Gadolinium is a metal which reacts strongly to magnetic fields emitted during an MRI scan; after injection into the blood stream as a contrast agent, it shows this network in intricate detail: tissues, shrinking, obstructions, etc.

An Italian physicist and astronomer. In introducing the use of the telescope into astronomy he brought about a revolution in the observation of celestial bodies. He discovered in particular the relief of the Moon, the rotation of the Sun around its axis, Jupiter’s main satellites, the phases of Venus and the presence of stars in the Milky Way. Won over to Copernicus’ heliocentric theory (the Earth is not the centre of the Universe; it gravitates around the Sun), Galileo was brought before the Inquisition’s tribunal, which condemned him and forced him to retract, on his knees (1633). Just after this retraction, he is nevertheless supposed to have exclaimed: ‘Eppur’, si muove!’ ‘And yet it moves!’ (the Earth). The Church finally rehabilitated him...in 1992. Galileo was also one of the precursors of modern mechanics and played a major role in the introduction of mathematics to explain the laws of physics. He also gave a preliminary formulation of the principle of relativity.

Etymologically, ‘game’ comes from the Latin jocus meaning ‘joke’ (in words) but has also taken on all the more general meanings of the Latin ludus ‘amusement, entertainment’.

Minerals which are not commercially viable.

Professor, journalist and entrepreneur specialising in computer science. In 2000, he published Database Nation, the Death of Privacy in the 21th Century, explaining how new technologies of information and communication erode our personal privacy.
 

French philosopher, mathematician and savant. A priest and professor of mathematics, he was a supporter of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory (the Earth is not the centre of the Universe; it gravitates around the Sun) and an admirer of Galileo, with whom he corresponded, as he did with the majority of the astronomers of his time. A tireless observer of eclipses, a pioneer of observing planets by telescope, he made the first scientific description of an aurora borealis in 1621. In physics he studied falling bodies and the laws of impact. In acoustics he explained the pitch of sounds and measured the speed they spread at. An adversary of Descartes.

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Agreement signed on 30th October 1947 by 23 countries to harmonise signatories’ customs policies and thus to encourage free-trade.

A Russian company mainly known for the extraction, processing and transporting of natural gas. Its name is an acronym of Gazovaïa Promychlennost, in other words the ‘Gas Industry.’ Since 1954 it has been the world’s largest operator and the largest exporter of natural gas, of which it owns around 16% of global reserves, or around 28,800km³. Since 2005 it has also been a major actor in the world petrol market. It employs over 30,000 people.
In addition to its reserves of natural gas, and the world’s largest pipeline network (150,000km), it holds financial stakes in banks, insurance, the media, construction and agriculture.

An economic indicator which defines the value of the wealth created on a country’s territory (it also includes the activities of foreign business companies based on this territory) over the course of a given year.

In 1967, the Union Minière of Haut Katanga (UMHK - Miner Union of Upper Katanga) was nationalized and renamed as the “General Company of Congolese Minerals ( GECOMIN), which, three years later, became the “General  Congolese Mining Company” (GECOMINE), and then in 1972 the “General Company of Quarries and Mines” (GECAMINES).

Through the taxes it paid to the Congolese state, it was the main source of income for the country, with up to 368 million dollars spent in taxes, duties and various charges in 1988.

In the 1990s, the mining sector in Katanga collapsed, resulting in delays to payment of wages by the Gecamines to its employees, including the loss of other advantages they had acquired such as contracts and agreements (and a delay of 56 months in the payment of a food allowance in the form of corn flour). The World Bank then provided finance under rigorous conditions, including a drastic reduction in staff levels encouraged by a policy of voluntary redundancy (the laying-off of 10,655 workers and managers of all categories, theoretically covered by Article 78 of the Congolese work Code and presidential decree No.035/2003 of 18/3/2003). 90% of the workers who satisfied the “sole condition of a minimum of 25 years’ service” accepted to leave the company with a “final payment” but in reality, were paid a sum of money which was only equivalent to only one-fifth of the money they were due.

A Dutch visual artist living in Canada. His work consists of installations placing centre stage objects from everyday life, evoking DIY, garage or attic scenes. These installations also integrate video, through the visual creation of short stories, projected onto transparent supports. A whole game is thus created between the transparency of light and the opacity of objects.

DNA of the nucleus of the cell. It is therefore the physical support center of all the genes in the cell.

All the cells that enable the formation of an individual’s gametes.

A didactic game invented by two teachers: Rabbi Raymond Zwerin and Audrey Friedman Marcus in 1976 intended for Jewish students. The aim of this game was to survive the long historic process leading up to the concentration death camps.

A tree from China that can live for a very long time. Its leaves are formed of two lobes (which give it its name) and are deciduous. The extract from the leaves of the Ginkgo is a powerful anti-oxidant and has vasodilatory qualities.

American poet and one of the founders of the Beat Generation (cultural forerunner of Hippy culture). He greatly inspired the texts of Bob Dylan.

A term which describes nearly thirty years of economic growth and prosperity from the end of the Second World War (between 1945 and the crisis of 1973). This growth was due in a large part to reflationary policies by Western states and principally inspired by the Keynesian school of thought. The economy was then partly nationalized and the state adopted the role of the welfare-state.

Produced by the organism from glucose and glutamine, an amino acid. It is indispensable for healthy cartilage in all the joints. When its fabrication process is affected, the cartilage degenerates and osteoarthrosis occurs. It strengthens the lubricating action of the synovial fluid.

Glucidic macromolecules. These are important components of the extracellular matrixes of connective tissues. There are several kinds. Hyaluronic acid is an example of one.

An economic indicator which defines the value of the wealth created by a country (whether it be within that country or abroad) over the course of a given year.

GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) is the general name to describe a satellite navigation system providing global geopositioning cover.
Two GNSS are currently fully operational: the classic GPS developed by the United States (historically, GPS has remained in everyone’s memory and we still currently wrongly use this term to refer to any navigation system), and the Russian system GLONASS. Other systems should see the light of day very shortly: Galileo (European project), Beidou (Chinese project) and IRNSS (Indian project).

A Franco-Swiss filmmaker born in Paris in 1930. In the 1950s and 1960s he contributed to the modernity of French cinema as a New Wave film director. At the end of the 1970s he integrated video into his working process and produced a series of engaged films and several video experiments before going back to cinema, without ever losing sight of cinema. Godard is considered as one of the most influential people in cinema. He changes its modes of thinking, writing, shooting and editing.

Substance fabricated by the hypothalamus which then makes its way to the pituitary. Its role is to stimulate the fabrication by the pituitary of two hormones (gonadotropins) which in turn, stimulate the genital glands (gonads).

GPS (Global Positioning System) is a program that was originally developed by the United States Department of Defense. Its objective is to allow users equipped with the necessary equipment to determine their position at any moment in a global reference system. Mainly designed for maritime or aerial navigation, this system is composed of three segments:  the space segment, the user segment and the terrestrial segment.
The thirty or so satellites comprising the GPS space segment emit two radiofrequencies. They travel between six orbital planes at an altitude of approximately 20 200 kilometres.
GPS receivers, comprising the user segment, are devices capable of using these two signals to make a real-time calculation of the position of an observer, anywhere, anytime on Earth, whatever the atmospheric conditions, with a precision of 5 to 20 metres.
The terrestrial segment is comprised of five stations that calculate the orbit of satellites, check that they are working properly as well as verifying the quality of their clock.

Basic unit of written language ('a', 'ou', 'ph', etc.)

If a glass lens is placed on the path of light rays, the image that is viewed through it is deformed. Similarly, because of the deviation of light rays by very massive bodies predicted by general relativity, the image of a star will be distorted when its direction is close to that of a very massive foreground object, like a galaxy or a black hole.

A gravitational lens is produced by the presence of a massive celestial body (a deflector) between a distant source and an observer. The deflector has the effect of deflecting the rays that pass near it and making the rays converge upon the observer. From his viewpoint, the observer will see several images of the source on both sides of the deflector. 

One of the consequences of Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the prediction of gravitational waves, disturbances which affect the geometry of space-time and travel at the speed of light. When a sound is emitted, the passing of the sound wave modifies the air pressure whilst the emission of an electromagnetic wave changes the electrical characteristics of the environment in which it moves. In the same way, when a massive body is accelerated space-time must permanently readjust around it, which is expressed by miniscule disturbances which travel at the speed of light. Miniscule as the gravitational interaction is very weak. The gravitational waves thus interact very little with matter, which thus causes the difficulty of bringing them to light and, to this day, no gravitational wave has been directly detected (we only have indirect proof of their existence).
The perturbation which the spreading of these waves provokes within space-time is expressed by the fact that the shortest route between two points will lengthen and then contract; in other words a light ray will take longer and then shorter to travel from one point to the other.

Two major experiments in particular are under way in order to try and detect these waves: VIRGO, near Pisa, which is a joint Franco-Italian project, and LIGO, in the United States. Both rest on the same principle: a laser beam is split into two rays, which take distinct trajectories within the two perpendicular arms (of a length from 3 to 4km) of an interferometer. At the end of these arms mirrors reflect the rays and send them back to meet up again; their interference is expressed by more or less light depending on the difference in length between the journeys. Yet the arrival of a gravitational wave should modify these lengths, which would be expressed by modifications of the interference pattern. But for that it is required that the interferometer is very highly sensitive, for it must be capable of detecting a relative variation of length (ΔL/L) of the order of 10^-21, or even more (the equivalent of the size of an atom compared to the distance between the Earth and the Sun) in a fraction of a second! And in that is rooted the importance of research into the means of reaching ultimate precisions in measurements in physics (read the article Measuring beyond the standard quantum limit).

At the outcome of the Second World War, major international organisations such as the World Bank and private bodies such as the Ford and Rockerfeller Foundations funded agronomical research greater towards greater agricultural productivity in developing countries. This enabled the setting up of several international research centres such as the International Rice Research Centre in the Philipinnes in 1959, and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico in 1963. The objective driving this research, an objective which was met, was to create varieties of high yield cereals allowing a very rapidly growing population in developing countries to be fed. This ‘Green Revolution’, as it has been called, enabled yields of wheat and rice to be at the minimnum doubled and agriculture to be modernised in the countries of the South.

Critics of this revolution for their part pointed out that it had increased the countries of the South’s technological dependency on those of the North, and above all on their large multinationals (seeds, farming machinery, fertilisers, etc.), encouraged the peasants to fall into debt, many of whom had to sell their land and migrate to the cities and destroyed the ecological balance of many farming regions (an impoverishment of the biodiversity, monocultures, the polluting of the water and the soil).

All the cellular bodies of the nerve cells. They process the information received from sense organs or other regions of the brain. 

Generalised system of preferences. Adopted by the Contracting Parties to the GATT in 1971, this system offers developed countries the possibility of encouraging the export and industrialisation of particular developing countries in order to accelerate the pace of their economic growth.

Sotalia guianensis (its Latin name) is a dolphin species in the Delphinidae family which resembles the Tucuxi dolphin, Sotalia fluviatilis. Until recently these two dolphins were thought to belong to the same species, with the former residing in a marine environment and the latter in freshwater. The Guiana dolphin lives on the Eastern coast of South and Central America.

Self help association, born in the Middle Ages, which brought together the members of the same profession.

Frédéric Guillaume Victor Albert de Hohenzollern (1859-1941). Was from 1888 up until his abdication in 1918, the third and last German Emperor and the ninth and last King of Prussia.

German printer who was born and died in Mainz. His real name being Johannes Gensfleisch – Gutenberg being the name of a house owned by his family (Zu guten Bergen, ‘at the good mountain’) –, this engineer is considered in the West as the inventor of printing, which was developed by his hand in 1450 in the town of his birth. What seems certain is that he invented the printing press (1434), metal letters in the place of wooden ones and good quality ink allowing the printing of two sides of a sheet of paper. If the paternity of his revolutionary discovery has been contested, it is because the well-known inventions in the history of humanity in general result less through the genius of a single individual than from a series of techniques being perfected which, step by step, have ultimately enabled the ‘invention’ in the strict sense of the word to be produced.

American folk singer and guitarist who greatly influenced the music of Bob Dylan.

In electricity, the watt (W) is the unit of power of a system in which a current of 1 ampere flows across a potential difference of 1 volt. It's an average instantaneous power. Nuclear reactors like those in Belgium have around 1,000 MW of power (1,000 megawatts, which is a billion watts or a gigawatt, GW).
In one year, an energy source with a power of 1MW will produce a number of MWh (megawatt hours) of energy equal to 8,760, or the number of hours in a year.
But Wh (watt hours) must not be confused with W/h (watts per hour), which indicates the variation in power per unit of time.

calcium sulphate dihydrate with the chemical formula CaSO₄·2H₂O. Gypsum is the mineral used to make plaster.