Krypton

�(Kr), � chemical element, rare gas of Group 0 (noble gases) of the periodic table, forming very few chemical compounds. About three times heavier than air, krypton gas is colourless, odourless, and tasteless. Although traces are present in meteorites and minerals, krypton is more plentiful in the Earth's atmosphere, which contains 1 part krypton in about 900,000. The element was discovered

Social Protection, Asylum and Refugees.

The distinction between voluntary and forced migration was sometimes difficult to discern. With the number of people on the move far outstripping the capacity of existing legal channels for migration - despite a ready market for labour - people who were not in need of protection sometimes used the asylum system. Although the public perception that governments

Plymouth

City, seat (1836) of Marshall county, northern Indiana, U.S., 23 mi (37 km) south of South Bend. Founded in 1834 and apparently named for Plymouth, Mass., it is near the site of the area's last Potawatomi Indian village from where, in 1838, more than 800 Indians were dispossessed and moved to a reservation on the Osage River in Kansas. Many of them died of malaria before reaching their destination. Plymouth

Hatton, Sir Christopher

After spending several years in halfhearted study of the law, Hatton enrolled as one of the queen's bodyguards in 1564. Handsome and accomplished, he impressed the queen with his talent for dancing and quickly won her affection. There is no evidence that they were

The Woman Citizen

American weekly periodical, one of the most influential women's publications of the early decades of the 20th century. It came into existence as a result of a substantial bequest from Mrs. Frank Leslie to Carrie Chapman Catt, the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). According to the terms of the bequest, the money was to be used to further the

Base

In chemistry, any substance that in water solution is slippery to the touch, tastes bitter, changes the colour of indicators (e.g., turns red litmus paper blue), reacts with acids to form salts, and promotes certain chemical reactions (base catalysis). Examples of bases are the hydroxides of the alkali and alkaline earth metals (sodium, calcium, etc.) and the water solutions

Ile-ife

Also called �Ife, or Ife-lodun,� town, Osun state, southwestern Nigeria. The town lies at the intersection of roads from Ibadan (40 miles [64 km] west), Ilesha, and Ondo. It is one of the larger centres and probably the oldest town of the Yoruba people. Considered by the Yoruba to be a holy city and the legendary birthplace of mankind, it was held to have been founded by a son of the deity Oduduwa and was certainly the

Spooner Amendment

Filipinos fought the imposition of American rule, and it was believed in the United States that their

Aquino, Benigno Simeon, Jr.

The grandson of a Philippine general and the son of a well-known politician and landowner,

Margaret Of Angoul�me

Daughter of Charles de Valois-Orl�ans, comte d'Angoul�me, and Louise of Savoy, she became the most influential woman in France, with the exception of her mother,

Close, Chuck

Close began taking art lessons as a child and at age 14 saw an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's abstract paintings, which helped inspire him to become a painter. He studied at the University of Washington

Close, Chuck

Major Canadian professional gridiron football organization, formed in 1956 as the Canadian Football Council, created by the Western Interprovincial Football Union (WIFU) and the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (IRFU). Though the IRFU still referred to their sport as rugby football, the member clubs played a gridiron style of football. The WIFU and IRFU became,

Torez

Formerly �(until 1964) Chistyakovo� city, Donetsk oblast (province), Ukraine. Torez is a typical coal-mining centre of the Donets Basin coalfield, but in Soviet times its industrial base was considerably widened. It is now a centre for engineering industries, especially electrical engineering, and for building materials. The city of Torez has been replanned in modern style, and its streets have been widened.

Dendrochronology

Also called �tree-ring dating� the scientific discipline concerned with dating and interpreting past events, particularly paleoclimates and climatic trends, based on the analysis of tree rings. Samples are obtained by means of an increment borer, a simple metal tube of small diameter that can be driven into a tree to get a core extending from bark to centre. This core is split in the laboratory,

Culross

Small, picturesque royal burgh (town) in Fife council area and historic county, Scotland, on the northern bank of the Firth of Forth. The burgh has early religious associations with the Celtic saints Serf and Mungo (5th century). A Cistercian abbey was founded there in 1217, and its tower and choir remain in the parish church. The burgh is a remarkable example of 16th- and 17th-century

Sa'ib

Sa'ib was educated in Esfahan, and in about 1626/27 he traveled to India, where he was received into the court of Shah Jahan. He stayed for a time in Kabul and in Kashmir, returning home after several years abroad. After his

Social Protection, "Truth Commissions."

Increasing use was made of "truth commissions" as a method for identifying and documenting human rights violations and helping to bring perpetrators of abuses to justice. Although these fact-finding bodies had no authority to prosecute crimes, they were designed to obtain and publicize information about past atrocities as a first step toward acknowledging

Heliopolis

(Greek), Egyptian �Iunu�, or �Onu (�Pillar City�)�, biblical �On� one of the most ancient Egyptian cities, and the seat of worship of the sun god, Re. It was the capital of the 15th nome of Lower Egypt, but Heliopolis was important as a religious rather than a political centre. Its great temple of Re was second in size only to that of Amon at Thebes, and its priesthood wielded great influence, particularly during the 5th dynasty, when the worship

Attention

Attempts to accommodate the selective and intensive aspects of attention and its links with both awareness and more automatic processes have led to the formulation of a number of �two-process� theories of attention. One of the most influential was that advanced by the American psychologists Richard M. Shiffrin and Walter Schneider in 1977 on the basis of experiments

Photosynthesis, The pathway of electrons

The general features of a widely accepted mechanism for photoelectron transfer, in which two light reactions occur during the transfer of electrons from water to carbon dioxide, were proposed by Robert Hill and Derek Bendall, in 1960. A modified scheme for this mechanism is shown in Figure 1. In this figure the vertical scale represents the relative potential (in volts)

Novel, Picaresque

In Spain, the novel about the rogue or p�caro was a recognized form, and such English novels as Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress (1724) can be regarded as picaresque in the etymological sense. But the term has come to connote as much the episodic nature of the original species as the dynamic of roguery. Fielding's Tom Jones, whose hero is a bastard, amoral, and very nearly gallows-meat,

Mare's-tail

The aquatic plant Hippuris vulgaris or either of two other species of its genus, which constitute the water milfoil family (Hippuridaceae). Mare's-tail grows from submerged, stout rootstocks along the margins of lakes and ponds in temperate regions throughout the world. It resembles the unrelated horsetail (Equisetum species) in having whorls of small, linear leaves

B�rgi, Joost

B�rgi served as court watchmaker to Duke Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel from 1579 to 1592 and worked in the royal observatory at Kassel, where he developed geometrical and astronomical instruments. Word of his exceptional instruments

Smith, Jedediah (strong)

Smith probably made his first trip west while still in his teens. In 1822 he joined a fur-trading expedition to the Rocky Mountains and continued in the Rocky Mountain trade for the remainder of the

Ear Disease, Otosclerosis

The commonest cause for progressive hearing loss in early and middle adult life is a disease of the hard shell of bone that surrounds the labyrinth of the inner ear. This disease of bone is known as otosclerosis, a name that is misleading, for in its early and actively expanding stage the nodule of diseased bone is softer than the ivory-hard bone that it replaces. The

Knappertsbusch, Hans

At his family's urging, Knappertsbusch studied philosophy at the University of Bonn. However, he also pursued his interest in music and in 1908 began studying at the Cologne Conservatory under Fritz Steinbach

Rabin, Yitzhak

Robert Slater, Rabin of Israel: Warrior for Peace (1996), is a biography.

Jian

The jian, which has a simple silhouette, is supported upon a narrow ring base. It has two or four ring handles that freely hang from slightly modeled monster masks (taotie). The decoration of the jian characteristic of the late Zhou dynasty (c. 600 - 256/255 BC), from which the

Crocket

In architecture, a small, independent, sharply projecting medieval ornament, usually occurring in rows, and decorated with foliage. In the late 12th century, when it first appeared, the crocket had the form of a ball-like bud, with a spiral outline, similar to an uncurling fern frond; but in the later Gothic period it took the form of open, fully developed leaves that by the