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radium

(Encyclopedia)radium rāˈdēəm [key] [Lat. radius=ray], radioactive metallic chemical element; symbol Ra; at. no. 88; mass number of most stable isotope 226; m.p. 700℃; b.p. 1,140℃; sp. gr. about 6.0; valence...

halo, in meteorology

(Encyclopedia)halo, in meteorology, short-lived circles or arcs, and less commonly spikes and crosses, of colored or whitish light surrounding the moon or sun or in clouds as seen from above. A halo occurs when the...

Mondavi, Robert Gerald

(Encyclopedia)Mondavi, Robert Gerald məndäˈvē [key], 1913–2008, American vintner who was in the forefront of establishing California as a major table-wine-producing region and wine as a staple of the American...

Khan, Ali Akbar

(Encyclopedia)Khan, Ali Akbar älēˈ ăkˈbär khän [key], 1922–2009, Indian musician, b. Shivpur, East Bengal (now Bangladesh). A master of the sarod, a lutelike 25-stringed N Indian instrument, Khan was born ...

Wright, Richard

(Encyclopedia)Wright, Richard, 1908–60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in ...

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...

Nakamura, Shuji

(Encyclopedia)Nakamura, Shuji, 1954–, Japanese physicist and electronics engineer, grad. Univ. of Tokushima (D.Eng., 1994). Nakamura joined the Nichia Corporation in 1977, and it was there that he began his life-...

Moseley, Henry Gwyn Jeffreys

(Encyclopedia)Moseley, Henry Gwyn Jeffreys mōzˈlē [key], 1887–1915, English physicist, grad. Trinity College, Oxford, 1910. He began his research under Ernest Rutherford while serving as lecturer at the Univ. ...

Lovell, Sir Bernard

(Encyclopedia)Lovell, Sir Bernard (Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell), 1913–2012, English radio astronomer, b. Oldland Common, Gloucestershire, England, Ph.D. Univ. of Bristol, 1936. He was a member of the cosmic...

liquid crystal

(Encyclopedia)liquid crystal, liquid whose component particles, atoms or molecules, tend to arrange themselves with a degree of order far exceeding that found in ordinary liquids and approaching that of solid cryst...