Human infants are acutely attuned to the human voice and prefer it above all other sounds. In fact, they prefer the higher pitch ranges characteristic of female voices. They are also attentive to the human face, particularly the eyes, whic...

About 110 distinct Philippine languages are spoken in the Philippines, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of mainland China, by 73 million Filipinos. The Philippine languages belong to the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Aus...

Lanthanum is the third element in Row 6 of the periodic table. It is sometimes classified as a rare earth element, a group of elements that follow it in Row 6 and are also known as the lanthanides. Lanthanum's atomic number is 57, its atom...

Legends state that the origin of Lao folk music comes from nature, such as the wind blowing through bamboo groves and the melodic songs of birds. Lao folk music is based on a tempered heptatonic scale, or a division of the octave into seve...

The Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) has been the sole party governing Laos since 1975. The Laotian prince Souphanuvong (1901–1995) and Kaysone Phomvihan (1920–1992), both influenced by the Indochinese Communist...

(1767–1829), Lao monarch. Chao Anou, or Anuvong, was the last ruler of the Lao kingdom of Viang Chan (present-day Vientiane, capital of Lao People's Democratic Republic) and a significant patron of Lao Buddhism. Born in Viang...

Lao Tzu (6th century BC) is believed to have been a Chinese philosopher and the reputed author of the "Tao te ching," the principal text of Taoist thought. He is considered the father of Chinese Taoism. Lao Tzu purportedly was an older con...

fl. c. 1395 Italian lawyer and ancestor of physician and merchant Philip Mazzei (1730-1816). Lapo served as attorney for Santa Maria Nuova, a hospital in Florence established by the father of Beatrice Portinari, the heroine of Dante'...

LARES. The ancient Roman name for the deified souls of the dead was lases (Inscriptiones Latinae liberae rei publicae 4), a term for which the only possible comparison is Lasa, the Etruscan name for a nymph. An old theory according to whic...

Many questions about computers are answered with numbers that have the prefixes "kilo," "mega," "giga," and even "tera" in their name. An understanding of these prefixes, and the mass...

No player has left a mark on 1980s professional basketball comparable to that of Larry Bird (born 1956), the renowned forward for the Boston Celtics. Bird took the NBA by storm as a rookie in 1979 and dominated the league almost without a ...

One of the late twentieth century's foremost television talk show hosts, Larry King's distinctive style, at once relaxed and commanding, and his focus on issues of topical interest, elevated the talk show genre to something o...

Although Larry McMurtry has moved beyond the status of a minor regional writer, he is still closely identified with Texas. His first six novels and a collection of essays (In a Narrow Grave, 1968) reflect life in his native state, and he h...

Lars V. Ahlfors was a mathematician whose major area of research was complex analysis. In 1936, he was one of the first to receive a Fields Medal. Often considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal is given every four yea...

LAESTADIUS, LARS LEVI (1800–1861), Sami minister, writer, ecologist, mythologist, and ethnographer who became the founder of Laestadian Lutheran revivalist movement. Laestadius was born January 10, 1800, in the Swedish Lappland vill...

Swedish neurochemist who was the first to show that certain small peptides, produced naturally in the body, act on the brain's opiate receptors in a manner similar to that of other opiates. This discovery helped elucidate the pharma...

Laryngitis (pronounced lar-uhn-JIE-tiss) is an inflammation of the larynx, resulting in hoarseness of the voice. The larynx is the upper portion of the trachea (pronounced TRAY-keeuh), or windpipe. When a person breathes in, air passes i...

The larynx is an organ in the neck associated with swallowing and sound (voice) production. The larynx is located at the point where incoming air (inspirational air) is directed to the trachea leading to the lungs, and where incoming food ...

On September 12, 1940, four boys formed a small expedition team to explore a shaft they found while hiking through the sloping woods above Lascaux manor. Armed with shovels and picks, they expanded the restricted opening enough to enable ...

The word "laser" is an acronym for "light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation." The laser is a unique device that produces a very pure color of light that is concentrated into a pencil-thin bea...

One of the most popular "dog stars" of midcentury America, Lassie, an intelligent, brave collie, demonstrated loyalty, compassion, and love toward humans and fellow animals in films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1943 to 1951, ...

The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo Born on the Greek isle of Zante in 1778, Niccol Pamela S. Loy...

Over the course of the Civil War, from 2.1 to over 2.4 million men served in the United States Armed Forces. In addition, from 850,000 to over 1,000,000 men served for some period of time in the Confederate Army and Navy. Significantly, of...

(b. 1929), Indian singer. Lata Mangeshkar's mellifluous voice has enthralled millions of people for the last five decades. Born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, Lata showed her talent early, acting and singing in scores of Hindi mo...

Originally published in 1970, Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth offered readers a guide to finding the future in the text of the Bible. With 15 million copies in print, this bestseller obviously struck a nerve in the modern ...