Late twentieth century technics and technologies heavily dependent on or embodying advanced scientific or engineering knowledge, e.g., many of those produced by and used in the microelectronics-based, biotechnology, aerospace, and instrumentation industries.

A testable scientific idea that can be proved right or wrong with experiments.

A model of the technical¬change-ensuing-social-change (TCESC) relationship in which the social change outcome of a technical change is a joint product of the nature of the technical change realized and the interplay of the SCES (at the time the technical change is introduced) with five interacting intervening variables:

Technology native to a particular place, people, or region.

The transformation of a technology based on human and animal labor to a technology based on the use of inanimate energy sources.

The continual expanding application of sophisticated technology designed to efficiently draw energy and raw materials out of the environment and fashion them into products for human use

A social actor, e.g., a government agency, business firm, union, or public interest group, that exercises some type of influence on scientific or technological activity or products or on some aspect of the total societal enterprise of science or technology.

A change in some aspect of scientific or technological activity or products or of the total societal enterprise of science or technology brought about through some types of influence exercise

Any of several qualitatively different types of influence on science or technology that can be exerted by an influence agent in trying to bring some king of influence effect

A new intellectual, material, or social product or process ready for practical us, or the process involved in arriving at one form, e.g., an invention

The process by which an innovation is disseminated in a social group.

The complex of specific dispositions, values, and political and economic institutions and rewards that, taken together, enabled and fostered technological innovation in modern Western society

The process by which the fledging endeavors of science and technology take on established forms of organization and practice in a society, eventually to the point of becoming recognized as abiding constituent elements of the society's culture.

The application of ever expanding technology and labor techniques to increase productivity

A technology resulting from taking a traditional technology through series of incremental modern innovations that make it much more productive yet leave it still able to meet the criteria for appropriate technology.

A substantially original operational device—or process of conceptualization and experimental testing by which one is realized—that achieves a desired result, often in an ingenious manner

The science of measuring changes, of assessing rates of movements and flow.

Less Developed Countries, often referred to collectively as the so-called Third World.

Activities undertaken by legislatures to restrict scientific and technological developments, ostensibly to serve what is held to be in the public interest

A model of the innovation process that represents technological innovation as due, at the bottom to basic scientific research, followed in order by development, production, and marketing phases

Countries, often understood as referring to those of Western Europe, North America, and Japan

An organizational innovation, consisting of the large-scale, multiunit, hierarchically organized, professionally managed firm that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century as a response to technologies that made business on a national and international scale technically feasible.

A technology that creates small materials at the scale of molecules by manipulating single atoms. The name nano comes from the size of molecules which is measured in nanometers - or one billionth of a meter (0.000000001 meter).

The process described by Darwin's theory of evolution that favors certain genotypes and disfavors others. This process is entirely guided by the interaction of an organism with its environment.

Newly Industrialized Countries; often used to refer to countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia.

The individual member of a species; can be a single cell or a multicellular organism. Organisms are the biological unit of reproduction and while cells of single cell organism are autonomous (bacteria, archaea), individual cells of multicellular organisms (fungi, plants, animals) are not

Well-founded knowledge of the natural world (science); technics and technic-related intellectual constructs (technology)

The set of intellectual commitments common to most practitioners of a given discipline of field of intellectual or practical activity.

The idea that scientific activity and technological activity each take many coexisting forms in the contemporary era.

The totality of a closely related number of individual organisms that belong to the same species and live in the same geographical area and interact with each other through sexual (or asexual for bacteria) reproduction.

A philosophical position according to which there are close ties between the social and natural sciences, which share a common logical framework