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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
helium
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
liquid
▪ Obviously there is a price to be paid in holding the liquid helium temperatures.
▪ The Kamikaze: One part liquid helium, two parts prussic acid.
▪ Supplies of liquid helium are an absolute necessity in many modern science laboratories.
▪ These micro-refrigerators are commercially available, and avoid the explosion hazard of liquid hydrogen and the expense of liquid helium.
■ NOUN
balloon
▪ Visual effects feature largely in this community arts venture, and have included helium balloons and fireworks.
▪ People left the auditorium that morning trailing their doubts behind them like children dragging exhausted helium balloons.
▪ I wish people would stop buying helium balloons and letting them go.
▪ Breastfeeding does perky things to some women's statistics, but it left mine looking like two well-past-their-sell-by-date helium balloons.
■ VERB
make
▪ And the recently discovered structure of atoms gave them the idea that they could make helium out of hydrogen.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But in addition there remained the puzzle of how the helium came to be in the springs.
▪ However, the story can be simplified without losing its essence by neglecting the helium for the time being.
▪ The job is made more difficult now because of self-sealing materials and the use of helium.
▪ The Kamikaze: One part liquid helium, two parts prussic acid.
▪ The two orbiting electrons of the helium atom form a shell.
▪ These solar gases contain a large amount of helium, the second most abundant element in the Sun.
▪ Typically, the fuels are isotopes of the three lightest elements, hydrogen, helium, and lithium.
▪ Uranium has two radioactive isotopes, each of which decays to an isotope of lead and helium.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
helium

Noble \No"ble\, a. [Compar. Nobler; superl. Noblest.] [F. noble, fr. L. nobilis that can be or is known, well known, famous, highborn, noble, fr. noscere to know. See know.]

  1. Possessing eminence, elevation, dignity, etc.; above whatever is low, mean, degrading, or dishonorable; magnanimous; as, a noble nature or action; a noble heart.

    Statues, with winding ivy crowned, belong To nobler poets for a nobler song.
    --Dryden.

  2. Grand; stately; magnificent; splendid; as, a noble edifice.

  3. Of exalted rank; of or pertaining to the nobility; distinguished from the masses by birth, station, or title; highborn; as, noble blood; a noble personage.

    Note: Noble is used in the formation of self-explaining compounds; as, noble-born, noble-hearted, noble-minded.

    Noble gas (Chem.), a gaseous element belonging to group VIII of the periodic table of elements, not combining with other elements under normal reaction conditions; specifically, helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, or radon; also called inert gas.

    Noble metals (Chem.), silver, gold, and platinum; -- so called from their resistance to oxidation by air and to dissolution by acids. Copper, mercury, aluminium, palladium, rhodium, iridium, and osmium are sometimes included.

    Syn: Honorable; worthy; dignified; elevated; exalted; superior; sublime; great; eminent; illustrious; renowned; stately; splendid; magnificent; grand; magnanimous; generous; liberal; free.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
helium

1868, coined from Greek helios "sun" (see sol), because the element was detected in the solar spectrum during the eclipse of Aug. 18, 1868, by English astronomer Sir Joseph N. Lockyer (1836-1920) and English chemist Sir Edward Frankland (1825-1899). It was not actually obtained until 1895; it was assumed before that to be an alkali metal, hence the ending in -ium.

Wiktionary
helium

n. 1 (context uncountable English) A colorless and inert gas, and the second lightest chemical element (''symbol'' He) with an atomic number of 2 and atomic weight of 4.002602. 2 (context countable English) A form or sample of the element.

WordNet
helium

n. a very light colorless element that is one of the six inert gasses; the most difficult gas to liquefy; occurs in economically extractable amounts in certain natural gases (as those found in Texas and Kansas) [syn: He, atomic number 2]

Wikipedia
Helium (band)

Helium was an American alternative rock band formed during the summer of 1992. Under the original moniker of "Chupa," the band's founding members were Mary Lou Lord; Jason Hatfield, Juliana Hatfield's brother; Shawn King Devlin; and Brian Dunton. Devlin and Dunton were both also in the band Dumptruck before founding Helium.

Helium (disambiguation)

Helium is chemical element. It may also refer to its isotopes:

  • Helium-3, an isotope of helium
  • Helium-4, an isotope of helium

Helium may refer to:

Helium (operating system)

Helium is a real-time kernel for the HC(S)08 processor core by Freescale and Atmel AVR.

Helium (album)

Helium is the second album by Pram, released in September 1994 through Too Pure.

Helium (film)

Helium is an Oscar-winning 2014 short film by Danish film maker Anders Walter.

Helium

Helium is a chemical element with symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas, the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is the lowest among all the elements.

Helium is the second lightest element and is the second most abundant element in the observable universe, being present at about 24% of the total elemental mass, which is more than 12 times the mass of all the heavier elements combined. Its abundance is similar to this figure in the Sun and in Jupiter. This is due to the very high nuclear binding energy (per nucleon) of helium-4 with respect to the next three elements after helium. This helium-4 binding energy also accounts for why it is a product of both nuclear fusion and radioactive decay. Most helium in the universe is helium-4, and is believed to have been formed during the Big Bang. Large amounts of new helium are being created by nuclear fusion of hydrogen in stars.

Helium is named for the Greek god of the Sun, Helios. It was first detected as an unknown yellow spectral line signature in sunlight during a solar eclipse in 1868 by French astronomer Jules Janssen. Janssen is jointly credited with detecting the element along with Norman Lockyer. Jannsen observed during the solar eclipse of 1868 while Lockyer observed from Britain. Lockyer was the first to propose that the line was due to a new element, which he named. The formal discovery of the element was made in 1895 by two Swedish chemists, Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet, who found helium emanating from the uranium ore cleveite. In 1903, large reserves of helium were found in natural gas fields in parts of the United States, which is by far the largest supplier of the gas today.

Liquid helium is used in cryogenics (its largest single use, absorbing about a quarter of production), particularly in the cooling of superconducting magnets, with the main commercial application being in MRI scanners. Helium's other industrial uses—as a pressurizing and purge gas, as a protective atmosphere for arc welding and in processes such as growing crystals to make silicon wafers—account for half of the gas produced. A well-known but minor use is as a lifting gas in balloons and airships. As with any gas whose density differs from that of air, inhaling a small volume of helium temporarily changes the timbre and quality of the human voice. In scientific research, the behavior of the two fluid phases of helium-4 (helium I and helium II) is important to researchers studying quantum mechanics (in particular the property of superfluidity) and to those looking at the phenomena, such as superconductivity, produced in matter near absolute zero.

On Earth it is relatively rare—5.2 ppm by volume in the atmosphere. Most terrestrial helium present today is created by the natural radioactive decay of heavy radioactive elements ( thorium and uranium, although there are other examples), as the alpha particles emitted by such decays consist of helium-4 nuclei. This radiogenic helium is trapped with natural gas in concentrations as great as 7% by volume, from which it is extracted commercially by a low-temperature separation process called fractional distillation. Previously, terrestrial helium—a non-renewable resource, because once released into the atmosphere it readily escapes into space—was thought to be in increasingly short supply. However, recent studies suggest that helium produced deep in the earth by radioactive decay can collect in natural gas reserves in larger than expected quantities, in some cases having been released by volcanic activity.

Helium (Haskell)

Helium is a compiler and a dialect of the functional programming language Haskell. It has been designed to make learning Haskell easier by giving clearer error messages. It is being developed at Utrecht University, Netherlands, primarily by Arjan van IJzendoorn, Daan Leijen, Bastiaan Heeren and Rijk-Jan van Haaften.

Certain language features of Haskell have not been included to create more specific error messages. For this reason, it (currently) lacks type classes, rendering it incompatible with many Haskell programs.

It also includes Hint, an interpreter written in Java with a graphical user interface.

Usage examples of "helium".

Electrical activity is up, helium emissions up, radon emissions up, foreshocks are occurring, though not directly within our nucleation zone.

The gravitational energy released in the collapse would heat the core further, eventually reaching the billion degrees necessary to initiate the fusion of helium nuclei into carbon, with other elements appearing through neutron capture along the lines Gamow had proposed.

Fifteen minutes later we received orders from the flagship to proceed toward Helium.

Savage had personally developed the alloy motors, and Doc, with help from Monk, had succeeded in synthesizing an inflating gas, noninflammable, with substantially greater lifting power than helium or hydrogen.

This was noninflammable and had greater lifting power than either helium or hydrogen.

The banners of Helium had been strung from stem to stern of each of our mighty craft, but the Zodangans did not need this sign to realize that we were enemies, for our green Martian warriors had opened fire upon them almost as they left the ground.

Moreover, there had never been any question about whether or not he would leave the Pachomian convent: his eventual departure was written in every little star that ever burped its hydrogen and farted its helium in the void above the roofless roof of the Rapunzel Suite.

Of burnt-out stars not even cinders were left, the last scraps of helium ash evanesced like table dust on a windy day.

Intelligent life form whose biochemistry is based on liquid helium and the thermoelectric effect.

Helium was but another of his awful blunders which I fear will sooner or later compel Zodanga to elevate a wiser man to his place.

The craft even without a propellor would still answer the purpose his plan required of it--provided the captors of Tara of Helium were a people without ships, and he had seen nothing to suggest that they had ships.

But then, when the temperature had dropped to a few thousand degrees, wildly streaming electrons slowed down to the point where atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium, could capture them, forming the first electrically neutral atoms.

The iron meteorites, besides metallic iron and nickel, of which they are almost entirely composed, contain hydrogen, helium, and carbonic oxide, and about the only imaginable way in which these gases could have become absorbed in the iron would be through the immersion of the latter while in a molten or vaporized state in a hot and dense atmosphere composed of them, a condition which we know to exist only in the envelopes of the sun and the stars.

We can compare the quantitative predictions of quantum theory with the measured wavelengths of spectral lines of the chemical elements, the behaviour of semiconductors and liquid helium, microprocessors, which kinds of molecules form from their constituent atoms, the existence and properties of white dwarf stars, what happens in masers and lasers, and which materials are susceptible to which kinds of magnetism.

An atom with one proton is an atom of hydrogen, one with two protons is helium, with three protons is lithium, and so on up the scale.