Allele Updated +Created
Allele means "other" in Greek.
Baryon vs meson vs lepton Updated +Created
"Barys" means "heavy" in Greek, because protons and neutrons was what made most of the mass of known ordinary matter, as opposed notably to electrons.
Baryons can be contrasted with:
  • mesons, which have an even number of elementary particles. The name meson comes from "medium" since their most common examples have two quarks rather than three as the most common baryons such as protons. So they have less mass than a proton, but more than an electron, this medium mass.
  • leptons, which are much lighter particles such as the electron. "Leptos" means "fine, small, thin".
Kudos Updated +Created
Ahh, Ciro Santilli was certain this was some slang neologism, but it is actually Greek! So funny. Introduced into English in the 19th century according to: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kudo.
Monotreme Updated +Created
The weirdest mammal clade: they lay fucking eggs. Only 5 known species alive as of 2020.
Eggs are basal: they simply didn't evolve out of what other reptiles do. From which we conclude that milk came before eggs stopped.
So this is the most basal subclade of mammals.
Etymology: means "single hole" in Greek, because like other reptiles it has a single hole for shit, pee and fucking: the cloaca.
Solenoid Updated +Created
Solenoids are a type of electromagnet coil of helical shape.
Solenoid means "tubular" in Greek.
Solenoids are simpler to build as they don't require insulated wire as in modern electrical cable because as the electromagnetic coils don't touch one another.
As such it is perhaps the reason why some early electromagnetism experiments were carried out with solenoids, which André-Marie Ampère named in 1823.
But the downside of this is that the magnetic field they can generate is less strong.
Figure 1.
Illustration of a solenoid
.
Figure 2.
Magnetic field lines around a solenoid cross-section
. TODO accurate simulation or not?
Telecommunication Updated +Created
Communicating at a distance, from Greek "tele" for distance!
A very cool thing about telecommunication is, besides how incredibly fast it advanced (in this sense it is no cooler than integrated circuit development), how much physics and information theory is involved in it. Applications of telecommunication implementation spill over to other fields, e.g. some proposed quantum computing approaches are remarkably related to telecommunication technology, e.g. microwaves and silicon photonics.
This understanding made Ciro Santilli wish he had opted for telecommunication engineering when he was back in school in Brazil. For some incomprehensible reason, telecommunications was the least competitive specialization in the electric engineering department at the time, behind even power electronics. This goes to show both how completely unrelated to reality university is, and how completely outdated Brazil is/was. Sad stuff.