All articles starting with W

Wealth of Elon Musk

The wealth of Elon Musk, also called Elon Musk's wealth, is the estimated value of his stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, tracked daily by Bloomberg and Forbes.

Wealth of Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein's wealth was a fortune of more than $577 million at his death in 2019, built on fees from billionaire clients and a Virgin Islands tax structure.

Wealth tax

A wealth tax, or net worth tax, is a recurring annual tax on a person's net worth. Only Switzerland, Spain, and Norway levy one today.

Wealthon (Wealthon S.A.) is a Warsaw-based Polish fintech founded in 2019 by Aleksander Majchrzak and Aleksander Przetakiewicz, offering point-of-sale systems, payments, and turnover-based lending to small businesses.

Wealthsimple

Wealthsimple is a Canadian financial technology company founded in Toronto in 2014, combining managed investing, trading, crypto, and banking; it held $150 billion in assets by 2026.

Weaning

Weaning is the process of switching an infant's diet from breast milk or formula to other foods and fluids, typically beginning around 6 months of age alongside continued breastfeeding.

Weaning protocol (mechanical ventilation)

A weaning protocol is a standardized clinical pathway of daily readiness screening, stepwise support reduction, and spontaneous breathing trials that shortens mechanical ventilation in critically ill adults.

WEAP

WEAP (Water Evaluation and Adaptation Planning, originally Water Evaluation and Planning) is a software tool for integrated water resources planning developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute, used in nearly 200 countries.

Weapon

A weapon, sometimes called an armament, is a device built or used to kill, injure, or threaten people or damage objects, defined differently by treaties, military doctrine, and national law.

Weapon (film)

Weapon is a 2024 Indian Tamil-language science-fiction action thriller directed by Guhan Senniappan, starring Sathyaraj and Vasanth Ravi, released in theaters on 7 June 2024.

Weapon of Choice (song)

"Weapon of Choice" is a 2000 Fatboy Slim song featuring Bootsy Collins, known for its 2001 Spike Jonze video in which Christopher Walken dances through a hotel lobby.

Weapon of mass destruction

A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a weapon that can kill or harm large numbers of people, chiefly nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, as defined by the United Nations in 1948.

Weapon Plus

Weapon Plus is the Marvel Comics covert super-soldier program, fully revealed in New X-Men #128 (2002), whose Roman-numeral projects include Project Rebirth (Weapon I, Captain America), Weapon VI (Luke Cage), and Weapon X (Weapon 10, Wolverine).

Weapon systems officer

A weapon systems officer (WSO, pronounced "wizzo") is a military aircrew officer who operates weapons, sensors, and navigation from the rear cockpit of two-crew combat aircraft.

Weapon X

Weapon X is a 13-part comic story by Barry Windsor-Smith, serialized in Marvel Comics Presents in 1991, that depicts Wolverine's origin of adamantium bonding and memory erasure.

Weapon yield

Weapon yield is the energy released by a nuclear weapon's detonation, expressed as the equivalent mass of TNT; most warheads yield several hundred kilotons, and the Soviet Tsar Bomba reached an estimated 50 megatons in 1961.

Weaponization of antisemitism

Weaponization of antisemitism: political use of antisemitism accusations, especially via the 2016 IHRA definition, to silence criticism of Israel and Zionism; traced from Eban 1973 and Forster-Epstein 1974 to campus and European cases, with documented costs to free speech and to combating real antisemitism.

Weapons (2025 film)

Weapons is a 2025 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Zach Cregger, in which all but one child from a school class vanish at 2:17 a.m.

Weapons of Norse mythology

Weapons of Norse mythology: Gungnir, Odin's spear from Ívaldi's Sons, and Mjölnir, Thor's hallowing hammer, plus Freyr's self-fighting sword lost before Ragnarök, and the debated saga pole-weapons such as the atgeirr.

Weapons-grade plutonium

Weapons-grade plutonium is plutonium metal with no more than 7 percent plutonium-240, made in dedicated reactors by short irradiation of uranium for nuclear weapon cores.

Wear

Wear, also known as wearing-out, is the progressive loss or displacement of surface material caused by mechanical interaction with another solid, fluid, or particles in relative motion.

Wear analysis

Wear analysis, also called use-wear or microwear analysis, is an archaeological method that infers how stone and bone tools were used from microscopic wear traces.

Wear leveling

Wear leveling is a firmware technique, performed by the flash translation layer, that distributes program/erase cycles evenly across NAND flash blocks to reach the device's full endurance.

Wear OS

Wear OS, formerly Android Wear, is Google's closed-source, Android-based operating system for smartwatches, first shipped on the LG G Watch in 2014 and rebranded in 2018.

Wear simulation

Wear simulation is a computational tribology method predicting material loss and surface damage under contact, used for service-life and wear-profile prediction of gears, implants, and more.

Wear Sunscreen

Wear Sunscreen, or "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young," is Mary Schmich's 1997 Chicago Tribune mock commencement speech, misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut at MIT and turned into Baz Luhrmann's 1999 UK No. 1 spoken-word hit.

Wear testing

Wear testing is a family of laboratory methods measuring material loss and surface damage under controlled contact, with the pin-on-disk test standardized as ASTM G99 the most widely used.

Wear-out

Wear-out is the final phase of a product's life in reliability engineering, when accumulated physical degradation raises the failure rate, forming the rising right-hand end of the bathtub curve.

Wearable computer

A wearable computer, also known as wearable computing, is a miniature body-borne computational and sensory device worn under, over, or as clothing, including smartwatches, smart glasses, and smart clothes.