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Showing posts from November, 2026

Happy Thought for 6 November 2026

Have a Happy Thought: Scientists have often been criticised for the names they give to things. Especially when it comes to acronyms. Here are a couple of doozies: ·       Captcha: Completely Automated Programmable Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (I actually didn’t know this was an acronym until doing this research!) ·       NEAR: Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, a mission by NASA to orbit asteroids to better understand how to defend Earth. Speaking of… ·       NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration ·       CRISPR: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (basically how 90% of new biology and vaccine research is done these days)   Sometimes an acronym is just too hard to make happen, so we settle for an initialism – where you just pronounce the letters without making it into another word. ·       VC...