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trusteeship, territorial

(Encyclopedia)trusteeship, territorial, system of UN control for territories that were not self-governing. It replaced the mandates of the League of Nations. Provided for under chapters 12 and 13 of the Charter of ...

Gulag

(Encyclopedia)Gulag, system of forced-labor prison camps in the USSR, from the Russian acronym [GULag] for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a department of the Soviet secret police (originally the Ch...

vapor pressure

(Encyclopedia)vapor pressure, pressure exerted by a vapor that is in equilibrium with its liquid. A liquid standing in a sealed beaker is actually a dynamic system: some molecules of the liquid are evaporating to f...

Laban, Rudolf von

(Encyclopedia)Laban, Rudolf von fôn läbˈän [key], 1879–1958, Slovakian dancer, choreographer, and dance theorist. After studying in Paris and performing in N Africa, Germany, and Austria, he founded (1910) a ...

Torvalds, Linus Benedict

(Encyclopedia)Torvalds, Linus Benedict, 1969–, Finnish-American computer software engineer. A member of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he attended the Univ. of Helsinki (M.S., 1996), where he also taught. I...

center of mass

(Encyclopedia)center of mass, the point at which all the mass of a body may be considered to be concentrated in analyzing its motion. The center of mass of a sphere of uniform density coincides with the center of t...

pound

(Encyclopedia)pound, abbr. lb, unit of either mass or force in the customary system of English units of measurement. Two different pounds of mass are defined, one in the avoirdupois system of units and one in the T...

thermodynamics

(Encyclopedia)thermodynamics, branch of science concerned with the nature of heat and its conversion to mechanical, electric, and chemical energy. Historically, it grew out of efforts to construct more efficient he...

gram

(Encyclopedia)gram, abbr. g, unit of mass equal to 0.001 kilogram, the basic unit of mass in the metric system. The gram is the unit of mass in the cgs system. It is approximately equal to 0.035 avoirdupois ounce, ...

watershed

(Encyclopedia)watershed, elevation or divide separating the catchment area, or drainage basin, of one river system or group of river systems from another system or group of systems. The term is also often used syno...