Tunneling, also known as the tunnel effect, is a quantum mechanical phenomenon by which a tiny particle can penetrate a barrier that it could not, by any classical or obvious means, pass. Though seemingly miraculous, the effect does have s...

Along with leptons, quarks are basic building blocks of all matter. According to the standard model of particle physics, fermions (quarks and leptons) are the basic constituents of all matter. In the standard model there are six types of q...

Quartz (SiO2), a common mineral, is the product of the two most prevalent elements in the earth's crust: silicon and oxygen. Quartz can be found as giant crystals or small grains, and is the main component of most types of sand. It ...

France was the United States' first friend. The 1778 Treaty of Alliance between the two nations secured French military support in the American War for Independence. Yet just two decades later, the nations stood at the brink of a fo...

The quaternions are the second "number system" other than the real numbers ever discovered, and the first to be found by a deliberate search. Their immediate predecessor was the field of complex numbers, formed by adjoining an imaginary un...

As one of the founding nations of Canada, Québec felt that they have been mistreated and that the French language has been ignored by the rest of Canada. In 1968 René Lévesque, an ex-journalist, founded the first separatist p...

Like most realms of mass media, the popular music industry has been historically dominated by men. Rap, the urban music style that developed in the late 1970s, has been characterized as particularly male-defined, with lyrics dedicated to b...

Writer and filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's career "was a Hollywood dream story," according to Daniel Fierman in Entertainment Weekly: "a young video clerk from rough-and-tumble beginnings who wrote and directed a stylish, violence-packed fil...

QUESTS. The Ojibwa Indians tell the story of the boy Wunzh and his vision quest. Having reached the appropriate age for the ritual search for totem spirits, Wunzh is left alone in the great forest. After several days of fasting, he retires...

QUETZALCOATL was one of the most powerful and multifaceted gods in Mesoamerican religions. The cult of Quetzalcoatl, the "quetzal-feathered serpent," was prominent in central Mexico from at least the time of Teotihuacá...

QUIETISM. Although some of the important insights of Quietism—a movement distinguished from the generic sense of the word quietistic, which implies withdrawal or passivity with regard to politics or ethics—can be found in med...

Quinine is an alkaloid obtained from the bark of several species of the cinchona tree. Until the development of synthetic drugs, quinine was used as the primary treatment of malaria, a disease that kills over 100 million people a year. The...

The chemical compound quinone, or 1,4-benzoquinone, is a unicyclic, or ring phenolic compound. Quinone is a derivative of benzene, with two hydrogens replaced by two oxygens, each double bonded to a ring carbon (Figure 1). Quinone exists a...

QUIRINUS. The god Quirinus was originally one of the main Roman divinities. The priest responsible for his cult was one of the three major flamines, along with the flamines of Jupiter and Mars, who outranked him in the ordo sacerdotum, the...

In 1958, while television was still in its infancy, Americans were still innocent about the medium's predilection to sacrifice veracity in favor of entertainment. That year, a series of revelations about the fixing of television qui...

Products and quotients are the results obtained by applying the operations of multiplication and division, respectively, to particular mathematical objects. Both will be examined; products first, followed by quotients. Product is defined i...

(2002 est. pop. 62,000). Qurghonteppa is the fourth-largest city in the republic of Tajikistan in Central Asia and the administrative center of Khalton Province. The city is situated in the southwestern part of the country, in the Vakhsh R...

fl. 860-900 Arab translator and scientist who was instrumental in transmitting Greek ideas to the Muslim world, and thus later to the West. As an original thinker, Qusta discussed the uses of tangents and cotangents in trigonometry and wro...

Home Shopping Network (HSN) and Quality, Value, Convenience (QVC) were responsible for a historic change in American consumer habits, and have become as much a feature of television as religious channels. These two cable television channel...