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casting

(Encyclopedia)casting or founding, shaping of metal by melting and pouring into a mold. Most castings, especially large ones, are made in sand molds. Sand, mixed with a binder to hold it together, is pressed around...

Manhattan Project

(Encyclopedia)Manhattan Project, the wartime effort to design and build the first nuclear weapons (atomic bombs). With the discovery of fission in 1939, it became clear to scientists that certain radioactive materi...

Escherichia coli

(Encyclopedia)Escherichia coli ĕshˌərĭkˈēə kōˈlī [key], common bacterium that normally inhabits the intestinal tracts of humans and animals, but can cause infection in other parts of the body, especially ...

solution

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Solubility curves solution, in chemistry, homogeneous mixture of two or more substances. The dissolving medium is called the solvent, and the dissolved material is called the solute. A solutio...

Ruskin, John

(Encyclopedia)Ruskin, John, 1819–1900, English critic and social theorist. During the mid-19th cent. Ruskin was the virtual dictator of artistic opinion in England, but Ruskin's reputation declined after his deat...

Santayana, George

(Encyclopedia)Santayana, George säntäyäˈnä [key], 1863–1952, American philosopher and poet, b. Madrid, Spain. Santayana's philosophic stance has been given the apparently opposite descriptions of materiali...

García Márquez, Gabriel

(Encyclopedia)García Márquez, Gabriel gäbrēĕlˈ gärsēˈä märˈkās [key], 1927–2014, Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, b. Aracataca. Widely considered one of the great Latin America...

Whitman, Walt

(Encyclopedia)Whitman, Walt (Walter Whitman), 1819–92, American poet, b. West Hills, N.Y. Considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets, Walt Whitman celebrated the freedom and dignity of the indivi...

carbon dioxide

(Encyclopedia)carbon dioxide, chemical compound, CO2, a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that is about one and one-half times as dense as air under ordinary conditions of temperature and pressure. It does not bur...

Motion, Sir Andrew Peter

(Encyclopedia)Motion, Sir Andrew Peter, 1952–, English poet and biographer, poet laureate of England (1999–2009), grad. University College, Oxford (B.A., 1974; M.Litt., 1977). He writes poems that are both lyri...