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tang, in zoology

(Encyclopedia)tang, common name for certain members of the Acanthuridae, a family of mostly small, mainly reef-dwelling tropical fishes with compressed bodies and small mouths and teeth. Other members of the family...

Wollemi pine

(Encyclopedia)Wollemi pine wŏlˈəmīˌ [key], primitive tree, Wollemia nobilis, of the conifer family Araucariaceae, named after Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, Australia, where it was discovered in 199...

Ting, Samuel Chao Chung

(Encyclopedia)Ting, Samuel Chao Chung, 1936–, American physicist, b. Ann Arbor, Mich., Ph.D. Univ. of Michigan 1962. Ting was a professor at Columbia from 1965 to 1969, when he joined the faculty at the Massachus...

pitchblende

(Encyclopedia)pitchblende pĭchˈblĕndˌ [key], dark, lustrous, heavy mineral, a source of radium and uranium. Largely natural uranium oxides, triuranium octaoxide (U3O8) and uranium dioxide (UO2), it usually cont...

optical character recognition

(Encyclopedia)optical character recognition (OCR), method for the machine-reading of typeset, typed, and, in some cases, hand-printed letters, numbers, and symbols using optical sensing and a computer. The light re...

Rubin, Vera

(Encyclopedia)Rubin, Vera, 1928–2016, American astronomer, b. Philadelphia as Vera Florence Cooper, Ph.D. Georgetown (1954). After teaching at Georgetown, she joined (1965) the Carnegie Institution's department o...

ombú

(Encyclopedia)ombú ōmbo͞oˈ [key], large evergreen tree (Phytolacca dioica) of the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. It has an umbrellalike spread of foliage; the trunk may attain a girth of 40 to 50 ft (12.2–1...

pumice

(Encyclopedia)pumice pŭmˈĭs [key], volcanic glass formed by the solidification of lava that is permeated with gas bubbles. Usually found at the surface of a lava flow, it is colorless or light gray and has the g...

quagga

(Encyclopedia)quagga kwăgˈə [key], extinct type of zebra. It formerly inhabited open plains in S Africa, where its range overlapped that of the plains zebra, or common zebra (Equus quagga, formerly E. burchellii...

lava

(Encyclopedia)lava läˈvə [key], molten rock that erupts on the earth's surface, either on land or under the ocean, by a volcano or through a fissure. It solidifies into igneous rock that is also called lava. Bef...
 

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