One of the two types of lymphocytes (the others being T cells). All lymphocytes begin their development in the bone marrow. B cells are involved in so-called humoral immunity; on encountering a foreign substance (antigen), the B lymphocyte...

Pa Chin (Ba Jin) was the pen name of the Chinese author Li Fei-kan (born 1904). An idealist of humanitarian passion and revolutionary fervor, he was one of China's most prolific and beloved novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. Born into a lar...

(1850–1888), Japanese statesman and political thinker. Baba Tatsui was born in Tosa Province (now Kochi Prefecture) in the area of Kaneko Bridge, Nakanoshima Town, near Kochi Castle. He initially studied at Fukuzawa Yukichi's...

Perhaps the best known elephant in the world, Babar was born in France in 1931. He was first seen in a children's book titled Histoire de Babar, written and illustrated by painter and first-time author Jean de Brunhoff. It told the ...

The late 1800s and early 1900s saw many advances in the dairying industry. One such development was the butterfat test invented by American Stephen M. Babcock (1843-1931) in 1890 and marketed in 1891. Before Babcock invented the test, dair...

Called "the athlete phenomenon of our time, man or woman," Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias (1913-1956) participated in almost every sport. She excelled as an Olympic athlete and as a golfer. Mildred Didrikson, known throughout her life a...

Babar the Conqueror (1483-1530) was a descendant of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, who founded the Mughal (Mogul) dynasty of India and, although a devout Muslim, bequeathed a legacy of toleration for non-Muslims that characterized the Empire ...

Bottles to feed infants have been in use for many centuries. The first consisted of urns with two openings: one for pouring the liquid into the bottle and the other to be put in the baby's mouth. Predictably, the baby bottle has changed ma...

Baby Face Nelson (Lester J. Gillis) December 6, 1908 November 27, 1934 AKA: Alex Gillis, Lester Giles, Big George, Jimmie Mobster, Robber, and Murderer At a time when many outlaws were romanticized by the American public, Baby Face Nelson w...

Ann Moore,the mother of three grown children, is the force behind the Snugli , a cloth baby-carrier she devised after returning to the United States following a Peace Corps stint in Togo. After her first child was born in the early sixties...

BACHOFEN, J. J. (1815–1887) was a Swiss scholar of mythology and Roman law and history. Through his most famous books, Gräbersymbolik (1859) and Mutterrecht (Mother right, 1861), Bachofen had a great influence on twentieth-ce...

The Back Room by Carmen Martín Gaite Carmen Martín Gaite was born in Salamanca, Spain, on December 8, 1925, “right in the middle of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship” (Martín Gaite, p. 129). As she des...

At the end of the Cold War (1946–1991) counterterrorist efforts had little impact on American society because they were confined to clandestine operations, criminal prosecution, and an occasional military strike against suspected te...

Backtracking refers to a scheme for solving a problem by solving a series of constituent sub-problems. Each of the sub-problems has a number of possible solutions, and a solution chosen affects the possible solutions of the remaining sub-p...

Bacon's Rebellion can be attributed to a myriad of causes and occurrences, all of which led to discontentment in the people of Virginia. Among the factors that caused dissatisfaction were high taxes, low tobacco prices, splitting the colony...

Group of microscopic, single-celled organisms that inhabit virtually all environments, including soil, water, organic matter, and the bodies of multicellular animals. Bacteria are distinguished in part by their morphological and genetic fe...

Conjugation is one of several mechanisms that bacteria use to transfer DNA, and hence new genetic information, between two cells. The other primary mechanisms are transformation, in which free DNA is transported across the cell membrane, a...

The growth and division of bacteria is the basis of the increase of bacterial colonies in the laboratory, such as colony formation on agar in a liquid growth medium, in natural settings, and in infections. A population of bacteria in a liq...

Bacteriocidal is a term that refers to the treatment of a bacterium such that the organism is killed. Bacteriostatic refers to a treatment that restricts the ability of the bacterium to grow. A bacteriocidal treatment is always lethal and ...

Ancient country, Central Asia. It was situated between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya in parts of modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Its capital was the city of Bactra. From the 6th century &BC; it was controlled by the Acha...

Language, as a fundamental form of human expression, is a central element in every religious tradition and can be examined from a variety of perspectives. This article will not be concerned with the theological issue of how to assess the t...

A fictional children's baseball team, the Bad News Bears, was the focus of three films and a CBS Television series between 1976 and 1979. The first of these films, The Bad News Bears (Paramount, 1976), struck an unexpected chord in both c...

Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld, opens with the description of a peaceful and beautiful town named Badenheim being visited by some average Jewish guests. The visitors think they are going to Badenheim to relax and to have some fun like t...

Round, with a hole in the middle, the bagel is made with high gluten flour and is boiled before it is baked creating a crispy outer crust and a chewy inside. Brought to the United States by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe during the ...

An air pollution control device normally using a collection of long, cylindrical, fabric filters to remove particulate matter from an exhaust air stream. The filter arrangement is normally designed to overcome problems of cleaning and hand...