Glossary - M

membrane

A membrane is a sheet-like 2 dimensional object, an object with area but very little or no thickness. Good examples are sheets of paper or a piece of surround wrap. Membranes can be flat or curved; rough or smooth.

MFLOPS

Stands for `Million Floating-point Operations Per second'. Usually pronounced and sometimes written as mega-flops. It is used to measure the number of arithmetic operations that a computer can perform in one second -- fast computers can do larger numbers of MFLOPS. See also FLOPS, GFLOPS, TFLOPS.

microemulsions

Microemulsions can be considered as swollen micelles - but not all micellar solution can be swollen to the extent of forming microemulsions.
Microemulsions are apparently homogenous mixtures of water and oil with large amounts of surfactants. They are thermodynamically stable (as opposed to emulsions), are formed spontaneously and contain particles that are extremely small. Droplet diameters in micro-emulsions typically range from 100 -1000 A. Microemulsions are usually transparent/translucent as opposed to emulsions which are turbid (dirty muddy).

See also emulsion.

monolayer

A layer one molcule thick. Examples include thin oils on water - the oil spreads out until it is about 1 molecule thick.

Monte Carlo

In physics the Monte Carlo is used to describe processes that calculate an average by a random sampling. The name comes from the city Monte Carlo which is famous for gambling -- which also uses random events like the tossing of dice. Monte Carlo is in the principality of Monaco which is on the coast of the Mediterranean, near Nice in France.

micelles

A self-assembling structure of amphiphilic molecules in suspension.