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DEFINITION: (noun) The quality or condition of being tortuous; twistedness or crookedness. SYNONYMS: crookedness, torsion, contortion. USAGE: The old tree was enormous, and they built a tree house in the tortuosities of its boughs.

Innocent XI was elected to the papacy because of his great saintliness and desire for reform. His election had been opposed by Louis XIV, with whom he had a long, bitter quarrel over Gallicanism, a Roman Catholic tradition of resistance to papal authority. As Pope, he passed strict ordinances against nepotism among the cardinals and lived very parsimoniously, exhorting the cardinals to do the same. Why did Innocent XI have little sympathy for the Catholic King of England, James II?

Joan of Arc was a French military leader and heroine. Inspired and directed by religious visions, she organized the French resistance that forced the English to end their siege of Orléans. The same year, she led an army of 12,000 to Rheims and had the dauphin crowned Charles VII. Captured and sold to the English by the Burgundians, she was later tried for heresy and sorcery and was burned at the stake in Rouen. How old was she when she died?

Punjabi is an Indo-European language spoken in the Punjab regions of Pakistan and India, where there are 80 and 30 million speakers, respectively. Unlike other Indo-European languages, it is tonal, meaning Punjabi words have high or low tones permanently associated with them. Punjabi is the preferred language of the Sikhs, and it is the usual language of Bhangra music, popular in South Asia and abroad. What are the main dialects of Punjabi?

Researchers have pinpointed a naturally occurring virus that kills red fire ants, which arrived in the US in the 1930s and now cause $6 billion in damage annually nationwide by destroying crops, damaging farm and electrical equipment, and hastening soil erosion. The virus caught the attention of US Department of Agriculture researchers in Florida in 2002. The agency is now seeking commercial partners to develop the virus into a pesticide to control the ants, which have no natural predators.