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Encyclopedia - Britannica Online Encyclopedia
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  • Cnidus, Battle of (Persian history)
    ...under this treaty, Sparta repudiated it and backed Ionia in its conflict against the Persians in the early 4th century. Despite Spartan successes on the continent, this war was lost at sea in the Battle of Cnidus (394). Later in the 4th century, however, Persian rule in Anatolia was severely shaken by an insurrection of the Persian satraps of the west (362–359), which subsequently......
  • CNIP (political party, France)
    French political party founded in 1949. It grew out of the National Centre of Independents, formed in 1948 by Roger Duchet, who, by the following year, had accomplished a coalition of various parliamentarians of the right and had absorbed the small peasant party, the Republican Party of Liberty (Parti Républicain de la Liberté); the new grouping became the CNIP. Thereafter it took pa...
  • CNIT Exhibition Hall (building, Paris, France)
    ...90 metres (300 feet). More complex forms of concrete shells have been made, including hyperbolic paraboloids, or saddle shapes, and intersecting parabolic vaults. An example of the latter is the CNIT Exhibition Hall in Paris, which consists of six intersecting double-shell parabolic vaults built to span a triangular space 216 metres (708 feet) on a side with supports only at the apexes of......
  • CNN (American company)
    subsidiary company of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., engaged in 24-hour live news broadcasts. Headquarters are in Atlanta....
  • CNO cycle (nuclear fusion)
    sequence of thermonuclear reactions that provides most of the energy radiated by the hotter stars. It is only a minor source of energy for the Sun and does not operate at all in very cool stars. Four hydrogen nuclei are in effect converted into one helium nucleus, a fraction of the mass being released as energy (according to the law of mass–energy equivalence, E = mc2...
  • Cnossus (ancient city, Crete)
    city in ancient Crete, capital of the legendary king Minos, and the principal centre of the Minoan, the earliest of the Aegean civilizations (see Minoan civilization). The site of Knossos stands on a knoll between the confluence of two streams and is located about 5 miles (8 km) inland from Crete’s northern coast. Excavations were begun at Knossos under Sir Arthur ...
  • CNR (military organization, Burkina Faso)
    ...and installed Major Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo as president. The Ouedraogo government soon split into conservative and radical factions, with the radicals seizing power on August 4, 1983. They set up a National Revolutionary Council (CNR) with Captain Thomas Sankara as head of state....
  • CNSA (Chinese space agency)
    ...and installed Major Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo as president. The Ouedraogo government soon split into conservative and radical factions, with the radicals seizing power on August 4, 1983. They set up a National Revolutionary Council (CNR) with Captain Thomas Sankara as head of state.......
  • CNT (Spanish labour union)
    ...led to worldwide protests and the resignation of the conservative government in Madrid. These events also resulted in a congress of Spanish trade unionists at Sevilla in 1910, which founded the National Confederation of Labour (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo; CNT)....
  • CNV (physiology)
    ...to its normal level. This slow potential change, contingent on the association of the two stimuli and the individual’s intended response to the imperative second stimulus, has been termed the contingent negative variation (CNV). It appears as a correlate of focal attention, and it has been suggested that one of its functions may be to prime the appropriate areas of the cerebral cortex fo...
  • Co (chemical element)
    chemical element, ferromagnetic metal of Group VIIIb of the periodic table, used especially for heat-resistant and magnetic alloys....
  • CO (American orchestra)
    American symphony orchestra based in Cleveland, Ohio. It was founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes in 1918 and was one of the last major American orchestras to be created. Nikolai Sokoloff (1918–33), the first music director, was succeeded by Artur Rodzinski (1933–43), Erich Leinsdorf (1943–46, mostly in absentia; he was serving concurrently in the U.S. armed forces), Geo...
  • CO insertion (chemistry)
    A reaction frequently referred to as CO insertion leads to carbon-carbon bond formation between the carbon atom of a carbonyl ligand and the carbon atom of an alkyl ligand, which is the methyl group in the following example....
  • co-conscious (psychology)
    American psychologist and physician who advocated the study of abnormal psychology and formulated concepts such as the neurogram, or neurological record of psychological behaviour, and the coconscious, a parallel, possibly rival, well-organized system of awareness comparable to the ordinary, familiar consciousness....
  • co-op (organization)
    organization owned by and operated for the benefit of those using its services. Cooperatives have been successful in a number of fields, including the processing and marketing of farm products, the purchasing of other kinds of equipment and raw materials, and in the wholesaling, retailing, electric power, credit and banking, and housing industries. The income from a retail cooperative is usually ...
  • Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (political party, Canada)
    left-wing political party prominent in Canada from the 1930s to the 1960s. Founded at Calgary, Alta., on Aug. 1, 1932, by a federation of various farmer, labour, and socialist parties in western Canada plus one labour union (the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Employees), its avowed aim was to transform the capitalist economic system into a “cooperative commonwealth” by democratic me...
  • Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, The (book by Webb)
    ...class life while helping her cousin Charles Booth, the shipowner and social reformer, to research his monumental study of The Life and Labour of the People in London. In 1891 she published The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, a small book based on her experiences in Lancashire, which later became a classic. It was not long before she realized that in order to find any......
  • Co-operative Republic of Guyana
    country located in the northeastern corner of South America. It is bordered by Venezuela to the west, Brazil to the southwest and south, Suriname (along the Courantyne River) to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the north. Most of the country’s population occupies the narrow coastal strip. The capital and chief port is Georgetown....
  • Co-operative Wholesale Society (British organization)
    At an early age, Mitchell joined the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers and was appointed its secretary in 1857. He shaped the policy of the Co-operative Wholesale Society, established in 1863, and was its chairman from 1874 until his death. Mitchell emphasized the fundamental importance of the consumer in the economy. His ideas provided the theoretical and practical basis of the......
  • co-orbital satellite (astronomy)
    Janus and Epimetheus are co-orbital moons—they share the same average orbit. Every few years they make a close approach, interacting gravitationally in such a way that one transmits angular momentum to the other, which forces the latter into a slightly higher orbit and the former into a slightly lower orbit. At the next close approach, the process repeats in the opposite direction. Tethys.....
  • co-ownership (law)
    Some marital property systems that are basically separation of property have modifications for the situation in which, for example, an asset has been acquired by contributions from both spouses with the intention that both will benefit from its purchase—as with a home, furnishings, an automobile, a joint bank account, or joint investments. But the attitudes of the spouses as to their......
  • Co-We-Nit (warp-knitting machine)
    An extension of conventional warp knitting is the Co-We-Nit warp-knitting machine, producing fabrics with the properties of both woven and knitted fabrics. The machines need have only two warp-forming warps and provision for up to eight interlooped warp threads between each chain of loops. These warp threads are interlaced with a quasiweft, forming a fabric resembling woven cloth on one side....
  • CoA (biochemistry)
    ...processes of humans and, indeed, of all animals and plants. In these processes, the CH3CO (acetyl) group of the acetic acid molecule is attached to a large biochemical molecule called coenzyme A; the entire compound is known as acetyl coenzyme A. In the metabolism of food materials (the body’s conversion of food to energy), the carbon atoms of carbohydrates, fats, and, to some...
  • coaccretion hypothesis (astronomy)
    Lunar origin theories can be divided into three main categories: coaccretion, fission, and capture. Coaccretion suggests that the Moon and Earth were formed together from a primordial cloud of gas and dust. This scenario, however, cannot explain the large angular momentum of the present system. In fission theories a fluid proto-Earth began rotating so rapidly that it flung off a mass of......
  • coach (horse-drawn vehicle)
    four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage, popularly thought to have originated in Hungary in the 15th century. The word coach often is used interchangeably with “carriage,” but a coach is generally either a public carriage—such as a stagecoach, Concord coach, mail coach, or the modern railway coach—or an opulent carriage of state. A coach has a suspended, enclosed body, with...
  • coach (railroad vehicle)
    railroad passenger car. In early railroad operation, passenger and freight cars were often intermixed, but that practice very soon gave way to running separate freight and passenger trains. The flexible gangway between coaches, introduced about 1880, made the entire train accessible to passengers and so made possible the introduction of the dining car and the club or lounge car. Early coaches wer...
  • coach horn (musical instrument)
    The coach horn, which was like a straight post horn, though longer, was made of copper and was of conical bore. It was used on the London–Oxford mail coach until 1914....
  • Coach Museum (museum, Lisbon, Portugal)
    The city has many other museums, including those dedicated to modern, antique, sacred, decorative, and folk arts. Two specialized, rather unusual museums are the Azulejo Museum and the National Museum of Coaches. The former, located in the convent of Madre de Deus, boasts a large and varied collection of the painted tiles (azulejos) for which the......
  • Coachella Valley (valley, California, United States)
    valley, part of the Colorado Desert, extending northwestward for 45 miles (70 km) from the Salton Sea (a shallow saline lake) through Riverside county to the San Gorgonio Pass, southern California, U.S. It is 15 miles (25 km) wide and lies between the Little San Bernardino Mountains (east) and the San Jacinto...
  • coaching (sports)
    A distinguishing mark of American football is the renown and status granted to the most successful and innovative coaches. The first innovators were men such as Walter Camp (not literally a coach but an adviser), Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago, George Woodruff at Pennsylvania, and Lorin Deland at Harvard, the coaches who developed the V trick, ends back, tackles back, guards......
  • coaching (horsemanship)
    art or sport of controlling and directing draft animals from a coach or other conveyance to which they are harnessed. The animal most commonly employed is the horse, but the mule, ass, ox, reindeer, and dog have been, and still are, used in some areas of the world....
  • Coaching Club (American horse club)
    ...of driving clubs existed in England in the 19th century: the Benson Driving club from 1807 to 1854; the Richmond club from 1838 to 1845; and the Four-in-Hand Driving Club from 1850 to 1926. The Coaching Club was founded in 1870 and survives; in 1958 the British Driving Society was formed to encourage people who wish to drive horses for pleasure. In the United States, the Coaching Club,......
  • Coaching Club American Oaks (American horse race)
    ...to encourage people who wish to drive horses for pleasure. In the United States, the Coaching Club, founded in 1875, held its last extended drive in 1916 but continued in existence, establishing the Coaching Club American Oaks, an annual stake race for three-year-old fillies, at Belmont Park, first held in 1917. Driving and coaching exhibitions are included in many horse shows such as the......
  • coaching inn clock
    weight-driven wall clock with a large wooden, painted or lacquered dial. More correctly, it is called a tavern clock. Clocks of this type were displayed by innkeepers and got their name from the passage of a five-shilling duty on clocks in Great Britain, introduced in 1797 by the English prime minister William Pitt the Younger. (Many clocks were disposed of by their owners, who ...
  • Coachman, Alice (American athlete)
    American athlete who was the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal....
  • coachwhip (snake)
    (Masticophis, sometimes Coluber, flagellum), nonvenomous snake of the family Colubridae that ranges from the southern half of the United States to west central Mexico. It averages 1.2 metres (4 feet) long, but it is occasionally twice that length. It is slender, and its tail is marked like a plaited whip. The eastern subspecies is brownish; western subspecies tend ...
  • coachwhip (plant)
    (Fouquieria splendens) flowering spiny shrub characteristic of rocky deserts from western Texas to southern California and southward into Mexico. It is a member of the candlewood family (Fouquieriaceae), which belongs to the order Ericales. Near the plant’s base the stem divides into several slender, erect, widespreading, intensely spiny branches, usually about 2...
  • coachwhipbird (bird genus)
    either of the two species of the Australian genus Psophodes, belonging to the songbird family Muscicapidae. They are named for the voice of the eastern whipbird (P. olivaceus): the male gives a long whistle and a loud crack, and the female answers instantly with “choo” sounds. This species is 25 centimetres (10 inches) long, with broad, graduated tail, and is dark green...
  • coagulation (of liquids)
    The coagulation of milk is an irreversible change of its protein from a soluble or dispersed state to an agglomerated or precipitated condition. Its appearance may be associated with spoilage, but coagulation is a necessary step in many processing procedures. Milk may be coagulated by rennin or other enzymes, usually in conjunction with heat. Left unrefrigerated, milk may naturally sour or......
  • coagulation (physiology)
    in physiology, the process by which a blood clot is formed. The formation of a clot prevents blood loss from a ruptured blood vessel. Under abnormal circumstances, clots can also form in a vessel that has not been breached; such clots can result in the occlusion of the vessel....
  • coagulation factor (physiology)
    Plasma, the liquid portion of the blood, is more than 90 percent water. It contains all the noncellular components of whole blood including the coagulation factors, immunoglobulins and other proteins, and electrolytes. When frozen, the coagulation factors remain stable for up to one year but are usually transfused within 24 hours after thawing. However, some of the clotting factors, such as......
  • coagulative necrosis (biology)
    ...describe as cell death is coagulative necrosis. This is an abnormal morphological appearance, detected in tissue examined under the microscope. The changes, which affect aggregates of adjacent cells or functionally related cohorts of cells, are seen in a variety of contexts produced by accident, injury, or disease. Among the environmental perturbations that may cause cell necrosis are......
  • Coahuila (state, Mexico)
    estado (state), northern Mexico. It is bounded by the United States (Texas) to the north and northeast and by the states of Nuevo León to the east, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas to the south, and Durango and Chihuahua...
  • Coahuiltecan languages
    ...level as, say, Indo-European. The Hokaltecan superfamily includes the Yuman family (four surviving languages, two extinct); the Serian family (one surviving language, four extinct); the Coahuiltecan family (four extinct languages); the Tequistlatecan family, with one living language; the Supanecan family (one surviving language, two extinct); and the Jicaquean family, with one......
  • coal (fossil fuel)
    solid, usually brown or black, carbon-rich material that most often occurs in stratified sedimentary deposits. It is one of the most important of the primary fossil fuels....
  • Coal and Iron Police (American police)
    ...second half of the 19th century, states enacted laws giving many business corporations the authority to create their own private police forces or to contract with established police agencies. The Coal and Iron Police of Pennsylvania was a company police force that later became notorious for its antilabour vigilantism. The most famous independent police force was the Pinkerton National......
  • coal ball (paleontology)
    a lump of petrified plant matter, frequently spheroid, found in coal seams of the Upper Carboniferous Period (from 325,000,000 to 280,000,000 years ago). Coal balls are important sources of fossil information relating to the forests preceding the Coal Age. As a result of a variety of conditions, small pockets of plant debris in Carboniferous swamps, infiltrated by mineral salts, became petrified ...
  • coal classification (process)
    any of various ways in which coal is grouped. Most classifications are based on the results of chemical analyses and physical tests, but some are more empirical in nature. Coal classifications are important because they provide valuable information to commercial users (e.g., for power generation and coke manufacturing) and to researchers studying the origin of...
  • Coal Exchange (building, London, United Kingdom)
    Closer to the English tradition are the billowing Laeken glass houses, Brussels (1868–76), by Alphonse Balat. Visitors were admitted to the Coal Exchange in London (1846–49, J.B. Bunning) through a round towered Classical porch at the corner of two Renaissance palaces to a magnificent rotunda hall, which was surrounded by three tiers of ornamental iron balconies and roofed by a......
  • Coal Flat (work by Pearson)
    Other notable novelists of the postwar period include Bill Pearson, whose one novel, Coal Flat (1963), gives a sober, faithful, strongly written account of life in a small mining town on the West Coast of the South Island; David Ballantyne (Sydney Bridge Upside Down [1968] and The Talkback Man [1978]), the “lost man” of those decades whose work....
  • coal gas (chemical compound)
    gaseous mixture—mainly hydrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide—formed by the destructive distillation (i.e., heating in the absence of air) of bituminous coal and used as a fuel. Sometimes steam is added to react with the hot coke, thus increasing the yield of gas. Coal tar and coke are obtained as by-products. ...
  • coal geology
    The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries was fueled by coal. Though it has been supplanted by oil and natural gas as the primary source of energy in most modern industrial nations, coal nonetheless remains an important fuel....
  • Coal Harbour Penal Settlement (New South Wales, Australia)
    city and port, New South Wales, Australia. It lies at the mouth of the Hunter River, 104 miles (168 km) by rail northeast of Sydney....
  • Coal Hill Park (park, Beijing, China)
    Jingshan (Prospect Hill) Park, also known as Meishan (Coal Hill) Park, is a man-made hill, more than a mile (1.6 km) in circumference, located north of the Forbidden City. The hill, offering a spectacular panorama of Beijing from its summit, has five ridges, with a pavilion on each. The hill was the scene of a historical tragedy when in 1644, at the end of the Ming dynasty, the defeated Ming......
  • Coal Measures (geology)
    major division of Upper Carboniferous rocks and time in Great Britain (the Upper Carboniferous Period began about 318,000,000 years ago and lasted about 19,000,000 years). The Coal Measures, noted for the great amounts of coal they contain, account for the major portion of England’s production of coal. They are the uppermost division of the Upper Carbon...
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter (film by Apted [1980])
    Other Nominees...
  • coal mining
    extraction of deposits from the surface of the Earth and from the underground....
  • coal oil (chemical compound)
    flammable pale yellow or colourless oily liquid with a not-unpleasant characteristic odour. It is obtained from petroleum and used for burning in lamps and domestic heaters or furnaces, as a fuel or fuel component for jet engines, and as a solvent for greases and insecticides....
  • coal processing
    As explained above, during the formation of coal and subsequent geologic activities, a coal seam may acquire mineral matter, veins of clay, bands of rock, and igneous intrusions. In addition, during the process of mining, a portion of the roof and floor material may be taken along with the coal seam in order to create adequate working height for the equipment and miners. Therefore, run-of-mine......
  • Coal Question, The (work by Jevons)
    ...in California and Australia. This work represents one of the greatest contributions to the theory of index numbers ever published. Yet it was not until the publication of The Coal Question (1865), in which Jevons called attention to the gradual exhaustion of Britain’s coal supplies, that he received public recognition. He feared that as the supply of coal was......
  • coal rock type
    Coals may be classified on the basis of their macroscopic appearance (generally referred to as coal rock type, lithotype, or kohlentype). Four main types are recognized: Vitrain (Glanzkohle or charbon brillant), which is characterized by a brilliant black lustre and composed primarily of the maceral group vitrinite,......
  • coal scuttle (container)
    ...fork to maneuver fuel into position, and a long-handled brush to keep the hearth swept. The poker, designed to break burning coal into smaller pieces, did not become common until the 18th century. Coal scuttles appeared early in the 18th century and were later adapted into usually ornamental wood boxes or racks for fire logs. The fire screen was developed early in the 19th century to prevent......
  • coal seam (geology)
    ...The term peat is used for the uncompacted plant matter that accumulates in bogs and brackish swamps. With increasing compaction and carbon content, peat can be transformed into the various kinds of coal: initially brown coal or lignite, then soft or bituminous coal, and finally, with metamorphism, hard or anthracite coal. In the geologic record, coal occurs in beds, called seams, which are......
  • coal slurry (fuel)
    Pulverized coal can be mixed with water and made into a slurry, which can be handled like a liquid fuel and burned in a boiler designed to burn oil. Coal-water slurry fuel (CWSF) normally consists of 50–70 percent pulverized or micronized coal, 29–49 percent water, and less than 1 percent chemicals to disperse the coal particles in the water and prevent settling of the coal. The......
  • coal tar (chemical compound)
    principal liquid product resulting from the carbonization of coal, i.e., the heating of coal in the absence of air, at temperatures ranging from about 900° to 1,200° C (1,650° to 2,200° F). Many commercially important compounds are derived from coal tar....
  • coal tar naphtha (chemical compound)
    In modern usage the word naphtha is usually accompanied by a distinctive prefix. Coal-tar naphtha is a volatile commercial product obtained by the distillation of coal tar. Shale naphtha is obtained by the distillation of oil produced from bituminous shale by destructive distillation. Petroleum naphtha is a name used primarily in the United States for petroleum distillate containing principally......
  • coal tar pitch (chemical compound)
    Coal tar pitch is a soft to hard and brittle substance containing chiefly aromatic resinous compounds along with aromatic and other hydrocarbons and their derivatives; it is used chiefly as road tar, in waterproofing roofs and other structures, and to make electrodes....
  • coal utilization
    combustion of coal or its conversion into useful solid, gaseous, and liquid products. By far the most important use of coal is in combustion, mainly to provide heat to the boilers of electric power plants. Metallurgical coke is the major product of coal conversion. In addition, techniques for gasifying and liquefying coal into fuels or into feedstocks for the ...
  • coal-bed gas
    Considerable quantities of methane are trapped within coal seams. Although much of the gas that formed during the initial coalification process is lost to the atmosphere, a significant portion remains as free gas in the joints and fractures of the coal seam and as adsorbed gas on the internal surfaces of the micropores within the coal itself. Since coal is relatively impermeable, any methane......
  • coal-log pipeline (technology)
    A new type of HCP being developed is coal-log pipeline (CLP), which transports compressed coal logs. The system eliminates the use of capsules to enclose coal and the need for having a separate pipeline to return empty capsules. Compared with a coal-slurry pipeline of the same diameter, CLP can transport more coal using less water....
  • coal-water slurry fuel (fuel)
    Pulverized coal can be mixed with water and made into a slurry, which can be handled like a liquid fuel and burned in a boiler designed to burn oil. Coal-water slurry fuel (CWSF) normally consists of 50–70 percent pulverized or micronized coal, 29–49 percent water, and less than 1 percent chemicals to disperse the coal particles in the water and prevent settling of the coal. The......
  • coal-workers’ pneumoconiosis (disease)
    respiratory disorder, a type of pneumoconiosis caused by repeated inhalation of coal dust over a period of years. The disease gets its name from a distinctive blue-black marbling of the lung caused by accumulation of the dust. Georgius Agricola, a German mineralogist, first described lung disease in coal miners in the 16th century, and it is now widely recognized. It may be the ...
  • Coalbanks (Alberta, Canada)
    city, southern Alberta, Canada, lying on the Oldman River near its junction with the St. Mary River, 135 miles (217 km) south-southeast of Calgary....
  • Coalbrookdale Bridge (bridge, England, United Kingdom)
    structure that is generally considered the first cast-iron bridge, spanning the River Severn at Ironbridge, near Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire, England. It is now a British national monument. The bridge’s semicircular arch spans 100.5 feet (30.6 m) and has five arch ribs, each cast in two halves. Designed by Abraham Darby or Thomas Pritchard, the bridge was erected by Darby in 1777–7...
  • coalescence (chemical process)
    ...different conditions and for different lengths of time in different parts of the cloud. A droplet appreciably larger than average will fall faster than the smaller ones and so will collide and fuse (coalesce) with some of those that it overtakes. Calculations show that, in a deep cloud containing strong upward air currents and high concentrations of liquid water, such a droplet will have a......
  • coalfish (fish)
    (Pollachius, or Gadus, virens), North Atlantic fish of the cod family, Gadidae. It is known as saithe, or coalfish, in Europe. The pollock is an elongated fish, deep green with a pale lateral line and a pale belly. It has a small chin barbel and, like the cod, has three dorsal and two anal fins. A carnivorous, lively, usually schooling fish, it grows to about 1.1 m (3.5 feet)...
  • coalification (geology)
    ...gaseous and liquid products. With increasing depth, however, the conditions become increasingly anaerobic (reducing), and molds and peats develop. The process of peat formation—biochemical coalification—is most active in the upper few metres of a peat deposit. Fungi are not found below about 0.5 metre (about 18 inches), and most forms of microbial life are eliminated at depths......
  • coaling station (military logistics)
    ...for a time the inordinate amount of space that had to be allocated to carry wood or coal seriously inhibited the usefulness of early warships. Eventually the maritime nations established networks of coaling stations, which became part of the fabric of empire in the late 19th century. The shift to oil a few years before World War I involved a major dislocation in naval logistics and changed the....
  • coalition diplomacy
    A summit is often preceded or followed by coalition diplomacy. This necessary joint working out of common policies or responses to proposals by cabinet ministers may be fairly informal. Coalitions require cumbersome two-step diplomacy at each stage, arriving at a joint policy and then negotiating with the other party....
  • Coalition Provisional Authority (government of Iraq)
    Following the fall of the Baʿth Party, an entity known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was headed by a senior American diplomat, assumed the governance of Iraq. An Iraqi governing council appointed by the CPA had limited powers. The primary goal of the CPA was to maintain security and rebuild Iraq’s badly damaged and deteriorated infrastructure, but its efforts we...
  • coalition war
    Following the fall of the Baʿth Party, an entity known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which was headed by a senior American diplomat, assumed the governance of Iraq. An Iraqi governing council appointed by the CPA had limited powers. The primary goal of the CPA was to maintain security and rebuild Iraq’s badly damaged and deteriorated infrastructure, but its efforts we...
  • Coalport porcelain (pottery)
    ware from the porcelain factory in Shropshire, England, founded by John Rose in 1795. “Coalbrookdale Porcelain” was used sometimes as a trade description and a mark because the factory was located at Coalbrookdale. Coalport’s glazed bone china was in great demand and improved greatly in quality about 1820 with the refinement of a hard, white porcelain. A Wi...
  • Coalsack (nebula)
    a dark nebula in the Crux constellation (Southern Cross). Easily visible against a starry background, it is perhaps the most conspicuous dark nebula. Starlight coming to Earth through it is reduced by 1 to 1.5 magnitudes. The Coalsack is about 500 light-years from Earth and 50 light-years in diameter. It figures in legends of peoples of the Southern Hemisphere and has been known to Europeans since...
  • Coalville (England, United Kingdom)
    ...in Great Britain. It is essentially an upland area of undulating meadows, but some cultivation of crops occurs in the southwest and along the River Soar valley in the north. The two principal towns, Coalville and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, are in the upland area bordering Charnwood Forest, a former royal hunting ground to the east. Charnwood Forest consists of a series of barren ridges rising above 900...
  • Coamo (Puerto Rico)
    town, south-central Puerto Rico. It lies in the southern foothills of the Cordillera Central, on the Coamo River, southwest of San Juan. It was founded as a religious community in 1579, made a town in 1616, and given the title villa by Spanish royal decree in 1778. During the Spanish-American War (1898), it was the scene of a decisive batt...
  • Coandă effect (physics)
    ...to use fluidics commercially. The demand for reliable controls in space research stimulated progress. In the 1930s Henri Coandă, a Romanian scientist, described what is now known as the Coandă effect, a major contribution to fluidic technology. He observed that as a free jet emerges from a jet nozzle the stream will tend to follow a nearby curved or inclined surface. It also......
  • Coanza River (river, Angola)
    river in central Angola, rising about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Chitembo on the Bié Plateau at an elevation of 5,000 feet (1,500 metres). It flows northward for about 320 miles (510 km) and then curves westward to enter the Atlantic Ocean 30 miles (50 km) south of Luanda after a course of 600 miles (960 km). The Cuanza drains much...
  • coarctate pupa (zoology)
    ...(wireworm-like), and vermiform (maggot-like). The three types of pupae are: obtect, with appendages more or less glued to the body; exarate, with the appendages free and not glued to the body; and coarctate, which is essentially exarate but remaining covered by the cast skins (exuviae) of the next to the last larval instar (name given to the form of an insect between molts)....
  • coarse coal
    The product from level 1 is sized into two products: coarse coal (larger than 12.5 millimetres) and fine coal (less than 12.5 millimetres); the coarse coal is cleaned to remove impurities; the fine coal is added to the cleaned coarse coal or marketed as a separate product....
  • coarse fishing (sport)
    Bait fishing, commonly called still fishing in North America and bottom fishing in England, is certainly the oldest and most universally used method. In English freshwater fishing it is used to catch what are called coarse fish: bream, barbel, tench, dace, and grayling (i.e., all fish but game fish, those that provide the angler with sport by the way they fight capture). A bait is......
  • coarse grating (astronomical technique)
    ...introduced precise methods in photographic photometry. The results of his studies clearly demonstrated the relationship between the spectral type and colour of a star. He pioneered in the use of a coarse grating (for example, a glass plate with closely spaced parallel lines etched into it) in the course of measurement of the separation of double stars; the technique has found widespread use in....
  • coarse-grain environment (biology)
    ...clumped, even if it is not particularly social. If the niche or habitat is patchily or irregularly distributed and the animal cannot move easily from one patch to another, it is said to live in a “coarse-grain” environment or to have a “coarse-grained” niche. Such animals often seem social when they in reality are not. If the niche or habitat of an animal is rather.....
  • coarse-grained niche (biology)
    ...clumped, even if it is not particularly social. If the niche or habitat is patchily or irregularly distributed and the animal cannot move easily from one patch to another, it is said to live in a “coarse-grain” environment or to have a “coarse-grained” niche. Such animals often seem social when they in reality are not. If the niche or habitat of an animal is rather.....
  • coarse-haired pocket mouse (rodent)
    The 15 species of coarse-haired pocket mice (genus Chaetodipus) are larger on average, weighing 15 to 47 grams and having a body length of 8 to 13 cm and hairy, tufted tails as long as or much longer than the body (up to 15 cm). Coarse-haired pocket mice are similar in colour to silky pocket mice, but the fur is harsh and the rump has spiny bristles. Silky and coarse-haired......
  • Coase, Ronald (British-American economist)
    British-born American economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991. The field known as new institutional economics, which attempts to explain political, legal, and social institutions in economic terms and to understand the role of institutions in fostering and impeding economic growth, originated in work by Coase and others....
  • Coase, Ronald Harry (British-American economist)
    British-born American economist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991. The field known as new institutional economics, which attempts to explain political, legal, and social institutions in economic terms and to understand the role of institutions in fostering and impeding economic growth, originated in work by Coase and others....
  • Coase theorem (economics)
    ...in which transaction costs and property rights affect business and society. In his most famous paper, “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960), he developed what later became known as the Coase theorem. In the paper, Coase argued that nuisances are the product of joint causation and that, when information and transaction costs are low, the market will produce an efficient solution to.....
  • coast (geography)
    broad area of land that borders the sea....
  • coast artillery
    weapons for discharging missiles, placed along the shore for defense against naval attack....
  • coast forest
    A distinct subtype of the North American coniferous forest is the moist temperate coniferous forest, or coast forest, which is found along the west coast of North America eastward to the Rocky Mountains. This subtype is sometimes called temperate rain forest, although this term is properly applied only to broad-leaved evergreen forests of the Southern Hemisphere. Warm temperatures, high......

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