plasma.

Mineral science refers to a bright green, translucent variety of cryptocrystalline silica, chalcedony, as plasma. Electronics gives it as a synonym for the positive column in a gas discharge where there’s no resultant charge (the number of anions and cation is the same). It is a source of radio emission. Physiology refers to plasma as the watery fluid in which blood cells are suspended. Cosmologists still speak of a primordial plasma prior galaxy formation. The Whole Earth Catalogue calls this soup ambiplasma.

In 1958, Hubble’s ex-student, Allen Sandage, discovered during research into this area what Hubble had identified in distant galaxies as bright stars were clumps of hot stars surrounded by a plasma ionised by stars. He consequently became involved in upping Hubble’s distance scale. Sandage was otherwise involved in the use of jiggle camera smearing images by moving the plate in a rectangle during exposure.

Painters, and some sculptors, refer to moulding the substance in their work. Plasma occurs in thermonuclear reactions like the sun. The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoidem, cell’s sudden action release of cyclic AMP in many ways resembles the sudden active inrush of sodium ions through nerve cell’s plasma membrane.