Risks & Risk Management
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Aerial view of icebergs and glaciers at Cape York, Greenland An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice . Alternatively, it may come to rest on the seabed in shallower water, causing ice scour (also known as ice gouging) or becoming an ice island . [ edit ] Etymology The word "iceberg" is a partial loan translation from Dutch ijsberg , literally meaning ice mountain , [ 3 ] cognate to Danish Isbjerg , German Eisberg , Low Saxon Iesbarg and Swedish Isberg . Because the density of pure ice is about 920 kg/m³ , and that of sea water about 1025 kg/m³, typically only one-ninth of the volume of an iceberg is above water.
Iceberg
Saturation (telecommunications) is a neither a disambiguation page nor an acceptable Wikipedia article, but until it can be converted to a hard redirect to this section, it may have some marginal value to users of this page. Saturation (chemistry) is a neither a disambiguation page nor an acceptable Wikipedia article, but until it can be converted to a hard redirect to this section, it may have some marginal value to users of this page. In the earth sciences, saturation generally refers to the water content in the soil, where the unsaturated zone is above the water table and the saturated zone is below
Saturation
Lipofuscin is the name given to finely granular yellow-brown pigment granules [ 1 ] composed of lipid -containing residues of lysosomal digestion. It is considered one of the aging or "wear-and-tear" pigments, found in the liver , kidney , heart muscle, adrenals , nerve cells, and ganglion cells. It is specifically arranged around the nucleus, and is a type of Lipochrome . [ edit ] Formation and turnover It appears to be the product of the oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids , and may be symptomatic of membrane damage, or damage to mitochondria and lysosomes . Aside from a large lipid content, lipofuscin is known to contain sugars and metals, including mercury , aluminum , iron , copper and zinc . [ 2 ]
Lipofuscin
Multipotentiality is an educational and psychological term referring to a pattern found among intellectually gifted individuals. "Because gifted students generally have diverse interests across numerous domains and may be capable of success in many endeavors or professions, they are confronted with unique decisions as a result of these choices. When encountering multiple opportunities, some students may experience confusion , anxiety and frustration because they fear missing something or making a wrong decision." -"An Investigation of Multipotentiality Among University Honors Students" Laurie Diane Shute , University of Connecticut (Dissertation) While there is some dispute as to the degree of prevalence of this phenomenon, it is a significant problem for those who experience it, leading to overscheduling, high stress levels, and impulsive or conformist choices in gifted children, and to feelings of social alienation , purposelessness, apathy and depression in the brightest of adults.
Multipotentiality
A limiting factor or limiting resource is a factor that controls a population's growth, such as organism growth or species population , size, or distribution. Limiting factors includes space, water, and food. The availability of food, predation pressure, or availability of shelter are examples of factors that could be limiting for an organism. An example of a limiting factor is sunlight in the rainforest , where growth is limited to all plants in the understory unless more light becomes available. A number of potential factors could influence a biological process, but importantly only one is limiting at any one place and time. This recognition that there is always a single limiting factor is vital in ecology ; and the concept has parallels in numerous other processes.
Limiting factor
Competitive exclusion principle
In ecology , the competitive exclusion principle , [ 1 ] sometimes referred to as Gause's law of competitive exclusion or just Gause's law , [ 2 ] is a proposition which states that two species competing for the same resources cannot coexist if other ecological factors are constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another, then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift towards a different ecological niche . The principle has been paraphrased into the maxim " complete competitors cannot coexist ". [ 1 ] [ edit ] Experimental basis
Mycoplasma
Mycoplasma refers to a genus of bacteria that lack a cell wall . [ 1 ] Without a cell wall, they are unaffected by many common antibiotics such as penicillin or other beta-lactam antibiotics that target cell wall synthesis. They can be parasitic or saprotrophic . Several species are pathogenic in humans, including M. pneumoniae , which is an important cause of atypical pneumonia and other respiratory disorders, and M. genitalium , which is believed to be involved in pelvic inflammatory diseases . Mycoplasma is the smallest known cell and is about 0.1 micron (μm) in diameter. [ edit ] Origin of the name The name Mycoplasma , from the Greek mykes (fungus) and plasma (formed), was first used by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1889.
"Wastes are materials that are not prime products (that is products produced for the market) for which the generator has no further use in terms of his/her own purposes of production, transformation or consumption, and of which he/she wants to dispose. Wastes may be generated during the extraction of raw materials, the processing of raw materials into intermediate and final products, the consumption of final products, and other human activities. Residuals recycled or reused at the place of generation are excluded." [ 1 ] Schematic illustration of the EU Legal definition of waste. Under the Waste Framework Directive (European Directive 75/442/EC as amended), the European Union defines waste as an object the holder discards, intends to discard or is required to discard.
Waste
A black hole . Most models of the far future of the Universe suggest that eventually, these will be the only remaining celestial objects. While predictions of the future can never be absolutely certain, this list of predictions follows from present scientific understanding and models.
Timeline of the far future
Precautionary principle
The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment , in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. This principle allows policy makers to make discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm from taking a particular course or making a certain decision when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result.
Systematic error
Systematic errors are biases in measurement which lead to the situation where the mean of many separate measurements differs significantly from the actual value of the measured attribute. All measurements are prone to systematic errors, often of several different types. Sources of systematic error may be imperfect calibration of measurement instruments (zero error), changes in the environment which interfere with the measurement process and sometimes imperfect methods of observation can be either zero error or percentage error. For example, consider an experimenter taking a reading of the time period of a pendulum swinging past a fiducial mark: If his stop-watch or timer starts with 1 second on the clock then all of his results will be off by 1 second (zero error).Error
The word error entails different meanings and usages relative to how it is conceptually applied. The concrete meaning of the Latin word "error" is "wandering" or "straying". Unlike an illusion , an error or a mistake can sometimes be dispelled through knowledge (knowing that one is looking at a mirage and not at real water does not make the mirage disappear). For example, a person who uses too much of an ingredient in a recipe and has a failed product can learn the right amount to use and avoid repeating the mistake. However, some errors can occur even when individuals have the required knowledge to perform a task correctly.Enthalpy is a measure of the total energy of a thermodynamic system . It includes the internal energy , which is the energy required to create a system, and the amount of energy required to make room for it by displacing its environment and establishing its volume and pressure. Enthalpy is a thermodynamic potential . It is a state function and an extensive quantity. The unit of measurement for enthalpy in the International System of Units (SI) is the joule , but other historical, conventional units are still in use, such as the British thermal unit and the calorie .
Enthalpy
Garbage in, garbage out
Garbage in, garbage out (abbreviated to GIGO , possibly intended to parallel the phrase first-in, first-out ) is a phrase in the field of computer science or information and communication technology . It is used primarily to call attention to the fact that computers will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data ("garbage in") and produce nonsensical output ("garbage out"). It was most popular in the early days of computing, but applies even more today, when powerful computers can spew out mountains of erroneous information in a short time. The first use of the term has been dated to a 1 April 1963 syndicated newspaper article about the first stages of computerization of the US Internal Revenue Service . [ 1 ] The term was brought to prominence as a teaching mantra by George Fuechsel, [ 2 ] an IBM 305 RAMAC technician/instructor in New York.Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy not available for work in a thermodynamic process , such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when converting energy to work. During this work, entropy accumulates in the system, which then dissipates in the form of waste heat . In classical thermodynamics, the concept of entropy is defined phenomenologically by the second law of thermodynamics , which states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant. Thus, entropy is also a measure of the tendency of a process, such as a chemical reaction, to be entropically favored , or to proceed in a particular direction.