Biology
This "self-eating" cellular process degrades damaged organelles and proteins by engulfing them in a double-membraned vesicle that fuses with a lysosome.
What is autophagy?
This quantum number, denoted l, determines the shape of an electron's orbital and ranges in value from 0 to n − 1.
What is the azimuthal (angular momentum) quantum number?
Computers speak in this two-digit numbering system.
What is binary?
This principle states that the more precisely a particle's position is known, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.
What is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?
Just below the crust, this hot, slow-flowing layer makes up most of Earth's volume
What is the mantle?
During DNA replication, this enzyme relieves the torsional strain building up ahead of the replication fork by cutting and rejoining the DNA backbone.
What is topoisomerase?
Unlike stoichiometric coefficients, the exponents in this experimentally determined expression describe how reaction rate depends on reactant concentration.
What is the rate law?
This decision problem asks whether some assignment of true/false to variables can satisfy a given Boolean formula — the first problem proven NP-complete, via the Cook–Levin theorem.
What is the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT)?
Conserved in any system with no external torque, this rotational analog of linear momentum equals a body's moment of inertia times its angular velocity.
What is angular momentum?
This theory explains how Earth's crustal plates drift and collide over millions of years.
What is plate tectonics?
This Nobel-winning technique uses a heat-stable polymerase, originally isolated from a bacterium living in hot springs, to exponentially amplify a target DNA sequence in vitro.
What is PCR (polymerase chain reaction)?
This effect describes how adding a soluble salt that shares an ion with a slightly soluble salt actually decreases the latter's solubility.
What is the common-ion effect?
This self-balancing binary search tree keeps operations at O(log n) by coloring each node red or black and enforcing rules about how those colors can appear along any path.
What is a red-black tree?
This 1905 theory rests on two postulates: the laws of physics are identical in all inertial reference frames, and the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for every observer.
What is (special) relativity?
Rock formed from cooled magma or lava, like granite or basalt.
What is igneous rock?
In the Hardy-Weinberg equation p² + 2pq + q² = 1, this term represents the expected frequency of heterozygotes in a population at genetic equilibrium.
What is 2pq?
Named for a German-born physicist, this rule states that electrons occupy degenerate orbitals singly, with parallel spins, before any orbital gets a second electron.
What is Hund's rule?
Claude Shannon's 1948 paper of this name founded a field that quantifies information using the bit and introduced the concept of channel capacity.
What is "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (information theory)?
Below a critical temperature, electrons in certain materials form these bound pairs, allowing electrical current to flow with exactly zero resistance.
What are Cooper pairs (giving rise to superconductivity)?
This radiometric dating method relies on the decay of a potassium isotope, with a half-life of about 1.25 billion years, into an inert gas — useful for dating very old volcanic rock.
What is potassium-argon dating?
This class of ~21–23 nucleotide RNAs silences gene expression after transcription by guiding the RISC complex to bind complementary mRNA.
What are microRNAs (miRNAs)?
This spectroscopic technique exploits the magnetic behavior of nuclei like hydrogen-1 or carbon-13 in a strong external field to map out a molecule's structure.
What is NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy?
This complexity class contains every decision problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time, even if finding that solution might not be — its exact relationship to P is one of the Millennium Prize Problems.
What is NP?
This partial differential equation, central to quantum mechanics, describes how a physical system's wavefunction evolves over time.
What is the Schrödinger equation?
This period ended ~66 million years ago with the asteroid impact that killed the non-avian dinosaurs.
What is the Cretaceous period?