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North, Douglass Cecil

(Encyclopedia)North, Douglass Cecil, 1920–2015, American economic historian, b. Cambridge, Mass., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1952. North was on the faculty at the Univ. of Washington, Seattle (1950–83...

Mead, George Herbert

(Encyclopedia)Mead, George Herbert mēd [key], 1863–1931, American philosopher and psychologist, b. South Hadley, Mass., grad. Oberlin, 1883, and Harvard, 1888, and studied in Leipzig and Berlin. He taught at the...

loess

(Encyclopedia)loess lĕs, lōˈəs, Ger. lös [key], unstratified soil deposit of varying thickness, usually yellowish and composed of fine-grained angular mineral particles mixed with clay. It is found in many reg...

paper nautilus

(Encyclopedia)paper nautilus or argonaut, pelagic, surface-dwelling cephalopod mollusk of the genus Argonauta. Like the closely related octopus, the paper nautilus has a rounded body, eight tentacles, and no fins. ...

blackbird

(Encyclopedia)blackbird, common name in North America of a perching bird allied to the bobolink, the meadow lark, the oriole, and the grackle and belonging to the family Icteridae. The European blackbird, Turdus me...

Steitz, Thomas Arthur

(Encyclopedia)Steitz, Thomas Arthur, 1940–2018, American biophysicist and biochemist, b. Milwaukee, Ph.D. Harvard, 1966. Steitz was a professor at Yale from 1970 and a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Inst...

thallium

(Encyclopedia)thallium thălˈēəm [key], metallic chemical element; symbol Tl; at. no. 81; interval in which at. wt. ranges 204.382–204.385; m.p. 303.5℃; b.p. about 1,457℃; sp. gr. 11.85 at 20℃; valence +...

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...

Ramses III

(Encyclopedia)Ramses III both: rămˈəsēzˌ [key], d. 1167 b.c., king of ancient Egypt, 2d ruler of the XX dynasty. He ended the period of anarchy that followed Merneptah rule and reigned c.1198–1167 b.c. The l...

polyphony

(Encyclopedia)polyphony pəlĭfˈənē [key], music whose texture is formed by the interweaving of several melodic lines. The lines are independent but sound together harmonically. Contrasting terms are homophony, ...