Whois & Analysis for gemsociety.org

A lapidary (lapidarist) is an artist or artisan who forms stone, minerals, or gemstones into decorative items such as cabochons, engraved gems, including cameos, and faceted designs.

The primary techniques employed are cutting, grinding, and polishing.

Carving is an important, but specialised technique.

Gemology or gemmology is the science dealing with natural and artificial gemstone materials.

It is considered a geoscience and a branch of mineralogy.

Some jewelers are academically trained gemologists and are qualified to identify and evaluate gems.

A gemstone (also called a gem, fine gem, jewel, precious stone or semi-precious stone) is a piece of mineral crystal which, in cut and polished form, is used to make jewelry or other adornments.

However, certain rocks (such as lapis lazuli) or organic materials that are not minerals (such as amber, jet, and pearl) are also used for jewelry and are therefore often considered to be gemstones as well.

Most gemstones are hard, but some soft minerals are used in jewelry because of their luster or other physical properties that have aesthetic value.

Rarity is another characteristic that lends value to a gemstone.

Apart from jewelry, from earliest antiquity engraved gems and hardstone carvings, such as cups, were major luxury art forms.

A gem maker is called a lapidary or gemcutter; a diamond worker is a diamantaire.

Jewellery or jewelry consists of small decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.

Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes, and the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example.

For many centuries metal, often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery, but other materials such as shells and other plant materials may be used.

It is one of the oldest type of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from Nassarius shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery.

The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.

Historically, the most widespread influence on jewellery in terms of design and style have come from Asia.

An inertial navigation system (INS) is a navigation aid that uses a computer, motion sensors (accelerometers) and rotation sensors (gyroscopes) to continuously calculate via dead reckoning the position, orientation, and velocity (direction and speed of movement) of a moving object without the need for external references.

It is used on vehicles such as ships, aircraft, submarines, guided missiles, and spacecraft.

Other terms used to refer to inertial navigation systems or closely related devices include inertial guidance system, inertial instrument, inertial measurement units (IMU) and many other variations.

Older INS systems generally used an inertial platform as their mounting point to the vehicle, and the terms are sometimes considered synonymous.