Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Eastern Highlands

(Encyclopedia)Eastern Highlands, c.2,400 mi (3,860 km) long, general name for the mountains and plateaus roughly paralleling the east and southeast coasts of Australia (including Tasmania) and forming the Continent...

Cornell, Eric Allin

(Encyclopedia)Cornell, Eric Allin, 1961–, American physicist, b. Palo Alto, Calif., Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. Since 1990, he has been a researcher at the Joint Institute for Laboratory As...

Absheron

(Encyclopedia)Absheron əp– [key], peninsula, c.40 mi (60 km) long, extending into the Caspian Sea, E Azerbaijan. It is a dry, hilly area at the eastern end of the Greater Caucasus Mts. and is underlain by rich o...

Hiller, Stanley, Jr.

(Encyclopedia)Hiller, Stanley, Jr., 1924–2006, American aeronautical engineer and business executive, b. San Francisco. At 12 years old, he designed and produced gas-propelled toy cars, a business that led to the...

Freon

(Encyclopedia)Freon frēˈŏn [key] [trade name], any one of a special class of chemical compounds that are used as refrigerants, aerosol propellants, and solvents. These compounds are haloalkanes, i.e., halogen de...

Gilan

(Encyclopedia)Gilan or Ghilan both: gēlänˈ [key], province, 14,709 sq mi (38,106 sq km), NW Iran, bounded in the N by ...

Genzel, Reinhard

(Encyclopedia)Genzel, Reinhard, 1952–, German astrophysicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Bonn, 1978. He was on the faculty at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, from 1980 to 1986, when he left to become director at the Max P...

National Petroleum Reserve

(Encyclopedia)National Petroleum Reserve, area, c.23 million acres (9.32 million hectares), Alaska North Slope, situated W of Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The reserve, which is the largest r...

Ashland

(Encyclopedia)Ashland ăshˈlənd [key]. 1 Industrial city (2020 pop. 21,625), Boyd co., E Ky., on terraces along the Ohio River near the influx of the Big Sandy; settled 1786, inc. 185...

Ketterle, Wolfgang

(Encyclopedia)Ketterle, Wolfgang, 1957–, German physicist, Ph.D. Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, 1986. He has been a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1990. Kett...

Browse by Subject