Please click the heading to reveal the answer.
Please click the heading to reveal the answer.
A rotational ambigram presents a different instance of the word when rotated - usually 180°, but it could be 90° or 45°. A simple example is the abbreviation for the word 'down' - dn - which when rotated turns into "up". A mirror ambigram is exactly that - a design that can be read when reflected in a mirror. "Bud" would be a quick example.
Ambigrams have been used on album covers (Chaos and Creation in the backyard by Paul McCartney), book covers (Angels and Demons by Dan Brown), logos (the 4S logo for Sun Microsystems) and comic books, amongst a myriad applications.
If this is interesting to you, it's worth exploring all the types and examples of ambigrams - they're really clever, and might even tempt you to come up with your own.
Certain animals exposed to cold water swimming have the ability to raise their body temperatures before they start swimming or diving. The best example is the cormorant, a fishing bird that has retained the ability to fly. Because it has to fly, it of course is much smaller and therefore less well insulated than the flightless penguin. Penguins are able to swim in cold water for much longer than the cormorant because the penguin has a large fat layer to insulate it.
Anticipatory thermogenesis refers to a condition in which the body begins to heat up by producing extra heat prior to cold exposure. This is probably a function of the sympathetic nervous system which activates metabolism in the muscles and fat cells which increase heat production raising the body temperature.
In the case of Lewis Pugh, his anticipatory thermogenesis could elevate his body temperature to 38.4 degrees centigrade which is 1.4 degrees centigrade higher than the normal resting body temperature.
Anticipatory thermogenesis was first reported in Japanese cold water divers on the island of Ama. In the winter months when the water temperature is lower, these divers were able to raise their body temperature by elevating their metabolic rate therefore sustaining more dives in winter than would have been possible without this mechanism.
Source: Professor Timothy D Noakes
MBChB, MD, DSc, FACSM
Humans are copycats by nature – we see something we like in magazines, in the movies, on a friend and we copy it. So, it comes as no big surprise that we turn to nature when we want to find solutions on how to fly, swim underwater or navigate by night.
Biomimetics is a term used for those engineering systems that make use of traits observed in biology. It may be a relatively new term, but the practice of borrowing from nature is old. Even the earliest stone-age implements mimicked attributes of other animals, such as claws used for digging or teeth used for ripping meat.
The field has expanded into a myriad of exciting ventures - think robotic insect spies, human gills and more…
The term generally refers to voluntary acts by individuals or companies that are commonly arranged by commercial or not-for-profit carbon-offset providers.
Carbon offsetting as part of a "carbon neutral" lifestyle (also known as erasing your “carbon footprint”) has gained some appeal and momentum mainly among consumers in western countries who have become aware and concerned about the potentially negative effects of energy-demanding lifestyles and economies on the environment.
You can practice carbon offset in a number ways - while tree planting has initially been a mainstay of carbon offsetting, renewable energy (wind and water power, solar energy and bio-fuel) and energy conservation offsets have now become increasingly popular.
The reason we can use a Cepheid to measure distance is because the speed that it pulses at is directly related to how bright it is. This means we can work out how much brighter than our Sun the star is, and from there we can calculate how much further away it must be to make it the brightness we see from Earth.
This pulsing is not a healthy symptom for a star, however. Cepheids are actually dying. Late in their lives, stars become swollen red giants, and after that most of them change into pulsating variable stars, before they finally die.
The word chronometer is also used to describe watches that have been tested and certified to meet very high standards of precision. In Switzerland, only watches certified by the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute may use the word 'Chronometer'.
This clock is actually a pair of pinhead-sized brain structures that contain about 20,000 neurons. It’s in a part of your brain called the hypothalamus. Your biological clock not only controls when you feel sleepy, but also things like your body temperature, hormone secretion, urine production, and changes in your blood pressure.
Your circadian rhythm is approximately 24-hours, and if it gets disrupted it can be very unpleasant. For example, when travellers pass from one time zone to another, they suffer from disrupted circadian rhythms. They experience this as an uncomfortable feeling known as jet lag.
The term "circadian" comes from the Latin. Circa means "around", and dies means "day", so its meaning is literally "about a day".
This is the answer to clue “crossword puzzle fan (14 letters)”. If you’re a lover of the monochromatic rectancles or compile them yourself, you are a cruciverbalist.
The word is a modern mock-Latin invention, being a translation back into Latin of the English crossword (using Latin crucis, cross, as in words like cruciform, plus verbum, word, as in verbose or verbatim).
As mathematicians and scientists you’ll appreciate the importance of this word.
Remember your first introduction to the marvelous world of Math? What was your most important tool then? Your fingers of course! They were the instruments guiding you through those killer 1 + 1 equations.
Dactylonomy is the art of counting on your fingers. But the plot thickens…
We only count each finger as one - die-hard dactylonomists divide their fingers into knuckles, two joints and three bones (one joint and two bones for the thumb) and all of them, on both hands, are used to count up to 9,999!
There are descriptions of this method from the Middle East, Asia, Greece, Rome and other places and paintings exist from more than four thousand years ago showing Egyptians counting in this way.
The word is from Greek daktulos, finger, plus –nomia, related to nomos, law, that we use to mark some specified area of knowledge.
No, it’s not the study of Puff the Magic Dragon and Co, even though that would make more sense. Dracontology refers to the study of lake animals unknown to science. It’s one of the specialist branches of cryptozoology - the study of animals unknown to science (which I’m sure Hagrid majored in at Hogwarts). The superstars that feature in this branch of science are the Loch Ness monster of Scotland and the serpent of Lake Memphrémagog on the Quebec-Vermont border.
Embodied energy – or emergy – is the amount of energy you need to make or do something and to get it to the place where it will be used.
You can think of it as a sort of energy accounting. Sometimes the concept of emergy is used to figure out how much oil is used by different aspects of the economy. Sometimes scientists use it to work out how much sunlight is used by different parts of the ecology.
Embodied energy as a concept seeks to measure the "true" energy cost of an item.
This is a phobia half (or even more) of the population suffers from. It usually occurs on Sunday evenings. Some people call it the Sunday-blues. You probably had a bad case of it just before school started. Guessed the meaning already? Yip, you’ve got it – we’ve all suffered from ‘fear of work’ at one time or another.
Ergophobia is a chronic ailment coined by a doctor named W D Spanton, writing in the British Medical Journal in 1905. He did so in all seriousness, recognising that it can be a real medical condition, an abnormal or persistent fear of work and the workplace.
Don’t go getting any ideas now! You probably won’t find a doctor that will diagnose you with this one…
The term actually refers to any exercise you perform whilst playing a video game. What started with the Nintendo Power Pad and the Power Glove in 1989 have evolved into the fully blown exergame-mania of Wii.
One of the Wii's distinguishing features is that it requires players to act out their character's movements, swinging the game's controller like a tennis racket or wielding it like a sword. People are actually complaining about the physicality with the term “Wii elbow” now being used to refer to arm injuries from playing too much.
Scientists at the European Southern Observatory recently detected an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star called Gliese 581 that can possibly support life with its Earth-like temperatures.
On some places on the earth there are extremely hostile environments, where pressure can be much higher than normal, where temperatures are either very high or very low, or where liquids are very acidic or alkaline or salty, for example. The only things that can live here are specially adapted organisms known as extremophiles. In fact, extremophiles need these crazy conditions to thrive in.
The most extreme conditions tolerated by extremophiles are found one mile down, on the ocean floor, at cracks in the Earth's crust called hydrothermal vents. Organisms there must live without any light, at pressures 600 times greater than atmospheric pressure and tolerate temperatures up to 110 degrees Celsius. At least they don’t have to do PT, though...
Fission can occur when a nucleus of a heavy atom captures a neutron, or it can happen spontaneously.
Know a silly, scatterbrained person? Well, now there is also a name for them…
Flibbertigibbet is an onomatopoeic representation which means it was cleverly constructed to sound like the action/person it is describing (think of the sound of a scatterbrained person’s chatter…)
Apparently a favourite with Shakespeare as well, Flibbertigibbet was used in King Lear, and I quote, “the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet”. It also appears in The Sound of Music in the song “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?”
How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find the word that means Maria?
A flibbertigibbet, a will-o'-the-wisp, a clown.
So what's your 'googleability' quotient? No clue? Well, then check it out right away because if the world's biggest search engine can't trace you in less than a second, then you are a certified also-ran!
News reports say that 'googleability' is now a primary baby-naming requirement, which means that parents want names for their children which will work well for web searches. That’s why parents are increasingly giving their kids an unusual name, so that they might be in the first top 10 search results.
Even though you may not be aware of it, you practice a form of haplology everyday. You use it every time you txt a friend. Know what I’m tlking about?
Haplology is the omission of one of a pair of sounds or syllables.
The word was (prophetically) invented long before cellphones came in use by the American philologist Maurice Bloomfield at the end of the nineteenth century. He derived it from the Greek haplos, one or single, and –logy, a word or speech.
It’s very common in English speech to drop the second of a pair of repeated sounds like this. A nice irony is that haplology is just the sort of word to which haplology happens...
Source: World Wide Words
Hygroscopic substances attract water from the air, so they need to be stored in airtight containers to keep them dry. Some examples of hygroscopic substances are honey and glycerine (the stuff in jelly). Some plants use hygroscopy to help them spread their seeds.
Don’t get confused between hygroscopy and hydroscopy. A hydroscope is a piece of equipment for seeing things deep under water.
You know that tone of voice your dad uses when he’s discovered you did something very wrong: “You did WHAT?!” An interrobang is the punctuation mark that is best suited to describe his tone of voice – a mix between an exclamation mark and a question mark (It’s not yet standard, so don’t go using it in your essays just yet.)
The interrobang was invented by Martin Speckter, head of a New York advertising agency. It’s is a combination of interrogation, for the question mark, with bang, an old printer’s term for the exclamation mark.
Source: World Wide Words
Is this your favourite section of the website? Is the dictionary your favourite read? If the answer is ‘yes’, you could be ‘suffering’ from logolepsy (I put it in inverted commas because I think words are marvelous and perhaps suffer from it myself!)
Being a logoleptic words will be your obsession. You’ll probably write down the words you don’t understand in the newspaper to look up later, or you’ll giggle with delight when watching Mary Poppins and hearing ‘super-cali-fradulistic-expi-ale-do-cious’(And Roald Dahl is probably your favourite author seeing as he seemed to have been a logoleptic himself!).
Does anybody know what 'My Very Elegant Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Porcupines’ represent? Or what about 'Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain'? Never heard of these sentences before? Let me enlighten you: The first sentence represent the order of the planets in the Solar System and the second one, the colours on the spectrum (as seen in a rainbow). Clever way to remember them, isn’t it?
These little devices are called mnemonics and they are simple formulas and rhymes used to aid us in remembering lists, dates, names and more.
Can you see those A’s lining up on your report card?
As mobile TV content becomes more popular, it’s also being changed to be more suitable for snacking TV episodes for cell phones will become ‘mobisodes' - small made-for-mobile episodes that cater to bite-sized portions of content on the go.
Do you shop till you drop? Chase the thrill of the bill? If the answer is ‘yes’, you could be suffering from a case of oniomania.
We identify somebody with oniomania as a shopaholic. They have an uncontrollable desire to buy things and in doing so acquire mental relaxation.
The reasons for oniomania are various: fears, depressions, emotional emptiness, low self-esteem. Buying serves as remedy for these feelings.
It’s quite a new and exciting branch of science too. Although we have information about hurricanes and cyclones that go back several hundred years, we to go back thousands of years to get a real idea of how often to expect them.
Insurance companies are beginning to realize this. And because they’ve got a lot of money on the line, they’ve started to pay for scientific research into prehistoric storms.
Try using Paleotempestology in a sentence and watch the expressions on your friends’ faces. Go on, we dare you!
A few of you have probably started to practice the art of pogonotrophy… You’re not allowed to practice the full art of it though – at this stage you’re forced to be more into pogonotomy. Confused? Ok, pogonotrophy refers to the art of growing a beard and pogotonomy means cutting your beard.
They both originate in the greek word ‘pogon’ which means beard. Pogonotomy has the ‘tomia’ ending which means cutting, whereas ‘trophe’ means nourishment.
Maybe you should ask your teacher if you can practise pogonotrophy. Not knowing what it means and wanting to hide this fact, they might even say yes!
Try saying it 5 times fast… Well, it’s better to say it than to do it, because this tongue twister refers to the habit of nose-picking – obsessive nose-picking to be precise.
It looks like an example of word invention for its own sake but has appeared in quite a few scientific publications. Some believe it may be an imitation of trichotillomania, an older term for a compulsive desire to pull out one’s hair which derives from the Greek tillesthai, meaning ‘to pull out’.
Eeuw!
This refers to a word, phrase or sentence that makes sense when reversed, but is not the same as the original. Confused? Take ‘diaper’ for instance…When you reverse it you get ‘repaid’. Or ‘god’ reversed gives you ‘dog’.
A semordnilap is the brother of the palindrome – a string of letters that reads the same backwards and forwards (“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”; “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”).
Did you notice that ‘semordnilap’ is ‘palindrome’ spelt backwards? We call this self-referential because it encapsulates within itself the thing that it represents.
No, it’s not what you get when you’ve been promoted lots of times! The idea of superposition claims that if you don’t know what state an object is in, it’s actually in all states at once. It’s only when you look to see that the object can be classified as being in one state or another.
A scientist called Schrodinger came up with a way to show how superposition works. Here's Schrödinger's theoretical (and really nasty!) experiment: You put a living cat into a box, along with some poison and a device to trigger the release of the poison. However, you can’t know when, or even if, the poison is released and the cat killed.
Since you don’t know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in what’s known as a superposition of states. The cat only becomes dead or alive when you open the box and look. If you can wrap your head around this one, you’re already well on your way to becoming a quantum physicist!
Is Wednesday red? Do melodies have colour? If ‘yes’ is your answer, you are a synaesthete…
The word refers to a person for whom sense impressions occur through stimulation of a different sense to that expected. Huh? How’s that possible you might ask? Well, the term is actually quite common in the psychological and artistic fields. It refers to a type of ‘cross-wiring’ in the brain, so that things which ought to be perceived by one sense are instead felt in another.
Colour seems to be a main component. For a synaesthete, the words on this phone screen might have colour associations; many musicians say that different keys evoke characteristic colours; or those affected may experience the sense of taste as hues.
The term synaesthesia was coined at the end of the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton for what had been and sometimes is still called coloured hearing. He derived it on the model of anaesthesia from the Greek prefix syn–, for things that are like one another, plus aisthesis, meaning sensation.
Be sure to use “twitterpated” in your next love letter. It means head over heels ‘besotted’ with your object of desire.
A contributor to the Urban Dictionary defined it as “An enjoyable disorder characterized by feelings of excitement, anticipation, high hopes, recent memories of interludes, giddiness, and physical overstimulation which occur simultaneously when experiencing a new love.”
Quite a lot of feelings all at once! But that’s love for you…
Source: World Wide Words
We all know that our tongue can distinguish only four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and that all tastes are combinations of these. Umami is apparently the fifth taste…
Western science is still unsure about whether it really exists or not. The word and the concept are both Japanese and when translated to English, means savoury, essence, pungent, deliciousness and meaty. It is said to be triggered by compounds of some amino acids, such as glutamates or aspartates, especially the flavour-enhancing substance monosodium glutamate (what we know as MSG).
Source: World Wide Words
Upcycling is the glamorous sister of recycling. Instead of just recycling materials to use as the same product again and again, upcycling ‘ups’ the game and refers to a process where would-be garbage is taken and through reimagining, reusing and reinventing a new product is created with a higher quality or value than the original materials.
The term was coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in a book called ‘Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.’ They used the term to describe the process of taking something that’s essentially waste and moving it up the consumer-goods chain.
A web crawler (also known as a Web spider or Web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.
Web crawlers are also called ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms.
Ants? Worms? Spiders?! It‘s a jungle out there.
Next time you’re having a wee problem with your connection, try dialling an entomologist. They appear to be better equipped to handle the job!
This means to surf aimlessly around the Web without any real purpose. It derives from an acronym for "What was I looking for"? (Does it sound familiar?)
And the noun would therefore be "Wilfer". We can certainly say that we fall under wilfing's spell every now and then - you're researching a topic for HIP, and before you know it - you're watching animal videos on youTube.
Anyway - back to the word. A YouGov survey revealed that 70% of all web users have succumbed at one stage or another. And that you're more likely to wilf if you're under 25. And that men are more prone to wilfing than women.
So to all the teenage males reading this article - beware, you're prime wilfing candidates! And be extra careful when going to news, travel and music sites - according to the research, they are the most dangerous.
Mathematicians should recognize this one because it refers to the eighth power of a number.
This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his work The Whetstone of Witte.
The word dates from a time when there was no easy way of denoting the powers of numbers other than squares and cubes. Its root word is the German zenzic, from the medieval Italian censo, meaning "squared." Since the square of a square of a number is its fourth power, Recorde used the word zenzizenzic to express it.
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