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Wurtz, Charles Adolphe

(Encyclopedia)Wurtz, Charles Adolphe shärl ädôlfˈ vürts [key], 1817–84, French chemist. He was professor at the Sorbonne (1852–75), at the Faculty of Medicine, Paris (1853–75), and at the Faculty of Scie...

Broch, Hermann

(Encyclopedia)Broch, Hermann hĕrˈmän brôkh [key], 1886–1951, Austrian novelist. Broch is one of the masters of European modernism. Influenced by Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and the Vien...

Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar

(Encyclopedia)Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar yōˈhän käsˈpär blo͝onchˈlē [key], 1808–81, Swiss jurist and political scientist. Trained at the Univ. of Berlin, he taught law at Zürich, Munich, and Heidelberg. ...

leucine

(Encyclopedia)CE5 leucine lo͞oˈsēn [key], organic compund, one of the 20 amino acids commonly found in animal proteins. Only the l-stereooisomer appears in mammalian protein. It is one of several essential am...

amnesia

(Encyclopedia)amnesia ămnēˈzhə [key], [Gr.,=forgetfulness], condition characterized by loss of memory for long or short intervals of time. It may be caused by injury, shock, senility, severe illness, or mental ...

denaturation

(Encyclopedia)denaturation, term used to describe the loss of native, higher-order structure of protein molecules in solution. Most globular proteins exhibit complicated three-dimensional folding described as secon...

cytosine

(Encyclopedia)cytosine sīˈtōsēnˌ [key], organic base of the pyrimidine family. It was isolated from the nucleic acid of calf thymus tissue in 1894. A suggested structure for cytosine, published in 1903, was co...

Rotifera

(Encyclopedia)Rotifera, phylum of predominantly free-living, microscopic, aquatic or semiterrestrial pseudocoelomates. Each rotifer has a head bearing a crown of cilia, the corona, at the anterior end; most rotifer...

Noguchi, Isamu

(Encyclopedia)Noguchi, Isamu ēsäˈmo͞o nōgo͞oˈchē [key], 1904–88, American sculptor, b. Los Angeles. The son of a Japanese poet father and an American mother, he was a student of Gutzon Borglum and won Gug...

mercurous chloride

(Encyclopedia)mercurous chloride, mercury (I) chloride, or calomel, chemical compound, Hg2Cl2, a white crystalline powder, very slightly soluble in water. It was once used medicinally as a purgative, cathartic, li...