Technology glossary

Surrogate Endpoint

Teleoperated Surgery

Teleoperation

Controlling a robot from another location through a communication link.

Therapeutic Drug Monitoring

Therapy-Related Mutation

A genetic change that arises after exposure to a cancer treatment and may affect later disease behavior.

Thermal Management

The control, removal and distribution of heat in devices and systems.

Thermal Radiation

Thermoelectric Generator

A solid-state device that produces electricity from a temperature difference between two sides. It has no moving parts, but its output depends on maintaining that temperature gradient and is usually limited by conversion efficiency.

Thin-Film Electronics

Three-Dimensional Cell Culture

A method of growing cells in a three-dimensional scaffold that better resembles natural tissue than a flat dish.

Thymulin

A thymus-derived hormone involved in immune regulation whose activity can decline with age.

Tidal Disruption Event

A flare produced when a star passes close enough to a black hole to be torn apart by tidal forces.

Topology Optimization

A computational method that decides how material should be distributed within a design space to meet goals such as stiffness, strength or low mass while respecting constraints.

Training Data

The collection of examples used to adjust a machine-learning model's parameters and behavior.

Transmission Spectroscopy

A method that studies starlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere while the planet crosses in front of its star.

Tritium(³H)

A radioactive isotope of hydrogen containing one proton and two neutrons.

Two-Dimensional Material

A material whose functional layer is only one or a few atoms thick.

Unit-Distance Graph

Utility Factor

Viral Replication

The process by which a virus uses host-cell machinery to copy its genetic material and produce new viral particles.

Virtual Unwrapping

Vision-Language-Action Model(VLA)

A vision-language-action model is an artificial-intelligence system that combines visual perception, language understanding, and action generation so a robot can interpret a scene and an instruction, then produce physical control commands.

Visual Acuity

A measure of the eye's ability to distinguish fine details at a specified distance.

Wavefront Shaping

Wearable Biosensor

Weight-Four Parity Check

An error-checking operation that measures a shared relationship among four data qubits using an additional qubit.

Wildfire Plume

The rising column of smoke, gases, ash and heated air produced by a wildfire.

World Simulation

X-Ray Tomography

Zeolite

A porous crystalline material with regularly sized channels that can selectively trap or exchange molecules and ions.