Half-life (t1⁄2) is the amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value. The term is very commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay, but it is also used more generally for discussing any type of exponential decay.
The original term, dating to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the principle in 1907, was "half-life period", which was shortened to "half-life" in the early 1950s. Rutherford applied the principle of a radioactive element's half-life to studies of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206.
Half-life is used to describe a quantity undergoing exponential decay, and is constant over the lifetime of the decaying quantity. It is a characteristic unit for the exponential decay equation. The term "half-life" may generically be used to refer to any period of time in which a quantity falls by half, even if the decay is not exponential. The table on the right shows the reduction of a quantity in the number of half-lives elapsed. For a general introduction and description of exponential decay, see exponential decay. For a general introduction and description of non-exponential decay, see rate law. The converse of half-life is doubling time.
Halflife is an EP by the Italian rock band Lacuna Coil, released in 2000 by Century Media. The EP contains 5 tracks. A slightly altered version of the track Senzafine would later appear on international releases of their 2001 full-length album, Unleashed Memories, while the entire HALFLife EP was appended to the United States release of the album. A performance of Senzafine can also be found on the band's 2008 live album.
The Haazareth Three debuted in Fantastic Four Vol 3 #69 (2003). They operate out of the hellish realm ruled by Mephisto. They are a trio of demons with whom Doctor Doom made a pact (seen in the Unthinkable story arc). They made a deal with Doom; if he sacrifices something of irreplaceable value, they would provide him with the magical powers he would have possessed if he had chosen to devote his life to studying magic over science. Doom does, killing his childhood sweetheart, Valeria. The demons come through with the deal.
Hack is a mutant whose first appearance was in Excalibur vol. 2 #2. He was one of the few survivors after Cassandra Nova programmed her Wild Sentinels to decimate the island nation of Genosha, killing over 16 million mutants. He found other survivors and allied himself with Unus the Untouchable and his gang. He was a very valuable asset on the island since all forms of electronic communication were eradicated or made useless by the resulting electro-magnetic damage. Inside of the gang, he became close friends with Hub and the two of them began to doubt if Unus' exclusive, clique-like strategy was the best way. Hack was gifted with a finely tuned form of telepathy that allowed him to "hack" into almost any mind.
MUX, Mux, or mux may refer to:
In computing, the Blit was a programmable bitmap graphics terminal designed by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi Jr. of Bell Labs in 1982.
The Blit technology was commercialized by AT&T and Teletype. In 1984, the DMD (dot-mapped display) 5620 was released, followed by models 630 MTG (multi-tasking graphics) in 1987 and 730 in 1989. The 5620 used a Western Electric 32000 processor (aka Bellmac 32) and had a 15" green phosphor display with 800×1024×1 resolution (66×88 characters in the initial text mode) interlaced at 30 Hz. The 630 and 730 had Motorola 68000 processors and a faster 1024×1024×1 monochrome display (most had orange displays, but some had white or green displays).
The folk etymology for the Blit name is that it stands for Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal, and its creators have also joked that it actually stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato. However, Rob Pike's paper on the Blit explains that it was named after the second syllable of bit blit, a common name for the bit-block transfer operation that is fundamental to the terminal's graphics. Its original nickname was the jerq, inspired by Three Rivers' PERQ graphic workstation.
In Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca (southern Mexico), a muxe (also spelled muxhe; [muʃeʔ]) is an assigned male at birth individual who dresses and behaves in ways otherwise associated with the female gender; they may be seen as a third gender. Some marry women and have children while others choose men as sexual or romantic partners. According to anthropologist Lynn Stephen, muxe "may do certain kinds of women’s work such as embroidery or decorating home altars, but others do the male work of making jewelry."
The word muxe is thought to derive from the 16th-century Spanish word for "woman", mujer. At the time, the letter x had a sound similar to "sh" (see History of the Spanish language § Modern development of the Old Spanish sibilants).
In contrast to Mexico's majority mestizo culture, the isthmus of Oaxaca has a predominantly Zapotec population, and it is widely reported that there is less hostility toward muxe in the region than homosexual, effeminate males and trans women face in other regions of the country. One study estimates that 6 percent of males in an Isthmus Zapotec community in the early 1970s were muxe. Other Zapotec communities have similar "third gender" roles, such as the biza’ah of Teotitlán del Valle.