Friday, September 16, 2016

Thismia, a flowering-plant genus named after the English microscopist Thomas Smith

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Smithia → a, h, i, i, m, s, t → Thismia As the above line shows, the word Thismia is an anagram . It is a play on the last name of the ...
Saturday, August 13, 2016

Phylloxera vastatrix, meaning “devastator of vines”

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Literally, Phylloxera vastatrix means dry-leaf devastator . The binomial term is composed of three words of the following origins: the Gre...
Thursday, August 11, 2016

VINE and WINE, a word pair with differences in pronunciation and meaning

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The nouns vine and wine look similar and sound similar—they rhyme. Yet, the two words differ in pronunciation and meaning.  The beginning...
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Sunday, March 27, 2016

Brexit, short for “British exit” and costly for Great Britain and Europe

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The portmanteau Brexit stands for “British exit.” This term mirrors the abbreviation Grexit , referring to the (potential) withdrawal of G...
Friday, November 6, 2015

“Tree of Life” associations

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The term Tree of Life is associated with words such as biodiversity , phylogeny and taxonomy . In the 1970s, Carl Woese and his coworker...
Friday, October 30, 2015

A twisted, racetrack-shaped torus to generate and confine a plasma: the stellarator

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A stellarator is a nuclear-fusion device invented in the early 1950s by American astrophysicist and plasma physicist Lyman Spitzer (19...
Sunday, October 25, 2015

Frank's introduction to stock market terms

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Stock market trading goes back over about two centuries. When telegraphy revolutionized long-distance communication in the 1840s and faci...