Beads in the context of "Glass"

An abacus (pl. abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a hand-operated calculating tool which was used from ancient times, in the ancient Near East, Europe, China, and Russia, until largely replaced by handheld electronic calculators, during the 1980s, with some ongoing attempts to revive their use. An abacus consists of a two-dimensional array of slidable beads (or similar objects). In their earliest designs, the beads could be loose on a flat surface or sliding in grooves. Later the beads were made to slide on rods and built into a frame, allowing faster manipulation.

Each rod typically represents one digit of a multi-digit number laid out using a positional numeral system such as base ten (though some cultures used different numerical bases). Roman and East Asian abacuses use a system resembling bi-quinary coded decimal, with a top deck (containing one or two beads) representing fives and a bottom deck (containing four or five beads) representing ones. Natural numbers are normally used, but some allow simple fractional components (e.g. 1⁄2, 1⁄4, and 1⁄12 in Roman abacus), and a decimal point can be imagined for fixed-point arithmetic.

The chain fountain phenomenon, also known as the Mould effect, self-siphoning beads, or Newton's beads, is a physical phenomenon observed with a chain placed inside a jar. One end of the chain is pulled from the jar and is allowed to fall under the influence of gravity. This process establishes a self-sustaining flow of the chain which rises over the edge and goes down to the floor or ground beneath it, as if being sucked out of the jar by an invisible siphon. For chains with small adjacent beads, the arc can ascend into the air over and above the edge of the jar with a noticeable gap; this gap is greater when the chain falls farther.

The self-siphoning effect is also observed in non-Newtonian fluids.