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...