| Term | Definition | | Generative AI | Generative AI creates new content, like text, images, audio, or code, rather than merely analyzing data. |
| Genetic Engineering | The name for certain methods used to introduce new traits or characteristics to an organism typically involving the use of recombinant DNA methods. While these techniques are sometimes referred to as "genetic modification", "genetic engineering" is considered to be a more precise term. |
| Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) | GMOs are plants, animals, or microorganisms with DNA altered through laboratory techniques - such as CRISPR or gene insertion - to introduce desirable traits like herbicide tolerance, pest resistance, or improved nutrition. |
| Genome | The entirety of an organism's hereditary information, containing all of the biological information needed to build and maintain a living example of that organism. An exact copy of the entire genome of the organism is in almost every cell. |
| Geocentrism | The belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. |
| Geosphere | The soils, sediments, and rock layers of the Earth's crust, both continental and beneath the ocean floors. |
| Global Warming | The recent and ongoing global average increase in temperature near the Earths surface. |
| Greenhouse Effect | Trapping and build-up of heat in the atmosphere (troposphere) near the Earths surface. Some of the heat flowing back toward space from the Earth's surface is absorbed by water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone, and several other gases in the atmosphere and then reradiated back toward the Earths surface. If the atmospheric concentrations of these greenhouse gases rise, the average temperature of the lower atmosphere will gradually increase. |
| Hallucination | A hallucination is a confident but false statement generated by an AI model; for example, the idea that glue is a useful pizza ingredient. Hallucinations occur when the model completes a pattern without verifying its accuracy. |
| Herd (Community) Immunity | A situation in which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease (through vaccination and/or prior illness) to make its spread from person to person unlikely. Even individuals not vaccinated (such as newborns and those with chronic illnesses) are offered some protection because the disease has little opportunity to spread within the community. |
