A-Z Browse

...of a certain type of fuel or raw material or may combine inputs to determine the productivity of labour and capital together or of all factors combined. The latter type of ratio is called “total factor” or “multifactor” productivity, and changes in it over time reflect the net saving of inputs per unit of output and thus increases in productive efficiency. It......

In the early 1970s, the Dutch “total football” system employed players with all-around skills to perform both defensive and attacking duties, but with more aesthetically pleasing consequences. Players such as Johan Cruyff and Johan Neeskens provided the perfect outlets for this highly fluent and intelligent playing system. Holland’s leading club—Ajax of Amsterdam...

French oil company that ranks as one of the world’s major petrochemical corporations. It engages in the exploration, refining, transport, and marketing of petroleum and chemical products. The firm has also pursued business interests in uranium ore, coal mining, and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. Headquarters are in Courbevoie, France....

the sum of the internal energy and the product of the pressure and volume of a thermodynamic system. Enthalpy is an energy-like property or state function—it has the dimensions of energy, and its value is determined entirely by the temperature, pressure, and composition of the system and not by its history. In symbols, the enthalpy, H, equals the sum of the internal energy, E,...

in physics, complete reflection of a ray of light within a medium such as water or glass from the surrounding surfaces back into the medium. The phenomenon occurs if the angle of incidence is greater than a certain limiting angle, called the critical angle. In general, total internal reflection takes place at the boundary between two transparent media when a ray of light in a medium of higher ind...

...their union is the entire sample space, so that exactly one of the Ak must occur, essentially the same argument gives a fundamental relation, which is frequently called the law of total probability:...

...Paul-Émile Borduas, one of the group of artists known as Les Automatistes, repudiated Quebec’s Jansenist past in the revolutionary manifesto Refus global (1948; Total Refusal). Poet and playwright Claude Gauvreau, one of the signatories of the manifesto, transposed the group’s principles to the written word, while poet and engraver Rola...

French oil company that ranks as one of the world’s major petrochemical corporations. It engages in the exploration, refining, transport, and marketing of petroleum and chemical products. The firm has also pursued business interests in uranium ore, coal mining, and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. Headquarters are in Courbevoie, France....

...in which L is an integer. The possible values of L depend on the individual l values and the orientations of their orbits for all the electrons composing the atom. The total spin momentum has magnitude S(S + 1) (ℏ), in which S is an integer or half an odd integer, depending on whether the number of electrons is even or......

...measure of total variation, SST, is the sum of the squared deviations of the dependent variable about its mean: Σしぐま(y − ȳ)2. This quantity is known as the total sum of squares. The measure of unexplained variation, SSE, is referred to as the residual sum of squares. For the data in Figure 4, SSE is the sum of the squared distances from each point in.....

military conflict in which the contenders are willing to make any sacrifice in lives and other resources to obtain a complete victory, as distinguished from limited war. Throughout history, limitations on the scope of warfare have been more economic and social than political. Simple territorial aggrandizement has not, for the most part, brought about total com...

French oil company that ranks as one of the world’s major petrochemical corporations. It engages in the exploration, refining, transport, and marketing of petroleum and chemical products. The firm has also pursued business interests in uranium ore, coal mining, and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. Headquarters are in Courbevoie, France....

French oil company that ranks as one of the world’s major petrochemical corporations. It engages in the exploration, refining, transport, and marketing of petroleum and chemical products. The firm has also pursued business interests in uranium ore, coal mining, and alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power. Headquarters are in Courbevoie, France....

form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of the individual’s life to the authority of the government. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini coined the term totalitario in the early 1920s to describe the new fascist state of Italy, which he further described as: “All within the state, none outs...

...On Earth the sunlight, shining through gaps in foliage and other small openings, is then seen to form little crescents of light that are images of the light source, the Sun. Toward the beginning of totality, the direct light from the Sun diminishes very quickly, and the colour changes. The sky near the zenith becomes dark, but along the horizon Earth’s atmosphere still appears bright bec...

In his major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), Lévinas presented a powerful critique of Heidegger for having granted priority to ontology over “ethics,” by which he meant one’s ethical relationship to “the Other.” By beginning with the Seinsfrage, or the question of being, Heidegger’s...

An important innovation in pari-mutuel betting came in the 1920s with the development of the totalizator, a mechanical device for issuing and recording betting tickets. Modern totalizators, usually computers, calculate betting pools and current odds on each horse and flash these figures to the public at regular intervals. They may also display race results, payoff amounts, running times, and......

...power in direct-current circuits. Induction-type meters measure power in alternating-current circuits and are the type commonly seen on the outside of houses. Specialized watt-hour meters include totalizing meters, which record the power used in more than one circuit, and highly accurate portable meters, which are used for testing installed watt-hour meters....

Lithgow’s major literary work is The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Years Travayles (1632; reprinted 1906), which, though written in a florid style, contains much cultural and economic detail. He also produced six poems about his travels and pamphlets on the siege by Frederick Henry of Orange of the Netherlands city of Breda......

...inference containing at least one hypothetical proposition as a premise. The extent of Theophrastus’ work in this area is uncertain, but it appears that he investigated a class of inferences called totally hypothetical syllogisms, in which both premises and the conclusion are conditionals. This class would include, for example, syllogisms such as “If αあるふぁ then βべーた; if ...

...and stage–audience relationship best suited for each production. Piscator commissioned plans for such a theatre from Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. The project was called Totaltheatre. A remarkably similar building was designed for Meyerhold. Neither were ever built....

...(Podocarpus elatus) of southeastern Australia; the black pine, or matai (P. spicatus), the kahikatea, or white pine (P. dacrydioides), the miro (P. ferrugineus), and the totara (P. totara), all native to New Zealand; kusamaki, or broad-leaved podocarpus (P. macrophyllus), of China and Japan; real yellowwood (P. latifolius), South African.....

An important innovation in pari-mutuel betting came in the 1920s with the development of the totalizator, a mechanical device for issuing and recording betting tickets. Modern totalizators, usually computers, calculate betting pools and current odds on each horse and flash these figures to the public at regular intervals. They may also display race results, payoff amounts, running times, and......

American composer of Austro-Hungarian birth, best known for his film music and the opera Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”)....

Aztec sun and war god, one of the two principal deities of Aztec religion, often represented in art as either a hummingbird or an eagle....

Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer’s explorations of the Australian Aborigines, he interpreted the mixture of fear and reverence for the totemic animal in terms of the child’s attitude toward the parent of the same sex. The...

system of belief in which humans are believed to have kinship with a totem or a mystical relationship is said to exist between a group or an individual and a totem. A totem is an object, such as an animal or plant that serves as the emblem or symbol of a kinship group or a person. The term totemism has been used to characterize a cluster of traits in the religion and in the soci...

carved and painted log, mounted vertically, constructed by the Indians of the Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada. There are seven principal kinds of totem pole: memorial, or heraldic, poles, erected when a house changes hands to commemorate the past owner and to identify the present one; grave markers (tombstones); house posts, which support the roof; portal poles, which have a hole ...

Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer’s explorations of the Australian Aborigines, he interpreted the mixture of fear and reverence for the totemic animal in terms of the child’s attitude toward the parent of the same sex. The...

...have some special mystical significance is merely to rephrase the problem, without identifying why only certain items have mystical significance. In Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962; Totemism) Lévi-Strauss advocated a different approach. He suggested that totemism, far from being a special stage in human development, was merely an instance of the use, within so-...

system of belief in which humans are believed to have kinship with a totem or a mystical relationship is said to exist between a group or an individual and a totem. A totem is an object, such as an animal or plant that serves as the emblem or symbol of a kinship group or a person. The term totemism has been used to characterize a cluster of traits in the religion and in the soci...

The first comprehensive work on totemism was Totemism and Exogamy, published in 1910 in four volumes by the British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. It presented a meritorious compilation of the then known worldwide data on the subject....

...which brought him back to Germany, were even more strongly socialistic and antimonarchical; they are considered to be among the best examples of German revolutionary poetry of the time. The poem Die Toten an die Lebenden (1848; “From the Dead to the Living”) resulted in his arrest for subversion, but he was acquitted. He moved to Cologne, where he formed a long-standing......

The Waffen-SS was made up of three subgroups: the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s personal bodyguard; the Totenkopfverbände (Death’s-Head Battalions), which administered the concentration camps; and the Verfügungstruppen (Disposition Troops), which swelled to 39 divisions in World War II and which, serving as elite combat troops alongside the regular army, gained a reputation a...

...congregated at churchyards to sing and dance while the representatives of the church tried in vain to stop them. In the 14th century another form of the dance of death emerged in Germany, the Totentanz, a danced drama with the character of Death seizing people one after the other without distinctions of class or privilege. The German painter Hans Holbein the Younger......

...and Elissa (1937). After the war, however, she emerged as an important lyric poet who combined modern and traditional verse forms with a highly original diction. In such works as Totentanz und Gedichte zur Zeit (1947; “Dance of Death and Poems of the Times”) and Zukunftsmusik (1950; “Music of the Future”), she expressed an anguished,......

In 1940 Nash again served as an official war artist for England. One of his best-known paintings of World War II was Totes Meer (1940–41; “Dead Sea”), in which he depicted a field of wrecked warplanes as turbulent ocean waves. In his last paintings he turned to an imaginative poetic symbolism that included images of flowers and references to......

Hungarian-born film and television director (b. May 15, 1913?, Mako, Austria-Hungary—d. Oct. 27, 2002, Burbank, Calif.), made a number of raw, violent, and psychologically disturbing B movies, including Ramrod (1947), Pitfall (1948), and Crime Wave (1954), that gained him a cult following, but he became best known to the general public for House of Wax (1953), co...

American inventor (b. July 24, 1915, Visalia, Calif.—d. March 20, 2005, Modesto, Calif.), at age 16 developed the Mae West life vest, an innovation that prevented thousands of World War II pilots and sailors from drowning (including U.S. Pres. George H.W. Bush, who, as a Navy pilot, was shot down over the Pacific in 1944). The Mae West, named for the voluptuous American film idol, could be ...

Ostrogoth king who recovered most of central and southern Italy, which had been conquered by the Eastern Roman Empire in 540....

Afrikaaner poet, pastor, biblical scholar, and the compiler of an Afrikaans Psalter (1936) that is regarded as one of the finest poetic achievements of its kind in Dutch, Flemish, or Afrikaans....

town (“parish”), South Hams district, administrative and historic county of Devon, England, on the River Dart. Totnes dates from Saxon times and is listed in Domesday Book (1086). Its earliest charter is dated 1205, and it became a walled town commanding the lowest crossing of the river. The keep and upper walls of the Norman castle still stand, ...

English soldier, administrator, and antiquary noted for his service in Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England....

Italian comic, most popular for his film characterization of an unsmiling but sympathetic bourgeois figure, likened by international film critics to the American film comic Buster Keaton....

Middle American Indian population of east-central Mexico. Totonac culture is in many ways similar to other Middle American cultures, but it possesses certain features not seen elsewhere in Middle America and more likely related to the circum-Caribbean cultures. The Totonac inhabit two types of environment—high mesa, cool and rainy, and coastal lowland, hot and usually humid—and ther...

The Totonacan family contains just two languages, of which one (Totonac) has at least three dialects. Possibly, Totonac is a complex....

city, west-central Guatemala, at 8,200 feet (2,500 metres) above sea level. The city has a population composed largely of Quiché Maya. Before the European conquest, it was the second most important city of the Quiché Maya and served as headquarters of their chief Tecún Umán. In 1820 it was the scene of one of the most famous Indian uprisings in Guatem...

The remnants of an ancient people, the Uru, still live on floating mats of dried totora (a reedlike papyrus that grows in dense brakes in the marshy shallows). From the totora, the Uru and other lake dwellers make their famed balsas—boats fashioned of bundles of dried reeds lashed together that resemble the crescent-shaped papyrus craft pictured on ancient Egyptian monuments....

...physically fit and teach them the discipline necessary in warfare. The dances of young Zulu and Ndebele men in Southern Africa recall the victories of past warriors. Among the Owo-Yoruba the stately Totorigi dance is for senior men and women, while adolescent boys perform the lively Ajabure with ceremonial swords. The transition from one age grade to the next may be marked by rites and......

borough (town), Passaic county, northeastern New Jersey, U.S., west of Paterson, on the west bank of the Passaic River. During the American Revolution, American troops were encamped here, and the nearby Theunis Dey Mansion (1740) was General George Washington’s headquarters in 1780. Dutch scholars translated Totowa,...

major Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products....

...and war broke out between the two countries. In 1457 the noble opposition, led by Archbishop Jöns Bengtsson Oxenstierna, rebelled against Charles, who fled to Danzig. Oxenstierna and Erik Axelsson Tott, a Danish noble, became the regents, and Christian was hailed as king of Sweden. Christian increased taxes, and in 1463 the peasants in Uppland refused to pay and were supported by......

...maturity and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557, and Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated o...

The short poems were printed by Richard Tottel in his Songes and Sonettes, Written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey and Other (1557; usually known as Tottel’s Miscellany). “Other” included Wyatt, and critics from George Puttenham onward have coupled their names....

...(south) by the Chūgoku Range. The mountains, including Mount Dai, form part of Daisen-Oki National Park, and the coast is included in San-in-kaigan National Park. Tourists also visit the Tottori Sand Dunes, which stretch for 10 miles (16 km) along the coast near the capital city, Tottori....

ken (prefecture), western Honshu, Japan, occupying 1,348 square miles (3,492 square km) along the Sea of Japan. The coastal plain is bounded (south) by the Chūgoku Range. The mountains, including Mount Dai, form part of Daisen-Oki National Park, and the coast is included in San-in-kaigan National Park. Tourists also visit the Tottori Sand Dunes, which stretch for 10 miles (16 km) al...

...and canine teeth, but most drums have underslung lower jaws and small teeth. Some have whiskerlike barbels on the chin. The largest member of the family, weighing up to 100 kg (225 pounds), is the totuava (C. macdonaldi) of the Gulf of California; other species are much smaller....

Romanian fascist organization that constituted a major social and political force between 1930 and 1941. In 1927 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael, which later became known as the Legion or Legionary Movement; it was committed to the “Christian and racial” renovation of Romania and fed on anti-Semitism and mystical nationalism. Cod...

type of ancient Chinese bronze vessel used to contain food. The dou is usually a circular bowl supported on a short stem rising from a flaring base. The rim has two ring-shaped handles at opposite sides of the bowl, and another shallow bowl serves as a lid....

The origins of the Chinese bracketing system also are found on pictorial bronzes, showing a spreading block (tou) placed upon a column to support the beam above more broadly, and in depictions of curved arms (kung) attached near the top of the columns, parallel to the building wall, extending outward and up to help support the beam; however, the block and arms were not yet......

...The line of the eaves, which in T’ang architecture of northern China was still straight, now curves up at the corners, and the roof has a pronounced sagging silhouette. The bracket cluster (tou-kung) has become more complex: not only is it continuous between the columns, often including doubled, or even false, cantilever arms (or “tail-rafters,” hsia-ang), whi...

town and seat of Yün-lin hsien (county), west-central Taiwan. It is located 85 miles (137 km) northeast of Kao-hsiung city in the middle of the western coastal plain. The town, which developed in the early 17th century, is a marketing centre for rice, sweet potatoes, peanuts (groundnuts), and fruits produced in the fertile plains of the Hu-wei River t...

...suitable than its traditional Chinese counterpart for new types of warfare. About 200 bca new and powerful barbarian people emerged on China’s western borders, the Hsiung-nu. Little is known of T’ou-man, founder of this empire, beyond the fact that he was killed by his son Mao-tun, under whose long reign (c. 209–174 bc) the Hsiung-nu becam...

Among the Yüan dramatists, the following deserve special mention. Kuan Han-ch’ing, the author of some 60 plays, was the first to achieve distinction. His Tou-o yüan (“Injustice Suffered by Tou-o”) deals with the deprivations and injustices suffered by the heroine, Tou-o, which begin when she is widowed shortly after her marriage to a poor scholar and culmi...

...cups, so-called because they are decorated with chickens. Their decoration is outlined in underglaze blue and filled in with soft overglaze colours called “contending colours” (tou ts’ai). Ch’eng-hua overglaze colours were thin, subdued in colour, and pictorial in effect....

Berber-speaking pastoralists who inhabit an area in North and West Africa ranging from Touat, Alg., and Ghudāmis, Libya, to northern Nigeria and from Fezzan, Libya, to Timbuktu, Mali. Their political organizations extend across national boundaries. In the late 20th century there were estimated to be 900,000 Tuareg....

oasis group, west-central Algeria. Situated along the Wadi Messaoud (called Wadi Saoura farther north), the Touat oases are strung beadlike in a northwest-southeast orientation west of the Plateau of Tademaït. The area was brought under Islamic control in the 10th century ad. In modern times the mixed population of Arabs, Berbers (Imazighe...

town, west-central Senegal. The town is the home of the Grand Mosquée of the Mourides (Murīdiyyah), a large and influential Muslim sect in Senegal. The mosque, located at the heart of the town, is a large white structure with five minarets that houses the tomb of Amadou Bamba M’backe (d. 1927), who founded the order and ...

town, west-central Senegal. The town is the home of the Grand Mosquée of the Mourides (Murīdiyyah), a large and influential Muslim sect in Senegal. The mosque, located at the heart of the town, is a large white structure with five minarets that houses the tomb of Amadou Bamba M’backe (d. 1927), who founded the order and ...

mountain peak that is the highest point (13,665 feet [4,165 metres]) in Morocco and in the Atlas Mountains. The peak is situated 40 miles (60 km) south of Marrakech in the High Atlas (Haut Atlas). Juniper forests covering the mountain’s higher slopes are succeeded by alpine meadows, whereas the lower slopes have bee...

the common name given to numerous species of tropical American forest birds known for their large and strikingly coloured bills. The term toucan is used in the common name of about 15 species (Ramphastos and Andigena), but the aracaris and toucanets are smaller, very similar birds of the same family that are also considered toucans....

any of about 12 species of small and relatively short-billed toucans of the genera Aulacorhynchus and Selenidera, 25–35 cm (10–14 inches) long, belonging to the toucan family, Ramphastidae. Mainly green with touches of bold colour, they range from the lowlands of southern Mexico and Brazil to the high Andes. The emerald toucanet (A. prasinus) has the widest rang...

The skin of the primate hand is well adapted for tactile discrimination. Meissner’s corpuscles, the principal receptors for touch in hairless skin, are best developed in apes and humans, but they can be found in all primates. Structurally correlated with a high level of tactile sensitivity are certain anatomic features of the skin of the hands and feet, such as the absence of pads on the pa...

children’s game in which, in its simplest form, the player who is “it” chases the other players, trying to touch one of them, thereby making that person “it.” The game is known by many names, such as leapsa in Romania and kynigito in parts of modern Greece. In some va...

perception by an animal when in contact with a solid object. Two types of receptors are common: tactile hairs and subcutaneous receptors....

...require forcing the opponent to relinquish a certain posture or position; toppling requires that the standing opponent be forced to touch the ground with some part of his body other than his feet; touch-fall wrestling requires that the opponent be forced into a certain position, usually supine, for a brief instant; pin-fall wrestling requires that the opponent be held in such a position for a.....

...In its many horticultural forms it is one of the showiest of garden flowers and is relatively easy to cultivate. I. biflora, I. nolitangere, and I. pallida, all known variously as touch-me-not, snapweed, and jewelweed, are common weeds native to extensive regions of eastern North America....

The African family Melianthaceae has a few species of shrubs that are sometimes cultivated in warm-temperate areas. Honey bush (Melianthus major) and touch-me-not (M. comosus) have long racemes of reddish flowers that are attractive to honeybees. A decoction of the leaves of the honey bush is used for healing wounds, while the root, bark, and leaves of the touch-me-not......

Other Nominees...

...films, such as A Foreign Affair (1948), The Monte Carlo Story (1956), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Touch of Evil (1958), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). She was also a popular nightclub performer and gave her last stage performance in 1974. After a period of......

perception by an animal when in contact with a solid object. Two types of receptors are common: tactile hairs and subcutaneous receptors....

...En passion (1969; The Passion, or The Passion of Anna), all dramas of inner conflicts involving a small, closely knit group of characters. With Beröringen (1971; The Touch), his first English-language film, Bergman returned to an urban setting and more romantic subject matter, though fundamentally the characters in the film’s marital triangle are...

...efficient as rotary dialing. Trials had already been conducted of special telephone instruments that incorporated mechanically vibrating reeds, but in 1963 an electronic push-button system, known as Touch-Tone dialing, was offered to AT&T customers. Touch-Tone soon became the standard U.S. dialing system, and eventually it became the standard worldwide....

...(plays), or it would be obliged to surrender the ball to the other side. Camp was also responsible for having 11 players on a side, for devising a new scoring system in 1883 with two points for a touchdown, four points for the goal after a touchdown, and five points for a field goal (a field goal became worth three points in 1909, a touchdown six points in 1912), for naming the positions......

...high-intensity white lights running along the centreline of the runway and extending up to 600 metres (2,000 feet) beyond the threshold. At airfields where aircraft operate in very poor visibility, touchdown-zone lighting is provided over the first 900 metres (3,000 feet) from the runway threshold. These lights, set in patterns flush with the runway pavement, provide guidance up to the final......

...and match chess is distinguished from casual games by the strict provisions for completing a move. Unless preceded by the warning “I adjust” (French: “j’adoube”), a piece touched must be moved or captured (if legally possible), and a completed move may not be retracted. The players also are obligated to record their moves. Only after making a move can they sto...

...with his faithful old servant Adam. Soon Rosalind is banished too, merely for being the daughter of the out-of-favour Duke Senior. She flees to Arden accompanied by her cousin Celia and the jester Touchstone. Disguised as a young man named Ganymede, Rosalind encounters Orlando, lovesick for his Rosalind, and promises to cure him of his lovesickness by pretending to be that very Rosalind, so......

black siliceous stone used to ascertain the purity of gold and silver. Assaying by “touch” was one of the earliest methods employed to assess the quality of precious metals. The metal to be assayed is rubbed on the touchstone, adjacent to the rubbing on the touchstone of a sample of a metal of known purity. The streaks of metal left behind on the touchstone are th...

...the studio’s glory days. Ron Miller, Disney’s son-in-law, is credited with initiating the company’s astounding resurgence. In the early 1980s Miller broadened the company’s product line and founded Touchstone Pictures, a subsidiary devoted to producing films for adult audiences. Touchstone produced some of the most financially and critically successful films of the 1...

...who was interested in the young composer, recommended Rossini to the committee of La Scala opera house in Milan. It was under contract to them that he wrote La pietra del paragone (1812; The Touchstone), a touchstone of his budding genius. In its finale, Rossini—for the first time—made use of the crescendo effect that he was later to use and abuse indiscriminately....

a Muslim people who mainly inhabit Senegal, with smaller numbers in western Mali. Their origins are complex: they seem basically akin to the Serer and Wolof peoples, and contacts with the Fulani have greatly influenced their development. They speak the Fulani language, called Fula, which belongs to the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo language family....

Muslim theocracy that flourished in the 19th century in western Africa from Senegal eastward to Timbuktu (Tombouctou)....

The fact that, uniquely in western Africa, the Fulani are pastoralists has led to suggestions that they were originally a Saharan people. The Fulani language, however, is classified as part of the Niger-Congo family of languages spoken by black Africans, and the earliest historical documentation reports that the Fulani were living in the westernmost Sudan close to ancient Ghana. The development......

chief town of the Wadi RʾHir region, northeastern Algeria. It lies in the Wadi Igharghar Valley with sand dunes and chotts (salt lakes) to the north and south and small hills to the west. It is a typical Saharan town of dried mud or clay-stone buildings, winding streets, and dazzlingly white archways. A massive fortress minaret and the Casbah’s clock tower rise abo...

In the heat-treatment method, glass sheets are tempered at about 650° C (1200° F), followed by sudden chilling. This treatment increases the strength of the glass sheets approximately sixfold. When such glass does break, it shatters into blunt granules....

...under an overload but not fail. Sudden failure begins at a notch or crack that locally concentrates the stress, and the energy required to extend such a crack in a solid is a measure of the solid’s toughness. In a hard, brittle material, toughness is low, while in a strong, ductile metal it is high. A common test of toughness is the Charpy test, which employs a small bar of a metal with ...

...lies along the Wadi Tilatou and is situated on a well-watered plain that is bounded on the south by the Aurès Massif and on the north by the Batna Mountains. To the west, the cedar-forested Mount Tougour (Pic des Cèdres) rises to 6,870 feet (2,094 m)....

town, north-central Guinea, western Africa, on the Fouta Djallon plateau. It is a trading centre (rice, millet, oranges, cattle, and goats) among the Fulani (Peul) people in a savanna region. Bauxite deposits have been discovered south of the town. Pop. (latest est.) 21,900....

Chicago-area bootlegger, brewer, and gambling boss during the Prohibition era....

Chicago-area bootlegger, brewer, and gambling boss during the Prohibition era....