Working definitions
The words, defined once.
45 terms across artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology. Each one is written to be read cold by someone who has just clicked it mid-sentence.
Artificial Intelligence
14 terms
Agentic AI
A system that plans a sequence of steps, calls tools, checks its own output and retries — rather than producing one response.
Artificial IntelligenceArtificial general intelligence
A hypothetical system matching human competence across essentially any cognitive task, rather than excelling at specific ones.
Artificial IntelligenceAttention
The mechanism by which each position in a sequence decides how much of every other position to mix into its own representation.
Artificial IntelligenceBenchmark
A fixed test set used to compare models — which measures one thing well and everything else badly.
Artificial IntelligenceDeep learning
Machine learning where the model also learns its own representation of the input, layer by layer.
Artificial IntelligenceEmbedding
A list of numbers representing a word, image or molecule, arranged so that similar things sit close together.
Artificial IntelligenceFine-tuning
Continuing to train an existing model on a smaller, more specific dataset to change its behaviour.
Artificial IntelligenceHallucination
A fluent, confident, and false output — the model's normal behaviour applied to something it does not know.
Artificial IntelligenceMachine learning
Any system whose rule is fitted to examples rather than written by hand.
Artificial IntelligenceOverfitting
When a model learns the noise in its training data well enough to perform worse on anything new.
Artificial IntelligenceParameter
One of the numbers inside a model that training adjusts; the count of them is the usual proxy for a model's size.
Artificial IntelligenceRetrieval-augmented generation
Fetching relevant documents at question time and putting them in front of the model, rather than training the facts in.
Artificial IntelligenceTraining
The process of adjusting a model's parameters so its outputs match a dataset better.
Artificial IntelligenceTransformer
The neural network architecture behind nearly every current language model, built around attention rather than sequential processing.
Nanotechnology
15 terms
Atomic force microscope
An instrument that images a surface by dragging or tapping an extremely sharp tip across it and recording the deflection.
NanotechnologyBottom-up fabrication
Building structures by letting atoms and molecules arrange themselves into the arrangement you want.
NanotechnologyCharacterisation
Establishing what a sample actually is — size, shape, composition, structure — rather than what it was intended to be.
NanotechnologyColloid
A stable suspension of particles small enough that they stay dispersed instead of settling out.
NanotechnologyNanomedicine
Medicine that uses nanoscale carriers to control where a drug goes and when it is released.
NanotechnologyNanometre
One billionth of a metre (10⁻⁹ m) — roughly the width of ten hydrogen atoms in a row.
NanotechnologyNanoparticle
A particle with at least one dimension between roughly 1 and 100 nanometres, at which size its behaviour stops matching the bulk material.
NanotechnologyQuantum confinement
What happens when a particle is small enough that its electrons' allowed energy levels separate into discrete steps.
NanotechnologyQuantum dot
A semiconductor nanocrystal whose emission wavelength is set by its physical size rather than its composition.
NanotechnologySelf-assembly
Structures that form themselves because the components' own interactions make the ordered arrangement the lowest-energy one.
NanotechnologySpectroscopy
Working out what something is made of by measuring which wavelengths of light it absorbs or emits.
NanotechnologySurface plasmon
A collective oscillation of the electrons at a metal surface, which absorbs light at a wavelength set by the particle's size and shape.
NanotechnologySurface-to-volume ratio
The fraction of a particle's atoms that sit on its surface — the mechanism behind most nanoscale behaviour.
NanotechnologyTop-down fabrication
Making small structures by carving them out of a larger block — lithography, etching, milling.
NanotechnologyTransmission electron microscope
An instrument that fires electrons through an ultra-thin sample to image structure down to individual atomic columns.
Biotechnology
12 terms
Bioinformatics
Analysing biological data — sequences, structures, expression — computationally.
BiotechnologyBiosensor
A device that turns a biological binding event into a measurable signal — a current, a colour, a frequency shift.
BiotechnologyCRISPR
A gene-editing system that uses a short guide RNA to find one address in a genome and an enzyme to cut it there.
BiotechnologyGuide RNA
The short RNA sequence that tells a CRISPR enzyme where in the genome to cut.
BiotechnologyIn silico
An experiment performed as a computation — a simulation, a docking run, a model prediction.
BiotechnologyIn vitro
An experiment performed outside a living organism — in a dish, a tube or a well plate.
BiotechnologyIn vivo
An experiment performed in a living organism.
BiotechnologyPAM
A short DNA sequence that must sit next to the target site for a CRISPR enzyme to cut — a constraint you cannot design away.
BiotechnologyPCR
A cycle of heating and cooling that doubles a chosen DNA sequence each round, turning one copy into billions.
BiotechnologyProtein folding
The process by which a chain of amino acids adopts the three-dimensional shape that determines what it does.
BiotechnologySequencing
Determining the order of bases in a stretch of DNA or RNA.
BiotechnologySynthetic biology
Designing and building biological systems that do not exist in nature, rather than modifying ones that do.
Cross-domain
4 terms
p-value
The probability of seeing data at least this extreme if the effect being tested were absent.
Cross-domainPeer review
Evaluation of a manuscript by other researchers before a journal publishes it.
Cross-domainPreprint
A manuscript posted publicly before, or instead of, peer review.
Cross-domainReproducibility
Whether an independent group following the published method obtains the same result.