). pH 7 is considered neutral because it is the pH of pure water at 25 °C.

Tachyons

To date, the existence of tachyons has been neither confirmed nor explicitly ruled out.

Fingerprints

There are also more complex classification systems that further break down patterns to plain arches or tented arches.

(c)Brain, considered the first computer virus for the PC

(c)Brain was written by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who lived in Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers told TIME magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from piracy and it was supposed to target copyright infringers only.

Seymour Cray (1925-1996), the architect of the Supercomputer

Iridium

The Iridium satellite constellation is a system of 66 active communication satellites and spares around the Earth. It allows worldwide voice and data communications using handheld devices. The Iridium network is unique in that it covers the whole earth, including poles, oceans and airways, however the service is interdicted due to American embargoes in North Korea, Iran, Libya and Sudan. The name was taken from the element Iridium, with the atomic number of 77 -- the size of the satellite constellation projected in the early stages of planning.

Broca's area

Broca's area is named after the 19th century physician Paul Broca who discovered it. He arrived at this discovery by studying the brains of aphasic patients (persons with speech and language disorders resulting from brain injuries).

Minamata disease

Symptoms include ataxia, numbness in the hands and feet, general muscle weakness, narrowing of the field of vision and damage to hearing and speech. In extreme cases, insanity, paralysis, coma and death follow within weeks of the onset of symptoms. It was caused by the release of methyl mercury in the industrial wastewater and this toxic chemical bioaccumulated in shellfish and fish in Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea, which when eaten by the local populace resulted in mercury poisoning.

Sidereal period

This is considered to be an object's true orbital period.

Gravitational slingshot (or) gravity assist

It is a commonly used maneuver for visiting the outer planets, which would otherwise either take far too long or require far too much fuel using current propulsion technologies. It was first developed in 1959 at the Department of Applied Mathematics of Steklov Institute and employed in the Luna 3 Moon mission. From a large distance, the spacecraft appears to have bounced off the planet. The Mariner 10 probe was the first spacecraft to use the effect to reach another planet, passing by Venus on February 5, 1974 on its way to becoming the first spacecraft to explore Mercury.

Hedy Lamarr

In 2003, the Boeing corporation ran a series of recruitment ads featuring Hedy Lamarr as a woman of science. No reference to her film career was made in the ads.

Raptor (velociraptor means 'swift robber')

The Velociraptor depicted in the Jurassic Park films were scientifically inaccurate in numerous ways. One major discrepancy is that the size of the Velociraptor in the film was much greater than their diminutive real-world counterparts. The size of the film's Velociraptor may also have been increased for dramatic reasons by Spielberg.

Pluto (dwarf planets)

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the official scientific body for astronomical nomenclature, defines a "dwarf planet" as a celestial body within the Solar System that satisfies these four conditions: 1) is in orbit around the Sun 2) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape 3) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit 4) is not a satellite.

Pioneer 10

It was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, and was the first to make direct observations of Jupiter. It is heading in the direction of the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus at roughly 2.6 AUs per year and if Aldebaran had zero relative velocity, it would take Pioneer about 2 million years to reach it. There is no longer communication with the probe; the last contact was in 2003 and in 2006 a final attempt at contact failed.

Polaroid photography

Among other things, he invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, instant polaroid photography, and his retinex theory of color vision. At one time, he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's richest scientist.

Snake eating

It is a specialized form of feeding of animals which hunt and eat snakes. There are ophiophagous mammals (such as the skunks and the mongooses), birds (such as snake eagles, the Secretary Bird, and some hawks), lizards, and even other snakes, such as the North American Common Kingsnake. There is even an entire genus of snakes named after this habit, Ophiophagus, with species such as the venomous King Cobra.

Buckyball or fullerene

The fullerenes, discovered in 1985 by researchers at Rice University, are a family of carbon allotropes named after Richard Buckminster Fuller and are sometimes called buckyballs. They are molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Buckminsterfullerene is the smallest fullerene in which no two pentagons share an edge. It is also the most common in terms of natural occurrence, as it can often be found in soot.

Paul Erdős

He (1913-1996) was an immensely prolific and famously eccentric Hungarian-born mathematician who, with hundreds of collaborators, worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.

Quark

Quarks are the only fundamental particles that interact through all four of the fundamental forces. They come in six flavors, and their names (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top) were also chosen arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be easily remembered and used. Antiparticles of quarks are called antiquarks.

Riemann hypothesis, formulated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859

A $1,000,000 prize has been offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the first correct proof. Most mathematicians believe the Riemann hypothesis to be true.

About 13 times

The Moon makes a complete orbit about the Earth with respect to the fixed stars (its sidereal period) approximately once every 27.3 days. However, since the Earth is moving in its orbit about the Sun at the same time, it takes slightly longer for the Moon to show its same phase to Earth, which is about 29.5 days (its synodic period). Unlike most satellites of other planets, the Moon orbits near the ecliptic and not the Earth's equatorial plane.

Parrot

As of February 2010, only 122 living individuals are known, most of which have been given names.