Campden tablets (potassium or sodium metabisulfite) are a sulfur-based product that is used primarily to sterilize wine, cider and in beer making to kill bacteria and to inhibit the growth of most wild yeast: this product is also used to eliminate both free chlorine and the more stable form, chloramine, from water solutions (e.g., drinking water from municipal sources). Campden tablets allow the amateur brewer to easily measure small quantities of sodium metabisulfite, so it can be used to protect against wild yeast and bacteria without affecting flavour. Typical use is one crushed Campden tablet...

Alexander Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and KGB, who fled from court prosecution in Russia and received political asylum in the United Kingdom. On 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized. He died three weeks later, becoming the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. Litvinenko's allegations about the misdeeds of the FSB and his public deathbed accusations that Russian president Vladimir Putin was behind his unusual malady resulted in worldwide media coverage. Subsequent investigations...

Aphasia is an inability to comprehend and formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. Caused either by a cerebral vascular accident (CVA), which is also known as a stroke, or head trauma such as with a concussion, aphasia can cause impairments in speech and language modalities. To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's speech or language must be significantly impaired in one (or several) of the four communication modalities following acquired brain injury or have significant decline over a short time period (progressive aphasia). The four communication modalities are auditory...

In physics, geometrothermodynamics (GTD) is a formalism developed recently by Hernando Quevedo to describe the properties of thermodynamic systems in terms of concepts of differential geometry. Consider a thermodynamic system in the framework of classical equilibrium thermodynamics. The states of thermodynamic equilibrium are considered as points of an abstract equilibrium space in which a Riemannian metric can be introduced in several ways. In particular, one can introduce Hessian metrics like the Fisher information metric, the Weinhold metric, the Ruppeiner metric and others, whose components...