Science Slang, Jargon, and New Words from Double-Tongued Dictionary

Science, research, scientific disciplines. You can also see entries assigned to this category.

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aaargh plop n. Scientists may just be learning what is already common knowledge among Indonesian villagers. Peter Roeder, a consultant for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says locals have an onomatopoeic name for bird flu “that sounds like ‘plop,’ the sound of a chicken hitting the ground when it falls out of a tree. They also have a name for the cat form of avian flu—‘aargh plop’—because cats make a screaming noise before they fall out of the tree.” [Indonesia Science] [full cite] (Mar. 13, 2006)

alife n. Artificial life, often referred to as alife, is a very diverse field of study, encompassing simulations, computer models, robotics and biochemistry. [English Science] [full cite] (Oct. 14, 2008)

ambulance chasing n. In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons. But the only theory he and Dr. Lee could come up with was ugly. A few weeks later it turned out that the triplet effect wasn’t true. [English Science Slang] [full cite] (Jul. 24, 2007)

ambulance-chasing n. As a result, theorists haven’t been able to resist interpreting these statistically suspect results. It’s an activity that Neil Turok of Princeton University (himself a theorist) describes as “ambulance chasing—running after these experiments hoping one of them will disprove some theory.” [English Science Slang] [full cite] (Jul. 25, 2007)

ambulance-chasing n. Scientists sensationalize stuff because they get noticed… They’re staking out their territory, causing alarm, so that there’s more funding in that area.…There is more and more a trend to what some people call “ambulance chasing” science. [English Science] [full cite] (Jul. 25, 2007)

ambulance-chasing n. “Clinical research and translational research is down 70% in the U.S.,” he tells me, laying out two primary explanations: First, he blames “the lobbies, restrictions, confidentiality problems, insurance companies regulating what needs to be done, what can be done, what cannot be done…the usual ambulance chasing that occurs.” [English Science Slang] [full cite] (Jul. 25, 2007)

ambulance-chasing n. Ambulance-chasing?…Some say that the division has become an “ambulance-chaser,” pursuing funding opportunities regardless of their relevance to the core work of the division. [English Science Slang] [full cite] (Jul. 25, 2007)

ambulance-chasing n. Gatehouse has accused the paper’s authors of conducting “a piece of ambulance-chasing research that is coming in on the coat-tails of the GM controversy.” [English Science Slang] [full cite] (Jul. 25, 2007)

ambulance-chasing n. Socially determined objectives must thus lead and direct this effort, not become relegated to “ambulance chasing,” following behind a series of technically compelling yet socially questionable discoveries, papers or patents. [English Science Slang] [full cite] (Jul. 25, 2007)

ant colony optimization n. Ant colony optimisation, as the technique is called, turns on the fact that such insects exploit food in what appears to be an intelligent, but is in fact an entirely mindless, way.…he computer scientists fill their machines with virtual ants and give them the task of finding their way through a maze or graph, leaving a coded signal as they pass until, just like the ants, the fastest route emerges. The technique is used in planning the most efficient design of a phone network, the best use of the gates at Heathrow and the management of wireless messages through a grid of receivers. In the phone system, for example, each message leaves a digital scent-mark as it passes through a node and, as it builds up, the fastest track soon attracts the most traffic. [English Biology Science Technology] [full cite] (Jul. 18, 2007)

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