Andropause

Andropause or male menopause, sometimes colloquially called "man-opause", is a name that has been given to a menopause-like condition in aging men. This relates to the slow but steady reduction of the production of the hormones testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone in middle-aged men, and the consequences of that reduction, which is associated with a decrease in Leydig cells.

Unlike women, middle-aged men do not experience a complete and permanent physiological shutting down of the reproductive system as a normal event. A steady decline in testosterone levels with age (in both men and women) is well documented.

Unlike "menopause", the word "andropause" is not currently recognized by the World Health Organization and its ICD-10 medical classification. This is likely because "andropause" is a term of convenience describing the stage of life when symptoms of aging appear in men. While the words are sometimes used interchangeably, hypogonadism is a deficiency state in which the hormone testosterone goes below the normal range for even an aging male.

Seigniorage

Seigniorage is the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce it. The term can be applied in the following ways:

• Seigniorage derived from specie—metal coins, is a tax, added to the total price of a coin (metal content and production costs), that a customer of the mint had to pay to the mint, and that was sent to the sovereign of the political area.
• Seigniorage derived from notes is more indirect, being the difference between interest earned on securities acquired in exchange for bank notes and the costs of producing and distributing those notes.

Seigniorage is a convenient source of revenue for some governments.

spaghettification

In astrophysics, spaghettification (sometimes referred to as the noodle effect) is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (rather like spaghetti) in a very strong gravitational field, and is caused by extreme tidal forces. In the most extreme cases, near black holes, the stretching is so powerful that no object can withstand it, no matter how strong its components. Within a small region the horizontal compression balances the vertical stretching so that small objects being spaghettified experience no net change in volume.

In his book A Brief History of Time (1988), Stephen Hawking describes the flight of a fictional astronaut who, passing within a black hole's event horizon, is "stretched like spaghetti" by the gravitational gradient (difference in strength) from head to toe. However, the term "spaghettification" was established well before this; Nigel Calder, for example, uses it in his book The Key to the Universe: A Report on the New Physics (Viking Press, 1977), a companion to a one-off BBC TV documentary: The Key to the Universe.

Thorn

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs ("giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being Thurisaz.

It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative [θ], like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative [ð], like th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), however the pronunciation of words beginning with a þ often depends on that word's position within a sentence, being pronounced [θ] if the word is at the beginning of a sentence but [ð] otherwise. Þ in modern Icelandic also has a voiceless allophone [θ], which occurs in certain positions within a phrase.

Cytopathology

Cytopathology (from Greek κύτος, kytos, "a hollow"; πάθος, pathos, "fate, harm"; and -λογία, -logia) is a branch of pathology that studies and diagnoses diseases on the cellular level. The discipline was founded by Rudolf Virchow in 1858. A common application of cytopathology is the Pap smear, used as a screening tool, to detect precancerous cervical lesions and prevent cervical cancer. Cytopathology is also commonly used to investigate thyroid lesions, diseases involving sterile body cavities (peritoneal, pleural, and cerebrospinal), and a wide range of other body sites. It is usually used to aid in the diagnosis of cancer, but also helps in the diagnosis of certain infectious diseases and other inflammatory conditions. Cytopathology is generally used on samples of free cells or tissue fragments, in contrast to histopathology, which studies whole tissues.

Tragicomedy

Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can variously describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or, often, a serious play with a happy ending.

Defacement

Defacement is a term used in heraldry and vexillology to refer to the addition of a symbol or charge to another flag. For example, the Australian flag is the British Blue Ensign defaced with the Southern Cross in the fly and the Commonwealth Star in the lower hoist quarter, beneath the Union Flag.

In the context of vexillology, "deface" carries no negative connotations, in contrast to general usage. It simply indicates differentiation of the flag from that of another owner by addition of elements. For example, many state flags are formed by defacing the national flag with a coat of arms.