Italian composer noted particularly for his 555 keyboard sonatas, which substantially expanded the technical and musical possibilities of the harpsichord.
acute infectious disease caused by group A hemolytic streptococcal bacteria, in particular Streptococcus pyogenes. Scarlet fever can affect people of all ages, but it is most often seen in children. It is called scarlet fever because of ...
(Cemophora coccinea), small, burrowing, nocturnal member of the family Colubridae. It occurs in the United States from New Jersey to Florida and as far west as Texas.
French writer who contributed significantly to the development of three literary genres: the drama, the burlesque epic, and the novel. He is remembered today for a single work, Le Roman comique ("The Comic Novel").
village and town (township), Westchester county, southeastern New York, U.S. It is a northern residential suburb of New York City. The site was settled in 1701, following its purchase by Caleb Heathcote, who received a royal edict from William III ...
in biology, any of four species of fishes constituting the family Scatophagidae (order Perciformes). The few species are placed into two genera, Selenotoca and Scatophagus. They are found in marine waters or estuaries of the Indo-Pacific region from the western ...
in music, jazz vocal style using emotive, onomatopoeic, and nonsense syllables instead of words in solo improvisations on a melody. Scat has dim antecedents in the West African practice of assigning fixed syllables to percussion patterns, but the style was ...
deviant sexual practice in which sexual pleasure is obtained through the compulsive use of obscene language. The affected person commonly satisfies his desires through obscene telephone calls, usually to strangers. Such telephone encounters may be extremely frightening to the recipients, ...
in physics, a change in the direction of motion of a particle because of a collision with another particle. As defined in physics, a collision can occur between particles that repel one another, such as two positive (or negative) ions, ...
(genus Aythya), any of three species of diving ducks (family Anatidae). The greater scaup (A. marila), also called the big bluebill, breeds across Eurasia and most of the Nearctic region. The lesser scaup (A. affinis), a New World species also ...
a leader of the Optimates (conservative senatorial aristocrats) and one of the most influential men in the Roman government about 100 BC. Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that the world was almost ruled by a nod of his head.
animal that feeds partly or wholly on the bodies of dead animals. Many invertebrates, such as carrion beetles, live almost entirely on decomposing animal matter. The burying beetles actually enter the dead bodies of small animals before feeding on them ...
tin-glazed earthenware and porcelain made at a factory in Sceaux, Fr., from 1748 to 1794. Both were skillfully painted in a large range of enamel colours with landscape and figure subjects and with minutely exact flowers and birds. Cupids in ...
(Old Irish: "story"; pl. scela), in the Gaelic literature of Ireland, early prose and verse legends of gods and folk heroes, most of which originated during or before the 11th century. Scela were divided into primary and secondary types. The ...
in film making, original idea for a film translated into a visually oriented text. The scenario plan gives the mood of each image and its relationship with the other shots in the sequence. The writer of the shooting script sets ...
genus of colonial green algae with 4, 8, or 16 cells arranged in a row. A common component of freshwater plankton, Scenedesmus is used in experimental work on photosynthesis. In sewage purification processes, it provides oxygen for ...
ornamented rod or staff borne by rulers on ceremonial occasions as an emblem of authority and sovereignty. The primeval symbol of the staff was familiar to the Greeks and Romans and to the Germanic tribes in various forms (baculus, "long ...
French poet who was considered great in his own day, then long neglected. Reinstated by 20th-century critics and poets, chiefly for his poem cycle, Delie, Sceve has often been described as the leader of the Lyonese school of writers (including ...
German banker and financial expert who achieved international renown by halting the ruinous inflation that threatened the existence of the Weimar Republic in 1922-23. He also served as minister of economics (1934-37) in the National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler.
American research chemist and meteorologist, who in 1946 carried out the first systematic series of experiments to investigate the physics of precipitation. From an aircraft over Massachusetts he seeded clouds with pellets of Dry Ice (solid carbon dioxide) and succeeded ...
French archaeologist whose excavation of the ancient city of Ugarit at Ras Shamra, Syria, disclosed a succession of cultures from the 7th or 6th millennium BC to about 1195 BC. Moreover, the resulting knowledge of northern Canaanite civilization helped to ...
French composer, acoustician, and electronics engineer who in 1948, with his staff at Radio-diffusion et Television Francaise, introduced musique concrete (q.v.), in which sounds of natural origin, animate and inanimate, are recorded and manipulated so that the original sounds are ...
Dutch statesman, Roman Catholic priest, and author who founded Catholic political clubs (forerunners of the Roman Catholic State Party) and established a Catholic-Calvinist legislative coalition that lasted from 1888 to 1905.
municipality, Brabant province, central Belgium. A village until 1795, it is now an industrial suburb northeast of Brussels and one of the 19 communes that make up Greater Brussels. A rail junction with switch and freight yards, it has an ...
Austrian figure skater who was the best performer in his sport during the 1930s and was an innovator in the sport as well. He won two successive gold medals in the Winter Olympics of 1932 and 1936. He was also ...
Swiss-born American ecumenical leader and theologian whose works, especially the Creeds of Christendom (1877), helped set standards in the United States for scholarship in church history.
capital of Schaffhausen canton, northern Switzerland, on the right bank of the Rhine, west of Lake Constance (Bodensee). The site was first mentioned in 1045 as Villa Scafhusun. About 1049 Count Eberhard III of Nellenburg founded there the Benedictine monastery ...
most northerly canton of Switzerland. It lies north of the Rhine River and west of Lake Constance (Bodensee) and has an area of 115 square miles (299 square km), of which about 90 percent is classed as productive. It is ...
economist and sociologist who served briefly as Austrian minister of commerce and agriculture (1871); he was responsible for a major plan of imperial federalization for the Bohemian crownland.
Swiss writer who lived in Germany from 1913. He belonged to a new generation of Swiss writers who, searching for uncompromising greatness and believing in life as a boundless adventure, broke away from the saturated tradition of middle-class society.
Polish-born American endocrinologist and corecipient, with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Yalow, of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was noted for isolating and synthesizing three hormones that are produced by the region of the brain known as ...
German battle cruiser completed in 1939. It did great damage to Allied shipping in northern waters during World War II before it was sunk by the British battleship "Duke of York" on Dec. 26, 1943. The "Scharnhorst" was a heavily ...
Prussian general who developed the modern general staff system. With another reformer of army procedures, August von Gneisenau, he devised the "shrinkage system" (Krumpersystem), in which army recruits were quickly trained and sent into the reserves so that more men ...
German architect who was closely associated with modern architectural movements of the 1920s, much later producing his best known work, the hall for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (1963).
German zoologist who, with the dermatologist Erich Hoffmann, in 1905 discovered the causal organism of syphilis, Spirochaeta pallida, later called Treponema pallidum. He is known for his work in the development of protozoology as an experimental science.
German painter and designer of woodcuts whose work bears the strong influence of Albrecht Durer. An altarpiece for the Church of Ober-Sankt-Veit, near Vienna, believed to be his first work, was drawn by Durer.
one of the smallest of member states of the German Reich prior to the end of World War II. It lay east of the middle bend of the Weser River and was bounded on all sides by Prussian territory from ...
any spectacle or public performance. In late 18th-century German literature the word took on the more specific meaning of a play that has characteristics of both a tragedy and a comedy in that it is a serious play with a ...
American physicist and corecipient, with Nicolaas Bloembergen of the United States and Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn of Sweden, of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in developing the laser and in laser spectroscopy.
