- 行业: Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 178089
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
McGraw Hill Financial, Inc. is an American publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, publishing, and business services.
Forensic chemistry is the application of analytical chemistry to solve disputes in legal proceedings. The legal proceedings may involve legislative, executive, or administrative decisions but usually involve judicial proceedings, such as criminal prosecutions or civil litigation. Forensic chemists are formally trained in analytical chemistry to examine physical evidence and to testify as expert witnesses before a judge or jury.
The evidential materials commonly associated with forensic chemistry include residues from explosives, flammables, and discharge from firearms; drugs and poisons; blood and body fluids (including nuclear and mitochondrial DNA extracts); fingerprints; alcohol (including breath and body fluids); inks and pigments; and the general category of trace evidence, which includes fibers, glass, soil, hair, and paint.
Industry:Science
Chemistry has seen many advances in a relatively short time, driven by scientists who wove seemingly unrelated observations into coherent theorems that explained molecular behavior. Before 1860, the empirical formula for water (H<sub>2</sub>O) was thought to be OH, and virtually nothing was known about the structure of organic compounds except that they were composed mostly of carbon and hydrogen. In the intervening years, a great deal of thought was devoted to developing an understanding of molecular behavior, and the results of that work are remarkable. Only a few decades ago, it was common knowledge that no microscope would ever allow human eyes to “see” a molecule. But now we are able to view (and even arrange) individual atoms using the modern techniques of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM).
Industry:Science
As a result of the recent proliferation of easily accessible electronic imaging hardware and software, printers specializing in the production of secure documents, packages, and labels (security printers) are now faced with new challenges and threats, but also opportunities. The ultimate goal of the security printer is to produce items in a way that deters counterfeiters, forgers, fraudsters, and terrorists from unauthorized copying or alterations of authentic items while maintaining the items' functionality, design, and esthetics.
Counterfeiting, forgery, and the production of fake products (“knockoffs” of brand-name products) were recently defined in broadest terms as an infringement of property rights both real and intellectual, and it was estimated that worldwide they cost brand owners in excess of $260 billion dollars per year.
Industry:Science
Generally, any technique that is used to make or modify the products of living organisms in order to improve plants or animals or to develop useful microorganisms. By this definition, biotechnology has actually been practiced for centuries, as exemplified by the use of yeast and bacteria in the production of various foods, such as wine, bread, and cheese.
However, in modern terms, biotechnology has come to mean the use of cell and tissue culture, cell fusion, molecular biology, and in particular, recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology to generate unique organisms with new traits or organisms that have the potential to produce specific products. The advances and products in the biotechnology arena have been developing at a rapid pace. Some examples of products in a number of important disciplines are described below.
Industry:Science
Basalt is a hard, black volcanic rock that constitutes the most abundant rock type at the surface of the Earth. Layers of basaltic lava floor the ocean basins and form the largest terrestrial volcanoes. Gases emanating from vast outpouring of basalt onto the continents could have contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs. Basalt is a rock type not confined to Earth: A large fraction of the meteorites that strike the Earth are basaltic. The circular impact basins (mare) on the Moon are filled with basalt. Olympus Mons, the most massive volcano in the solar system, is thought to be the product of sustained eruption of basalt from the Martian interior.
As a material that emanates from depths that are inaccessible by direct sampling, basalt has provided scientists with an invaluable probe to elucidate the nature of the Earth's interior.
Industry:Science
As computer systems are being applied to more aspects of personal and professional life, the quantity and complexity of software systems are increasing considerably. At the same time, the diversity in hardware architectures remains large and is likely to grow with the deployment of embedded systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and portable computing devices. All these architectures will coexist with personal computers, workstations, computing servers, and supercomputers. Currently, a major goal of academic and industrial computer scientists is to develop techniques to support seamless integration of computer systems in highly heterogeneous environments. The construction of these new software systems and applications in an easy and reliable way can be achieved only through the extensive revise of software components and services.
Industry:Science
For many years satellite communications mostly utilized satellites in geostationary orbits, in which the satellite remains directly overhead at a fixed location on the Equator at an altitude of 35,786 km (22,236 mi). More recently, alternative satellite orbits have been seen to have distinct advantages and have found increasing use. Modern global communications networks have been developed using constellations of satellites in low Earth orbit. Specifically, the Iridium system makes it possible to make or receive calls from anywhere in the world using a handheld mobile telephone, while the SkyBridge system will provide worldwide broadband communications services. The advantages of satellite orbits that are geosynchronous but not geostationary are to provide services to geographical regions at high latitudes.
Industry:Science
Animal waste is generated in beef cattle feedlots, swine operation sites, dairy barns, poultry houses, and other sites of livestock operations. This renewable resource is a source of macronutrients (such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) and micronutrients (including zinc, copper, iron, and magnesium) that are essential for growing plants. Therefore, manure can be an excellent substitute for synthetic fertilizers. Manure application can also increase the soil organic matter, an important factor influencing physical characteristics and chemical and biological activities in the soil.
Manure was used for centuries all over the world for improving soil fertility and enhancing crop productivity. However, with the advent of synthetic fertilizers after World War II, manure was considered more of a liability than a great soil nutrient resource.
Industry:Science
For almost a century, our understanding of evolution has been based on the modern evolutionary synthesis, also known as “neo-Darwinism.” This paradigm assumes that natural selection is acting solely on the amount and structuring of heritable genetic variation, for which the ultimate origin is random mutation. Accordingly, genetic uniformity will severely constrain the adaptive flexibility of a given population or species, sooner or later resulting in evolutionary failure.
During the 1990s, a challenge to this foundation was posed: several studies revealed that heritable phenotypic variation did not need to be based on variation in primary (coding) DNA sequences; instead, novel permutations of spatial and temporal patterns of gene expression could be achieved via a suite of noncoding changes, even in the complete absence of genetic variability.
Industry:Science
For increased energy efficiency, modern homes tend to be “tighter,” with less loss of heating and cooling. As a result, moisture generated inside a home may not find a way out and moisture from outside, coming in through a leak, may end up trapped in the home. Moisture is involved in many housing durability, health, and performance problems. Excessive moisture in a house can lead to rot, mold, swelling, staining, dissolution, freeze-thaw damage, and termite attacks that damage building materials and impede building performance. An understanding of moisture content and movement in a building is critical if one is to provide good housing performance, and is particularly important for walls, roofs, windows, and basements. Owners, builders, subcontractors, inspectors, designers, regulatory agencies, and product manufacturers require such knowledge.
Industry:Science
