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piculet

(Encyclopedia)piculet pĭkˈyələt [key], common name for a small bird of the family Picidae, which includes the woodpecker and the wryneck. Like the true woodpeckers, piculets are large-headed and have long, stic...

Ga, black African ethnic group

(Encyclopedia)Ga gä [key], black African ethnic group, SE Ghana. The Ga speak a Kwa language and, together with the closely related Adangme, number over 1 million. Inheritance and succession to public office are d...

Black Warrior, river, United States

(Encyclopedia)Black Warrior, navigable river, 178 mi (286 km) long, rising in N central Ala. and flowing generally SW to the Tombigbee River. The Black Warrior drains a coal- and cotton-producing area, but these in...

Townes, Charles Hard

(Encyclopedia)Townes, Charles Hard, 1915–2015, American physicist and educator, b. Greenville, S.C. He was educated at Furman Univ., Duke, and the California Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1939), was on the tech...

Dye, Pete

(Encyclopedia)Dye, Pete (Paul Dye, Jr.), 1925–2020, American golf course architect, often regarded as the father of modern golf course architecture, b. Urbana, Ohio. He was a successful amateur golfer and an insu...

Midas

(Encyclopedia)Midas mīˈdəs [key], in Greek mythology, king of Phrygia. Because he befriended Silenus, the oldest of the satyrs, Dionysus granted him the power to turn everything into gold by touch. But when even...

X-ray astronomy

(Encyclopedia)X-ray astronomy, study of celestial objects by means of the X rays they emit, in the wavelength range from 0.01 to 10 nanometers. X-ray astronomy dates to 1949 with the discovery that the sun emits X ...

Morrison, Arthur

(Encyclopedia)Morrison, Arthur, 1863–1945, English novelist. A journalist, he worked on the National Observer for William Ernest Henley. His stories of life in the London slums include Tales of Mean Street (1894)...

ozone layer

(Encyclopedia)ozone layer or ozonosphere, region of the stratosphere containing relatively high concentrations of ozone, located at altitudes of 12–30 mi (19–48 km) above the earth's surface. Ozone in the ozone...

Conklin, Edwin Grant

(Encyclopedia)Conklin, Edwin Grant, 1863–1952, American zoologist, b. Waldo, Ohio, B.S. Ohio Wesleyan Univ., 1886, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1891. From 1908 he taught and conducted research at Princeton, principally i...