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Glen Canyon Dam

(Encyclopedia)Glen Canyon Dam, 710 ft (216 m) high, 1,560 ft (475 m) long, NE Ariz., on the Colorado River. The key unit of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Colorado River storage project, it is one of the world's ...

My Lai incident

(Encyclopedia)My Lai incident mē lī [key], a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War. On Mar. 16, 1968, a unit of the U.S. army's Americal division, led by Lt. William L. Calley, inva...

Nightingale, Florence

(Encyclopedia)Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910, English nurse, the founder of modern nursing, b. Florence, Italy. Her life was dedicated to the care of the sick and war wounded and to the promotion of her vision ...

Waldheim, Kurt

(Encyclopedia)Waldheim, Kurt ko͝ort vältˈhīm [key], 1918–2007, Austrian diplomat, secretary-general of the United Nations (1972–81) and president of Austria (1986–92). He entered diplomatic service after ...

Brenner, Sydney

(Encyclopedia)Brenner, Sydney, 1927–2019, British molecular biologist, Ph.D. Oxford, 1954. He was director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England (1979–86), and director of the MRC Mol...

Taylor, Cecil

(Encyclopedia) Taylor, Cecil, 1929-2018, African-American jazz pianist, composer, and poet, b. Queens, N.Y. A child prodigy on the piano, Taylor studied at the N.Y. ...

Barnard, Frederick Augustus Porter

(Encyclopedia)Barnard, Frederick Augustus Porter, 1809–89, American educator and mathematician, b. Sheffield, Mass., grad. Yale, 1828. After tutoring at Yale and teaching in institutions for the deaf and mute, he...

aircraft carrier

(Encyclopedia)aircraft carrier, ship designed to carry aircraft and to permit takeoff and landing of planes. The carrier's distinctive features are a upper deck (flight deck) that is flat and sometimes sloped to fu...

collective farm

(Encyclopedia)collective farm, an agricultural production unit including a number of farm households or villages working together under state control. The description of the collective farm has varied with time and...

formula, in chemistry

(Encyclopedia)formula, in chemistry, an expression showing the chemical composition of a compound. Formulas of compounds are used in writing the equations (see chemical equations) that represent chemical reactions....