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Hi all,
I thought it might be fun to start a thread about all our favourite sciency-type words and names for things - there sure are some funny ones out there!!
To start off, I am going to offer up two of my own favourites:
Hepatosplenomegaly (an enlarged liver and spleen often due to a parasitic infection)
Scaphagnothite (if my memory serves me well, this is a part of a crab that acts like a windscreen wiper, brushing food particles that have entered through the gills down to the edge of the carapace to be taken into the alimentary canal)
I look forward to hearing yours...
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GAS
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always a good one - somehow liquid and solid were never that funny!
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Radon.
tee hee hee...radon.. [:D]
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ben i thought urs was honkey remameber? last year Mr.s A's class?
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Hey! It was a good guess! She even said so when she wasn't argueing with you for the whole period.
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nucleus
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Apoptosis - it means programmed cell death, but it's a lovely word to say.
And following on from Hepatosplenomegaly - just the word 'Spleen' is a good one.
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A phrase 'Material Buckling Factor' beacuse it has nothing to do with materials buckling!
(It tells you the power-shape of a reactor with a moderator made of the material you're interested in).
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Not so much a science term as an IT term: Regular backups are called "Periodic Massive Dumps"
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I put this in general science from the chat room because I wanted people to define the words that they post...
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Haemoglobin. Testes [;)]
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
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Hi all,
my favourite Science word could be:
...was SERENDIPITOUSLY found...
(485,000 catches on Google)
(280 citations on PubMed)
so basic in scientific research!
ikod [^]
Penicillin
Penicillin was originally isolated from the Penicillium chrysogenum (formerly Penicillium notatum) mold. The antibiotic effect was originally discovered by a young French medical student Ernest Duchesne studying Penicillium glaucum in 1896, but his discovery was ignored by the Institut Pasteur.
It was serendipitously rediscovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, who noticed a halo of inhibition of bacterial growth around a contaminant blue-green mold on a Staphylococcus culture. Fleming concluded that the mold was releasing a substance that was inhibiting bacterial growth. He grew a pure culture and discovered that the fungus was Penicillium notatum � he later named the bacterial inhibiting substance penicillin after the Penicillium notatum that released it. Fleming was convinced after conducting some more experiments that penicillin could not last long enough in the human body to kill pathogenic bacteria and stopped studying penicillin after 1931. It would prove to be the discovery that changed modern medicine. In 1939, Australian Howard Walter Florey and a team of researchers at Oxford University made significant progress in showing Penicillin’s in vivo ability to kill infectious bacteria.
Penicillin was being mass-produced in earnest in 1944
During World War II, penicillin made a major difference in the number of deaths and amputations caused by infected wounds amongst Allied forces. Availability was severely limited, however, by the difficulty of manufacturing large quantities of penicillin and by the rapid renal clearance of the drug necessitating frequent dosing. Penicillins are actively secreted and about 80% of a penicillin dose is cleared within three to four hours of administration. During those times it became common procedure to collect the urine from patients being treated so that the penicillin could be isolated and reused. (Silverthorn, 2004)
This was not a satisfactory solution, however, so researchers looked for a way to slow penicillin secretion. They hoped to find a molecule that could compete with penicillin for the organic acid transporter responsible for secretion such that the transporter would preferentially secrete the competitive inhibitor. The uricosuric agent probenecid proved to be suitable. When probenecid and penicillin are concomitantly administered, probenecid competitively inhibits the secretion of penicillin, increasing its concentration and prolonging its activity. The advent of mass-production techniques and semi-synthetic penicillins solved supply issues, and this use of probenecid declined. (Silverthorn, 2004) Probenecid is still clinically useful, however, for certain infections requiring particularly high concentrations of penicillins. (Rossi, 2004)
The chemical structure of penicillin was determined by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in the early 1940s, enabling synthetic production. A team of Oxford research scientists led by Australian Howard Walter Florey and including Ernst Boris Chain and Norman Heatley discovered a method of mass producing the drug. Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel prize in medicine with Fleming for this work. Penicillin has since become the most widely used antibiotic to date and is still used for many Gram-positive bacterial infections.
from: http://www.spmclanka.com/cms/
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Crystallography
(from the Greek words crystallon = cold drop / frozen drop, with its meaning extending to all solids with some degree of transparency, and graphite is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in solids.
In older usage, it is the scientific study of crystals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallography
Diffraction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction
Single Helix DNA Structure
And of Course
Rosalind Franklin !!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi32.tinypic.com%2F1zdybf9.jpg&hash=659d1803047adb8bfd18976d5070c3ba)
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Buckminsterfullerene - a C60 allotrope of carbon discovered by a scientist and named after an architect. [???]
Spherical forms are called Buckyballs. [:0]
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Truth
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Give me "rigour" any time.
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phenylphaline an indicator, laxative and a word with two phs in it. Fancy being an indicator and having ph twice in your name.
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Herpetologist. I thought it was someone who studied herpes [:)]
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Wasn't Herpes that Greek god with wings on his feet?
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Wasn't Herpes that Greek god with wings on his feet?
That was HERMES, dummy!
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.culturacampania.rai.it%2Fsite%2F_contentimages%2F00037700%2F37752_foto%2520hermes.bmp&hash=5bcc4d4080e1bafe6336050a139ee59c)
http://www.culturacampania.rai.it/site/_contentimages/00037700/37752_foto%20hermes.bmp
...favourite word? odd beaver soil! or old fever boil? [;)]
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No. Hermes is an aircraft carrier. That wingy-footed shirt-lifter could never carry an aircraft.
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No. Hermes is a aircraft carrier. That wingy-footed shirt-lifter could never carry an aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)
The Greek God Atlas could lift more than an aeroplane because he could carry the whole world on his Back !!
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No. Hermes is a aircraft carrier. That wingy-footed shirt-lifter could never carry an aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)
The Greek God Atlas could lift more than an aeroplane because he could carry the whole world on his Back !!
And he invented map books.
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No. Hermes is a aircraft carrier. That wingy-footed shirt-lifter could never carry an aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)
The Greek God Atlas could lift more than an aeroplane because he could carry the whole world on his Back !!
And he invented map books.
That Atlas is just part of a myth not real like the Cartographer (map-maker), Mercator was and he made the first world cylindrical maps too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
I like that word Cartography as well, after all maps of all sorts affect us all daily whether it's the book version or the SatNavs etc.
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No. Hermes is a aircraft carrier. That wingy-footed shirt-lifter could never carry an aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)
The Greek God Atlas could lift more than an aeroplane because he could carry the whole world on his Back !!
And he invented map books.
That Atlas is just part of a myth not real like the Cartographer (map-maker), Mercator was and he made the first world cylindrical maps too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
I like that word Cartography as well, after all maps of all sorts affect us all daily whether it's the book version or the SatNavs etc.
Most importantly, Atlas invented this special bone&joint
which makes you shake your head desperately...
when you read some dumb questions in here! [;D]
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uccofmonmouth.com%2Fimages%2Fatlasaxis3-BB.jpg&hash=b69b24c6acbb83dfb2e3077382a669c9)
http://www.uccofmonmouth.com/images/atlasaxis3-BB.jpg
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KNOWLEDGE
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No. Hermes is a aircraft carrier. That wingy-footed shirt-lifter could never carry an aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)
The Greek God Atlas could lift more than an aeroplane because he could carry the whole world on his Back !!
And he invented map books.
That Atlas is just part of a myth not real like the Cartographer (map-maker), Mercator was and he made the first world cylindrical maps too.
What an idiot. Everyone knows the world isn't cylindrical [::)]
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When Mercator researched his maps, everyone thought that the world was FLAT !!
I know that the world is round, then they didn't have the technology that we do now.
Wiki
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator, in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant true bearing or true course, known as rhumb lines, as straight line segments. While the direction and shapes are accurate on a Mercator projection, it distorts size, in an increasing degree away from
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When Mercator researched his maps, everyone thought that the world was FLAT !!
No they didn't. That the world was a sphere had been known since Aristotle's time.
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When Mercator researched his maps, everyone thought that the world was FLAT !!
No they didn't. That the world was a sphere had been known since Aristotle's time.
Then why did the Ancient Greek Sailors as legend says that they would fall of the ends of the flat earth?
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You've been watching too many Hollywood movies.
from http://www.iki.rssi.ru/mirrors/stern/stargaze/Scolumb.htm (http://www.iki.rssi.ru/mirrors/stern/stargaze/Scolumb.htm)
Today it is well known that the Earth is a sphere, or very close to one (its equator bulges out a bit because of the Earth's rotation). When Christopher Columbus proposed to reach India by sailing west from Spain, he too knew that the Earth was round.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus)
Following Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus, Americans commonly believed Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because Europeans thought the Earth was flat.[4] In fact, the primitive maritime navigation of the time relied on the stars and the curvature of the spherical Earth. The knowledge that the Earth was spherical was widespread and the means of calculating its diameter using an astrolabe was known to both scholars and navigators[5]. The spherical view of the earth had been the general opinion of Ancient Greek science, and continued as the standard view in the Middle Ages (for example of Bede in The Reckoning of Time). In fact the Earth had generally been believed to be spherical since the 4th century BCE by most scholars and almost all navigators[citation needed], and Eratosthenes had measured the diameter of the Earth with good precision in the second century BC[6].
from http://iq.lycos.co.uk/qa/show/17270/Who+discovered+that+the+world+was+round%3F/ (http://iq.lycos.co.uk/qa/show/17270/Who+discovered+that+the+world+was+round%3F/)
Nobody is sure who first deduced that the world is round. It is most likely that it was done by observing the Earth's shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse. Aristotle (384-322 BC) said that it was common knowledge, at least among the learned, so it's been known for at least 2,500 years.
We do know that Eratosthenes of Cyrene was the first to accurately estimate the Earth's diameter, around 220 BC. How he did it is detailed at Astronomy Online.
What he did was use the information that, at noon on the Summer Solstice, the sun shone to the bottom of a well in Syene (now called Aswan), Egypt. This meant that the sun was making a 90° angle to the ground on that day, in Syene.
Eratosthenes then measured the angle of sunlight to the ground in Alexandria, Egypt, at noon on the same day. He used that angle to calculate what fraction of the Earth's circumference (which is 360°) was between Alexandria and Syene. Since he knew the distance to Syene, and that it was exactly south of Alexandria, he was able to calculate the Earth's circumference.
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I thought a cartographer was someone who designed menus.
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I thought a cartographer was someone who designed menus.
NO, a cartographer is a map-maker and it's a Greek Word (I don't understand that language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography
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Thats right, it's from ΚΑΡΤOΣ (a menu) and ΓΡΑΦOΣ ( a designer).
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Arsole.
It's an organic molecule, honest it is ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsole
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Arsole.
It's an organic molecule, honest it is ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsole
Here is a short explanation of a Molecule - A french word.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecules
Join that up with a Chromosome and you get DNA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomes
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Fucitol, is another organic compound.
It and other comic compounds can be found here. (http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm)
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If your favourite word is phenolphthalein, shouldn't you be able to spell it?
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Here is a short explanation of a Molecule - A french word.
Yeah, and it was Descartes who coined it - the greatest original thinker EVER, and he wasn't even a scientist but a philosopher [::)].
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Isn't a molecule a small mole? [???]
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Yeah, and it was Descartes who coined it - the greatest original thinker EVER, and he wasn't even a scientist but a philosopher [::)].
A "freelance philosopher" such as yourself should know that the predecessor of modern science was "natural philosophy"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
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Isn't a molecule a small mole? [???]
LOL LOL LOL LOL
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A "freelance philosopher" such as yourself should know that the predecessor of modern science was "natural philosophy"...
Surely - but what I intended was that he was more interested in the 'mind' bit and the abstract ideas of mathematics rather than the deterministic/material stuff like mucking about with apparatus. Although he did fiddle with compasses and hydrostatics and was interested in medicine and the prolonging of life as well as dissecting and vivisecting animals. On reflection he was probably more 'scientific' in the modern sense than is generally thought as he is remembered mostly for the epistemological - "What can I know?" - stuff.