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Et cetera |
Et cetera means "and the rest" in Latin. It is often used in English to continue a list that is longer than what can be normally written. People most often write "et cetera" as etc.. Very rarely, it is also written "&c" because the ampersand, or the "&", is the same as "et", having been formed by 'e' and 't' being join... |
Experiment |
An experiment is a test of an idea or a method. It is often used by scientists and engineers. An experiment is used to see how well the idea matches the real world. Experiments have been used for many years to help people understand the world around them. Experiments are part of scientific method. Many experiments are ... |
Experiments can tell us if a theory is false, or if something does not work. They cannot tell us if a theory is true. When Einstein said that gravity could affect light, it took a few years before astronomers could test it. General relativity predicts that the path of light is bent in a gravitational field; light passi... |
Now, a hundred years or so after Einstein published his ideas, there have been many tests, all of which have been consistent with Einstein's predictions. But, one day, we might find the theory has some limits beyond which it does not work. What we test are implications of the theory, because the theory itself is too la... |
A controlled experiment is a kind of comparison. It often compares the results from experimental samples against control samples. Control samples are the same as the experimental sample, except for one difference. This difference is the one thing whose effect is being tested (the independent variable). A good example w... |
An observational study is used when an experiment would be difficult, unethical, or expensive. Observational studies are not experiments. Experiments can control for other variables, and it allows the researchers to change something. Observational studies often do not have random samples, and they often have many varia... |
Ethics |
Ethics is the study of good and bad behaviour. It is one of the main parts of philosophy. Ethics tries to answer questions like: |
When discussing ethics, the philosophy is generally separated into: |
"Morality" is what someone thinks or feels is good or bad. |
There are many different moralities, but they share some things. |
For example, most people think that murder (killing somebody) is wrong.(compare Exodus 20:13) |
Some philosophers have hope to find more things that moralities share. |
They think that ethics should use the scientific method to study |
things that people think are good or bad. Their work can be used |
to test the fairness of a situation, such as how people should treat |
each other. An example of this kind of thinking is the categorical imperative. |
Many countries have laws based on this idea of fairness. |
Understanding ethics can help people decide what to do when they have choices. Many think that doing anything or making any choice is a part of ethics. |
Ethics is part of other fields of study in many ways. Here are some ways: |
Along with aesthetics ethics forms part of axiology, the philosophy of what people like. |
E Prime |
E Prime (it means English Prime) is a way of speaking English without using the verb "to be" in any way ("be, is, am, are, was, were, been, and being"). Instead, an E Prime speaker or writer uses different verbs like "to become," "to remain," and "to equal" or they might choose to rearrange the sentence to show that th... |
D. David Bourland, Jr. first suggested E Prime in 1965. Bourland had studied the discipline (way of thinking) of General Semantics. The main idea of General Semantics is that people can only know what they observe and experience when they see, hear, touch, taste, smell, think, and feel, and furthermore, that what they ... |
Students of General Semantics and users of E Prime contend that to say "This cat is soft" leaves out many other attributes, and implies that the outside "object" of the cat is the "same as" the inside experience of "softness". Instead, E Prime users say "This cat feels soft TO ME" to remind themselves of the following: |
Although languages like Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Cantonese do not always use a separate verb for "to be," they do have the idea of "being." For example, an English speaker might say "This apple is red." An Arabic speaker might say "This apple red." Most languages can be used to express the idea of a red apple. An ... |
Many teachers of English encourage students to use verbs other than "to be." To them, using more active verbs makes writing clearer and more interesting. These teachers want to improve their students' writing and may not agree with the ideas of General Semantics or E Prime. |
In English, 'to be' can have different functions: |
Einstein on the Beach |
Einstein on the Beach is an opera written by the minimalist composer Philip Glass and theater director and designer Robert Wilson. It was first acted for an audience in Avignon, France in 1976. |
It is a single act opera, about five hours long with no intermission. Because of the length and the minimalist (repetitive) nature of the music, audience members are free to enter and leave the opera as they wish. Glass's music tends to cycle round, but does not exactly repeat itself. Admittedly, he has described himse... |
English |
The word English can mean: |
Ethnic group |
An ethnic group is a group of people who are considered to be the same in some or multiple ways. They may all have the same ancestors, speak the same language, or have the same religion. They often live in the same or surrounding area. |
Sometimes almost all of the people in one country are of the same ethnic group, but not always. Often one country may have several different ethnic groups, or the people of one ethnic group may live in several different countries. |
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ensures the rights of ethnic groups in Article 27 and also gives them the right to use their own language. |
Ewe |
Ewe might mean: |
Ebola virus |
Ebola virus or Ebola virus disease (EVD), often shortened to Ebola is a very dangerous virus. It belongs to the family Filoviridae and is responsible for a severe disease characterized by the sudden onset of hemorrhagic fever accompanied by other non specific signs and symptoms. "Hemorrhagic" means that the victim will... |
The Ebola virus that makes people sick lives in the blood and other liquids and wet things in some kinds of non-human animals without killing them. Scientists think the animals it lives in are mainly some kinds of monkeys or fruit bats. When people touch animals that have the virus, or wet things that came out of those... |
Ebola cannot be caught through the air, or by being near sick people. The virus can only go from liquids into people's bodies. This means Ebola can be caught by touching a sick person's blood, saliva, mucus, semen, diarrhea, vomit, or other fluids that come out of a sick person's body. |
If a person does not die from the disease, he can still give other people the infection by having sex for nearly another two months after they stop being sick. This is because the virus can still be in the man's semen after a long time. |
1. Once the virus enters the human body via mucosal surfaces, abrasions or injuries in the skin or by direct parental transmission, it fuses with the cells lining the respiratory tract, eyes, or body cavities. |
2. It invades the macrophages and dendritic immune cells and releases its genetic content. The cell explosion triggers the secretion of proinflammatory cytokines initiating a ‘cytokine storm’. The genetic material takes over the cell machinery to replicate itself; new copies of the virus are formed and released into th... |
3. The virus then, goes on to attack spleen, kidneys and even the brain. The blood vessels leak blood and fluid into the surrounding tissues. This atypical clotting and bleeding at the same time manifests externally in the form of rashes. |
4. The virus causes the shutdown of other vital organs such as liver and lungs too. In fact, it is able to invade almost all human cells through different attachment mechanisms for each cell type (except for lymphocytes). The very cells that are meant to fight infection are used as carriers to spread infection to other... |
5. It has been found that the ebola-infected cells do not undergo normal apoptosis, but exhibit vacuolization and signs of necrosis. |
When people get Ebola the first symptoms look like some other diseases. People get a fever and feel very tired. Their head, stomach, joints, and throat might hurt. Sometimes, people think they have other diseases like malaria or typhoid fever. |
Later, people get much sicker. They bleed both inside and outside their bodies. They have blood in their diarrhea and vomit. They bleed from their noses, mouths, and genitals/sex organs. They get shock: low blood pressure, fast pulse (heart rate), and low blood circulation to the body. Their organs might stop working. ... |
Five to nine out of every ten people who get sick with Ebola die. |
There is no cure for Ebola, but if people get care quickly from doctors and nurses at a hospital, more of them live. People with Ebola need a lot of fluids to replace fluids lost from diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding. The most important care is giving them water with a very small amount of salt and sugar in it. This is... |
In December 2016, a study found the VSV-EBOV vaccine to be very effective (in the neighborhood of 70–100%) against the Ebola virus, making it the first vaccine against the disease. |
Many Ebola vaccine candidates had been developed in the decade prior to 2014, but as of October 2014, none had yet been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in humans. |
World Community Grid is a computing project that is seeking possible drug treatments. People donate the spare time on their computers to the project. |
Ecology |
Ecology is the branch of biology that studies the biota (living things), the environment, and their interactions. It comes from the Greek "oikos" = house; "logos" = study. |
Ecology is the study of ecosystems. Ecosystems describe the web or network of relations among organisms at different scales of organization. Since ecology refers to any form of biodiversity, ecologists research everything from tiny bacteria in nutrient recycling to the effects of tropical rain forests on the Earth's at... |
Terrestrial ecoregion and climate change research are two areas where ecologists now focus. |
There are many practical applications of ecology in conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource management (agriculture, forestry, fisheries), city planning (urban ecology), community health, economics, and applied science. It provides a framework for understanding and researching human social interactio... |
Population ecology measures the size of a population: all the living things from one species that live in an place. A population gets bigger because of birth and movement into a place, and it gets smaller because of death and movement out of a place. Growth rate is the change in population size divided by the current p... |
A community is all populations of different species that live in the same place. An ecosystem is a community and its environment. Ecosystem ecology studies how energy and nutrients move through an ecosystem. All living things need energy to survive, move, grow, and reproduce. A trophic level is the number of times ener... |
Ecology starts many powerful philosophical and political movements - including the conservation movement, wellness movement, environmental movement, and ecology movement we know today. When these are combined with peace movements and the Six Principles, they are called green movements. In general, these put ecosystem h... |
People with these beliefs are called political ecologists. Some have organized into the Green Parties, but there are actually political ecologists in most political parties. They very often use arguments from ecology to advance policy, especially forest policy and energy policy. |
Also, ecology means that it is the branch of biology dealing with the relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms. |
Many ecologists also deal with human economics: |
Ecological economics and human development theory try to separate the economic questions from others, but it is difficult. Many people think economics is just part of ecology now, and that economics that ignores it is wrong. "Natural capital" is an example of one theory combining both. |
Sometimes ecology is compared to anthropology. Anthropology includes how our bodies and minds are affected by our environment, while ecology includes how our environment is affected by our bodies and minds. There is even a type of anthropology called ecological anthropology, which studies how people interact with the e... |
Antoine de Saint-Exupery stated: "The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books. Because it resists us. Man discovers himself when he measures himself against the obstacle". |
Economics |
Economics is the social science which studies economic activity: how people make choices to get what they want. It has been defined as "the study of scarcity and choice" and is basically about the choices people make. It also studies what affects the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in an ... |
Investment and income relate to economics. The word comes from Ancient Greek, and relates to οἶκος oíkos "house" and νόμος nomos "custom" or "law". The models used in economics today were mostly started in the 19th century. People took ideas from political economy and added to them because they wanted to use an empiric... |
The subjects (actors) in economic study are households, business companies, the government (the state), and foreign countries. Households offer their "factors of production" to companies. This includes work, land, capital (things like machines and buildings) and information. In exchange for their factors of production,... |
Business companies produce and sell goods and services and buy factors of production from households and from other companies. |
The state or public sector includes institutions and organisations. The state takes some of the earnings from the business companies and households, and uses it to pay for "public goods" like streets or education, to be available for everyone. The last subject is foreign countries. This includes all households, busines... |
The objects (things acted upon) in economic study are consumer goods, capital goods, and factors of production. Consumer goods are classified as "usage goods" (for example, gasoline or toilet paper), as "purpose goods" (for example, a house or bicycle), and as "services" (for example, the work of a doctor or cleaning l... |
The ideas that economists have depend a lot on the times they live in. For example, Karl Marx lived in a time when workers' conditions were very poor, and John Maynard Keynes lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. Today's economists can look back and understand why they made their judgments, and try to make b... |
The two main branches of economics are microeconomics and macroeconomics. |
Macroeconomics is about the economy in general. For example, macroeconomists study things that make a country's wealth go up and things that make millions of people lose their jobs. Microeconomics is about smaller and more specific things such as how families and households spend their money and how businesses operate. |
There are a number of other branches of economics: |
Famous economists in history include: |
Famous economists of the 19th and 20th century include Friedrich August von Hayek, Wassily Leontief, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras. |
Chemical element |
A chemical element is a substance that is made up of only one type of atom, which is the smallest particle of an element. Atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. |
The number of protons in an atom is called the atomic number. For example, all atoms with 6 protons are atoms of the chemical element carbon, and all atoms with 92 protons are atoms of the element uranium. The number of neutrons in the nucleus does not have to be the same in every atom of an element. Atoms of the same ... |
The number of protons in the nucleus causes its electric charge. This fixes the number of electrons in its normal (un-ionized) state. The electrons in their atomic orbitals determine the element's various chemical properties. |
Elements are the basic building blocks for all types of substances. If a substance contains more than one type of atom, it is a compound or a mixture. The smallest particle of a compound is a molecule. |
118 different chemical elements are known to modern chemistry. 92 of these elements can be found in nature, and the others can only be made in laboratories. The human body is made up of 26 elements. The last natural element discovered was uranium, in 1789. The first man-made element was technetium, in 1937. |
Chemical elements are commonly arranged in the periodic table. Where the elements are in the table tells us about their properties relative to the other elements. |
Chemical elements are given a unique "chemical symbol". Chemical symbols are used all over the world. This means that, no matter which language is spoken, there is no confusion about what the symbol means. Chemical symbols of elements almost always come from their English or Latin names. For example, carbon has the che... |
Elements can join (react) to form pure compounds (such as water, salts, oxides, and organic compounds). In many cases, these compounds have a fixed composition and their own structure and properties. The properties of the compound may be very different from the elements it is made from. Sodium is a metal that burns whe... |
Some elements mix together in any proportion to form new structures. Such new structures are not compounds. They are called mixtures or, when the elements are metals, alloys. |
Most elements in nature consist of atoms with different numbers of neutrons. An isotope is a form of an element with a certain number of neutrons. For example, carbon has two stable, naturally occurring isotopes: carbon-12 (6 neutrons) and carbon-13 (7 neutrons). Carbon-14 (8 neutrons) is a naturally occurring radioact... |
Elements can be classified based on physical states. At room temperature and pressure, most elements are solids, only 11 are gases and 2 are liquids. |
Elements can also be classified into metals and non-metals. There are many more metals than non-metals. |
However, a few elements have properties in between those of metals and non-metals. These elements are called semimetals (or metalloids). |
Egypt |
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