What's in a Name: Acronyms in Science

It's an unwritten rule in science that to attract funding for a project or organization, or to promote a scientific technique or relevant software among its users, etc., its name has to condense to a catchy acronym.

People spend serious time thinking about these; I myself have been part of such (formal) brainstorming sessions. Over time I have collected some of the acronyms that stood out to me. Hope you find some of them amusing:

1. ABRACADABRA: A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus, a project at MIT aimed at detecting Axions.

2. AMANDA: Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, a neutrino detector at the South Pole.

3. AMBER: Astronomical Multi-Beam Recombiner, a telescope.

4. ATLAS: Australia Telescope Large Area Survey, this is a program.

5. BICEP: Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.

6. BLAST: Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope.

7. BOOMERANG: Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics.

8. BRAINS: Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists, an award set up by the National Institute of Mental Health.

9. BREAD: Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection, a scaled up version of ABRACADABRA.

10. CANGAROO: Collaboration between Australian and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory.

11. CAOS: Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

12. CIAO: Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics.

13. EGRET: Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope.

14. FAME: Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer.

15. FLAMES: Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph.

16. FLIRT: Fast local infrared thermogenetics.

17. FORTE: Fast On-orbit Rapid Recording of Transient Events.

18. FPI: The Future Photon Initiative, an optics center at my university. All emails from the director go out to the 'FPI agents'.

19. FROG: Frequency Resolved Optical Grating.

20. GANDALF: Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting, software for spectroscopy. Refers to the Tolkien character from Lord of The Rings, etc.

21. GLIMPSE: Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire.

22. HAYSTAC: Haloscope At Yale Sensitive to Axion Cold dark matter.

23. MADMAX: Magnetized Disc and Mirror Axion eXperiment.

24. MAGIC: Media, Arts, Games, Interaction and Creativity center at my university.

25. MUSTANG: Multiplexed SQUID TES Array at Ninety GHz.

26. OWL: OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. This has only been proposed, and does not exist.

27. PATRIOT: Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target, it's the radar component of the famous missile.

28. POLONAISE: Probing Oscillations using Levitated Objects for Novel Accelerometry In Searches of Exotic physics.

29. QROCODILE: Quantum Resolution-Optimized Cryogenic Observatory for Dark matter Incident at Low Energy.

30. RABBITT: Reconstruction of Attosecond Beating by Interference of Two-photon Transitions.

31. SPIDER: Spectral Phase Interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction.

32. SQUID: Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, a machine for detecting magnetic fields.

33. STORM: STochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy.

34. TRIUMF: TRI-University Meson Facility. Canadian national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, including the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.