Crossword clues for incubator
incubator
- Hospital equipment holding an island?
- Place for a preemie
- Apparatus consisting of a box designed to maintain a constant temperature by the use of a thermostat
- Used for chicks or premature infants
- Egg hatcher
- Where Guantanamo's endlessly wrong - it holds a baby
- Where Communists alone are elected to run neonatal facility
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Incubator \In"cu*ba`tor\, n.
That which incubates, especially, an apparatus by means of which eggs are hatched by artificial heat.
An apparatus containing an enclosed chamber, used for the cultivation of micro["o]rganisms or tissue cultures by maintaining a suitable temperature and atmospheric composition. Some incubators have no provision for maintaining a special atmosphere, while in others, especially for anaerobic organisms and tissue culture, the moisture level and composition of the gases are also controlled.
(Med.) An apparatus consisting of enclosed chamber, for maintaining prematurely born babies in a favorable environment until able to thrive under normal conditions. The temperature and level of oxygen in the atmosphere may be controlled.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"apparatus for hatching eggs by artificial heat," 1845, from incubate + -or.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context chemistry English) Any apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for a reaction. 2 (context medicine English) An apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for a newborn baby. 3 An apparatus used to maintain environmental conditions suitable for the hatching of eggs. 4 A place to maintain the culturing of bacteria at a steady temperature. 5 (context business English) A support programme for the development of entrepreneurial company.
WordNet
n. apparatus consisting of a box designed to maintain a constant temperature by the use of a thermostat; used for chicks or premature infants [syn: brooder]
Wikipedia
An incubator is anything that performs or facilitates various forms of incubation. It may also refer to:
In biology and medicine:
- Incubator (culture), a device used to grow and maintain microbiological cultures or cell cultures
- Incubator (egg), a device for maintaining the eggs of birds or reptiles to allow them to hatch
- Incubator (neonatal), a device used to care for premature babies in a neonatal intensive-care unit
In arts and entertainment:
- "Incubator" (Farscape episode), a 2001 episode of the American TV series
- "Incubator", a song by the Israeli rock band, HaClique, in their 1981 album, Ima Ani Lo Rotze Lehigamel
- "Incubator", Kyubey's true identity in the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Other uses:
- Business incubator, a company that helps new and startup companies to develop by providing services such as management training or office space
- Apache Incubator, a gateway for open source projects under the Apache Software Foundation
- Wikimedia Incubator, a wiki project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation
In biology, an incubator is a device used to grow and maintain microbiological cultures or cell cultures. The incubator maintains optimal temperature, humidity and other conditions such as the carbon dioxide (CO) and oxygen content of the atmosphere inside. Incubators are essential for a lot of experimental work in cell biology, microbiology and molecular biology and are used to culture both bacterial as well as eukaryotic cells.
Louis Pasteur used the small opening underneath his staircase as an incubator.Incubators are also used in the poultry industry to act as a substitute for hens. This often results in higher hatch rates due to the ability to control both temperature and humidity. Various brands of incubators are commercially available to breeders.
The simplest incubators are insulated boxes with an adjustable heater, typically going up to 60 to 65 °C (140 to 150 °F), though some can go slightly higher (generally to no more than 100 °C). The most commonly used temperature both for bacteria such as the frequently used E. coli as well as for mammalian cells is approximately 37 °C, as these organisms grow well under such conditions. For other organisms used in biological experiments, such as the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a growth temperature of 30 °C is optimal.
More elaborate incubators can also include the ability to lower the temperature (via refrigeration), or the ability to control humidity or CO levels. This is important in the cultivation of mammalian cells, where the relative humidity is typically >80% to prevent evaporation and a slightly acidic pH is achieved by maintaining a CO level of 5%.
An incubator is a device simulating avian incubation by keeping eggs warm and in the correct humidity, and if needed to turn them, to hatch them. Reginald Carl A. Sanchez invented this incubator for the eggs even if there is no hen to hatch it.
Usage examples of "incubator".
Jergens smiled, but somewhat uneasily, as a herpetologist does when he puts his hands into an incubator and finds that the rattlesnakes have come out of their eggs sooner than he bad expected.
Corinne savored the feel of his mouth for a moment, then bent to put little Jennifer in the incubator.
For every northern cow, on whom he stuck his regiments of incubator ticks, came down with Texas fever.
Why, First Sergeant Tacitus, over in Kilo Company, he caught one of his corporals, brought back a clutch of raptor eggs from Wanderjahr and was hatching them in a homemade incubator behind his wall locker!
As long as the women stayed healthy and drug-free, and agreed to be monitored on a daily basis, they were good enough to serve as human incubators for the vastly superior beings gestating within them.
They were surrounded by other incubators, with other little sick babies.
Periodically it flew northward to meet floatwood islands coming along the Meral, sought out the incubators installed on them, left one of its leathery eggs in a seed pod on each, finally returned to its cold skies.
She wondered if Graham was feeling that also--wondered if he was looking out at those babies in their incubators and thinking that some woman had managed to carry and bear each one.
The infant is apparently now in a South Shore hospital incubator, attached to machines and tapering off the Clonidine285 it received for in-utero addictions to substances Kate Gompert can only speculate about.
He was a complete surprise and terribly premature, and withered, and he spent the next many weeks waggling his withered and contractured arms up at the Pyrex ceilings of incubators, being fed by tubes and monitored by wires and cupped in sterile palms, his head cradled by a thumb.
What a beautiful baby she was, Babygirl the loving parents called her, conceived in the heat of the most tender yet the most erotic love, fated to be smothered with love, devoured with love, an Amer-ican Babygirl placed with reverent fingers in her incubator.
In her incubator air, humid and warm as a tropical rain forest, Babygirl thrived, glowed, prospered, grew.
One mild April day, when a winey-red trail of clotted blood was detected in the incubator, issuing from between Babygirl's plump thighs, we were all quite astonished and disapproving, but what's to be done?
She had oohed and ahhed over a generous assortment of electron microscopes, incubators, radiation counters, test tubes, petri dishes, titration setups, gas chromatography equipment, MRI scanners, and other apparatus she couldn’.
So the festival city's body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.