Science & Philosophy: Mysticism to Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide

Science Encyclopedia

Mysticism in African Thought - Cosmology And Interaction, Indigenous Religions Compared With Christianity And Islam, Bibliography

The term mysticism typically denotes a complex of beliefs and practices related to the personal experience of the divine. Much, although not all, mystical thought and practice derives from or draws upon formal religious doctrines, emphasizing reflective, introspective, and meditative practices as the keys to cultivating perception and awareness that will ultimately lead to knowledge of and communi…

less than 1 minute read

Myth - Myth And Science, Myth And Philosophy, Myth And Religion, Myth And Ritual, Myth And Psychology

The study of myth across the disciplines is united by the questions asked. The main questions are those of origin, function, and subject matter. Origin in this context means why and how myth arises; function, why and how myth persists. The answer to the why of origin and function is usually a need, which myth arises to fulfill and persists by continuing to fulfill. What that need is varies from th…

2 minute read

Nanotechnology - Nanofabrication Techniques, Theoretical Methods, Conventional Nanoscale Devices, Quantum-effect Nanoscale Devices, Tangible Advances

Nanotechnology describes technologies where the component parts can measure just a few atomic diameters (generally around a millionth of a millimeter). The general goal of nanotechnology research programs is to reduce complex and sophisticated machinery into very small operational units. Nanotechnology involves the development of techniques to build machines from atoms and molecules. The name come…

4 minute read

Narcotic

A narcotic is a substance that produces insensibility, or a stuporous state. The most notable characteristics of narcotics are their ability to decrease the perception of pain and alter the reaction to pain, and their extremely addictive properties. Narcotics often induce a state of euphoria or extreme well being. The word narcotic is derived from the Greek word narké (meaning stupor), and …

1 minute read

National History - Nation Building And Professionalization, Varieties Of National History, Germany, Britain, Nation And History Today

The professionalization of history in nineteenth-and twentieth-century European universities was so closely related to the construction of the nation-state that national histories came to be seen as the only objective form of historical writing—indeed, criticism of national histories was seen not only as unpatriotic, but as a threat to the integrity of the historical profession and its clai…

1 minute read

Nationalism - Historical Manifestations, Theories Of Nationalism, Civic And Ethnic Nations, The Perennialists, The Modernists

Nationalism is one of the most significant political ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the heart of worldwide and local conflicts penetrating every region of the globe. It can be defined simply as a political ideology that aims to bring about or to increase the political representation or power of "the nation" and has appeared in many forms in a wide variety of circ…

2 minute read

Europe Nationalism in Music and the United States - Musicology And Nationalism, Nationalism And Art, German Nationalism, Features Of Nationalist Music, The Legacy Of Nationalism And The Special Case Of The United States

Nationalism in music has traditionally been described as a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon associated with countries or regions aspiring to nationhood whose composers strove to wed a national (most often folk-based) musical idiom to existing "main-stream" genres. Some of these accounts begin with Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), but he is more often understood as �…

1 minute read

Nationalism - Middle East - The Emergence Of Modern Nationalisms, World War I And Its Settlement, Differential Nationalist Trajectories, After Nationalism?

Nationalism is generally regarded as a recent development in the Middle East, a contingent phenomenon produced by the unique conditions of the modern era. Prior to the nineteenth century, concepts of collective identity and allegiance appear to have been defined primarily on the basis of lineage, locale, or religion—communities of sentiment and solidarity either smaller or larger than the n…

1 minute read

Native Policy - Anthropology's Changes, Perspectives On Colonialism And Postindependence Latin America, Indian Policies Of The Twentieth-century Nation-states

Before Europeans from a variety of countries began arriving on the shores of the two continents of the western hemisphere in the late fifteenth century, there were no "Indians." At that point in time, millions of human beings, members of hundreds of distinctive societies speaking mutually unintelligible languages, inhabited the lands between Alaska and Patagonia. The category of per…

1 minute read

Natural Fibers - Production Of Wool Fabric, Properties, Production Of Silk Fabric, Specialty Fibers From Animals, Vegetable Fibers - Animal fibers, Seed-hair fibers, Miscellaneous fibers, Mineral fibers

Natural fibers may be of animal, vegetable, or mineral origin. Although the annual production of vegetable fibers outweighs that of animal or mineral fibers, all have long been useful to humans. Animal hair fibers consist of a protein known as keratin. It has a composition similar to human hair. Keratin proteins are actually crystalline copolymers of nylon, where the repeating units are amino acid…

6 minute read

Natural History - Collections And The Growth Of Natural History, Maturity Of Natural History, Modern Synthesis And Contemporary Natural History

Natural history, the study of natural objects, has been a feature of all literate civilizations. In the Western tradition, starting with Aristotle, natural history has engaged scholars and has been an important feature of Western literature. The perspective with which writers have approached natural objects, and the aspects of interest to them, have varied as much as their cultures. Natural histor…

5 minute read

Natural Law - Natural Law In The Ancient And Medieval World, Early Modern Germany, Early Modern France, Natural Law And Natural Rights

Natural jurisprudential approaches to ethics have proved difficult to integrate into the historiography of philosophy because of just this same ambiguous relationship to history itself. On the one hand, natural law was viewed as a set of eternal verities presented by God to humanity in finished and perfect shape, and found embodied in the moral and civil order as evidence of its divine fashioning,…

2 minute read

Natural Numbers

The natural numbers are the ordinary numbers, 1, 2, 3,... with which we count. Sometimes they are called "the counting numbers." They have been called "natural" because much of our experience from infancy deals with discrete objects such as fingers, balls, peanuts, etc. We quickly, if not naturally, learn to count them. The mathematician Kronecker is reported to have sa…

2 minute read

Natural Theology - Natural Theology And The Birth Of Modern Science, Natural Theology And Its Critics In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The primary sense of the term natural theology rests on the contrast between natural and revealed knowledge. Natural theology concerns knowledge of the existence and attributes of God arrived at using only the natural faculties of sense and reason. Philosophical arguments for the existence, intelligence, power, and goodness of God based on the order and beauty of the world, or on purely intellectu…

1 minute read

Naturalism - Origins Of The Term, Zola's Understanding Of Naturalism, Critical Debates, Naturalism In The United States

Naturalism was one of a wave of "isms" that swept through the cultural world of the late nineteenth century. Its most vocal advocate was the French author Émile Zola (1840–1902), a prolific novelist, dramatist, essayist, and critic. Highly controversial in the period between the heyday of realism (1830–1860) and the emergence of early forms of modernism at the end …

2 minute read

Naturalism in Art and Literature - The Father Of Naturalism, The Early Naturalist Painters, Spreading Naturalism, Bibliography

Naturalism, a term widely used in the nineteenth century, was employed by novelists, artists, and art critics as a synonym for realism. But, in fact, naturalism was a much more complex term. The term derived from the theory of positivism developed by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). The roots of scientific naturalism, emerging from the eighteenth century and coming to frui…

1 minute read

Naturalization - Bibliography

Citizenship rests with territory at the heart of the definition of nation-state. If territory determines the geographical limits of state sovereignty, citizenship determines a state's population. Beyond these limits one finds foreign land, foreign sovereignty, and foreigners. Drawing the boundary within which some human beings are included and others excluded as foreigners, permitting some…

6 minute read

Nature - Nature Before Literacy, Nature In Antiquity, Pre-socratic Ideas Of Nature, Nature In Greek Rationalism

No interpretation of the idea of nature is good for all people in all places at all times. The interpretive position here reflects pivotal conceptual developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Charles Darwin's century brought home forcefully the reality of time, of evolutionary process that ultimately transforms all things. Darwin's contemporary T. H. Huxley believed tha…

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Naturphilosophie - The Work Of Schelling, Supporters And Detractors, Bibliography

Naturphilosophie refers both to the specific philosophical program Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) initiated with his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas for a philosophy of nature) and to the movement during the German Romantic period that Schelling's work is said to have spawned. The context of both is the achievement of Immanuel Kant (1724–1…

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Nautical Archaeology - Techniques For Underwater Surveyance, Retrieval, And Analysis, The Development Of Nautical Archaeology, Whole-ship Retrieval

Nautical archaeology is the branch of archaeology concerned with the excavation, identification, and study of the remains of sunken ships. The techniques used in nautical archaeology can be applied to the study of submerged ports, lost cities, sacrificial wells, and other underwater sites. The ocean conceals a vast number of unexplored, and potentially valuable, archaeological sites. But the techn…

1 minute read

NEAR-Earth Object Hazard Index

Advanced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Richard P. Binzel in 1995, the Torino scale is a revision of the Near-Earth Object Hazard Index. In 1999, the International Conference on Near-Earth objects adopted the scale at a meeting in Turino (Turin), Italy (from which the name of the scale is derived). The Torino scale is used to portray the threat to Earth of an impact with a part…

4 minute read

Nectar

Nectar is a sweet, pleasant-tasting liquid secreted by nectaries. These are specialized organs located inside flowers, and also outside. For example, the "glands" on leaf stalks of cherry (Prunus) and wattle (Acacia) trees are nectaries. The nectar produced inside flowers attracts crawling or flying insects, birds, or mammals. As a result of feeding on nectar, these visitors may tran…

1 minute read

Negative

Negative is a term in mathematics that usually means "opposite." An electron's charge is called negative not because it is "below" but because it is opposite that of a proton. A surface with negative curvature bulges in from the point of view of someone on one side of the surface but bulges out from the point of view of someone on the other side. A line with nega…

3 minute read

Neocolonialism - Bibliography

Neocolonialism can be defined as the continuation of the economic model of colonialism after a colonized territory has achieved formal political independence. This concept was applied most commonly to Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. European countries had colonized most of the continent in the late nineteenth century, instituting a system of economic exploitation in which Afric…

9 minute read

Neoplatonism - Terminology, Before Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Later Neoplatonists, Ancient Christian Neoplatonism, Medieval Neoplatonism, Neoplatonism In The Latin West

Neoplatonism initially had a negative connotation. Enlightenment historians developed the term to dissociate the Platonists of the late Roman Empire from Plato, believing that they had distorted his philosophy beyond all recognition by their eclecticism. Jacob Brucker (Historia critica philosophiae, 1742–1744) branded them "the Eclectic Sect" before A. F. Büsching (Grundr…

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Neptune - Discovery, Characteristics, Observations From Earth, Results From The Voyager 2 Flyby, Neptune's Magnetic Field

Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun and about four times the size of Earth. Astronomers consider Neptune to form with Uranus a subgroup of the Jovian planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Neptune and Uranus are similar in size, mass, periods of their rotation, the overall features of their magnetic fields, and ring systems. However they differ in the structure of their atmospheres …

7 minute read

Nerve Growth Factor

Nerve growth factor (NGF) is a polypeptide, a molecule composed of several amino acid units that has a protein-like behavior, but is not as complex as a protein in structure. NGF increases the growth of nerve cells, especially those in the peripheral nervous system, and directs the growth and orientation of nerve cell axons (processes which carry impulses away from the nerve cell body to adjoining…

2 minute read

Nerve Impulses and Conduction of Impulses

In contrast to the endocrine system that achieves long-term control via chemical (hormonal) mechanisms, the nervous system relies on more rapid mechanisms of chemical and electrical transmission to propagate signals and commands. The rapid conduction of impulses is essential in allowing the nervous system to mediate short-term and near immediate communication and control between various body syste…

5 minute read

Neuron - Structure And Function, Structural Classification, Glial Cells, Functional Classification

Neurons are nerve cells (neurocytes), which, together with neuroglial cells, comprise the nervous tissue making up the nervous system. The neuron is the integral element of our five senses and of countless other physical, regulatory, and mental faculties, including memory and consciousness. A neuron consists of a nerve cell body (or soma), an elongated projection (axon), and short branching fibers…

1 minute read

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system and its components. Neuroscientists may examine the nervous systems of humans and higher animals as well as simple multicellular nervous systems, or investigate nervous phenomenon at the cellular, organelle, or molecular level. Neuroscience principally originated with three European scientists working at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of…

2 minute read

Neurosurgery - Application Of Neurosurgery, Diagnosis, Advances In Neurosurgery, Intraoperative Guidance Systems

Neurosurgery is a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of the central and peripheral nervous system. The nervous system is composed of the brain, spinal cord and spinal column, as well as the nerves that travel through all parts of the body (hands, legs, arms, face). Neurosurgeons treat degenerative and congenital diseases of the spine, pain from pinched nerves in the neck,…

2 minute read

Neutrino - History, Neutrino Mass, Interactions With Matter

Neutrinos are elusive subatomic particles that result from certain nuclear reactions. Neutrinos have no electrical charge and only a tiny mass, travel at nearly the speed of light, come in three types—electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos—and barely interact with normal matter. Because their interaction rate is so low, neutrinos produced in the core of the Sun fly dir…

1 minute read

Neutron Activation Analysis

Neutron activation analysis is an analytical technique for determining the elements present in a material as well as the amount of each element in the sample. The technique is based on a well-known reaction from nuclear chemistry. When an element is bombarded with neutrons, some of the atoms of that element may capture neutrons and incorporate them into their nuclei. Those atoms that do so have th…

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New Criticism - Beginnings In England, American New Criticism, Decline Of The New Criticism And Continuing Influence, Bibliography

The New Criticism is the name given to the work of a school of formalist-oriented Anglo-American literary critics whose writings appeared in the years following World War I and came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) coined the moniker itself in his 1941 study The New Criticism, in which he provided an overview of the work of key "New" Critics,…

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New World Monkeys - Capuchins, The Night Monkey, Titis, Squirrel Monkeys, The Saki Family, Howler Monkeys

The New World monkeys of Central and South America belong to the family Cebidae and to the family Callitrichidae (the marmosets and tamarins). The Cebidae, or capuchin-like monkeys, are distinguished from the marmosets and tamarins by their possession of nails instead of claws on most fingers and toes, and three molars instead of two on either side of each jaw. Finally, cebids tend to give birth t…

2 minute read

Newtonianism - The Philosophy Of Body, Experimental Philosophy, Rational Mechanics, Religion And Politics, Bibliography

A standard definition of Newtonianism or Newtonian philosophy found in early eighteenth-century dictionaries such as John Harris's Lexicon Technicum (5th ed., 1736) is: "The doctrine of the universe, and particularly of the heavenly bodies; their laws, affections, etc., as delivered by Sir Isaac Newton." An almost identical definition appears around thirty years later in the E…

6 minute read