All articles starting with S
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Spitball
The spitball, also known as the spitter, is a baseball pitch doctored with saliva, legal until Major League Baseball banned it before the 1920 season.
Spitbank Fort
Spitbank Fort is a circular 19th-century sea fort in the Solent off Portsmouth, built between 1867 and 1878 and now a scheduled monument and luxury hotel.
Spite and malice
Spite and malice, also called Cat and Mouse and the basis of Skip-Bo, is an American two-player competitive patience card game: players race to shed 20-card pay-off piles onto shared ace-to-queen stacks, with kings wild.
Spite fence
Spite fence: a fence or fence-like structure (including tree rows and hedges) built maliciously to annoy a neighboring owner. Statutory heights vary: 5 feet (Kentucky), 6 feet (Indiana, Massachusetts), 10 feet (California).
Spite house
A spite house is a building constructed or modified to annoy a neighbor or municipality, often blocking light or a view, at cost to its own occupant.
Spithead and Nore mutinies
The Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797 were Royal Navy fleet mutinies off Portsmouth and Sheerness involving about 30,000 sailors; Spithead won a pay raise and pardon, the Nore ended in executions.
Spiticeras
Spiticeras (Uhlig, 1903) is an extinct Tithonian–Berriasian ammonoid genus in family Olcostephanidae, type species Ammonites spitiensis Blanford, known from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, including Neuquén Basin species S. acutum and S. hauthali.
Spitsbergen
Spitsbergen, also called West Spitsbergen before 1969, is the largest island of Norway's Svalbard archipelago at 37,673 km², named by Willem Barentsz in 1596, home to Longyearbyen, and governed under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty.
Spittelau incineration plant
The Spittelau incineration plant (Müllverbrennungsanlage Spittelau) is a Vienna waste-to-energy plant run by Wien Energie, known for its colorful Hundertwasser redesign after a 1987 fire.
Spitting cobra
Spitting cobras, Naja spp. and the rinkhals Hemachatus haemachatus, eject venom at enemies' eyes up to about 2.5 m; spitting evolved three times independently with raised PLA2 venom abundance.
Spitting Image
Spitting Image: British satirical puppet sketch show on ITV 1984–1996, created by Peter Fluck, Roger Law, and Martin Lambie-Nairn; latex caricatures of Thatcher and others, 15 million peak viewers, BritBox revival 2020, cancelled after two series.
Spitting Image (2020 TV series)
Spitting Image (2020) was a BritBox revival of the British satirical puppet show, led by Roger Law with showrunner Jeff Westbrook, two 10-episode series from October 2020 to December 2021, cancelled in 2022.
Spitting Off the Edge of the World
Spitting Off the Edge of the World is a 2022 Yeah Yeah Yeahs song featuring Perfume Genius, the lead single from Cool It Down, their first release in nine years, Grammy-nominated and climate-themed.
Spitting spider
Spitting spiders (Scytodidae, genus Scytodes) are spiders that spit a zig-zag spray of silk, glue, and venom from modified venom glands to immobilize prey at up to 28.8 m/s; Scytodes thoracica is the common cosmopolitan house species.
Spittoon
A spittoon, also called a cuspidor, is a receptacle for catching spit and chewing-tobacco juice, once common in American saloons until anti-tuberculosis campaigns in the late 1800s.
Spitzenkandidat
Spitzenkandidat (German, lead candidate): EU practice since 2014 in which European parties nominate candidates for Commission President, meant to let the winning party's nominee take the post, applied to Juncker in 2014, bypassed in 2019, and followed in von der Leyen's 2024 re-election.
Spitzer
Spitzer is a four-player trick-taking card game of the Schafkopf/Sheepshead family, played almost only in northeast Michigan (Rogers City, Alpena, Posen). Its 14 trumps include the diamond 7, the 'Spitzer', ranked second between the black queens; first to 42 game points wins.
Spitzer Space Telescope
The Spitzer Space Telescope, also called SIRTF, was a NASA infrared observatory launched in 2003 and decommissioned in 2020, best known for revealing seven Earth-size planets around TRAPPIST-1.
Spix's macaw
Spix's macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii, ararinha-azul), a small blue macaw endemic to Brazil's Caatinga, declared Extinct in the Wild in 2019 after the last wild male vanished in 2000; about 360 survive in captivity, with reintroductions since 2022.
Spiza
Spiza (Bonaparte, 1824) is a monotypic cardinalid genus containing only the Dickcissel, Spiza americana, a North American grassland songbird with a namesake song, erratic movements, and winter roosts in Venezuela.
Spizaetus
Spizaetus (Vieillot, 1816) is a genus of four Neotropical forest eagle species, ornatus, tyrannus, melanoleucus, isidori; former Old World hawk-eagles were moved to Nisaetus after molecular phylogenies showed paraphyly.
Spizzichino
Spizzichino, also Tressette in Due or Tressette a Pizzico, is the two-player adaptation of the Italian 40-card trick-taking game Tressette, played in a packet version (a Pizzichino) or a stock version (a Metà Mazzo) with 11 points per deal and buongioco honours declarations.
SPL II: A Time for Consequences (โหดซัดโหด)
SPL II: A Time for Consequences (杀破狼2, Saat po long 2) is a 2015 Hong Kong action thriller by Soi Cheang starring Tony Jaa, Wu Jing, Simon Yam, and Zhang Jin, a name-only sequel to SPL about a Thai prison fronting an organ-trafficking ring.
SPL: Sha Po Lang (杀破狼)
SPL: Sha Po Lang (殺破狼, Kill Zone) is a 2005 Hong Kong action crime film directed by Wilson Yip, starring Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Simon Yam, and Wu Jing; Yen's realistic action direction won a Hong Kong Film Award and spawned two sequels.
Splachnaceae
Splachnaceae, the dung moss family (Splachnum, Tetraplodon, Tayloria), is a moss family of about 73 species, unique among land plants for fly-dispersed sticky spores and growth on dung and carrion.
SPLADE
SPLADE, short for Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model, is a family of neural retrieval models from NAVER Labs Europe that expands and weights bag-of-words representations for search.
Splanchnic arteriovenous fistula
Splanchnic arteriovenous fistula (arterioportal fistula, ICD-11 DB98.73) is an abnormal artery-to-portal-vein connection in the abdominal circulation, usually traumatic or iatrogenic, causing non-cirrhotic portal hypertension and treated mainly by endovascular embolization.
Splash (film)
Splash (1984) is a Ron Howard romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah about a man in love with a mermaid; it was the first Touchstone film, Disney's mature-themes label, released March 9, 1984.
Splash Brothers
Splash Brothers: Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, Golden State Warriors backcourt (2011-2024), four NBA titles, record 678 combined threes in 2015-16; nickname coined via #SplashBrothers tweet in December 2012.
Splash cymbal
Splash cymbal: a small, thin drum-kit effect cymbal, 6 to 12 inches typical, giving fast attack and short decay for quick accents; developed with Gene Krupa and Avedis Zildjian in the 1930s swing era.