Technology glossary

Recombinant Spider Silk

Spider-silk proteins produced using engineered cells rather than harvested from spiders.

Reconfigurable Electronics

Electronic systems whose physical arrangement, electrical behavior, or computational function can be changed after fabrication. Reconfiguration may use software, programmable circuits, movable components, or materials that respond to external stimuli.

Regolith

The loose layer of dust, broken rock, and soil covering the solid bedrock of a planet, moon, or asteroid. On the Moon, regolith was formed by billions of years of meteorite impacts and can trap ice in permanently shadowed, extremely cold regions near the poles.

Relativistic Correction

A relativistic correction accounts for differences in clock rates caused by satellite speed and weaker gravity at orbital altitude. GPS must correct for effects predicted by special and general relativity or positioning errors would accumulate rapidly.

Remote Assistance

Human support provided from a control centre to help an autonomous vehicle interpret an unusual situation without directly driving it continuously.

Remotely Operated Vehicle(ROV)

An underwater robot controlled by operators through a tether or communication link.

Renewable Methanol

Methanol made with renewable energy and non-fossil carbon, commonly by reacting clean hydrogen with carbon dioxide captured from air, biomass or industrial sources.

Reservoir Engineering

In quantum science, the deliberate design of a system's surrounding environment, or reservoir, to control dissipation, decoherence, and steady states. By tailoring these interactions, researchers can prepare, protect, or manipulate quantum states.

Resiquimod(R848)

An experimental immune-stimulating compound that activates Toll-like receptors 7 and 8 and is studied as a way to shift innate immune cells toward a more inflammatory response.

Retinal Prosthesis

An implanted visual device that stimulates retinal cells to provide limited artificial vision.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation(RAG)

A method that searches a selected collection of documents for relevant passages and supplies them to a generative model as context before it produces an answer.

Reusable Launch Vehicle(RLV)

A rocket designed so that part of it, usually the first stage or booster, can return to Earth intact after launch and fly again on a later mission, instead of being discarded. Reusability can cut launch costs because the same hardware carries multiple payloads over its lifetime.

Robot Interoperability

The ability of software, tools and control systems to work across robots from different manufacturers or with different hardware.

Robot-Assisted Bronchoscopy

A physician-controlled procedure that uses robotic navigation to guide a flexible bronchoscope and biopsy tools through branching airways toward small or difficult lung lesions.

Robotics Benchmark

A standardized task, dataset, environment, or measurement protocol used to compare robotic systems. A useful benchmark defines repeatable conditions and metrics such as success rate, accuracy, speed, robustness, safety, or generalization.

Runaway Supermassive Black Hole

A supermassive black hole moving away from its host galaxy after a violent interaction or merger.

Safety Guardrail

A technical, procedural, or policy control intended to prevent a system from causing unacceptable harm or operating outside defined limits. In AI, guardrails can include input filters, output checks, access controls, monitoring, rate limits, and human review.

Safety-Preserving Fine-Tuning

The adaptation of a pretrained AI model to a new task or domain while trying to retain its existing safety behavior. Methods may combine curated data, constrained optimization, safety evaluations, adversarial testing, and continued alignment training.

Same-Origin Policy(SOP)

A browser security rule that limits how content from one origin can access data from another origin.

Sandbox Escape

A sandbox escape occurs when software or an automated agent breaks out of a restricted execution environment and gains access to systems, networks, files, or privileges that the isolation boundary was designed to block.

Satellite Clock Error

Satellite clock error is the difference between a navigation satellite's onboard clock and the system's reference time. GNSS control systems estimate these errors and broadcast corrections because even nanosecond-scale timing offsets affect measured range.

Satellite Constellation

A satellite constellation is a coordinated group of satellites designed to provide a shared service over a region or the globe. GPS uses a constellation in medium Earth orbit so receivers can normally see enough satellites to calculate position and time.

Satellite Navigation

Satellite navigation uses radio signals from orbiting satellites to let receivers determine position, velocity and precise time. GPS is one satellite-navigation system within the broader family known as GNSS.

Satellite Ranging

Satellite ranging estimates the distance between a receiver and a satellite from a signal's travel time or carrier phase. Combining ranges to several satellites allows a navigation receiver to solve for its position and clock offset.

Satellite Signal Acquisition

Satellite signal acquisition is the process by which a GNSS receiver searches for and locks onto the code and frequency of a navigation satellite signal before it can track that satellite continuously.

Satellite-Based Augmentation System(SBAS)

A Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) improves GNSS by broadcasting corrections and integrity information derived from a network of precisely surveyed ground stations. Examples include WAAS in North America and EGNOS in Europe.

Saturation Magnetization

The maximum magnetization a material reaches when increasing the applied magnetic field no longer aligns substantially more magnetic moments. It helps indicate how much magnetic flux a motor material can support.

Search Data Portability

The ability of a user or business to transfer search-related data, such as query history, preferences, or performance information, from one service to another in a usable format. It can lower switching barriers, subject to privacy, security, and intellectual-property safeguards.

Secure Data Enclave

A controlled computing environment that lets approved users analyse sensitive data without freely downloading or copying the underlying records. Access, exports and computation can be monitored to reduce disclosure risk.

Security Domain

An isolated part of a computing system governed by its own trust boundary, permissions and enforcement mechanisms.