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heating

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Typical warm-air heating system heating, means of making a building comfortably warm relative to a colder outside temperature. Old, primitive methods of heating a building or a room within it ...

Levitt, Michael

(Encyclopedia)Levitt, Michael, 1947–, British-Israeli-American biophysicist, b. South Africa, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1971. Levitt was a faculty member at Cambridge from 1974 to 1979 and at the Weizmann Institute in Isr...

Karplus, Martin

(Encyclopedia)Karplus, Martin, 1930–, Austrian-American theoretical chemist, b. Vienna, Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1953. He has been a professor at Harvard since 1967, studying the electronic struc...

Warshel, Arieh

(Encyclopedia)Warshel, Arieh, 1940–, Israeli-American chemist, b. Kibbutz Sde Nahum (in what is now Israel), Ph.D. Weizmann Institute, 1969. He has been a professor at the Univ. of Southern California since 1976....

valve

(Encyclopedia)valve, device for controlling the flow of fluids (liquids and gases). Valves vary in construction and size depending upon their function. Some are classified according to their method of operation or ...

sulfur dioxide

(Encyclopedia)sulfur dioxide, chemical compound, SO2, a colorless gas with a pungent, suffocating odor. It is readily soluble in cold water, sparingly soluble in hot water, and soluble in alcohol, acetic acid, and ...

ceramics

(Encyclopedia)ceramics sərămˈĭks [key], materials made of nonmetallic minerals that have been permanently hardened by firing at a high temperature, or objects made of such materials. Most ceramics resist heat a...

plastic

(Encyclopedia)plastic, any organic material with the ability to flow into a desired shape when heat and pressure are applied to it and to retain the shape when they are withdrawn. The first important plastic, cel...

sun, in astronomy

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Structure of the sun sun, intensely hot, self-luminous body of gases at the center of the solar system. Its gravitational attraction maintains the planets, comets, and other bodies of the sola...

fusion

(Encyclopedia)fusion, in physics. 1 The change of a substance from the solid to the liquid state, also known as melting. The heat given up by a unit mass of a substance during fusion is called the latent heat of fu...