SMAP

SMAP is a Japanese boy band formed by Johnny & Associates. While originally consisting of six members, the group currently consists of five: Masahiro Nakai, Takuya Kimura, Goro Inagaki, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, and Shingo Katori. The group's name is an acronym standing for Sports Music Assemble People.

The best selling boyband in Asia by more than 35 million records sold, SMAP released their first CD in 1991 and has since released over fifty singles and twenty albums. Approximately more than half of the singles and a half of the albums have reached the top of the Japanese Oricon music charts. In recent years, the interval between the band's single CD releases has become longer, and they are now released approximately once a year.

The members of SMAP have also pursued careers outside of music, including involvement in television variety shows, dramas, commercials, and movies, making them one of the most popular Johnny's groups. Largely due to their popularity, Johnny & Associates became the most successful agency in Japan, with earnings of almost three billion Japanese yen in 1995.

SMAP1

Stromal membrane-associated protein 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SMAP1 gene.

The protein encoded by this gene is similar to the mouse stromal membrane-associated protein-1. This similarity suggests that this human gene product is also a type II membrane glycoprotein involved in the erythropoietic stimulatory activity of stromal cells. Alternate splicing results in multiple transcript variants encoding different isoforms.

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Soil Moisture Active Passive

Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) is an American environmental research satellite launched on 31 January 2015. It is one of the first Earth observation satellites being developed by NASA in response to the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey.

Mission overview

SMAP will provide measurements of the land surface soil moisture and freeze-thaw state with near-global revisit coverage in 2–3 days. SMAP surface measurements will be coupled with hydrologic models to infer soil moisture conditions in the root zone. These measurements will enable science applications users to:

SMAP observations will be acquired for a period of at least three years after launch. A comprehensive validation, science, and applications program will be implemented, and all data will be made available publicly through the NASA archive centers.

Wool

Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and certain other animals, including cashmere from goats, mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, angora from rabbits, and other types of wool from camelids.

Wool has several qualities that distinguish it from hair or fur: it is crimped, it is elastic, and it grows in staples (clusters).

Characteristics

Wool's scaling and crimp make it easier to spin the fleece by helping the individual fibers attach to each other, so they stay together. Because of the crimp, wool fabrics have greater bulk than other textiles, and they hold air, which causes the fabric to retain heat. Wool has a high specific heat coefficient, so it impedes heat transfer in general. This effect has benefited desert peoples, as Bedouins and Tuaregs use wool clothes for insulation.

Felting of wool occurs upon hammering or other mechanical agitation as the microscopic barbs on the surface of wool fibers hook together.

The amount of crimp corresponds to the fineness of the wool fibers. A fine wool like Merino may have up to 100 crimps per inch, while the coarser wools like karakul may have as few as one or two. In contrast, hair has little if any scale and no crimp, and little ability to bind into yarn. On sheep, the hair part of the fleece is called kemp. The relative amounts of kemp to wool vary from breed to breed and make some fleeces more desirable for spinning, felting, or carding into batts for quilts or other insulating products, including the famous tweed cloth of Scotland.

Woollyback

Wool (disambiguation)

Wool is the fibre commonly produced from sheep

Wool (the fiber) refers to one of the following:

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