All articles starting with S
44,216 articles
Spark Therapeutics
Spark Therapeutics, Philadelphia gene therapy company founded in 2013 as a CHOP spin-off; developed Luxturna, the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease ($850,000 price); acquired by Roche in 2019 for $4.8 billion and later fully integrated into the Roche Group.
Spark-gap transmitter
A spark-gap transmitter is a radio transmitter that generates damped radio waves by discharging a capacitor across a spark gap, dominating wireless telegraphy from the 1890s until the 1920s.
Spark: The Definitive Guide
Spark: The Definitive Guide (Big Data Processing Made Simple) is a 2018 O'Reilly book on Apache Spark by Bill Chambers and Matei Zaharia, covering Spark 2.0's structured APIs, RDDs, streaming, and MLlib, with a Databricks GitHub code repository; no second edition exists.
SparkFun Electronics
SparkFun Electronics is an American retailer and designer of open source electronics components, development boards, and educational kits based in Boulder, Colorado, founded in 2003 by Nathan Seidle.
Sparki
Sparki is a small, pre-assembled two-wheeled Arduino-based educational robot by ArcBotics of California, funded on Kickstarter in 2013 and used at over 2,000 schools and universities including Stanford, MIT, and Northwestern.
Sparkle (1976 film)
Sparkle (1976) is a Warner Bros. musical drama directed by Sam O'Steen, starring Irene Cara, Lonette McKee, and Philip Michael Thomas as a Harlem girl group loosely inspired by the Supremes, with a Curtis Mayfield score sung on the soundtrack album by Aretha Franklin.
Sparkle (2012 film)
Sparkle (2012 film) is an American musical drama set in 1968 Detroit. It stars Jordin Sparks and features Whitney Houston in her final performance as the sisters' mother.
Sparkle (Honkai: Star Rail)
Sparkle (Hanabi) is a 5-star Quantum Harmony support character in Honkai: Star Rail, released in Version 2.0 via the Sparkling Splendor banner; she raises the Skill Point cap, restores SP, advances allies' actions, and buffs CRIT DMG.
Sparkle (singer)
Sparkle (Stephanie Edwards), Chicago-born contemporary R&B singer born 1975; 1998 debut single "Be Careful" with R. Kelly topped R&B Airplay six weeks; self-titled debut reached Billboard 200 number three; testified against R. Kelly in 2008; returned with the Obstacle Course EP (2022).
Sparkle L. Sooknanan
Sparkle Leah Sooknanan, born 1983 in Trinidad and Tobago, is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge in the District of Columbia.
Sparklehorse
Sparklehorse was the indie rock project of Virginia songwriter Mark Linkous (1995-2010), known for Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, It's a Wonderful Life, Dark Night of the Soul, and the 2023 posthumous Bird Machine.
Sparkles emoji
Sparkles emoji (✨), U+2728, Dingbats block; Unicode 6.0 (2010), Docomo 1999 origin; three yellow four-point stars used for emphasis, sarcasm, newness, and AI features.
Sparkling wine
Sparkling wine: wine with endogenous CO2 producing effervescence, at least 3.5 bars at 20°C per OIV. Made by traditional, tank, or ancestral methods; Champagne, Prosecco, Cava, Franciacorta; about 7-8% of global wine production.
Sparko
Sparko was a 65-pound mechanical dog built by Westinghouse Electric as a companion for the robot Elektro, first shown at the 1940 New York World's Fair; none survive.
Sparkplug (protocol)
Sparkplug is an open specification adding a standard topic namespace, binary protobuf payload, and session state management to MQTT, contributed to the Eclipse Foundation in 2019 and standardized as ISO/IEC 20237:2023.
SparkPost
SparkPost, founded as Message Systems in 2008 by George Schlossnagle, was a Columbia, Maryland email infrastructure company offering a cloud API for high-volume sending, acquired by MessageBird in 2021 for $600 million.
Sparks (2026 film)
Sparks (2026) is Fergus Campbell's debut feature, a queer coming-of-age fantasy drama starring Elsie Fisher as Cleo, a Nevada teen trying to time-travel via a reservoir to 1960s Paris; SXSW premiere, Strand Releasing.
Sparks (band)
Sparks: American art-pop band of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, formed in Los Angeles as Halfnelson, known for "This Town Ain't Big Enough", the Moroder-produced No. 1 in Heaven, 28 studio albums, and lasting synth-pop influence.
Sparks Live on the Moon
Sparks Live on the Moon (2026, Transgressive) is the first full concert album by Sparks, Ron and Russell Mael: 20 songs, 1h31, framed as a show at Taruntius Crater with Cate Blanchett as emcee, following MAD!.
Sparks, Nevada
Sparks, Nevada: railroad city east of Reno in the Truckee Meadows, founded 1904 by Southern Pacific, incorporated 1905, named for Governor John Sparks; about 112,000 residents, Rail City nickname, Sparks Marina, and limited room left to grow.
SparkShorts
SparkShorts is Pixar Animation Studios' experimental short-film program, launched with Purl, Smash and Grab, and Kitbull in January 2019, giving staff six months and modest budgets to direct personal shorts on Disney+.
Sparky Anderson
Sparky Anderson (George Lee Anderson, 1934-2010), American MLB manager of the Cincinnati Reds and Detroit Tigers; won World Series in 1975, 1976, and 1984, first manager to win it in both leagues, 2,194 wins, Hall of Fame 2000.
SPARQL
SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is the W3C-standardized query language and associated HTTP protocol for querying RDF graph data, a W3C Recommendation since 2008 and the standard query language for Linked Data.
Sparro
Sparro, also spelled Sparro (Shibumi), is Phil Leduc's 2011 three-in-a-row game for the Shibumi marble-pyramid system, adapting Connect Four with 12 balls per player and non-flat lines; not the Steam game Sparrow God.
Sparrow
Sparrow: small seed-eating passerines, chiefly the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), the world's most abundant bird at 1.6 billion, human-associated, IUCN Least Concern but declining in North America and Europe.
Sparrow Lacus
Sparrow Lacus is a lake of liquid hydrocarbons near Titan's north pole, about 81 km across, named after Sparrow Lake in Ontario and approved by the IAU in 2007.
Sparrow search algorithm
The sparrow search algorithm (SSA) is a swarm intelligence metaheuristic introduced in 2020 that mimics sparrow flock foraging and anti-predation behavior to find global optima.
Sparrow-and-rat surcharge
The sparrow-and-rat surcharge (雀鼠耗) was an extra levy on grain tax in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, nominally to cover grain eaten by sparrows and rats in storage.
Sparrows
Sparrows (1926) is a Mary Pickford silent melodrama directed by William Beaudine, originally titled Scraps, about orphans escaping a swamp baby farm; premiered May 1926, restored by the Library of Congress, added to the National Film Registry in 2025.
Sparse approximation
Sparse approximation is the task of representing a signal as a combination of a small number of elements from a larger dictionary, underlying compression, denoising, and inverse-problem regularization.