Pyrites

It is iron disulfide, FeS2, and is the most common of the sulfide minerals. The name pyrite is from the Greek word ðõñÜ (pura) meaning "fire". This is likely due to the sparks that result when pyrite is struck against steel. This capacity made it popular for use in early firearms such as the wheellock.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy." He is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology (see History of ecology).

Portland cement

It is a fine powder produced by grinding Portland cement clinker (more than 90%), a maximum of about 5% gypsum which controls the set time, and up to 5% minor constituents (as allowed by various standards).

Potassium

Apart from Potassium, Bananas are a valuable source of Vitamin A, Vitamin B6 and Vitamin C. The fruit averages 125g, of which approximately 75% is water and 25% dry matter content.

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.

Chilean Sea Bass

Illegal overfishing threatens the species in some areas, as it is slow-growing, reaching maturity between ten and twelve years of age. The longline fishery has also been criticised for drowning thousands of seabirds, including albatrosses.

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).

Another name for the big toe

Geber (Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan, 721– c. 815)

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.

Clouds. Stratus means 'layer' and cumulus means 'piled up'

These two cloud types are divided into four more groups that distinguish the cloud's altitude - High, Medium, Low and Vertical.

CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research)

The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. As of 2007, about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN. As an international facility, the CERN sites are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, and some company vehicles have diplomatic number plates.

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.

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.

Oxygen

Merino

AIDS

Technically, it is a biochemical technique used mainly in immunology to detect the presence of an antibody or an antigen in a sample. It has also found applications in the food industry in detecting potential food allergens such as milk, peanuts, walnuts, almonds, and eggs.

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.

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.

Fingerprints

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

Messerschmitt Bf 109

It was one of the first true modern fighters of the era, including such features as an all-metal monocoque construction, a closed canopy, and retractable landing gear. The Bf 109 was the standard fighter of the Luftwaffe for the duration of World War II, although it began to be partially replaced by the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 starting in 1941. The Bf 109 scored more aircraft kills in World War II than any other aircraft. Although the Bf 109 had weaknesses, including a short range, and especially a sometimes difficult to handle narrow, outward-retracting undercarriage, it stayed competitive with Allied fighter aircraft until the end of the war.

~ 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.

He was the head Soviet rocket engineer and designer during the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although trained as an aircraft designer, Korolyov's greatest strengths proved to be in design integration, organization and strategic planning. He oversaw the successes of the Sputnik and Vostok projects.

A relationship between two living organisms, where one organism benefits and the other is neither harmed nor helped.

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.

Equilibrioception

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.

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".

The Okapi

Although it bears striped markings reminiscent of the zebra, the Okapi is most closely related to the giraffe. Native just to the Ituri forests situated in the north east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was known only to the local people until 1901.

Ganymede

It is Jupiter's moon, and the largest moon in the entire solar system.

Orange

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

A facelift

Literally meaning 'surgical removal of wrinkles', it is a procedure used in plastic surgery to give a more youthful appearance. It usually involves the removal of excess facial skin, with or without the tightening of underlying tissues, and the redraping the skin on the patient's face and neck.

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.

The spacecraft Pioneer 10

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, and was the first spacecraft to make direct observations of Jupiter. It was launched from Cape Canaveral on March 2, 1972. 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.

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.

Water

Blood is about 7% of the human body weight, so the average adult has a blood volume of about 5 litres, of which 2.7-3 litres is plasma.

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.

An 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.

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.

Tuberculosis, just as deadly

The World Health Organization declared TB a global health emergency in 1993, and the Stop TB Partnership proposed a Global Plan to Stop Tuberculosis which aims to save 14 million lives between 2006 and 2015.

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.

The skin!

This applies to exterior surface, as it covers the body, appearing to have the largest surface area of all the organs. Moreover, it applies to weight, as it weighs more than any single internal organ, accounting for about 15 percent of body weight. For the average adult human, the skin has a surface area of between 1.5-2.0 square meters, most of it is between 2-3 mm thick.

The Riemann hypothesis (also called the Riemann zeta-hypothesis), first 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.

Mammals that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young.

The only surviving examples of monotremes are all indigenous to Australia and New Guinea, although there is evidence that they were once more widespread.

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.

Tachyons

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

Hedy Lamarr

True Trivia, if there were ever one! 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.

Schrödinger's cat

The thought experiment serves to illustrate the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the mathematics necessary to describe quantum states. The idea of a particle existing in a superposition of possible states, while a fact of quantum mechanics, is a concept that does not scale to large systems (like cats), which are not indeterminably probabilistic in nature. Philosophically, these positions which emphasize either probability or determined outcomes are called (respectively) positivism and determinism.

Monkey puzzle (X is monkey)

The proud owner of a young specimen in Cornwall was showing it to a group of friends, and one made the remark "It would puzzle a monkey to climb that"; as the tree species had no existing popular name, first 'monkey-puzzler', then 'monkey-puzzle' stuck. As a practical exercise, a monkey trying to climb one would not be so much puzzled as injured by the razor-sharp leaf edges.

The Astrolabe

Western Redcedar

The h index

By definition, a scholar with an index of h has published h papers with at least h citations each. Thus, the h-index is the result of the balance between the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. The index is designed to improve upon simpler measures such as the total number of citations or publications, to distinguish truly influential scientists from those who simply publish many papers. The index is also not affected by single papers that have many citations. The index works properly only for comparing scientists working in the same field; citation conventions differ widely among different fields.

Aluminium

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.

The 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.

Amur (or Siberian) tiger is the largest and the Sumatran tiger is the smallest

The 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.

Bertrand Russell, in his autobiography

Russell's adolescence was very lonely and he remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests were in sex, religion and mathematics. Russell is generally recognised as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, even of its several branches.

Sidereal Period

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

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743 – 1794)

He stated the first version of the Law of conservation of mass, co-discovered, recognized and named oxygen (1778) as well as hydrogen, disproved the phlogiston theory, introduced the Metric system, invented the first periodic table including 33 elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature.

The Kakapo

Also called owl parrot, it is endemic to New Zealand and is currently listed as critically endangered.

Cluster Headaches

It has been described in medical journals as one of the most severe pain syndromes suffered by human beings. Medically, cluster headaches are considered benign, but because of the extreme and often debilitating pain associated with them, a severe attack is nevertheless treated as a medical emergency by doctors who are familiar with the condition.

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.

Boabab

Some are reputed to be many thousands of years old, though as the wood does not produce annual growth rings, this is impossible to verify; few botanists give any credence to these claims of extreme age. It is the national tree of Madagascar and is known colloquially as "upside-down tree" (from the Arabic legend which claims that the devil pulled out the tree and planted it upside down).

Isabelline penguins

This is possibly in reference to the legend that the archduchess Isabella of Austria vowed not to change her undergarments until her husband united the northern and southern Low Countries by taking the city of Ostend--which took three years to accomplish. Isabellinism is different from albinism, though the faded color of the plumage calls albinism to mind. Isabelline penguins tend to live shorter lives than normal specimens, since their backs aren't well camouflaged against the deep, and they are often passed over as mates, so the trait is selected against.

Dry ice

A combination of its low temperature, solid phase and direct sublimation to gas makes it a simple and effective coolant.

The Saffir-Simpson

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.

The 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.

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.)

4-6 hrs

Only the transparent section of the eyes (called cornea) is taken out and not the full eye ball.

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.

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.

Lemmings (this belief is not true).

Lemmings will often migrate in large groups and as a result some lemmings will occasionally be pushed off cliffs or drowned in bodies of water simply by the press of their compatriots. The myth of lemming mass suicide has been popularized by The Walt Disney Company documentary 'White Wilderness' which includes footage of lemmings running head-long over a ledge. However, the filmmakers contrived this scene. Due to their association with this odd behavior, Lemmings are a frequently-used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 - 1920)

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.

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).

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.

88

Examples are Ursa Major (containing the Big Dipper), Orion (containing a figure of a hunter), Leo (containing bright stars outlining the form of a lion) and Scorpius (a scorpion).

Ceres and Eris

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

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.

Otzi (Frozen Fritz and Similaun Man are also used)

Leptons

There are three known flavors of lepton: the electron, the muon, and the tau.

The 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.

One which inhabits or spends large amounts of time in trees or bushes.

Paul Erdos

Erdos (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.

5

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. Enterprise 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.

The Seikan Tunnel

It is a 53.85 km (33.49 mile) railway tunnel in Japan, with a 23.3 km (14.5 mile) portion under the seabed. It travels beneath the Tsugaru Strait — connecting the islands of Honshû and Hokkaidô. The Channel tunnel is 51.5kms (31 miles) long, but with an undersea section of 39kms (24 miles), it is the longest undersea tunnel in the world.

(c)Brain, considered to be 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.

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.