By donating, say, bone marrow or blood. The use of genetic testing and aids to fertility to maximise the chance of a saviour baby being born is controversial in some circles.

New Scientist, 14 July 2007: “What is most worrying is that government agencies do not yet have a framework for even thinking about how to regulate nanotechnology. So varied are its products that deciding what are potential threats and what to track is a mammoth task in itself. To see why, consider nanotechnology’s larger-scale cousin “centitechnology”. This would include teacups, loaded guns, pencils, nuclear batteries, tubs of weedkiller and vials of nitroglycerine. Imagine working out a framework for identifying the dangers posed by such a diverse group of things, and then regulating them.”

Goodness! I had no idea that just adding this would set off such a chain of events. Kind of exciting to be contributing to the sum of human knowledge. Well, to the sum of Google’s knowledge, anyway. When it takes over the world I will only have myself to blame.

There are examples carved out of stone in the Roman catacombs of Malta. Agape is a Latin word which is sometimes translated as meaning “the love of family” (as opposed to eros or philia).

I saw a hagiothecium in the Cathedral Museum of Mdina on Malta: a small travelling case containing perhaps forty small plaques carved with Byzantine-style portraits of saints. Google finds no (that’s right, zero) references to the term …

Used to describe the mass nesting behaviour of Ridley sea turtles, which come ashore in their thousands to lay eggs.

In other words, a human-animal hybrid. (Or, in the novels of Dan Simmons, an artificial intelligence in a human body.)

The opposite of a maiden voyage

A lump of rock must be bigger than 256 millimetres (just over ten inches) to be a boulder, according to geologists’ Udden-Wentworth scale.

is defined by the Udden-Wentworth scale as being between 64 and 256 millimetres in diameter.

Is defined by the Udden-Wentworth scale as having a particle size of 2 to 64 millimetres.

Is defined by the Udden-Wentworth scale as being composed of grains that are between 62.5 micrometres and 2 millimetres in diameter.

Is defined by the Udden-Wentworth scale as having a particle size of 3.90625–62.5 micrometres (0.00015–0.0025 inches)

Is defined by the Udden-Wentworth scale as having a particle size of less than 3.90625 micrometres(0.00015 inches) but more than 1 micrometre.

Is defined by the Udden-Wentworth scale as a suspension comprised of particles whose diameter is less than a micrometre.

1) The term given by some neuroscientists to the ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else’s mind.
2) the ability to recognize that something has changed in a scene without being able to identify the change. This would represent a new mode of visual perception – “sensing without seeing” – but its existence is disputed

A famous migratory Irish trout.

A kind of trout only found in Ireland’s Lough Melvin.

A snail-eating Irish trout whose name derives from the deep red spots on its sides (Giolla Rua is the Irish for “red fellow”). It is apparently the only fish that has a gizzard (of sorts) to aid digestion. This anatomical curiosity lies behind the story that a priest, presented with a gillaroo on a Friday, refused to believe that it was not chicken and would not eat it; ever since, the fish has been considered cursed and unfit to eat.

Ireland’s largest, fiercest and most famous species of trout.

You’re welcome!

In palaeontology, geological phenomena that move fossil remains between strata, creating the impression that their owners were still alive long after they actually died

One of our dinosaurs is missing.

The coelacanth being the canonical example.

Specimens are often confused with those from a Lazarus taxon.

One who works at the South Pole. A polie may also be a winterover (hardcore!).

One who spends (or will spend) the winter in Antarctica.

Soviet-era coolhunters

In Soviet times, bootleggers on the Russian side of the Iron Curtain found that they could press illicit copies of musical recordings from the West (or from forbidden genres like jazz) onto discarded X-Ray plates in a roentgenizdat. The word is combination of “Roentgen” (the discoverer of X-Rays) with “samizdat“, the underground self-publishing publishing and distribution for banned writings.

recently discovered in the Arctic Ocean. The “pico” refers to their minute size.