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Orphic Mysteries

(Encyclopedia)Orphic Mysteries or Orphism, religious cult of ancient Greece, prominent in the 6th cent. b.c. According to legend Orpheus founded these mysteries and was the author of the sacred poems from which the...

Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell

(Encyclopedia)Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell, 1887–1975, English biologist and writer, educated at Oxford; grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley, and half-brother of Sir Andrew Huxley. He taught at...

guinea pig

(Encyclopedia)guinea pig gĭnˈē [key], domesticated form of the cavy, Cavia porcellus, a South American rodent. It is unrelated to the pig; the name may refer to its shrill squeal. Guinea pigs were raised by the ...

sucrose

(Encyclopedia)sucrose so͞oˈkrōs [key], commonest of the sugars, a white, crystalline solid disaccharide (see carbohydrate) with a sweet taste, melting and decomposing at 186℃ to form caramel. It is known commo...

Sundarbans

(Encyclopedia)Sundarbans, large, heavily forested swamp region, c.3,860 sq mi (10,000 sq km), in the S Ganges delta on the Bay of Bengal, about 60% in SW Bangladesh and the rest in West Bengal state, India. The mor...

Bacon, Francis, English painter

(Encyclopedia)Bacon, Francis, 1910–92, English painter, b. Dublin. A self-taught artist, Bacon rejected abstraction in painting to explore a repertoire of strange, fractured, and often bizarre figurative images, ...

Wilmut, Sir Ian

(Encyclopedia)Wilmut, Sir Ian, 1944– British embryologist, b. Warwickshire, England, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1971. While doing postdoctoral research at Cambridge, he was part of the team that produced Frostie, the first...

wisent

(Encyclopedia)wisent vēˈsənt [key], name for the European bison, Bison bonasus. It is a close relative of the American bison, B. bison. Longer legged and less heavily built than its American cousin, the wisent m...

Porifera

(Encyclopedia)CE5 A. Canal systems of the three morphological types of sponges B. Internal anatomy of an asconoid sponge, representative of the phylum Porifera Porifera pōrĭfˈərə [key] [Lat.,=pore bearer],...

leucine

(Encyclopedia)CE5 leucine lo͞oˈsēn [key], organic compund, one of the 20 amino acids commonly found in animal proteins. Only the l-stereooisomer appears in mammalian protein. It is one of several essential am...