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McGraw Hill Financial, Inc. is an American publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, publishing, and business services.
A plant of the genus <i>Solanum</i> in the nightshade family, Solanaceae; it is related to tomatoes and peppers. There are more than 2000 species of <i>Solanum</i>, of which about 150 bear tubers. The potato of commerce, <i>S</i>. <i>tuberosum</i>, originated in South America, probably in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, where it has been cultivated for several thousand years. Potatoes were introduced into Europe by Spanish explorers in the late sixteenth century and into the United States from Ireland in 1719. The crop became a staple in Europe, was a primary source of food in Ireland, and is known even today as the Irish potato. The potato blight famine of 1845 and 1846, caused by <i>Phytophthora infestans</i>, was responsible for the death of more than a million Irish people, and the emigration of about 1.5 million others.
Industry:Science
A plant, <i>Papaver somniferum</i> (Papaveraceae), which is probably a native of Asia Minor. It is cultivated extensively in China, India, and elsewhere. This plant is the source of opium, obtained by cutting into the fruits (capsules) soon after the petals have fallen (see <b>illustration</b>). The white latex (juice) flows from the cuts and hardens when exposed to the air. This solidified latex is collected, shaped into balls or wafers, and often wrapped in the flower petals. This is the crude opium, which contains at least 20 alkaloids, including morphine and codeine. These drugs are used in medicine to allay pain, induce sleep, and relax spasms. Opium is one of the most useful drugs, but it is habit-forming and consequently should be used with the utmost caution. The opium habit is deleterious physically, mentally, and morally, and misuse of the drug is an extremely serious problem.
Industry:Science
A plant, <i>Phleum pratense</i>, of the order Cyperales, long the most important hay grass for the cooler temperate humid regions. It is easily established and managed, produces seed abundantly, and grows well in mixtures with alfalfa and clover. It is a short-lived perennial, makes a loose sod, and has moderately leafy stems 2–4 ft (0.6–1.2 m) tall and a dense cylindrical inflorescence (see <b>illus.</b>). Timothy responds to fertile soils with high yield and nutritive content. Cutting promptly after heading improves the feed quality. Timothy-legume mixtures still predominate in hay and pasture seedings for crop rotations in the northern half of the United States, but orchard grass and bromegrass have increasingly replaced timothy in such mixtures in many areas.
Industry:Science
A plant, <i>Psidium guajava</i>, of tropical America that has long been in cultivation. It is a shrub or low tree which belongs to the myrtle family (Myrtaceae). The fruit (see <b>illus.</b>) is a berry, yellow when ripe, and quite variable in size depending on variety and growing conditions, the average being about 2½ in. (7.2 cm) long. The guava is quite aromatic, sweet, and juicy. It is used mostly for jellies and preserves, but also as a fresh fruit.
Industry:Science
A plant, <i>Ricinus communis</i>, belonging to the spurge family (Euphorbiaceae). Castor varies greatly in height and in color of foliage, stems, and seeds and also in size and oil content of the seeds. The palmately lobed leaves are borne more or less alternately. The main stem is terminated by a raceme (primary). After appearance of the primary raceme, branches on the main stem are each in turn terminated by a raceme. Growth continues sequentially as long as the plant lives, with branches arising from recently terminated branches. Thus a plant can have racemes in all stages of development from mature to prebloom. Mature racemes mostly have 10 to 70 capsules, each capsule containing three seeds. In frost-free areas castor can attain heights of 9 to 11 m (30 to 36 ft). Castor seeds are poisonous and also contain allergens.
Industry:Science
A plant, sometimes called the tree of life, belonging to the genus <i>Thuja</i> of the order Pinales. It is characterized by flattened branchlets with two types of scalelike leaves. At the edges of the branchlets the leaves may be keeled or rounded; on the upper and lower surfaces they are flat, and often have resin glands. The cones, about ½ in. (1.2 cm) long, have the scales attached to a central axis (see <b>illus.</b>).
Industry:Science
A plant's cuticle is the boundary layer between the plant and its environment, and is one of the key innovations that occurred during the evolution of land plants. Over the last 400 million years the plant cuticle has evolved to become a complex and multifunctional interface, consisting mainly of insoluble polymers such as cutin (a polyester matrix) and (in some species) cutan, plus polysaccharides such as cellulose. Waxes are a major component of the cuticle that are either embedded into the cutin matrix (intracuticular waxes) or deposited onto the cuticle surface (epicuticular waxes). The major function of the cuticle is to serve as a highly efficient barrier against uncontrolled water loss and to reduce leaching of organic and inorganic substances from the leaf interior, and waxes are the main determinants of these properties.
Industry:Science
A plasma is matter in an ionized state. The assumption is often made that such matter is necessarily in a fluid state, and this is the case most often observed. However, cold, highly correlated ion plasmas confined in a vacuum by magnetic and electric fields have recently been observed to crystallize into lattice patterns that depend on the sizes and shapes of the plasmas. These studies are relevant to the understanding of dense astrophysical objects, such as neutron stars and white dwarfs, in which plasmas having similar properties are believed to exist.
Industry:Science
A plasma protein produced by the liver that maintains fluid balance in the blood and transports fatty acids in the plasma and interstitial fluid. It is the most abundant protein in human serum, and one of the first discovered and earliest studied proteins. Serum albumin was precipitated from urine in 1500 by Paracelsus, and was crystallized in 1894 by A. Gürber. Probably no other protein has been studied as extensively as serum albumin, and our knowledge of its structure and interactions with its ligands has come from many researchers, using a great variety of experimental approaches. Its ability to bind many different ligands, most of which are hydrophobic anions, and several molecules of the same ligand (fatty acid) is well documented. Fatty acids, bilirubin (an orange-yellow bile pigment formed in the breakdown of red blood cells), and hematin (a blue to blackish-brown compound formed in the decomposition of hemoglobin) represent the endogenous ligands of albumin with highest affinity.
Industry:Science
A plastic card, the size of a credit card, that contains an embedded silicon computer chip. Its primary purpose is the portable storage and retrieval of data used to authorize various types of electronic transactions. Compared to their predecessors, magnetic stripe cards (for example, credit cards), smart cards can store data relating to more than one institution, facilitate more than one type of use, carry substantially larger volumes of data, process transactions at higher rates, and provide logical and physical security to the card's data. Smart cards work by interacting with a card reader—an interface between the smart card and an institution.
Industry:Science
