How to Use periodicity in a Sentence
periodicity
noun-
The model factors in everything from the height and periodicity of waves to how close pelicans fly to the ocean’s surface.
—Gary Robbins, San Diego Union-Tribune, 28 Apr. 2021
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In either case, the laser or the thread helps crystals form, but their periodicity, their patterning, is fully their own.
—Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, Scientific American, 9 Mar. 2022
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The second is periodicity — a repeating path like a ball pinging back and forth between two sides.
—Quanta Magazine, 8 Aug. 2017
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But Mendeleev was neither the first nor the last word in representing periodicity.
—Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 12 Apr. 2022
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Their paper demonstrates that this hierarchy is the only way to tile the plane with hats, which amounts to proving that the shape will never slip into periodicity.
—Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 27 Apr. 2023
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His idea was that perturbations in the star’s motions across our line of sight that would reveal some sort of periodicity indicative of a planet.
—Bruce Dorminey, Forbes, 19 May 2021
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The latter is what a natural heart does, of course, gently pushing the blood along, and that periodicity is what results in a person’s familiar pulse.
—Henry Petroski, WSJ, 3 Aug. 2018
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This periodicity is to Webster the most exciting part of his team’s results.
—Adam Mann, Scientific American, 7 June 2018
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Such short periodicity provides strong evidence for a neutron-star origin of the event.
—Julia Musto, Fox News, 20 July 2022
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This periodicity affords money a whiff of certainty—a sense that wealth and poverty are, like the positions of the planets, subject to a set of objective and universal truths.
—Charles Duhigg, The New Yorker, 31 May 2021
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The synchrony and the group periodicity were purely emergent products of the fireflies hanging out together.
—Joshua Sokol, Quanta Magazine, 20 Sep. 2022
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There are no steady beats, though various kinds of periodicity come into play, including a rat-a-tat flapping noise that Fure elicits by holding a piece of paper over an upturned subwoofer.
—Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2021
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Some have suggested this periodicity comes from close encounters with neighboring stars that fling comets our way.
—Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 21 Feb. 2020
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But those hypotheses all assume that grid cells map landscapes with perfect periodicity, Ulanovsky notes.
—Quanta Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
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Through these observations, the scientists discovered the FRB does, in fact, have a periodicity similar to what had been predicted in June.
—Jennifer Leman, Popular Mechanics, 27 Aug. 2020
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But those models don’t predict the breakdown of periodicity in three dimensions.
—Quanta Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
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Another theory ties their periodicity to glacial eras in the distant past.
—Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 2 Apr. 2021
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Researchers had seen, for instance, that changing the geometry of a room could push and pull at the hexagonal grids, distorting their activity and rigid periodicity.
—Quanta Magazine, 14 Oct. 2021
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But human influence is affecting the dynamics of weather systems, the periodicity of the jet stream and the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.
—Matthew Cappucci, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Aug. 2022
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These measurements could reveal that travel through dangerous areas — such as those with more cosmic rays or dense pockets of stars — does show a kind of periodicity that could explain regular extinction events.
—Sarah Scoles, Discover Magazine, 27 July 2016
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For the medicine prize, periodicity also shows up between discoveries of basic molecular biology and ones that lead to people actually being treated or cured of the things that ail them.
—Megan Molteni, STAT, 30 Sep. 2022
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But the famous periodicity of cicada broods can set some predators up for feast-then-famine scenarios—population booms followed by food insecurity and then sudden drops in numbers.
—Jillian Mock, Scientific American, 9 Apr. 2021
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Proofs of quantum advantage always seemed dependent on oracles that had some kind of nonrandom structure, such as periodicity.
—Quanta Magazine, 11 July 2022
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Many objects in space, like pulsars, send out radio signals with a certain periodicity: flashes of electromagnetic activity that switch on and off at regular rates.
—Steven Johnson, New York Times, 28 June 2017
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Overnight, Iyer-Biswas’ doctoral student Kunaal Joshi analyzed their field data and developed a new model for emergent periodicity, which the scientists uploaded as a draft paper to the biorxiv.org preprint server last spring.
—Joshua Sokol, Quanta Magazine, 20 Sep. 2022
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In the twentieth century, scientists realized that periodicity wasn’t determined by atomic weight; instead, what mattered was the number of protons that each atom contained in its nucleus.
—Neima Jahromi, The New Yorker, 27 Dec. 2019
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Arecibo helped researchers uncover the 33-second periodicity of the Crab Pulsar, which provided physicists with their first solid empirical evidence of the existence of neutron stars.
—Ben Evans, Discover Magazine, 5 Dec. 2022
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Besides citations, prediction prizes, and periodicity, Pendlebury is also playing the long game.
—Megan Molteni, STAT, 30 Sep. 2022
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Juneteenth demonstrates a periodicity that corresponds with the holiday every year.
—C. Brandon Ogbunu, Wired, 19 June 2020
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Another thing that Pendlebury takes into account in his predictions is periodicity.
—Megan Molteni, STAT, 30 Sep. 2022
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'periodicity.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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