Monday, January 31, 2005
Also called �Gydan Peninsula, �Russian �Gydansky Poluostrov, � peninsula, northern Russia. It is a northern extension of the West Siberian Plain reaching into the Kara Sea and situated between the bays of Ob and Tazovsky to the west and the estuary of the Yenisey River to the east. The peninsula is about 250 miles (400 km) long and is similar in width. It is predominantly low-lying, varying in elevation between 165 and 525 feet (50 and 160 m). The peninsula is
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Architecture And Civil Engineering, Exhibitions.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City staged the largest exhibit ever held of the work of the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Originating in Glasgow, Scot., the exhibit later traveled to Chicago and Los Angeles. It focused on 250 items, including furniture, watercolours, posters, and other objects by the noted architect, one of the founders of the
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Hand Tool, Ax and adz
The ax and adz are similar enough to be considered together. This is especially the case with ancient tools that were small and ineffective because they were made of brittle stone or had unsatisfactory hafting. The difference between the tools lies in the relation of the cutting edge to the handle. In the ax the cutting edge and handle are parallel, whereas in the adz
Friday, January 28, 2005
Karakol
Formerly �(1889 - 1921, 1939 - 91) Przhevalsk,� city, eastern Ysyk-k�l oblast (province), Kyrgyzstan, at the northern foot of the Terskey-Alatau Mountains at an elevation of 5,807 feet (1,770 m) on the Karakol River. The city was founded in 1869 as a Russian military and administrative outpost; it was renamed for the Russian explorer Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky, who died there in 1888. It has many food and other light industries, a teacher-training
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Portuguese Literature
The literature of Portugal is distinguished by a wealth and variety of lyric poetry, which has characterized it from the beginning; by its medieval lack of and later
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Aryabhata
First unmanned Earth satellite built by India. It was named for a prominent Indian astronomer and mathematician of the 5th century AD. The satellite was assembled at Peenya, near Bangalore, but was launched from within the Soviet Union by a Russian-made rocket on April 19, 1975. Aryabhata weighed 794 pounds (360 kilograms) and was instrumented to explore conditions in the Earth's ionosphere,
Monday, January 24, 2005
Space Law
The evolution of space law began with U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's introduction of the concept into the United Nations in 1957, in connection with disarmament negotiations. Following the successful launchings of the Soviet satellite
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Butaritari Atoll
Also called �Makin Atoll, �formerly �Pitt Island, � coral atoll of the Gilbert Islands, part of Kiribati, in the west-central Pacific Ocean. Located in the northern Gilberts, it comprises a central lagoon (11 miles [18 km] wide) ringed by islets, with a total area of 5.2 square miles (13.5 square km), which provides a good deep anchorage with three passages to the open sea. Occupied by Japanese forces from 1941 to 1943, the atoll served as a U.S. air and naval
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Earth, Structure and composition of the solid Earth
David G. Smith (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences (1981), is a highly readable, illustrated collection of articles on the Earth's surface and interior. Two collections of articles from Scientific American are The Dynamic Earth (1983), on the geologic processes occurring inside and around the planet; and Robert Decker and Barbara Decker (eds.), Volcanoes and the Earth's Interior (1982), on volcanoes and the rocks occurring in the mantle. Minoru Ozima, The Earth: Its Birth and Growth (1981; originally published in Japanese, 1979), gives a general account of the evolution of the Earth based on geochemical research. Martin H.P. Bott, Interior of the Earth: Its Structure, Constitution, and Evolution, 2nd ed. (1982), provides a thorough summary of the nature of the Earth's interior. Two works with a more technical slant are Jean-Claude De Bremaecker, Geophysics, the Earth's Interior (1985), an introductory textbook; and Donald L. Turcotte and Gerald Schubert, Geodynamics: Applications of Continuum Physics to Geological Problems (1982), a mathematical text on processes occurring within the Earth. See also G.C. Brown and A.E. Mussett, The Inaccessible Earth (1981), on both geophysics and geochemistry.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Nicholas (v)
An assembly of priests and laymen in Rome under the influence of the Holy Roman emperor Louis IV the Bavarian, whom John had excommunicated, elected the Franciscan monk Pietro Rainalducci as the antipope
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Classical Scholarship, Late 19th-century developments in German scholarship
Germany made so vast a contribution to 19th-century classical scholarship that it would be impossible to name all of the eminent scholars of the period. But from a time rather earlier than the establishment of the German Empire (1871), signs of decline might be observed; the new methods had begun to harden into orthodoxy, mechanically applied by a mass of inferior practitioners.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Hysterectomy
Surgical removal of the complete uterus (total hysterectomy) or of the complete uterus except for the cervix (subtotal hysterectomy). The cervix is the outermost portion of the uterus, which projects into the vagina. Removal of the uterus is indicated in a number of abnormal situations, including the presence of a cancer or of a benign tumour of the type called myoma,
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Asia
In antiquity, the first and westernmost Roman province in Asia Minor, stretching at its greatest extent from the Aegean coast in the west to a point beyond Philomelium (modern Aksehir) in the east and from the Sea of Marmara in the north to the strait between Rhodes and the mainland in the south. The province was first constituted when Attalus III, king of Pergamum, bequeathed
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Insurance, Group health insurance
Major types of health insurance written on a group basis include insurance against the losses occasioned by hospitalization, surgical expense, and disability. Hospitalization insurance is designed to cover daily room and board and other expenses. Surgical expense insurance usually provides specified allowances for physicians' charges for various operations.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Cable
In electrical and electronic systems, a conductor or group of conductors for transmitting electric power or telecommunication signals from one place to another. Electric communication cables transmit voice messages, computer data, and visual images via electrical signals to telephones, wired radios, computers, teleprinters, facsimile machines, and televisions.
Friday, January 14, 2005
Sunday Times, The
Founded in 1822 as a nationally circulated paper with an independent editorial policy, The Sunday Times reflects the dignified,
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Ezra And Nehemiah, Books Of
Also spelled �Esdras and Nehemias, � two Old Testament books that together with the books of Chronicles formed a single history of Israel from the time of Adam. Ezra and Nehemiah are a single book in the Jewish canon. Roman Catholics long associated the two, calling the second �Esdras alias Nehemias� in the Douay-Confraternity. Later works, e.g., the Jerusalem Bible, maintain separate identities but associate
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Ashe, Arthur (robert)
Ashe began to play tennis at the age of seven in a neighbourhood park. He was coached by Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Va., who had coached tennis champion Althea Gibson. Ashe moved to St. Louis, Mo., where he was coached by Richard Hudlin, before he entered
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Shadbolt, Maurice
As a young man, Shadbolt worked as a documentary-film scriptwriter and a director and then turned to journalism. He became a full-time freelance journalist and writer in 1957. His
Monday, January 10, 2005
Nagaland, Cultural life
Tribal organization varies from the autocratic angs (chiefs) of the Konyaks and hereditary chieftainships of the Semas and Changs to the democratic structures of the Angamis, Aos, Lothas, and Rengmas. A prominent village institution is the morung (a communal house or dormitory for young unmarried men), where skulls and other trophies of war formerly were hung. The pillars
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Nagaland, Cultural life
Tribal organization varies from the autocratic angs (chiefs) of the Konyaks and hereditary chieftainships of the Semas and Changs to the democratic structures of the Angamis, Aos, Lothas, and Rengmas. A prominent village institution is the morung (a communal house or dormitory for young unmarried men), where skulls and other trophies of war formerly were hung. The pillars
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Adage
A saying, often in metaphoric form, that embodies a common observation, such as "If the shoe fits, wear it,'' "Out of the frying pan, into the fire,'' or "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.'' The scholar Erasmus published a well-known collection of adages as Adagia in 1508. The word is from the Latin adagium, �proverb.�
Friday, January 07, 2005
Vacuum Technology
The operating principles of this gauge are similar to the Penning gauge except that the electrons are produced by a hot filament and accelerated to a grid. The pressure range covered is either 1 to 10-5 torr or 10-2 to 10-7 torr, depending on the electrode structure. Electrons emitted from the filament ionize residual gas molecules in the container being evacuated; the ion current
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Peter Of Castelnau
Peter became an archdeacon in 1199 and in 1202 joined the Cistercian order. In 1207 Pope
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Allman Brothers Band, The
American rock band whose bluesy, jam-oriented sound helped spark the Southern rock movement of the 1970s and set the stage for several generations of roots-oriented improvisational rock bands. The members were Duane Allman (in full Howard Duane Allman; b. Nov. 20, 1946, Nashville, Tenn., U.S. - d. Oct. 29, 1971, Macon, Ga.), Gregg Allman (in full Gregory Lenoir Allman; b. Dec. 8, 1947, Nashville), Berry Oakley (in full
Monday, January 03, 2005
Zangi
When Zangi's father, the governor of Aleppo, was killed in 1094, Zangi fled to Mosul. He served the Seljuq dynasty, and in 1126 the Seljuq sultan, Mahmud II, appointed Zangi governor of Basra. When the 'Abbasid dynasty caliph al-Mustarshid
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Bridgeton
City, seat (1749) of Cumberland county, southwestern New Jersey, U.S. It lies along Cohansey Creek, 38 miles (61 km) south of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The site was settled by Richard Hancock in 1686, and its first name was Cohansey Bridge, for a bridge (1718) that spanned the creek. It next was called Bridge Town, later Bridgeton. A woolen mill (1811), nail works and ironworks (1815), and glass factory (1863) were early
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Rome, Emergence of the Roman commune
The Roman revolution in 1143 had fundamentally the same goals as other contemporaneous communal movements in northern Italy: freedom from episcopal (in Rome's case, papal) authority and control of the surrounding countryside. The revival of the Roman Senate and other echoes of the Classical past perhaps owed something to the preaching of Arnold of Brescia, a priest
