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404,596 | The Jovians (a non-playable race) were also descended from colonists. Unlike the other races of "Eve Online", they maintained a relatively high-functioning technological society after the collapse of the EVE wormhole and did not need to spend millennia recapitulating ancient societal developments as the others did, and while the other four major races were still grounded, Jovian history saw two major periods of spacefaring imperialism. They expanded outward and eventually turned to genetic engineering in order to mold themselves into a species more suited for deep-space life and long-range interstellar exploration. Genetic experimentation and manipulation were not without their drawbacks, however: by the time period in which players enter the "Eve Online" universe, millennia of human genetic manipulation have rendered the Jovians barely recognizable as human; more critically, the Jovian manipulation of their genome has resulted in the eventually fatal "Jovian Disease," an inherited psychological disorder which, despite the best efforts of the Jovians to reverse it, has affected every individual of the Jovian race and thus crippled their civilization. Having experienced a catastrophic population decline (the Jovian societal structure is believed to be barely maintained by their immensely-advanced technological systems), the Jovians have effectively retreated to inhabit a region of space inaccessible to outsiders. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=403307 | 404,396 |
1,305,583 | In August 1961, at the International Congress of Biochemistry in Moscow, Nirenberg presented a paper to a small group of scientists, reporting the decoding of the first codon of the genetic code. Matthew Meselson, who was in the audience, spontaneously hugged Nirenberg at the end of the talk and then told Francis Crick about Nirenberg's result. Crick invited Nirenberg to repeat his performance the next day in a talk to a much larger audience. Speaking before the assembled congress of more than a thousand people, Nirenberg electrified the scientific community. He quickly received great scientific attention for these experiments. Within a few years, his research team had performed similar experiments and found that three-base repeats of adenosine (AAA) produced the amino acid lysine, and cytosine repeats (CCC) produced proline. The next breakthrough came when Philip Leder, a postdoctoral researcher in Nirenberg's lab, developed a method for determining the genetic code on pieces of tRNA (see "Nirenberg and Leder experiment"). This greatly sped up the assignment of three-base codons to amino acids so that 50 codons were identified in this way. Khorana's experiments confirmed these results and completed the genetic code translation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=762368 | 1,304,867 |
1,263,693 | Their American allies in the Vietnam War lent on the Australians heavily to choose the Lockheed F-104G Starfighter making the choice of the French aircraft highly unexpected, especially since the French government was opposed to the war. Mirages entered service in the RAAF in 1965 and were used in a front-line role by seven RAAF units. The first 50 were built under the classification of Mirage IIIO(F) to serve in the interceptor role. The rest were designated IIIO(A) and equipped to serve in the ground attack role. The main additions of this modification were a coat of camouflage paint and the installation of the Cyrano IIB Doppler radar and altimeters. When the last 6 were ordered in 1971 the Australian Government asked for two seated versions for training purposes built between 1973 and 1974. The specification was enabled by the removal of the Cyrano radar to make room for a second cockpit behind the original and the transfer of the avionics system to the nose. This purchase cost A$11 million and allowed the final decommission of the old Sabre trainers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63754631 | 1,263,005 |
2,153,453 | Boykin grew up with her mother, who worked at Phoenix Suns basketball games to pay Boykin's way through college. She studied biology at Occidental College, where she worked on the chaparral shrub "Arctostaphylos parryana". She moved to San Francisco State University for her Master's studies, working with Bob Patterson on a phylogenetic analysis of "Arctostaphylos." She earned her PhD in 2003 at the University of New Mexico, where she worked in the Los Alamos National Laboratory theoretical biology research group. Here she learned how to use a supercomputer, analysing sequence data of influenza and hepatitis C in an effort to provide information for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccines. Boykin moved to the United States Department of Agriculture in Florida, where she began to investigate whiteflies. At the time, Europe limited the importation of flowers from Florida because of concerns about whiteflies. After completing her postdoctoral research, Boykin taught science at Jensen Beach High School. In 2009 Boykin moved to Lincoln University, where she worked in the Bio-Protection Research Centre. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61288020 | 2,152,222 |
99,882 | In 2017, the FIA began negotiations with existing constructors and potential new manufacturers over the next generation of engines with a projected introduction date of but delayed to due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial proposal was designed to simplify engine designs, cut costs, promote new entries and address criticisms directed at the 2014 generation of engines. It called for the 1.6 L V6 configuration to be retained, but abandoned the complex Motor Generator Unit–Heat () system. The Motor Generator Unit–Kinetic () would be more powerful, with a greater emphasis on driver deployment and a more flexible introduction to allow for tactical use. The proposal also called for the introduction of standardised components and design parameters to make components produced by all manufacturers compatible with one another in a system dubbed "plug in and play". A further proposal to allow four-wheel drive cars was also made, with the front axle driven by an unit—as opposed to the traditional driveshaft—that functioned independently of the providing power to the rear axle, mirroring the system developed by Porsche for the 919 Hybrid race car. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11034903 | 99,837 |
1,705,668 | The common midwife toad is found in a number of countries in north west Europe. It is common throughout France and is also found in southern Belgium and the Netherlands, Luxembourg, western Germany and northern and western Switzerland. There are some disconnected outlying populations in Portugal and northern Spain. In the Pyrenees it is found at altitudes of up to . It is usually found not far from water but sometimes wanders away, often living in sunny locations. These include hilly areas, cultivated land, quarries, rocky slopes, gravel pits, woods, parks and gardens. It is active at dusk and through the night, spending the day hidden in undergrowth, in crevices or under logs or stones in a place where it can keep damp. It can dig a burrow with its fore limbs in which to lie and spends the winter hibernating on land. Research has demonstrated that four of the introduced populations in Bedfordshire, England have the same origin, through sequencing of 16S and COI gene sequences. However, due to limitations in the reference database, the researchers can't be sure of the exact location of origin. Researchers have noted a number of limb deformities in the introduced populations found throughout the United Kingdom, which are likely linked to small founder population sizes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12371603 | 1,704,710 |
400,736 | On 31 August 1939 "Belfast" was transferred to the 18th Cruiser Squadron. Based at Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands, 18th Cruiser Squadron was part of the British effort to impose a naval blockade on Germany. Germany invaded Poland the following day, and Britain and France declared war on 3 September. At 11:40 that morning, "Belfast" received the message ‘Commence hostilities at once against Germany’. On 8 September "Belfast" put to sea from Scapa Flow with the battlecruisers , , her sister ship "Edinburgh" and four destroyers, on a patrol intended to intercept German ships returning from Norway. In particular, they were to search for the Norddeutscher Lloyd liner . No enemy vessels were found. On 25 September, "Belfast" took part in a fleet operation to recover the submarine , during which the ship was attacked by German aircraft, but suffered no damage. On 1 October 1939 "Belfast" left Scapa Flow for a patrol in the North Sea. On 5 October "Belfast" intercepted and boarded a neutral Norwegian factory ship that was sailing in company with six whaling ships. On 8 October the ship sighted the Swedish merchant ship "C. P. Lilljevach" but, in poor weather, did not intercept or board her. The following day she boarded "Tai Yin", a Norwegian ship. "Tai Yin" had been listed by the Admiralty as suspicious, so a prize crew from "Belfast" sailed her to Kirkwall for investigation. On 9 October "Belfast" intercepted a German liner, the 13,615-ton "Cap Norte", north-west of the Faroe Islands. Disguised as a neutral Swedish vessel, SS "Ancona", "Cap Norte" was attempting to return to Germany from Brazil; her passengers included German reservists. Under the Admiralty's prize rules, "Belfast"s crew later received prize money. On 12 October "Belfast" boarded the Swedish ship "Uddeholm", which was also sailed to Kirkwall by a prize crew. Returning to harbour, on the night of 13–14 October, "Belfast" was among the few ships anchored in Scapa Flow, following intelligence reports of an expected air raid. That night, the battleship was torpedoed by German submarine , which had infiltrated the anchorage. On the morning following the sinking, "Belfast" left for Loch Ewe. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=209815 | 400,537 |
179,016 | The first radiological imaging of the ureters first occurred via X-rays, although this was made more difficult by the thick abdomen, which the low power of the original X-rays was not able to penetrate enough to produce clear images. More useful images were able to be produced when Edwin Hurry Fenwick in 1908 pioneered the use of tubes covered in material visible to X-rays inserted into the ureters, and in the early 20th century when contrasts were injected externally into the urinary tract (retrograde pyelograms). Unfortunately, much of the earlier retrograde pyelograms were complicated by significant damage to the kidneys as a result of contrast based on silver or sodium iodide. Hryntshalk in 1929 pioneered the development of the intravenous urogram, in which contrast is injected into a vein and highlights the kidney and, when excreted, the urinary tract. Things improved with the development by Moses Swick and Leopold Lichtwitz in the late 1920s of relatively nontoxic contrast media, with controversy surrounding publication as to who was the primary discoverer. Side-effects associated with imaging improved even more when Tosten Almen published a ground-breaking thesis in 1969 based on the less toxic low-osmolar contrast media, developed based on swimming experiences in lakes with different salinity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=188325 | 178,923 |
1,665,533 | Arterial spin labeling utilizes the water molecules circulating with the brain, and using a radiofrequency pulse, tracks the blood water as it circulates throughout the brain. After a period of time in microseconds (enough to allow the blood to circulate through the brain), a 'label' image is captured. A 'control' image is also acquired before the labeling of the blood water. A subtraction technique gives a measurement of perfusion. In order to increase SNR, collections of control and label images can be averaged. There are also other specifications in the MRI that can increase SNR, like the amount of head coils of the MRI, or a stronger field strength (3 T is standard, but 1.5 T is satisfactory). In order to properly scale the perfusion values into cerebral blood flow units (CBF, ml/100g/1 min), a separate proton density map with the same parameters (but longer TR to fully relax the blood spins) is recommended to be acquired as well. Alternatively, the average control image can be used to generate CBF, which is the case for Phillips pCASL readouts. Usually background suppression is also applied to increase the SNR. Due to the different variations of each implementations, it is recommended that a large multi-scanner study should design a protocol minimizing the variety of readout methods used by each scanner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58296164 | 1,664,596 |
833,566 | Leo Szilard and Thomas A. Chalmers reported that neutrons generated by gamma rays acting on beryllium were captured by iodine, a reaction that Fermi had also noted. When Meitner repeated their experiment, she found that neutrons from the gamma-beryllium sources were captured by heavy elements like iodine, silver and gold, but not by lighter ones like sodium, aluminium and silicon. She concluded that slow neutrons were more likely to be captured than fast ones, a finding she reported to "Naturwissenschaften" in October 1934. Everyone had been thinking that energetic neutrons were required, as was the case with alpha particles and protons, but that was required to overcome the Coulomb barrier; the neutrally charged neutrons were more likely to be captured by the nucleus if they spent more time in its vicinity. A few days later, Fermi considered a curiosity that his group had noted: uranium seemed to react differently in different parts of the laboratory; neutron irradiation conducted on a wooden table induced more radioactivity than on a marble table in the same room. Fermi thought about this and tried placing a piece of paraffin wax between the neutron source and the uranium. This resulted in a dramatic increase in activity. He reasoned that the neutrons had been slowed by collisions with hydrogen atoms in the paraffin and wood. The departure of D'Agostino meant that the Rome group no longer had a chemist, and the subsequent loss of Rasetti and Segrè reduced the group to just Fermi and Amaldi, who abandoned the research into transmutation to concentrate on exploring the physics of slow neutrons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64011351 | 833,117 |
746,544 | The secondary armament consisted of sixteen guns in eight twin mounts, weighing 81 tons each. They were grouped at the four corners of the citadel, with a twin mount on the main deck and another superimposed above it nearer amidships. This disposition gave better arcs of fire, freedom from blast, more separation of the magazines and a better arrangement of the ammunition supply. The cupolas for these mounts revolved on either the upper or superstructure deck; between deck mountings travelled on roller paths on the armoured deck. This permitted a flat-trajectory or high-angle fire. Loading was semi-automatic, normal rate of fire was ten to twelve rounds per minute. The maximum range of the Mk I guns was at a 45-degree elevation, the anti-aircraft ceiling was . The guns could be elevated to 70 degrees and depressed to 5 degrees. However, the guns could only practically fire seven to eight rounds per minute, due to the heavy weight of the shell and the fact that the 5.25-inch round was semi-fixed, requiring the crew to separately load the cartridge and shell into the breech. "King George V" introduced the High Angle Control System Mark IVGB anti-aircraft fire control system to the Royal Navy, which, along with the Mk IV Pom-Pom Director, pioneered the use of the Gyro Rate Unit. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=485616 | 746,149 |
94,942 | It is deployed aboard aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, Maritime Sealift Command ships, and fast combat support ships. Its missions include vertical replenishment, medical evacuation, combat search and rescue, anti-surface warfare, maritime interdiction, close air support, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and special warfare support. The MH-60S is to deploy with the AQS-20A Mine Detection System and an Airborne Laser Mine Detection System (ALMDS) for identifying submerged objects in coastal waters. It is the first US Navy helicopter to field a glass cockpit, relaying flight information via four digital monitors. The primary means of defense has been with door-mounted machine guns such as the M60D, M240D, or GAU-17/A. A "batwing" Armed Helo Kit based on the Army's UH-60L was developed to accommodate Hellfire missiles, Hydra 70 2.75 inch rockets, or larger guns. The MH-60S can be equipped with a nose-mounted forward looking infrared (FLIR) turret to be used in conjunction with Hellfire missiles; it also carries the ALQ-144 Infrared Jammer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=202031 | 94,901 |
1,826,776 | From 1979 the Laboratory was encouraged to develop external software sales and entered into licensing agreements for this purpose, most notably with Synercom and ISSCO Corporation (sold to Computer Associates in 1987) for Odyssey. However, the licensing agreements had weak to non-existent technology exploitation and non-compete clauses, so potential purchasers were frustrated in attempting to license from a competitor often preferentially positioning its proprietary software. Potential purchasers often redeveloped Odyssey functions rather than wait for licenses. Meanwhile, having carved out the potential commercial interests, from 1981 the Harvard Graduate School of Design sought less commercial work and an increased focus on research, though with reduced budgets. "But the timing of this burgeoning commercialism of the Lab's activities collided with the moment in history when Harvard's President Derek Bok set out to clarify the blurred lines between academic research and development on the one hand, and more clearly defined commercial activities on the other." Financial strain and the lack of commercial inspiration for projects led to the dispersal of many team members from 1981. Despite some further research during the late 1980s, the Laboratory closed in 1991. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47557282 | 1,825,737 |
1,106,098 | The purpose of this small 2017 study was to test the anabolic theory and the effect of consuming the same amount of protein before and after resistance training on muscle strength, hypertrophy, and body composition changes. There were 21 subjects of the study involved in the study. All were men that participated in resistance training with more than one year of experience. These subjects were all recruited from a university setting and were all given an equal dose of protein consumed immediately either before working out or post-training. All participants were natural athletes, meaning they had no history of anabolic steroid usage. The subjects of the study were all paired based on their strength in the squat and bench press exercises. The pairs were then put into two different control groups. One group consumed 25 grams of protein and 1 gram of carbohydrates before the workout and the other control group was given the same amount of protein and carbohydrates post-workout. The study consisted of a full-body routine that ran on three-week sessions on nonconsecutive days for ten weeks. The results of this study showed that the protein consumption before the workout and after the workout had shown similar effects on all the subjects studied. This scientific evidence shows that the anabolic window, which is quite narrow, is false and although it does increase MPB after training, the effects are very short. This supporting evidence also points to the fact that the interval for the anabolic window may be as big as several hours or maybe even more depending on the timing of protein intake before the workout. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20023618 | 1,105,535 |
1,217,989 | Like his predecessor, Shah Tahmasp, at the beginning of his reign (1524–1555) stayed rather inactive in architectural matters, contenting himself with restorations and embellishments, always along the lines of the dynasties which preceded him. In particular, the great mosques of Kerman, Shiraz and Isfahan, and the sanctuaries of Mashhad and Ardabil benefited from his attention. In the latter place, one can cite the funeral tower of Shah Ismail, possibly ordered by this one, but which was undoubtedly created during the first years of the reign of Shah Tahmasp, even though no date is mentioned. It is situated right next to the funeral tower of the founder of the dynasty and, because of this proximity, has a restrained diameter. It looks therefore a little diminished by its neighbouring monument. Tall in measurement, it contains three small superposed cupolas, and flaunts a ceramic decor divided into numerous registers to avoid monotony. The yellow colour of the decorative ceramic is, however, a totally new element. Also at Ardabil is attributed to Shah Tahmasp the Jannat Sara, an octagonal building with accessories and gardens much degraded in the 18th century (and greatly restored). Situated at the north-east of the tomb, it dates, according to Morton, to the years 1536–1540. Its main use is still debated, because it's mentioned as a mosque in European sources, but not in Persian ones, which raises certain questions. Was it planned to place here the tomb of Shah Tahmasp, actually interred at Mashhad? From this place come the famous carpets of Ardabil (see below). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9485636 | 1,217,335 |
399,945 | A number of theorists have explored the meaning and implications of prosthetic extension of the body. Elizabeth Grosz writes, "Creatures use tools, ornaments, and appliances to augment their bodily capacities. Are their bodies lacking something, which they need to replace with artificial or substitute organs?...Or conversely, should prostheses be understood, in terms of aesthetic reorganization and proliferation, as the consequence of an inventiveness that functions beyond and perhaps in defiance of pragmatic need?" Elaine Scarry argues that every artifact recreates and extends the body. Chairs supplement the skeleton, tools append the hands, clothing augments the skin. In Scarry's thinking, "furniture and houses are neither more nor less interior to the human body than the food it absorbs, nor are they fundamentally different from such sophisticated prosthetics as artificial lungs, eyes and kidneys. The consumption of manufactured things turns the body inside out, opening it up "to" and "as" the culture of objects." Mark Wigley, a professor of architecture, continues this line of thinking about how architecture supplements our natural capabilities, and argues that "a blurring of identity is produced by all prostheses." Some of this work relies on Freud's earlier characterization of man's relation to objects as one of extension. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=72750 | 399,746 |
1,121,705 | But the attitude of the academical medicine of the day is doubtless indicated in Martin Lister's use of the term sectaries for Sydenham and his admirers, at a time (1694) when the leader had been dead five years. If there were any suspicion that the opposition to him was quite other than political, it would be set at rest by the testimony of Dr Andrew Brown, who went from Scotland to inquire into Sydenham's practice and has incidentally revealed what was commonly thought of it at the time, in his Vindicatory Schedule concerning the "New Cure of Fevers". In the series of Harveian Orations at the College of Physicians, Sydenham is first mentioned in the oration of Dr John Arbuthnot (1727), who styles him "aemulus Hippocratis" ("rival of Hippocrates"). Herman Boerhaave, the Leyden professor, was wont to speak of him in his class (which had always some pupils from England and Scotland) as "Angliae lumen, artis Phoebum, veram Hippocratici viri speciem" ("The light of England, the skill of Apollo, the true face of Hippocrates"). Albrecht von Haller also marked one of the epochs in his scheme of medical progress with the name of Sydenham. He is indeed famous because he inaugurated a new method and a better ethics of practice, the worth and diffusive influence of which did not become obvious (except to those who were on the same line with himself, such as Morton) until a good many years afterwards. It remains to consider briefly what his innovations were. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=564669 | 1,121,131 |
347,819 | During the first years of the 19th century, lithography had only a limited effect on printmaking, mainly because technical difficulties remained to be overcome. Germany was the main center of production in this period. Godefroy Engelmann, who moved his press from Mulhouse to Paris in 1816, largely succeeded in resolving the technical problems, and during the 1820s lithography was adopted by artists such as Delacroix and Géricault. After early experiments such as "Specimens of Polyautography" (1803), which had experimental works by a number of British artists including Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, James Barry, Thomas Barker of Bath, Thomas Stothard, Henry Richard Greville, Richard Cooper, Henry Singleton, and William Henry Pyne, London also became a center, and some of Géricault's prints were in fact produced there. Goya in Bordeaux produced his last series of prints by lithography—"The Bulls of Bordeaux" of 1828. By the mid-century the initial enthusiasm had somewhat diminished in both countries, although the use of lithography was increasingly favored for commercial applications, which included the prints of Daumier, published in newspapers. Rodolphe Bresdin and Jean-François Millet also continued to practice the medium in France, and Adolph Menzel in Germany. In 1862 the publisher Cadart tried to initiate a portfolio of lithographs by various artists, which was not successful but included several prints by Manet. The revival began during the 1870s, especially in France with artists such as Odilon Redon, Henri Fantin-Latour and Degas producing much of their work in this manner. The need for strictly limited editions to maintain the price had now been realized, and the medium became more accepted. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18426 | 347,638 |
404,812 | In 1884, Paul Vieille invented a smokeless powder called Poudre B (short for "poudre blanche", white powder, as distinguished from black powder) made from 68.2% insoluble nitrocellulose, 29.8% soluble nitrocellulose gelatinized with ether and 2% paraffin. This was adopted for the Lebel rifle chambered in 8×50mmR Lebel. It was passed through rollers to form paper thin sheets, which were cut into flakes of the desired size. The resulting propellant, today known as "pyrocellulose", contains somewhat less nitrogen than guncotton and is less volatile. A particularly good feature of the propellant is that it will not detonate unless it is compressed, making it very safe to handle under normal conditions. Vieille's powder revolutionized the effectiveness of small guns because it gave off almost no smoke and was three times more powerful than black powder. Higher muzzle velocity meant a flatter trajectory and less wind drift and bullet drop, making shots practicable. Since less powder was needed to propel a bullet, the cartridge could be made smaller and lighter. This allowed troops to carry more ammunition for the same weight. Also, it would burn even when wet. Black powder ammunition had to be kept dry and was almost always stored and transported in watertight cartridges. Other European countries swiftly followed and started using their own versions of Poudre B, the first being Germany and Austria, which introduced new weapons in 1888. Subsequently, Poudre B was modified several times with various compounds being added and removed. Krupp began adding diphenylamine as a stabilizer in 1888. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=860000 | 404,612 |
1,878,369 | Keutel syndrome is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by a novel loss-of-function mutation in the matrix Gla protein gene (MGP). MGP protein resides in the extracellular matrix and is implicated in inhibiting calcification though the repression of bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2). Mutations resulting in loss of consensus donor splice site at exon 2-intron 2 junctions result in significant diffuse calcification of soft tissue cartilage. Extensive diffuse cartilaginous calcification is present in MGP-knockout mice, manifesting in vascular media replacement with a cartilaginous, chondrocyte-like matrix, and ultimately premature death. Conversely, over expression of extracellular MGP effectively abolishes calcification in chondrocytes, suggesting that MGP may function in inhibiting passive calcification in soft tissues. Recent evidence suggests MGP is a vitamin K dependent protein synthesized by chondrocytes and vascular smooth muscle cells, where it potentiates the inhibition of cartilaginous and arterial calcification. Thus, potential vitamin K deficiency, via nutritional deficiency or coumarin-derivative use, would render MGP uncarboxylated and inactive, thus diminishing biological function. Arterial calcification resulting from MGP inactivation results in inimical prognosis, commonly seen in patients with diabetes, atherosclerosis, and renal dysfunction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15912221 | 1,877,289 |
1,082,416 | Constructing his designs proved far more difficult than Evans initially envisaged—with just six working steam engines in the United States at this time, and a handful of workshops with any experience making them, it took Evans much of his savings and two years to yield a working example to display to the public in 1803. This first engine was powered by a double-acting cylinder six inches in diameter and with a piston stroke length of eighteen inches. Many components, such as the flywheel and crosshead, were made of wood in order to simplify construction. The boiler, the engineering of which was critical to the safe operation of the engine, consisted of a large copper shell encased in wood and cast iron rings in order to contain the pressure. The output of the machine was approximately five horsepower. This work output was modest by contemporary standards—the low-pressure engine of the nearby waterworks produced about twelve horsepower. But his steam engine was just a fraction of the size of pre-existing machines—the waterworks machine was over twenty-five times larger in volume. Evans unveiled his engine at his store and put it to work crushing plaster of Paris and, more sensationally, sawing slabs of marble. The showmanship paid off, and thousands came to see the machine in operation, while the Philadelphia newspaper "Aurora" declared "a new era in the history of the steam engine." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=389929 | 1,081,859 |
1,630,599 | The lexical decision task is an implicit memory task in which participants are given a stimulus (a string of letters), and asked to decide whether this string is a word or a nonword. Nonwords are made by replacing at least one letter in a word with another letter (ex. mark becomes marb). Vowels are used to replace vowels and consonants are used to replace consonants. Response times are the main measure in these tasks and they are measured as a function of the string's meaning, familiarity, and the frequency of the word. Response times are also measured to see if they reflect what has occurred previously - like if the participant has been recently exposed to these words or if they relate to ideas that the participant has been recently thinking about. It has been found that people respond faster to words they have recently been exposed to as well as to words that relate to ideas that the person has recently been thinking about. The original task consisted of a stimulus that involved either a pair of words, a word and a nonword, or a pair of nonwords. The participants are asked to respond "yes" if both strings are words, and "no" in the other two conditions (if there is a word and a nonword, or if there are two nonwords). Another variation of this answering scheme is for participants to respond "same" if the strings are either both words or both nonwords, and "different" if one of the strings is a word and the other is a nonword. "The stimuli were generated on a Stromberg Carlson SC4060 graphics system, photographed on 16-mm movie film and presented on a rear-projection screen by a Perceptual Development Laboratories' Mark III Perceptoscope." The participants were told to look at a fixation box which appeared on the screen for 1 second and after this the stimulus was displayed. The participants used a panel with finger keys for their right and left hands to respond. The right index finger pressed the "yes" (or "same") button and the left index finger pressed the "no" (or "different") button. By counting the cycles of a 1000 Hz oscillator, the participants' reaction times were measured to the nearest millisecond; the response times were measured from the time the stimulus was presented until the response was made by the participant. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21312287 | 1,629,678 |
1,660,705 | In 1979 the Aviation Systems Command issued a Full Scale Engineering Development Request for Proposal for a systems which would meet the Artillery's Required Operational Capability. Lockheed Missile and Space Division won the contract in late 1979. The contract provided for the delivery off 22 air vehicles, 4 Ground Control Stations, 3 Launch Systems, 3 Recovery Systems and support hardware. This target acquisition, designation and aerial reconnaissance (TADAR) program effort produced a stealthy tailless aircraft driven by a Herbrandson piston engine with a pusher propeller. The Westinghouse payload was a television imager/laser designator in a turret in the belly. The laser designator was intended for use with the M712 Copperhead artillery ammunition and the AGM-114 Hellfire missile. Development of a Ford Aerospace FLIR/laser designator payload began in 1984. Secure communications with the air vehicle was provided by a joint Army/Air Force program called Modular Integrated Communications/Navigational System (MICNS). On the nose of the air vehicle was a Near IR source which interacted with the Recovery System to automatically recover the aircraft after the flight. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17844797 | 1,659,771 |
181,575 | On Earth, all known living things have a carbon-based structure and system. Scientists have speculated about the pros and cons of using atoms other than carbon to form the molecular structures necessary for life, but no one has proposed a theory employing such atoms to form all the necessary structures. However, as Carl Sagan argued, it is very difficult to be certain whether a statement that applies to all life on Earth will turn out to apply to all life throughout the universe. Sagan used the term "carbon chauvinism" for such an assumption. He regarded silicon and germanium as conceivable alternatives to carbon (other plausible elements include but are not limited to palladium and titanium); but, on the other hand, he noted that carbon does seem more chemically versatile and is more abundant in the cosmos). Norman Horowitz devised the experiments to determine whether life might exist on Mars that were carried out by the Viking Lander of 1976, the first U.S. mission to successfully land an unmanned probe on the surface of Mars. Horowitz argued that the great versatility of the carbon atom makes it the element most likely to provide solutions, even exotic solutions, to the problems of survival on other planets. He considered that there was only a remote possibility that non-carbon life forms could exist with genetic information systems capable of self-replication and the ability to evolve and adapt. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7316 | 181,480 |
919,771 | Roland was designed to a joint French and German requirement for a low-level mobile missile system to protect mobile field formations and fixed, high-value targets such as airfields. Development began in 1963 as a study by Nord Aviation of France and Bölkow of Germany with the system then called SABA in France and P-250 in Germany. The two companies formed a joint development project in 1964 and later (as Aérospatiale of France and MBB of Germany) founded the Euromissile company for this and other missile programs. Aerospatiale took primary responsibility for the Roland 1 day/clear-weather system while MBB took primary responsibility for the Roland 2 all-weather system. Aerospatiale was also responsible for the rear and propulsion system of the missile while MBB developed the front end of the missile with warhead and guidance systems. The first guided launch of a Roland prototype took place in June 1968, destroying a Nord Aviation CT20 target drone and fielding of production systems was expected from January 1970. The test and evaluation phase took much longer than originally anticipated with the clear-weather Roland I finally entering operational service with the French Army in April 1977, while the all-weather Roland II was first fielded by the German Army in 1978 followed by the French Army in 1981. The long delays and ever-increasing costs combined with inflation meant Roland was never procured in the numbers originally anticipated. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2278911 | 919,285 |
59,050 | The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object classification and detection, with millions of images and hundreds of object classes. In the ILSVRC 2014, a large-scale visual recognition challenge, almost every highly ranked team used CNN as their basic framework. The winner GoogLeNet (the foundation of DeepDream) increased the mean average precision of object detection to 0.439329, and reduced classification error to 0.06656, the best result to date. Its network applied more than 30 layers. That performance of convolutional neural networks on the ImageNet tests was close to that of humans. The best algorithms still struggle with objects that are small or thin, such as a small ant on a stem of a flower or a person holding a quill in their hand. They also have trouble with images that have been distorted with filters, an increasingly common phenomenon with modern digital cameras. By contrast, those kinds of images rarely trouble humans. Humans, however, tend to have trouble with other issues. For example, they are not good at classifying objects into fine-grained categories such as the particular breed of dog or species of bird, whereas convolutional neural networks handle this. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40409788 | 59,025 |
1,047,496 | In 2006, Mount Merapi had not been active for more than four years, but on May 11 a pyroclastic flow triggered the evacuation of more than 20,000 people from the northern sector of Yogyakarta. While authorities expected a larger eruption to follow, the earthquake occurred instead. The volcano's previous eruptions deposited loosely bound sedimentary material in the valley during lahar flows and this material was found to have played a significant role in the effects of the shock. For example, German and Indonesian scientists set up instruments at several locations situated on different soil types to measure aftershocks. Of nine events that were analyzed, it was found that the station at Imogiri (a heavily affected village that was built on of sediment) showed signs of local amplification when compared to a location that was built on bedrock, and that the deposits amplified the impact of the shallow crustal rupture. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5309730 | 1,046,951 |
1,392,862 | Spenta Wadia has made significant contributions to high energy physics and quantum gravity, that include i) the observation that global gauges like the Coulomb gauge cannot be fixed in a non-abelian gauge theory; ii) the discovery of the large N, 3rd order phase transition in soluble models of low dim lattice gauge theory (called the Gross-Witten-Wadia transition); iii) for the exact closed equations for Wilson loops in a lattice gauge theory; iv) for the first proposal of a Nambu-Jona-Lasinio type phenomenological non-linear fermion model for QCD that describes all low energy properties of low-lying mesons, including their anomalous interactions; v) for the discovery of the black hole solution of 2-dim string theory; vi) for the exact bosonization of non-relativistic fermions using the co-adjoint orbits of the W(infinity) algebra; vii) for extending the D-brane model of Strominger and Vafa to near extremal black holes that emit Hawking radiation and demonstrating the rate calculated in this model matched Hawking’s calculation in gravity; vii) for dualities involving the partition function and S-matrix of fermions and bosons coupled to 2+1 dim Chern-Simons theories; viii) for the first detailed study of black hole formation and evaporation within the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model that is a holographic description of black holes in 2-dim gravity, that effectively describes 4-dim near extremal black holes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22665200 | 1,392,091 |
1,820,468 | On 29 October 1950 the party of five met up at Jogbani, the railhead on the India–Nepal border. With six Sherpas from Darjeeling they went by road to Dharan where they took on eighteen local porters for the trek via Dhankuta to the Arun River, which they crossed in a dugout canoe, and then trekked beside the Dudh Kosi river to Namche Bazaar. They found the village had prospered because it had been a trading point with Tibet, over the Nangpa La pass. Also Sherpas based in Darjeeling who were recruited for mountaineering expeditions would remit home some of their earnings. From Namche Bazaar, Charlie Houston and Tilman went ahead with four porters and arrived at Tengboche Monastery on the Imja Khola where they were the first Western visitors. Tilman found the monastery "incomparably more beautiful and less austere" than Rongbuk Monastery in Tibet, familiar from earlier Everest expeditions. They then went further up the valley to just below the snout of the Khumbu Glacier. Cowles wrote of Tengboche "Our days at the lamassery were a delight, the beauty of the scene around us and the warm happy spirit of the place itself combining to make our stay there something never to be forgotten. ... The head lama, a young man of about sixteen, received us and we sipped Tibetan tea together in a ceremony in which chanting featured and a strange sort of rhythmic music from horns, cymbals, bells and drums. ... Each evening was especially memorable for, after the sun had set, the great rock face would go on blazing away long after the rest of the mountain world was in darkness around us." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48827836 | 1,819,431 |
934,593 | Since ethnomusicology evolved from comparative musicology, some ethnomusicologists' research features analytical comparison. The problems arising from using these comparisons stem from the fact that there are different kinds of comparative studies with a varying degree of understanding between them. Beginning in the late 60s, ethnomusicologists who desired to draw comparisons between various musics and cultures have used Alan Lomax's idea of cantometrics. Some cantometric measurements in ethnomusicology studies have been shown be relatively reliable, such as the wordiness parameter, while other methods are not as reliable, such as precision of enunciation. Another approach, introduced by Steven Feld, is for ethnomusicologists interested in creating ethnographically detailed analysis of people's lives; this comparative study deals with making pairwise comparisons about competence, form, performance, environment, theory, and value/equality. Bruno Nettl has noted as recently as 2003 that comparative study seems to have fallen in and out of style, noting that although it can supply conclusions about the organization of musicological data, reflections on history or the nature of music as a cultural artifact, or understanding some universal truth about humanity and its relationship to sound, it also generates a great deal of criticism regarding ethnocentrism and its place in the field. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=80077 | 934,100 |
1,251,603 | The YC-14 Prototype was a prototype plane that was being designed by Boeing specifically for the US Air Force. There were a lot of different designs that were considered and different technologies that were used specifically for carrying tanks and paratroopers. There was a computer that was installed and a very powerful vertical wing that could keep the plane flying at a set altitude, so they could drop whatever they needed to in the battlefield without any complications. This allowed for precise troop placement which could be the difference between victory and defeat in a battle. It also talks about different cheaper materials for the prototype which were heavier and used a honeycomb pattern. The cheaper materials were too heavy, and the Air Force was not happy that Boeing did not meet the Air Force's expectations on the prototype even though the Air Force was aware that they would be using different materials in the production of the actual aircraft.The Apache helicopter that Boeing makes is designed so the front of the helicopter is very narrow. Not only does it create less drag, but it is a smaller target for infantry units to hit the helicopter. They have also designed the F-15 fighter jet, which has two engines instead of one for maximum speed. This particular aircraft can reach speeds of Mach 2.5. It also happens to be the 8th fastest aircraft ever built. The Boeing C-17 Globemaster 3 uses size and a very large design to carry cargo. It has 4 powerful engines and a special T-tail designed by Boeing for precise control of the unusually large aircraft. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8203113 | 1,250,925 |
1,306,663 | After Desert Storm, the army struggled with military operations other than war, such as peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations. The school and its graduates examined the situations in Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. Graduates also participated in Defense Support of Civil authorities missions. The course continued to change in the 1990s. Under Colonel Gregory Fontenot, the school moved from Fort Leavenworth's Flint Hall to Eisenhower Hall in October 1994. In later years, the school's leadership expanded the number of seminars and the civilian faculty. The military continues to draw heavily on SAMS in the twenty-first century. SAMS planners have played a significant role in the Global War on Terror. Beginning in 2002, the United States Central Command requested planners from SAMS and its sister schools, the United States Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS), which was designed to be similar to SAMS, and the United States Marine Corps's School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW). SAMS students from the 2002 and 2003 classes participated as planners in the preparations for the invasion of Iraq and the plan for the post-combat occupation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47720 | 1,305,947 |
2,055,677 | Maantay and Maroko believe that GIS can have an important role in these "risk-framed" understandings. As New York is a "hyper-heterogeneous urban area", traditional administrative population data is insufficient for flood zone/population risk research. A more fine-tuned analysis is possible if tax-level datasets (based on smaller, residential units) are used instead. Maantay and Maroko use Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) floodplain and tax-level datasets to determine the potential number of people at risk. A CEDS approach significantly increases the number of affected people within New York City. In using a different GIS method, Maantay and Maroko are able to better represent the impact of such flood events on minority populations. As such, their research supports all of Schlosberg's notions of distributional, recognitional and participatory justice. As noted by themselves; "the disadvantages suffered by racial and ethnic minority communities during and after disasters are due primarily to their low economic status and lack of political power". Their research broadly supports the aims of the EJ movement. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31783151 | 2,054,494 |
957,752 | BAC had inherited the aerospace activities of several companies via its formation, and research into various space-related ventures continued at the new entity. One of BAC's research teams, headed by engineer Tom Smith, Chief of the Aerospace Department at BAC, that was initially investigating supersonic and hypersonic flight problems, became interested in the application of such a vehicle for space-related activities, leading to the BAC Mustard, a reusable launch system that comprised several near-identical winged vehicles. In the most detailed design, Mustard was to have weighed roughly 420 tonnes prior to launch, and been capable of delivering a three tonne payload to a geostationary earth orbit (GEO). According to author Nigel Henbest, Britain was likely unable to pursue Mustard's development alone, but suggested organising a multinational European venture, similar to the conventional Europa and Ariane launchers. The knowledge and expertise developed on this project was subsequently harnessed on later efforts, most prominently the re-usable HOTOL spaceplane project of the 1980s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=81087 | 957,246 |
2,191,221 | Finally, along with Lawrie in 2009, Doom (0.65, 0.49 and 0.56 WHIP in 1982 and 1984–85), Susan LeFebvre (0.58 in 1986), Shawn Andaya (0.62 in 1987), Lisa Longaker (0.64, 0.58 and 0.56 in 1988-90), Tiffany Boyd (0.57 in 1989), Debby Day (0.64 in 1991), Susie Parra (0.71, 0.68 and 0.99 in 1991, 1993–94), Scott (0.83 in 1998), Freed (0.88 in 1999), Jennie Finch (0.71 in 2001), Jocelyn Forest (0.77 in 2002), Keira Goerl (0.74 and 0.81 in 2003–04), Jennie Ritter (0.62 in 2005) and Alicia Hollowell (0.68 in 2006), Katie Burkhart (0.61 in 2008), Keilani Ricketts (0.78 in 2013), Kylee Hanson (0.76 in 2018), Megan Faraimo (0.84 in 2019) and Rachel Garcia (0.79 in 2019) all won NCAA National Championships those years. For their careers, Osterman (Big 12), Lisa Ishikawa (Big 10), Sarah Pauly (Big South), Abbott (SEC), Jamie Southern (WAC), Angela Tincher (ACC), Terri Whitmarsh (MVC), Sarah Dawson (Southland), Johnston (MAC), Galati (CAA), Danielle Henderson (A-10), Lindsay Chouinard (Summit), Courtney Blades (USA in two seasons with a 0.71 WHIP), Nicole Myers (A-Sun), Brooke Mitchell (Sun Belt) and Bonnie Bynum (OVC) all hold their conference crowns for walks plus hits per innings pitched. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67373176 | 2,189,972 |
2,035,199 | In this same period, she had entered a relationship with Walter Rosenthal. Rosenthal was Jewish, and Jews were increasingly persecuted in Germany in the 1930s under the National Socialist (Nazi) regime that took power in 1933. Walter Rosenthal emigrated to Brazil in 1936. Hildegard joined him in São Paulo in 1937. That same year she began working as a laboratory supervisor at the Kosmos photographic materials and services company. A few months later, the agency Press Information hired her as a photojournalist and she did news reports for national and international newspapers. During this period, she took photographs of the city of São Paulo and the state countryside of Rio de Janeiro and other cities in southern Brazil, as well as portraying several personalities from the São Paulo cultural scene, such as the painter Lasar Segall, the writers Guilherme de Almeida and Jorge Amado, the humorist Aparicio Torelly (Barão de Itararé) and the cartoonist Belmonte. Her images sought to capture the artist at his moment of creation, in obvious connection with his spirit of reporter. She interrupted her professional activity in 1948, after the birth of her first daughter. And in 1959, after her husband died, she took over the management of her family's company. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59373759 | 2,034,026 |
1,073,867 | Additional examples of non-mitotic proliferation, and important insights into underlying mechanisms, have resulted from extensive work with polyploid cells. Such cells, long acknowledged to exist, were once believed simply to be anomalous. Accumulating research, including in the liver now suggests that cells containing multiple copies of the genome are importantly involved in a cell's ability to adapt to its environment. A couple of decades of research has shown that polyploid cells are frequently "reduced" to diploid cells by amitosis (Zybina et al.). For instance, naturally occurring polyploid placental cells have been shown capable of producing nuclei with diploid or near-diploid complements of DNA. Furthermore, Zybina and her colleagues have demonstrated that such nuclei, derived from polyploid placental cells, receive one or more copies of a microscopically identifiable region of the chromatin, demonstrating that even without the reassuring iconography of identical chromosomes being distributed into "identical" daughter cells, this particular amitotic process results in representative transmission of chromatin. Studying rat polyploid trophoblasts, this research group has shown that the nuclear envelope of the giant nucleus is involved in this subdivision of a highly polyploid nucleus into low-ploidy nuclei. Polyploid cells are also at the heart of experiments to determine how some cells may survive chemotherapy. Erenpreisa and colleagues have shown that following treatment of cultured cells with mitosis-inhibiting chemicals (similar to what is used in some chemotherapy), a small population of induced polyploid cells survives. Eventually this population can give rise to "normal" diploid cells by formation of polyploid chromatin bouquets that return to an interphase state, and separate into several secondary nuclei. Intriguing phenomena including controlled autophagic degradation of some DNA as well as production of nuclear envelope-limited sheets accompanies the process. Since neither of these depolyploidizations involves mitotic chromosomes, they conform to the broad definition of amitosis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33039059 | 1,073,313 |
931,708 | Thrun developed a number of autonomous robotic systems that earned him international recognition. In 1994, he started the University of Bonn's Rhino project together with his doctoral thesis advisor Armin B. Cremers. In 1997 Thrun and his colleagues Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox developed the world's first robotic tour guide in the Deutsches Museum Bonn (1997). In 1998, the follow-up robot "Minerva" was installed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, where it guided tens of thousands of visitors during a two-week deployment period. Thrun went on to found the CMU/Pitt Nursebot project, which fielded an interactive humanoid robot in a nursing home near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2002, Thrun helped develop mine mapping robots in a project with his colleagues William L. Whittaker and Scott Thayer, research professors at Carnegie Mellon University. After his move to Stanford University in 2003, he engaged in the development of the robot Stanley, which in 2005 won the DARPA Grand Challenge. His former graduate student Michael Montemerlo, who was co-advised by William L. Whittaker, led the software development for this robot. In 2007, Thrun's robot "Junior" won second place in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Thrun joined Google as part of a sabbatical, together with several Stanford students. At Google, he co-developed Google Street View. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3538953 | 931,216 |
1,558,939 | The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the federal agency responsible for funding health research, recommended in 2010 against funding a pan-Canadian trial of liberation therapy because there was a lack of evidence on the safety or efficacy of the procedure. It suggested a scientific expert working group made up of the principal investigators for the seven MS Society-sponsored studies. The health minister accepted the CIHR recommendation and said that Canada was not going to fund clinical trials. The expert panel was created by the end of 2010 together between the CIHR and the MS Society of Canada. It has been proposed that the creation of this expert panel was partly directed to cope with the high levels of social pressure the CCSVI theory had raised and at the same time try to maintain a scientific perspective in the funding and investigation of CCSVI. The main task of the panel was to monitor the results of the ongoing studies in the relationship between CCSVI and MS and recommend the funding of a clinical trial in case that there was evidence of a true relationship between the two. In 2011, the Canadian federal government announced that they would fund clinical trials of the procedure to widen the veins since CIHR considered that evidence of venous abnormalities in MS was enough for small treatment trials. It has been proposed that the recommendation to fund phase I and II trials instead of a big study was a compromise between the high levels of social and political pressure and the low level of evidence on the theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24133117 | 1,558,054 |
1,408,168 | Reflowing as a rework technique, similar to the manufacturing process of reflow soldering, involves dismantling the equipment to remove the faulty circuit board, pre-heating the whole board in an oven, heating the non-functioning component further to melt the solder, then cooling, following a carefully determined thermal profile, and reassembling, a process which is hoped will repair the bad connection without the need to remove and replace the component. This may or not resolve the problem; and there is a chance that the reflowed board will fail again after some time. For typical devices (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) one repair company estimates that the process, if there are no unexpected problems, takes about 80 minutes. On a forum where professional repair people discuss reflowing of laptop computer graphics chips, different contributors cite success rates (no failure within 6 months) of between 60 and 90% for reflowing with professional equipment and techniques, in equipment whose value does not justify complete reballing. Reflowing can be done non-professionally in a domestic oven or with a heat gun. While such methods can cure some problems, the outcome is likely to be less successful than is possible with accurate thermal profiling achieved by an experienced technician using professional equipment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1663983 | 1,407,378 |
1,658,221 | Even then scepticism still persisted. Considering the degree of variations between Taiwan strain and typical "T. saginata", Taiwanese parasitologists such as P.C. Fan, C.Y Lin, C.C. Chen and W.C Chung from National Yang-Ming University designated it to a subspecies, and named it "T. saginata asiatica". Based on critical assessment on the field reports, experimental infections, morphological and immunological studies available since 1981, they advocated this position. Independent research in Australia also supported the subspecies concept regardless of the genetic variations. But subsequent analyses including epidemiological studies, and phylogenetic analysis using random amplified polymorphic DNA imposed its validity as a distinct species. In 2005 the first complete sequence of its mitochondrial genome was published, and genetic comparison ("Cox1"gene) with those of "Taenia solium" and "T. saginata" provided further support to its taxonomic status. The complete sequence of mitochondrial genome of "T. saginata" in 2007, and the development of high-resolution multiplex PCR assay in 2009 finally established beyond doubt that it is indeed a new species. The two species separated . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26890853 | 1,657,288 |
148,036 | XPS is widely used to generate an empirical formula because it readily yields excellent quantitative accuracy from homogeneous solid-state materials. Absolute quantification requires the use of certified (or independently verified) standard samples, and is generally more challenging, and less common. Relative quantification involves comparisons between several samples in a set for which one or more analytes are varied while all other components (the sample matrix) are held constant. Quantitative accuracy depends on several parameters such as: signal-to-noise ratio, peak intensity, accuracy of relative sensitivity factors, correction for electron transmission function, surface volume homogeneity, correction for energy dependence of electron mean free path, and degree of sample degradation due to analysis. Under optimal conditions, the quantitative accuracy of the atomic percent (at%) values calculated from the major XPS peaks is 90-95% for each peak. The quantitative accuracy for the weaker XPS signals, that have peak intensities 10-20% of the strongest signal, are 60-80% of the true value, and depend upon the amount of effort used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (for example by signal averaging). Quantitative precision (the ability to repeat a measurement and obtain the same result) is an essential consideration for proper reporting of quantitative results. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70847 | 147,977 |
1,791,162 | After a year of training following his selection by NASA in January 1990, Jones became an astronaut in July 1991. In 1994 he flew as a mission specialist on successive flights of . First, in April 1994, he ran science operations on the "night shift" during STS-59, the first flight of the Space Radar Laboratory (SRL-1). Then, in October 1994, he was the payload commander on the SRL-2 mission, STS-68. Jones next flew in late 1996 on . STS-80 successfully deployed and retrieved 2 science satellites, ORFEUS/SPAS and the Wake Shield Facility. While helping set a Shuttle endurance record of nearly 18 days in orbit, Jones used "Columbia"s robot arm to release the Wake Shield satellite and later grapple it from orbit. His latest space flight was aboard on STS-98, in February 2001. Jones and his crew delivered the "Destiny" module to the International Space Station, (ISS) and he helped install the Lab in a series of three spacewalks lasting over 19 hours. The successful addition of "Destiny" gave the first Expedition Crew the largest space outpost in history and marked the start of onboard scientific research at the ISS. A veteran of four space flights, Jones has logged over 52 days (1,272 hours) in space. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=606010 | 1,790,155 |
1,568,954 | NCRP Report No. 153 notes that: “Denisova et al. exposed rats to 1.5 Gy of 1 GeV/u56Feions and tested their spatial memory in an eight-arm radial maze. Radiation exposure impaired the rats’ cognitive behavior, since they committed more errors than control rats in the radial maze and were unable to adopt a spatial strategy to solve the maze. To determine whether these findings related to brain-region specific alterations in sensitivity to oxidative stress, inflammation or neuronal plasticity, three regions of the brain, the striatum, hippocampus and frontal cortex that are linked to behavior, were isolated and compared to controls. Those that were irradiated were adversely affected as reflected through the levels of dichlorofluorescein, heat shock, and synaptic proteins (for example, synaptobrevin and synaptophysin). Changes in these factors consequently altered cellular signaling (for example, calciumdependent protein kinase C and protein kinase A). These changes in brain responses significantly correlated with working memory errors in the radial maze. The results show differential brain-region-specific sensitivity induced by 56Fe irradiation ([figure 6-6]). These findings are similar to those seen in aged rats, suggesting that increased oxidative stress and inflammation may be responsible for the induction of both radiation and age-related cognitive deficits.” | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39761773 | 1,568,067 |
1,995,299 | Except the conventional semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs), which use III–V semiconductor multiple quantum wells grown on distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs), many researchers have turned their attention onto other materials as saturable absorbers. Especially because there are a number of drawbacks associated with SESAMs. For example, SESAMs require complex and costly clean-room-based fabrication systems such as Metal-Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) or Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE), and an additional substrate removal process is needed in some cases; high-energy heavy-ion implantation is required to introduce defect sites in order to reduce the device recovery time (typically a few nanoseconds) to the picosecond regime required for short-pulse laser mode-locking applications; since the SESAM is a reflective device, its use is restricted to only certain types of linear cavity topologies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21474889 | 1,994,156 |
1,400,051 | The Center has a regional facility for Genetic Fingerprinting, which provides DNA analysis services for forensic & criminal investigations, paternity disputes, identification of wildlife remains, authentication of plants and seeds besides a battery of molecular diagnostics for genetic and infectious diseases. RGCB is also a major provider of laboratory and infrastructure services to other academic and research institutions. RGCB has a strength of 25 scientists, 120 Ph.D. students and around 100 research project staff. The centre has good infrastructural facilities for carrying out research in the field of Biotechnology. Financial support of Rs. 100 crores sanctioned by the Govt. of India in 2008, for a period of 3 years, apart from the yearly allocation of Rs. 25 crores, aims at making RGCB a world class research centre in the near future. RGCB is set to expand further into a second campus at Aakkulum shortly. It would focus on R & D and also provide a unique"TEST & PROVE " facility to encourage biotechnology. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8819388 | 1,399,264 |
131,619 | The effects of toxicity on health have been examined using questionnaires and in-person interviews in an effort to understand the relationship between and asthma. The influence of indoor air pollutants on health is important because the majority of people in the world spend more than 80% of their time indoors. The amount of time spent indoors depends upon on several factors including geographical region, job activities, and gender among other variables. Additionally, because home insulation is improving, this can result in greater retention of indoor air pollutants, such as . With respect to geographic region, the prevalence of asthma has ranged from 2 to 20% with no clear indication as to what's driving the difference. This may be a result of the "hygiene hypothesis" or "western lifestyle" that captures the notions of homes that are well insulated and with fewer inhabitants. Another study examined the relationship between nitrogen exposure in the home and respiratory symptoms and found a statistically significant odds ratio of 2.23 (95% CI: 1.06, 4.72) among those with a medical diagnosis of asthma and gas stove exposure. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=238528 | 131,567 |
982,365 | While there is no single medical, physical, or genetic test for ADHD, an evaluation can be provided by a qualified mental health care professional or physician who gathers information from multiple sources. These can include ADHD symptom checklists, standardized behavior rating scales, a detailed history of past and current functions including the person's history of childhood behavior and school experiences, and information obtained from family members, friends, or significant others. The evaluations also seek to rule out other conditions or differential diagnoses such as depression, anxiety, or substance use disorders. Other diseases such as hyperthyroidism may exhibit symptoms similar to those of ADHD, and it is imperative to rule these out as well. Autism is sometimes mistaken for ADHD, due to impairments in executive functioning found in some people with autism. However, autism also typically involves difficulties in social interaction, restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests, and problems with sensory processing, including hypersensitivity. Along with this, the quality of diagnosing an adult with ADHD can often be skewed being that the majority of adults with ADHD also have other complications, ranging from anxiety and depression to substance abuse. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1673370 | 981,853 |
1,601,361 | Wet nanotechnology is an anticipated new sub-discipline of nanotech that is going to mostly be dominated by the different forms of wet engineering. The processes that will be used are going to take place in aqueous solutions and are very close to that of biotechnology manufacturing / bio-molecular manufacturing which is largely concerned with the production of biomolecules like proteins and DNA/RNA. There is some overlap of Biotechnology and Wet nanotechnology because living things are inherently bottom-up engineered and any exploitation of this by biotechnologists means they dabble in bottom-up engineering (though mostly at the level of producing macromolecules like proteins and nucleic acids from there monomer units. Wet nanotech, however, seeks to analyse living things and their components as engineering systems and aims to understand them completely to have complete control of the behavior of the system and to derive principles and methods that can be applied more broadly to bottom up manufacturing, to manipulate matter on the atomic and molecular scales and to creating machines or devices at the nanometer and microscopic scales. Biotech is mostly about exploiting living systems in any way possible. Molecular Biology and related disciplines compare the mechanism of function of proteins in particular - and nucleic acids to a lesser extent - as like "molecular machines". In order for engineers to mimic these nanoscale machines in a way that they could be produced with some efficiency, they must look into bottom-up manufacturing. Bottom-up manufacturing deals with manipulating individual atoms during the manufacturing process, so that there is absolute control of their placement and interactions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30380229 | 1,600,460 |
417,334 | A cooperative approach to reintroduction by ecologists and biologists could improve research techniques. For both preparation and monitoring of reintroductions, increasing contacts between academic population biologists and wildlife managers is encouraged within the Survival Species Commission and the IUCN. The IUCN states that a re-introduction requires a multidisciplinary approach involving a team of persons drawn from a variety of backgrounds. A survey by Wolf et al. in 1998 indicated that 64% of reintroduction projects have used subjective opinion to assess habitat quality. This means that most reintroduction evaluation has been based on human anecdotal evidence and not enough has been based on statistical findings. Seddon et al. (2007) suggest that researchers contemplating future reintroductions should specify goals, overall ecological purpose, and inherent technical and biological limitations of a given reintroduction, and planning and evaluation processes should incorporate both experimental and modeling approaches. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=477117 | 417,131 |
260,330 | Despite Castronovo's statements, Karl Sperling, Heidemarie Neitzel and Hagen Scherb reported that the prevalence of Down syndrome (trisomy 21) in West Berlin, Germany, peaked 9 months following the main fallout.[ 11, 12] From 1980 to 1986 the birth prevalence of Down syndrome was quite stable (i.e., 1.35–1.59 per 1,000 live births [27–31 cases]). In 1987, 46 cases were diagnosed (prevalence = 2.11 per 1,000 live births) and most of the increase resulted from a cluster of 12 children born in January 1987. The prevalence of Down Syndrome in 1988 was 1.77, and in 1989, it reached pre-Chernobyl values. The authors noted that the cluster of children would have been conceived when radioactive clouds containing radionucleotides with short half-lives, like iodine, would have been covering the region and also that the isolated geographical position of West Berlin prior to reunification, the free genetic counseling, and complete coverage of the population through one central cytogenetic laboratory supported completeness of case ascertainment; in addition, constant culture preparation and analysis protocols ensure a high quality of data. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4155456 | 260,196 |
975,533 | The university began moving in 1968 to a new site on Stag Hill in Guildford, adjacent to Guildford Cathedral. Students continued to alternate between the original Battersea campus and the new Guildford campus until 1970. A further allocated to the university remained undeveloped until 2005. The BBC's local radio station for Surrey and North-East Hampshire, BBC Surrey, has its studios on the campus. In addition the university has a student-run medium wave radio station, "Stag Radio". In September 2009, the Guildford School of Acting moved into a new purpose-built facility on the main Stag Hill campus as part of a strategic merger between the two organisations. The old Sports Centre was converted into the Ivy Arts Centre, a performing arts facility housing a 200-seat theatre and studio and workshop space. In October 2015, the £45m School of Veterinary Medicine was opened by the Queen accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh. The new Manor Park campus, designed as a car-free village, is from the Stag Hill campus and on the other side of the A3 trunk road. It combines residences for students and staff, buildings for research and teaching, and sporting facilities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=167774 | 975,022 |
5,014 | In terms of the game's combat system, Plessas said that unlike previous games, which often relied on the player to use many combos in a sequential fashion, this game is "more about individual moves strung together in response to the assortment of enemies being fought." Although that difference may be small, he said that the independent attacks of the axe "feature benefits and drawbacks players will need to understand and master to be as effective as possible." Furthermore, although the axe is "conceptually simple", it is "mechanically fascinating". It "succeeds as both a versatile means of dismembering foes and as a key element in puzzle solving." He felt the axe and all of its features was "distinctly rewarding to use" and that it had more versatility than all of the weapons in many other games. Juba said the Leviathan Axe is "a well-balanced and entertaining tool of destruction." He liked how it "emphasizes a more calculated style of combat; instead of zoomed-out, combo-driven encounters, Leviathan makes you a tactician." He also enjoyed how the combat system gradually unfolded through the course of the game; although seemingly restrictive at first, he noted players will be rapidly alternating between weapons and skills. While some reviewers greatly enjoyed the ability to call the Leviathan Axe back to Kratos's hand, Chris Carter of "Destructoid" felt it got old after a while. Atreus' implementation was praised. Plessas said Atreus is "surprisingly useful" and that he "lands in the perfect spot on the spectrum between independence and reliance." Faulkner noted that, "The interplay between Kratos ax, fists, and shield, and Atreus' bow makes for an impressive fighting system." Despite its different approach to combat, compared to the previous games, "GamesRadar+"s Leon Hurley felt the game was "every bit as brutally unflinching as previous games." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50810460 | 5,011 |
1,478,948 | "Cementitious" syntactic foams have also been investigated as a potential lightweight structural composite material. These materials include glass microspheres dispersed in a "cement" paste matrix to achieve a closed cell foam structure, instead of a metallic or a polymeric matrix. The resulting composites are reported to achieve compressive strength values larger than 30 MPa while maintaining densities lower than 1.2 g/cm. Though the cementitious syntactic foams demonstrate superior specific strength values in comparison to most conventional cementitious materials, it is challenging to manufacture them. Generally, the hollow inclusions tend to buoy and segregate in the low shear strength and high-density fresh cement paste. Therefore, maintaining a uniform microstructure across the material must be achieved through a strict control of the composite rheology. In addition, certain glass types of microspheres may lead to an alkali silica reaction. Therefore, the adverse effects of this reaction must be considered and addressed to ensure the long-term durability of these composites. Cementitious syntactic foams have also been tested for their mechanical performance under high strain rate loading conditions to evaluate their energy dissipation capacity in crash cushions, blast walls, etc. Under these loading conditions, the glass microspheres of the cementitious syntactic foams did not show progressive crushing. Ultimately, unlike the polymeric and metallic syntactic foams, they did not emerge as suitable materials for energy dissipation applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1539042 | 1,478,115 |
1,869,554 | The main objectives of SAMPEX experiments was to obtained data for several continuous years on the anomalous components of cosmic rays, on solar energetic particles emissions from the Sun, and on the precipitating magnetospheric relativistic electrons. The orbit of SAMPEX has an altitude of and an 81.70° inclination. The spacecraft uses an on-board 3-axis stabilized solar pointed/momentum bias system with the pitch axis pointed to towards the Sun. Solar panels provide power for operations, including 16.7 watts for science instruments. An on-board Data processing unit (DPU) preprocesses the science and other data and stores them in a Recorder/Processor/Packetizer (RPP) unit of about 65 Mb, before transmitting in the S-band at a rate of 1.5 Mbit/s over Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) (or a back-up) station. The command memory can store at least a thousand commands. The science instruments generally point toward local zenith, especially over the terrestrial poles, for optimal sampling of galactic and solar cosmic ray flux. Energetic magnetospheric particle precipitation is monitored at lower geomagnetic latitudes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10669005 | 1,868,478 |
1,642,157 | Thymus tissue is compartmentalized into cortex and medulla and each of these two compartments comprises its specific thymic epithelial cell subset. cTECs reside in the outer part- cortex, which mostly serves as a developmental site for T cells. Precursors of T cells originate in the bone marrow from which they migrate via bloodstream into thymic cortex, where they encounter stromal cells including cTECs, which form the microenvironment crucial for proliferation and development of T cells by expression of DLL4 (delta-like notch ligand 4), cytokines IL-7, TGFβ or stem cell factor and chemokines CCL25, CXCL12 or CCRL1 etc. Essential part of T cell development forms process called VDJ recombination, mediated by RAG recombinases, that stochastically changes DNA sequences of T cell receptors (TCR) and endows them with diverse recognition specificity. Thanks to this process, T cells can recognize vast repertoire of pathogens, but also self-peptides or even their TCRs don't respond to any surrounding signals. Major role of thymic epithelial cells is to test, whether TCRs are "functional" and on the other hand "harmless" to our body. While cTECs control the functionality of TCRs during the process called positive selection, Medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs) that home in the inner part of the thymus- medulla, present on their MHC molecules self-peptides, generated mostly by protein Autoimmune regulator, to eliminate T cells with self-reactive TCRs via processes of central tolerance e.g. negative selection and protect the body against development of autoimmunity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58068464 | 1,641,230 |
559,733 | Building on the body of work forwarded by Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, 18th-century astronomers refined telescopes, produced star catalogues, and worked towards explaining the motions of heavenly bodies and the consequences of universal gravitation. Among the prominent astronomers of the age was Edmund Halley. In 1705, Halley correctly linked historical descriptions of particularly bright comets to the reappearance of just one, which would later be named Halley’s Comet, based on his computation of the orbits of comets. Halley also changed the theory of the Newtonian universe, which described the fixed stars. When he compared the ancient positions of stars to their contemporary positions, he found that they had shifted. James Bradley, while attempting to document stellar parallax, realized that the unexplained motion of stars he had early observed with Samuel Molyneux was caused by the aberration of light. The discovery was proof of a heliocentric model of the universe, since it is the revolution of the earth around the sun that causes an apparent motion in the observed position of a star. The discovery also led Bradley to a fairly close estimate to the speed of light. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17912788 | 559,444 |
1,402,253 | Jerome Clarke Hunsaker (August 26, 1886 – September 10, 1984) was an American naval officer and aeronautical engineer, born in Creston, Iowa, and educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work with Gustav Eiffel outside Paris led to the first wind tunnel in the US at MIT. He was instrumental in developing a weather reporting and airway navigation. Hunsaker was also pivotal in establishing the theoretical and scientific study of aerodynamics in the United States. And he was primarily responsible for the design and construction of the Navy-Curtiss airplane (NC-4) that accomplished the first transatlantic flight (May 1919), and the first successful shipboard fighter. Later he championed lighter-than-air flight but the loss of the Navy airship he designed, the USS Akron, led to the withdrawal of federal support. His WW2 chairmanship of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was notable for favouring the development of existing aircraft designs rather than experimenting with turbojets or missile technology. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3956769 | 1,401,466 |
530,323 | The stage of fruit set follows flowering almost immediately, when the fertilized flower begins to develop a seed and grape berry to protect the seed. In the Northern Hemisphere, this normally takes place in May and in the Southern Hemisphere in November. This stage is very critical for wine production since it determines the potential crop yield. Not every flower on the vine gets fertilized, with the unfertilized flowers eventually falling off the vine. The percentage of fertilized flowers averages around 30 but can get as high as 60 or be much lower. Climate and the health of the vine play an important role with low humidity, high temperatures and water stress having the potential of severely reducing the amount flowers that get fertilized. Coulure occurs when there is an imbalance of carbohydrate levels in the vine tissues and some berries fail to set or simply fall off the bunch. Varieties like Grenache and Malbec are prone to this abnormal fruit set. Millerandage occurs when some fertilized flowers do not form seeds but only small berry clusters. Grape berry size depends on the number of seeds so berries with no seeds will be significantly smaller than berries containing seeds. On one cluster there may be berries of various sizes which can create problems during winemaking due to the varying "skin to pulp" ratio among the grapes. This can be caused by vine disease, such as fanleaf, or by a boron deficiency in the vine. Gewürztraminer and the Chardonnay clones IA and Mendoza are both prone to millerandage. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19533906 | 530,049 |
538,951 | After serving on the "Olympic", he transferred to the "Titanic", where he was given the post of chief engineer. On the night of April 14, shortly before the "Titanic" hit the iceberg, Bell received an order from the bridge to either stop or reverse the engines (accounts vary), in an attempt to slow the ship. Despite the crew's best efforts, the "Titanic" could not avoid the immense block of ice. As the ship began to sink, Bell and the engineers remained in the engine room, urging the stokers and firemen to keep the boilers active, allowing the pumps to continue their work and ensuring the electricity remained on as long as possible. According to legend, Bell and his men worked to keep the lights and the power on in order for distress signals to get out and they all died in the bowels of the "Titanic". However, according to the historical record, when it became obvious that nothing more could be done, and the flooding was too severe for the pumps to cope, some of the engineers came up onto "Titanic" open well deck, but by this time all the lifeboats had already left. Greaser Frederick Scott testified to seeing eight engineers gathered at the aft end of the starboard Boat Deck at the end. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56900718 | 538,672 |
241,135 | In 1995, Stephen Blust coined the term "software defined radio", publishing a request for information from Bell South Wireless at the first meeting of the Modular Multifunction Information Transfer Systems (MMITS) forum in 1996, organized by the USAF and DARPA around the commercialization of their SpeakEasy II program. Mitola objected to Blust's term, but finally accepted it as a pragmatic pathway towards the ideal software radio. Although the concept was first implemented with an IF ADC in the early 1990s, software-defined radios have their origins in the U.S. and European defense sectors of the late 1970s (for example, Walter Tuttlebee described a VLF radio that used an ADC and an 8085 microprocessor), about a year after the First International Conference in Brussels. One of the first public software radio initiatives was the U.S. DARPA-Air Force military project named SpeakEasy. The primary goal of the SpeakEasy project was to use programmable processing to emulate more than 10 existing military radios, operating in frequency bands between 2 and 2000 MHz. Another SpeakEasy design goal was to be able to easily incorporate new coding and modulation standards in the future, so that military communications can keep pace with advances in coding and modulation techniques. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=83137 | 241,015 |
574,149 | Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. Muller was a third-generation American whose father's ancestors were originally Catholic and came to the United States from Koblenz. His mother's family was of mixed Jewish (descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews) and Anglican background, and had come from Britain. Among his first cousins are Herbert J. Muller and Alfred Kroeber (Kroeber is Ursula Le Guin's father). As an adolescent, Muller attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school, he became an atheist. He excelled in the public schools. At 16, he entered Columbia College. From his first semester, he was interested in biology; he became an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity—and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a biology club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern. Muller earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1910. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=240846 | 573,855 |
1,004,525 | Among naval historians, the 5"/38 gun is considered the best intermediate-caliber, dual purpose naval gun of World War II, especially as it was usually under the control of the advanced Mark 37 Gun Fire Control System which provided accurate and timely firing against surface and air targets. Even this advanced system required nearly 1000 rounds of ammunition expenditure per aircraft kill. However, the planes were normally killed by shell fragments and not direct hits; barrage fire was used, with many guns firing in the air at the same time. This would result in large walls of shell fragments being put up to take out one or several planes or in anticipation of an unseen plane, this being justifiable as one plane was capable of significant destruction. The comparatively high rate of fire for a gun of its caliber earned it an enviable reputation, particularly as an anti-aircraft weapon, in which role it was commonly employed by United States Navy vessels. Base ring mounts with integral hoists had a nominal rate of fire of 15 rounds per minute per barrel; however, with a well-trained crew, 22 rounds per minute per barrel was possible for short periods. On pedestal and other mounts lacking integral hoists, 12 to 15 rounds per minute was the rate of fire. Useful life expectancy was 4600 effective full charges (EFC) per barrel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5293178 | 1,004,007 |
761,007 | The English physicist Lord Rayleigh [1842–1919] worked on sound. The Irishmen William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) and Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) produced several major works: Stokes was a leader in optics and fluid dynamics; Kelvin made substantial discoveries in thermodynamics; Hamilton did notable work on analytical mechanics, discovering a new and powerful approach nowadays known as Hamiltonian mechanics. Very relevant contributions to this approach are due to his German colleague mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi (1804–1851) in particular referring to canonical transformations. The German Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) made substantial contributions in the fields of electromagnetism, waves, fluids, and sound. In the United States, the pioneering work of Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) became the basis for statistical mechanics. Fundamental theoretical results in this area were achieved by the German Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906). Together, these individuals laid the foundations of electromagnetic theory, fluid dynamics, and statistical mechanics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=173416 | 760,601 |
1,576,698 | In September 2015, Eric Lipton writing for the "New York Times" reported that the agriculture industry had enlisted academics, including Folta, to use their "independent voices" to advocate for public perception and policy, which appeared favorable to the industry. He reported that the University of Florida had received a $25,000 grant from Monsanto to be used at the university's discretion which was earmarked for an established biotechnology communication program. Folta submitted expense reports to use the biotechnology communication fund to pay for travel expenses, a small projector, coffee and food. Most of these expenses had since been reimbursed to the fund with honoraria from his talks and private donations from individuals and small businesses, while none of the donation from Monsanto was used. In response to the controversy and personal threats against Folta and his family, the university offered to return the donation, which Monsanto refused; instead, funds were redirected to a university food pantry. Folta has promised a complete accounting for his research and extension activities, which he says "defines a new standard of transparency and a new tool to cultivate trust" he hopes other scientists and advocates will adopt. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47731689 | 1,575,809 |
1,122,759 | The drug aprotinin (Trasylol, previously Bayer and now Nordic Group pharmaceuticals), is a small protein bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI), or basic trypsin inhibitor of bovine pancreas, which is an antifibrinolytic molecule that inhibits trypsin and related proteolytic enzymes. Under the trade name Trasylol, aprotinin was used as a medication administered by injection to reduce bleeding during complex surgery, such as heart and liver surgery. Its main effect is the slowing down of fibrinolysis, the process that leads to the breakdown of blood clots. The aim in its use was to decrease the need for blood transfusions during surgery, as well as end-organ damage due to hypotension (low blood pressure) as a result of marked blood loss. The drug was temporarily withdrawn worldwide in 2007 after studies suggested that its use increased the risk of complications or death; this was confirmed by follow-up studies. Trasylol sales were suspended in May 2008, except for very restricted research use. In February 2012 the European Medicines Agency (EMA) scientific committee reverted its previous standpoint regarding aprotinin, and has recommended that the suspension be lifted. Nordic became distributor of aprotinin in 2012. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4628609 | 1,122,185 |
1,883,011 | Thermoacoustic imaging was originally proposed by Theodore Bowen in 1981 as a strategy for studying the absorption properties of human tissue using virtually any kind of electromagnetic radiation. But Alexander Graham Bell first reported the physical principle upon which thermoacoustic imaging is based a century earlier. He observed that audible sound could be created by illuminating an intermittent beam of sunlight onto a rubber sheet. Shortly after Bowen's work was published, other researchers proposed methodology for thermoacoustic imaging using microwaves. In 1994 researchers used an infrared laser to produce the first thermoacoustic images of near-infrared optical absorption in a "tissue-mimicking" phantom, albeit in two dimensions (2D). In 1995 other researchers formulated a general reconstruction algorithm by which 2D thermoacoustic images could be "computed" from their "projections," i.e. thermoacoustic computed tomography (TCT). By 1998 researchers at Indiana University Medical Center extended TCT to 3D and employed pulsed microwaves to produce the first fully three-dimensional (3D) thermoacoustic images of biologic tissue [an excised lamb kidney (Fig. 1)]. The following year they created the first fully 3D thermoacoustic images of cancer in the human breast, again using pulsed microwaves (Fig. 2). Since that time, thermoacoustic imaging has gained widespread popularity in research institutions worldwide. As of 2008, three companies were developing commercial thermoacoustic imaging systems – Seno Medical, Endra, Inc. and OptoSonics, Inc. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19820084 | 1,881,930 |
147,831 | General Secretary and President Hu Jintao announced that the disaster response would be rapid. Just 90 minutes after the earthquake, Premier Wen Jiabao, who has an academic background in geomechanics, flew to the earthquake area to oversee the rescue work. Soon afterward, the Ministry of Health stated that it had sent ten emergency medical teams to Wenchuan County. On the same day, the Chengdu Military Region Command dispatched 50,000 troops and armed police to help with disaster relief work in Wenchuan County. However, due to the rough terrain and close proximity of the quake's epicenter, the soldiers found it very difficult to get help to the rural regions of the province. Premier Wen ordered the People's Liberation Army by saying, "It is the people who have raised you. It's up to you to see what to do! Even if it means walking on foot, you must nonetheless walk in there anyways. (Chinese:是人民养育了你们, 你们自己看着办! 你们就是靠双腿走, 也要给我走进去)" However, PLA commander Guo Boxiong only listened to Jiang Zemin's order, neither Wen Jiabao's or Hu Jintao's. The first 72 critical rescue hours were wasted. "The New York Times" reported "the troops were unprepared to save lives in the first 72 hours, when thousands were buried under toppled masonry and every minute mattered." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17901805 | 147,772 |
1,057,693 | Passive nuclear safety is a design approach for safety features, implemented in a nuclear reactor, that does not require any active intervention on the part of the operator or electrical/electronic feedback in order to bring the reactor to a safe shutdown state, in the event of a particular type of emergency (usually overheating resulting from a loss of coolant or loss of coolant flow). Such design features tend to rely on the engineering of components such that their predicted behaviour would slow down, rather than accelerate the deterioration of the reactor state; they typically take advantage of natural forces or phenomena such as gravity, buoyancy, pressure differences, conduction or natural heat convection to accomplish safety functions without requiring an active power source. Many older common reactor designs use passive safety systems to a limited extent, rather, relying on active safety systems such as diesel powered motors. Some newer reactor designs feature more passive systems; the motivation being that they are highly reliable and reduce the cost associated with the installation and maintenance of systems that would otherwise require multiple trains of equipment and redundant safety class power supplies in order to achieve the same level of reliability. However, weak driving forces that power many passive safety features can pose significant challenges to effectiveness of a passive system, particularly in the short term following an accident. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1228393 | 1,057,144 |
973,849 | In 1997, President Freeman Hrabowski created the Conservation and Environmental Research Areas of UMBC also known as "CERA" on the south end of the campus. The conservation area encompasses 50 acres surrounding Pig Pen Pond and Bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. At the same time as preserving the land, CERA allowed UMBC students to use the land for educational and recreational purposes. CERA contains two parts. The larger tract, covering approximately 45 acres of the south end of the main campus, contains a wide variety of ecological conditions: mature upland forest, early- and mid- successional forest, and riparian and wetland environments. The second, area is much smaller, with an area of about 3 acres. This surrounds Pigpen Pond, which was once actually a pigpen until it filled with water. There are also several areas within CERA where evidence of previous human occupancy and use can be found. In addition to teaching opportunities for faculty, CERA offers a wide range of opportunities for students and faculty to undertake short and long-term research projects in a variety of disciplines. Management of CERA is guided by the need to maintain these landscapes as natural areas to be preserved and protected for approved uses in education, research and wildlife observation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=375259 | 973,339 |
844,637 | Neurotoxicity is a form of toxicity in which a biological, chemical, or physical agent produces an adverse effect on the structure or function of the central and/or peripheral nervous system. It occurs when exposure to a substance – specifically, a neurotoxin or neurotoxicant– alters the normal activity of the nervous system in such a way as to cause permanent or reversible damage to nervous tissue. This can eventually disrupt or even kill neurons, which are cells that transmit and process signals in the brain and other parts of the nervous system. Neurotoxicity can result from organ transplants, radiation treatment, certain drug therapies, recreational drug use, and exposure to heavy metals, bites from certain species of venomous snakes, pesticides, certain industrial cleaning solvents, fuels and certain naturally occurring substances. Symptoms may appear immediately after exposure or be delayed. They may include limb weakness or numbness, loss of memory, vision, and/or intellect, uncontrollable obsessive and/or compulsive behaviors, delusions, headache, cognitive and behavioral problems and sexual dysfunction. Chronic mold exposure in homes can lead to neurotoxicity which may not appear for months to years of exposure. All symptoms listed above are consistent with mold mycotoxin accumulation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=546712 | 844,187 |
1,964,862 | The origins of the DPC are rooted in a 1995 workshop put on by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library at the University of Warwick, focusing on how to approach the digital preservation. Internet usage was rapidly increasing, user expectations of digital resources were greater, and more users and institutions were seeking information across international borders in the late-20th century. The scholastic community at large was apprehensive to make a serious effort toward converting to digital systems without more permanent solutions to ensure the integrity and authenticity of electronic resources, due to the instability experienced in some U.S. government archives that was generated by physical decay of storage media and obsolete hardware and software. The 1995 workshop at the University of Warwick led to research into the various necessary elements of digital preservation, which concluded in 1999. Proposals for the DPC were published in D-lib magazine in February 2001, began operations in July of the same year, and officially launched at the House of Commons in February 2002. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2361111 | 1,963,733 |
1,557,719 | Alloplasty is a surgical procedure performed to substitute and repair defects within the body with the use of synthetic material. It can also be performed in order to bridge wounds. The process of undergoing alloplasty involves the construction of an alloplastic graft through the use of computed tomography (CT), rapid prototyping and "the use of computer-assisted virtual model surgery." Each alloplastic graft is individually constructed and customised according to the patient's defect to address their personal health issue. Alloplasty can be applied in the form of reconstructive surgery. An example where alloplasty is applied in reconstructive surgery is in aiding cranial defects. The insertion and fixation of alloplastic implants can also be applied in cosmetic enhancement and augmentation. Since the inception of alloplasty, it has been proposed that it could be a viable alternative to other forms of transplants. The biocompatibility and customisation of alloplastic implants and grafts provides a method that may be suitable for both minor and major medical cases that may have more limitations in surgical approach. Although there has been evidence that alloplasty is a viable method for repairing and substituting defects, there are disadvantages including suitability of patient bone quality and quantity for long term implant stability, possibility of rejection of the alloplastic implant, injuring surrounding nerves, cost of procedure and long recovery times. Complications can also occur from inadequate engineering of alloplastic implants and grafts, and poor implant fixation to bone. These include infection, inflammatory reactions, the fracture of alloplastic implants and prostheses, loosening of implants or reduced or complete loss of osseointegration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60958951 | 1,556,834 |
1,808,723 | An important early success of his biophysical approach to palaeobotany was the discovery of evidence for a substantial increase in the atmospheric CO₂ concentration and 'super-greenhouse' conditions across the Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J) boundary, 200 million years ago, based on analyses of fossil stomata and leaf morphology from Greenland. This causally linked a catastrophic extinction event with the break-up of Pangaea. Before his group's work, the Tr-J extinction represented one of the most poorly understood of the so-called 'big-five' mass extinctions in the Phanerozoic (past 540 million years). His paper resulted in major new international research programmes that subsequently identified evidence confirming the carbon cycle perturbation in marine and terrestrial sediments world-wide. He extended this discovery by evaluating hypothesized causal mechanisms with numerical geochemical carbon cycle modelling in collaboration with the Yale University geochemist Robert Berner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43094065 | 1,807,702 |
2,084,060 | The offensive was renewed on 20 September with the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. The new tactics emphasised stepwise attacks, allowing time for the heavy artillery to carry out CB tasks and to destroy concrete emplacements. 23rd HAG began a 'hurricane' bombardment the day before and continued until 08.40 on Z day, by which time XIV Corps' right-hand division (20th (Light)) had carried out its limited operation. The guns then fired a protective barrage as the infantry consolidated their gains. 23rd HAG next began bombarding concrete dugouts and strongpoints along the Broehmbeek to prepare for the next advance. XIV Corps played a minor role in this attack (the Battle of Polygon Wood, 26 September), with 23rd HAG firing a protective 'weaving' barrage across the divisional front, 41st Siege Bty concentrating on Pascal Farm and its outbuildings. Major Trechmann went sick on 3 October and Capt H.M. Bennett took over command of the battery. The Battle of Broodseinde on 4 October saw XIV Corps gain its limited objectives with very little opposition. Next day 41st Siege Bty moved Nos 1 and 2 guns forward to a new position at 'Wood 16'. The Battle of Poelcappelle on 9 October went well for XIV Corps, but the worsening conditions led to failure further south. 41st Siege Bty got Nos 3 and 4 guns up to Wood 16 by light railway on 11 October but when the attack was renewed next day (the First Battle of Passchendaele) guns and ammunition across the front were sinking in the mud, bombardments were thin and inaccurate, and CB fire had almost ceased. 41st Siege Bty tried to get Nos 3 and 4 guns forward to 'Iron Cross Corner' on the Steenbeek, but 'both got hopelessly ditched in shell holes'. They were not ready for action until 25 October. 23rd HAG was ordered to lay on a 48-hour bombardment for the next attack (the Second Battle of Passchendaele on 26 October) from wherever the guns happened to be, but the infantry struggling through the mud failed to take their objectives. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=69464934 | 2,082,860 |
362,948 | The situation changes somewhat with the introduction of dark energy or a cosmological constant. A cosmological constant due to a vacuum energy density has the effect of adding a repulsive force between objects that is proportional (not inversely proportional) to distance. Unlike inertia it actively "pulls" on objects that have clumped together under the influence of gravity, and even on individual atoms. However, this does not cause the objects to grow steadily or to disintegrate; unless they are very weakly bound, they will simply settle into an equilibrium state that is slightly (undetectably) larger than it would otherwise have been. As the universe expands and the matter in it thins, the gravitational attraction decreases (since it is proportional to the density), while the cosmological repulsion increases; thus the ultimate fate of the ΛCDM universe is a near vacuum expanding at an ever-increasing rate under the influence of the cosmological constant. However, the only locally visible effect of the accelerating expansion is the disappearance (by runaway redshift) of distant galaxies; gravitationally bound objects like the Milky Way do not expand and the Andromeda galaxy is moving fast enough towards us that it will still merge with the Milky Way in 3 billion years time, and it is also likely that the merged supergalaxy that forms will eventually fall in and merge with the nearby Virgo Cluster. However, galaxies lying farther away from this will recede away at ever-increasing speed and be redshifted out of our range of visibility. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5985207 | 362,758 |
1,274,050 | In 1946, Randall was appointed Head of Physics Department at King's College in London. He then moved to the Wheatstone chair of physics at King's College, London, where the Medical Research Council set up the Biophysics Research Unit with Randall as the director (now known as Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics) at King's College. During his term as Director the experimental work leading to the discovery of the structure of DNA was made there by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alex Stokes and Herbert R. Wilson. He assigned Raymond Gosling as a PhD student to Franklin to work on DNA structure by X-ray diffraction. According to Raymond Gosling, the role of John Randall in the pursuit of the double helix cannot be overstated. Gosling felt so strongly on this subject that he wrote to "The Times" in 2013 during the sixtieth anniversary celebrations. Randall firmly believed that DNA held the genetic code and assembled a multi-disciplinary team to help prove it. It was Randall who pointed out that since DNA was largely carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, it was just the same as the atoms in the air in the camera. The result was a diffuse back-scattering of X-rays, which fogged the film, and so he instructed Gosling to displace all the air with hydrogen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30859641 | 1,273,358 |
385,191 | A common use of the one-time pad in quantum cryptography is being used in association with quantum key distribution (QKD). QKD is typically associated with the one-time pad because it provides a way of distributing a long shared secret key securely and efficiently (assuming the existence of practical quantum networking hardware). A QKD algorithm uses properties of quantum mechanical systems to let two parties agree on a shared, uniformly random string. Algorithms for QKD, such as BB84, are also able to determine whether an adversarial party has been attempting to intercept key material, and allow for a shared secret key to be agreed upon with relatively few messages exchanged and relatively low computational overhead. At a high level, the schemes work by taking advantage of the destructive way quantum states are measured to exchange a secret and detect tampering. In the original BB84 paper, it was proven that the one-time pad, with keys distributed via QKD, is a perfectly secure encryption scheme. However, this result depends on the QKD scheme being implemented correctly in practice. Attacks on real-world QKD systems exist. For instance, many systems do not send a single photon (or other object in the desired quantum state) per bit of the key because of practical limitations, and an attacker could intercept and measure some of the photons associated with a message, gaining information about the key (i.e. leaking information about the pad), while passing along unmeasured photons corresponding to the same bit of the key. Combining QKD with a one-time pad can also loosen the requirements for key reuse. In 1982, Bennett and Brassard showed that if a QKD protocol does not detect that an adversary was trying to intercept an exchanged key, than the key can safely be reused while preserving perfect secrecy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22210 | 384,996 |
1,110,373 | This extended lambda calculus was intended to serve as a provably memory-safe intermediate representation for compiling Standard ML programs into machine code, but building a translator that would produce good results on large programs faced a number of practical limitations which had to be resolved with new analyses, including dealing with recursive calls, tail calls, and eliminating regions which contained only a single value. This work was completed in 1995 and integrated into the ML Kit, a version of ML based on region allocation in place of garbage collection. This permitted a direct comparison between the two on medium-sized test programs, yielding widely varying results ("between 10 times faster and four times slower") depending on how "region-friendly" the program was; compile times, however, were on the order of minutes. The ML Kit was eventually scaled to large applications with two additions: a scheme for separate compilation of modules, and a hybrid technique combining region inference with tracing garbage collection. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26294208 | 1,109,808 |
993,057 | "The Closing of the American Mind" was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in "National Review" about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life I've led", that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher's modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in "The New York Times" and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will titled, "A How-To Book for the Independent", it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on "The New York Times Bestseller List" for nonfiction for four months. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=84444 | 992,540 |
1,206,479 | By late 1941, Junkers decided the best course of action was to make more radical changes to the design, and introduced the 222C and 222D models. With a new bore and stroke of , the engine displacement increased a second time, to 55.5 L (3,386.8 in³), just very slightly larger than the contemporary Wright Duplex Cyclone American 18-cylinder air-cooled radial engine, which at the time was having its own significant problems ironed out, partially from the use of combustible magnesium-alloy metal for its crankcase. Back at the original 3,200 rpm, the Jumo 222 C/D models could deliver just under when they started running in the summer of 1942. However, the problems were not cured, and only a handful were built. The RLM had been waiting for three years at this point, and eventually gave up and had all designs based on it look for alternate engines. Later that year, they gave up on that as well, and cancelled the entire Bomber B program outright. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=705691 | 1,205,834 |
1,196,414 | The Lockheed Martin CEV design included several modules in the LEO (low earth orbit) and crewed lunar versions of the spacecraft, plus an abort system. The abort system was an escape tower like that used in the Mercury, Apollo, Soyuz, and Shenzhou craft (Gemini, along with the Space Shuttles "Enterprise" and "Columbia" [until STS-4] used ejection seats). It would be capable of an abort during any part of the ascent phase of the mission. The crew would sit in the Rescue Module (RM) during launch. According to the publication "Aviation Week and Space Technology", the RM would have an outer heat shield of reinforced carbon-carbon and a redundant layer of felt reusable surface insulation underneath in case of RCC failure. The RM comprised the top half of the Crew Module (CM), which comprised the RM and the rest of the lifting-body structure. The CM included living space for four crew members. In an emergency the RM separates from the rest of the CM. The RM would seat up to six crew members, with two to a row, and the CM has living space and provisions for four astronauts for 5–7 days. Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVAs) could be conducted from the CM, which could land on land or water and could be reused 5–10 times. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6640441 | 1,195,774 |
292,007 | Davies independently developed a similar message routing concept and more detailed network design in 1965. He coined the term "packet switching", and proposed building a commercial nationwide data network in the UK. He gave a talk on the proposal in 1966, after which a person from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) told him about Baran's work. Roger Scantlebury, a member of Davies' team met Lawrence Roberts at the 1967 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles and suggested it for use in the ARPANET. Davies had chosen some of the same parameters for his original network design as did Baran, such as a packet size of 1024 bits. In 1966, Davies proposed that a network should be built at the laboratory to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching. To deal with packet permutations (due to dynamically updated route preferences) and to datagram losses (unavoidable when fast sources send to a slow destinations), he assumed that "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control", thus inventing what came to be known the end-to-end principle. After a pilot experiment in 1969, the NPL Data Communications Network entered service in 1970. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43339 | 291,849 |
1,988,812 | Following his PhD, Chibale joined the University of Liverpool as a Sir William Ramsay British Research Fellow. He developed optically active alcohols using lanthanides. In 1994 he joined the Scripps Research Institute, creating complicated natural molecules from organic building blocks. He began to explore angiogenesis inhibitors, which can be used to stop cancer cells developing new blood vessels. Inspired by medicinal chemistry, Chibale returned to Africa in 1996, joining the research group of James Bull. In 2002 he joined the University of California, San Francisco as a Sandler Foundation Fellow. He was elected a Professor in 2007 and a Life Fellow of the University of Cape Town in 2009. His group studies treatments for HIV, cancer, malaria and hypertension. He set up collaborations and exchange programs for South African students to learn how to translate basic science into potential products. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa in 2009. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57520533 | 1,987,670 |
259,245 | Measures of performance on tests of working memory increase continuously between early childhood and adolescence, while the structure of correlations between different tests remains largely constant. Starting with work in the Neo-Piagetian tradition, theorists have argued that the growth of working-memory capacity is a major driving force of cognitive development. This hypothesis has received substantial empirical support from studies showing that the capacity of working memory is a strong predictor of cognitive abilities in childhood. Particularly strong evidence for a role of working memory for development comes from a longitudinal study showing that working-memory capacity at one age predicts reasoning ability at a later age. Studies in the Neo-Piagetian tradition have added to this picture by analyzing the complexity of cognitive tasks in terms of the number of items or relations that have to be considered simultaneously for a solution. Across a broad range of tasks, children manage task versions of the same level of complexity at about the same age, consistent with the view that working memory capacity limits the complexity they can handle at a given age. Although neuroscience studies support the notion that children rely on prefrontal cortex for performing various working memory tasks, an fMRI meta-analysis on children compared to adults performing the n back task revealed lack of consistent prefrontal cortex activation in children, while posterior regions including the insular cortex and cerebellum remain intact. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33912 | 259,111 |
369,370 | Wind and solar energy generated 8.5% of worldwide electricity in 2019. This share has grown rapidly while costs have fallen and are projected to continue falling. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that 2.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) would need to be invested in the energy system each year between 2016 and 2035 to limit global warming to . Well-designed government policies that promote energy system transformation can lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality. In many cases they also increase energy security. Policy approaches include carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards, phase-outs of fossil fuel subsidies, and the development of infrastructure to support electrification and sustainable transport. Funding research, development, and demonstration of new clean energy technologies is also an important role of government. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1055890 | 369,177 |
722,459 | John Sloan (1871–1951) was an early-20th-century Realist of the Ashcan School, whose concerns with American social conditions led him to join the Socialist Party in 1910. Originally from Philadelphia, he worked in New York after 1904. From 1912 to 1916, he contributed illustrations to the socialist monthly "The Masses". Sloan disliked propaganda, and in his drawings for "The Masses", as in his paintings, he focused on the everyday lives of people. He depicted the leisure of the working class with an emphasis on female subjects. Among his better known works are "Picnic Grounds" and "Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair". He disliked the category of Ashcan School and expressed his annoyance with art historians who identified him as a painter of the American Scene: "Some of us used to paint little rather sensitive comments about the life around us. We didn't know it was the American Scene. I don't like the name...A symptom of nationalism, which has caused a great deal of trouble in this world." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11382737 | 722,079 |
1,375,523 | Faye Glenn Abdellah (March 13, 1919 – February 24, 2017) was an American pioneer in nursing research. Abdellah was the first nurse and woman to serve as the Deputy Surgeon General of the United States. Preceding her appointment, she served in active duty during the Korean War, where she earned a distinguished ranking equivalent to a Navy Rear Admiral, making her the highest ranked woman and nurse in the Federal Nursing Services at the time. In addition to these achievements, Abdellah led the formation of the National Institute of Nursing Research at the NIH, and was the founder and first dean of the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). A few of Abdellah's more passionate interests in public health included the importance of long-term care planning for elderly patients; the need to strengthen nursing school infrastructure; and the necessity of patient-centered approaches in nursing. In 2000 Abdellah was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. During her acceptance speech, Abdellah made the following quote: "We cannot wait for the world to change . . . Those of us with intelligence, purpose, and vision must take the lead and change the world . . . I promise never to rest until my work has been completed!” | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6742984 | 1,374,762 |
496,673 | In recent years, geology has continued its tradition as the study of the character and origin of the earth, its surface features and internal structure. What changed in the later 20th century is the perspective of geological study. Geology was now studied using a more integrative approach, considering the earth in a broader context encompassing the atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere. Satellites located in space that take wide scope photographs of the earth provide such a perspective. In 1972, The Landsat Program, a series of satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, began supplying satellite images that can be geologically analyzed. These images can be used to map major geological units, recognize and correlate rock types for vast regions and track the movements of Plate Tectonics. A few applications of this data include the ability to produce geologically detailed maps, locate sources of natural energy and predict possible natural disasters caused by plate shifts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8245348 | 496,417 |
1,964,943 | In 1951, he became an assistant professor at Princeton University. There he gave lectures on quantum electrodynamics from which his seminal textbook, written with Josef-Maria Jauch, emerged. In 1953 he became an associate professor (and colleague of Jauch) at the University of Iowa; the text "The theory of Photons and Electrons" was first published in 1955. In 1963 he became a professor at Syracuse University, where he spent the rest of his career; his text "Classical Charged Particles" was first published in 1965. In addition to his work in theories of quantum and classical electrodynamics, in the early 1960s he also investigated (with T. Fulton and Louis Witten) the problem of the radiation of the free-falling charged particle in the general theory of relativity and the question of whether this violated the principle of equivalence. In the 1980s, he put his focus on the philosophy of science, and wrote the text "From Paradox to Reality: Our Basic Concepts of the Physical World". In 1991 he retired and became a professor emeritus. He remained active in research for many years thereafter, and in 2009 was honored by the lifetime "outstanding referee" designation of the American Physical Society. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55859711 | 1,963,814 |
1,074,204 | In industrial process, the control of the quality of process water can be critical to the quality of the end product. Water is often used as a carrier of reagents and the loss of reagent to product must be continuously monitored to ensure that correct replacement rate. Parameters measured relate specifically to the process in use and to any of the expected contaminants that may arise as by-products. This may include unwanted organic chemicals appearing in an inorganic chemical process through contamination with oils and greases from machinery. Monitoring the quality of the waste water discharged from industrial premises is a key factor in controlling and minimising pollution of the environment. In this application monitoring schemes analyse for all possible contaminants arising within the process and in addition contaminants that may have particularly adverse impacts on the environment such as cyanide and many organic species such as pesticides. In then nuclear industry analysis focuses on specific isotopes or elements of interest. Where the nuclear industry makes waste water discharges to rivers which have drinking water abstraction on them, radio-isotopes which could potentially be harmful or those with long half-lives such as tritium will form part of the routine monitoring suite. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25213120 | 1,073,650 |
1,867,624 | The term "mycotic aneurysm", initially attributed to Osler and used to describe bacterial intracranial aneurysms, is a misnomer. Most investigators currently agree that its use should be strictly limited to descriptions of aneurysms of fungal origin. Yet efforts to establish an accurate nomenclature have been generally unsuccessful. Therefore, we are resigned to the fact that the term mycotic aneurysm will remain in general parlance. At the same time, we prefer the use of a more specific and accurate heading, namely, "infected intracranial aneurysm", to include the categories of intracranial bacterial aneurysm, fungal aneurysm, spirochetal aneurysm, infested or amebic aneurysm, viral aneurysm and phytotic aneurysm, according to the specific infecting organism or agent. The terms "infectious aneurysm" and "infective aneurysm" are flawed because they imply that the aneurysm itself is the infecting agent rather than being the end point of an infecting process. Until such a pathogenesis has been detected, it is the intention of the authors to avoid catachresis and the application of archaic language (Marcus S, The George Delacorte Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, personal communication, 1993: "The correct usage is 'infected'. The term 'infectious' died out as a usage in termed of infected in 1726." And Jost, DA, former senior lexicographer of "The American Heritage Dictionary", Boston, personal communication, 1996: ""Infectious aneurysm" will be interpreted by most users of English as an aneurysm that can communicate infection"). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38656185 | 1,866,548 |
1,542,257 | Dr. Goodman is a Fellow of the OSA, the IEEE, and the SPIE. In 1971, he was chosen the recipient of the Frederick Emmons Terman Award of the American Society for Engineering Education. He received the 1983 Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America for his contributions to physical optics, and in particular to holography, synthetic aperture optics, image processing, and speckle theory. He received the 1987 IEEE Education Medal for his contributions to Electrical Engineering education, the 1987 Dennis Gabor Award of the International Optical Engineering Society (SPIE) for his contributions to holography, optical processing and optical computing, the 1995 Esther Hoffman Beller Medal of the OSA, and the 1990 Frederick Ives Medal, the highest award of the Optical Society of America. In 2018 he was elected one of 16 Honorary Members of the OSA. In 2007, he received the SPIE Gold Medal, the highest award of that society, and in 2009 he was named the winner of the Emmett Leith Medal of the OSA. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, and a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. Also in 1996, he received an honorary D.Sc. degree from the University of Alabama, and in 2012 he received an honorary D.Sc. degree from the St. Petersburg (Russia) the National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics. He is the author of approximately 220 technical publications, including the textbooks Introduction to Fourier Optics (1968, Second Edition 1996, Third Edition 2005, Fourth Edition 2017), Statistical Optics (1985, Second Edition 2015), Speckle Phenomena in Optics (2006, Second Edition 2020) and (with R.M. Gray) Fourier Transforms: An Introduction for Engineers (1995). His first full-length publication (Proc. I.E.E.E., Vol. 53, 1688 (1965)) was named a "Citation Classic" by the Institute for Scientific Information. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21665361 | 1,541,384 |
271,751 | The decision to go through with the operation was hotly contested within Begin's government. Ariel Sharon, a member of the Security Cabinet, later said that he was among those who advocated bombing the reactor. Dayan, Defense Minister (until late 1980) Ezer Weizman and Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin were among those opposed. According to Mueller, "the principal difference between the hawks and doves on this issue lay in their estimation of the likely international political costs of an air strike". Shai Feldman specifies that "[those opposed] feared that the operation would derail the fragile Israeli-Egyptian peace process, fuel Arab anxieties about Israel's profile in the region, and damage Israel-French relations". Begin and his supporters, including Sharon, were far less pessimistic than their opponents about the political fallout. Yehoshua Saguy argued for continued efforts in trying to find a non-military solution as it would take the Iraqis five to ten years to produce the material necessary for a nuclear weapon. In the end, Begin chose to order the attack based on a worst-case estimate where a weapon could be created in one to two years time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4191587 | 271,603 |
510,168 | Metal substrates for use in SAMs can be produced through physical vapor deposition techniques, electrodeposition or electroless deposition. Thiol or selenium SAMs produced by adsorption from solution are typically made by immersing a substrate into a dilute solution of alkane thiol in ethanol, though many different solvents can be used besides use of pure liquids. While SAMs are often allowed to form over 12 to 72 hours at room temperature, SAMs of alkanethiolates form within minutes. Special attention is essential in some cases, such as that of dithiol SAMs to avoid problems due to oxidation or photoinduced processes, which can affect terminal groups and lead to disorder and multilayer formation. In this case appropriate choice of solvents, their degassing by inert gasses and preparation in the absence of light is crucial and allows formation of "standing up" SAMs with free –SH groups. Self-assembled monolayers can also be adsorbed from the vapor phase. In some cases when obtaining an ordered assembly is difficult or when different density phases need to be obtained substitutional self-assembly is used. Here one first forms the SAM of a given type of molecules, which give rise to ordered assembly and then a second assembly phase is performed (e.g. by immersion into a different solution). This method has also been used to give information on relative binding strengths of SAMs with different head groups and more generally on self-assembly characteristics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1753270 | 509,903 |
50,904 | The industry has been accused of making unscientific claims, and distorting facts relating to infertility, in particular through widely exaggerated claims about how common infertility is in society, in an attempt to get as many couples as possible and as soon as possible to try treatments (rather than trying to conceive naturally for a longer time). This risks removing infertility from its social context and reducing the experience to a simple biological malfunction, which not only "can" be treated through bio-medical procedures, but should be treated by them. Indeed, there are serious concerns about the overuse of treatments, for instance Dr Sami David, a fertility specialist, has expressed disappointment over the current state of the industry, and said many procedures are unnecessary; he said: "It's being the first choice of treatment rather than the last choice. When it was first opening up in late 1970s, early 80s, it was meant to be the last resort. Now it's a first resort. I think that it can harm women in the long run." IVF thus raises ethical issues concerning the abuse of bio-medical facts to 'sell' corrective procedures and treatments for conditions that deviate from a constructed ideal of the 'healthy' or 'normal' body i.e., fertile females and males with reproductive systems capable of co-producing offspring. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57880 | 50,884 |
858,121 | Emotion is defined as any mental experience with high intensity and high hedonic content. The existence and nature of emotions in non-human animals are believed to be correlated with those of humans and to have evolved from the same mechanisms. Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to write about the subject, and his observational (and sometimes anecdotal) approach has since developed into a more robust, hypothesis-driven, scientific approach. Cognitive bias tests and learned helplessness models have shown feelings of optimism and pessimism in a wide range of species, including rats, dogs, cats, rhesus macaques, sheep, chicks, starlings, pigs, and honeybees. Jaak Panksepp played a large role in the study of animal emotion, basing his research on the neurological aspect. Mentioning seven core emotional feelings reflected through a variety of neuro-dynamic limbic emotional action systems, including seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, panic and play. Through brain stimulation and pharmacological challenges, such emotional responses can be effectively monitored. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5160010 | 857,665 |
1,114,539 | At sufficiently large enough scales, rigid matter such as the typical silicate-ferrous composition of rocky planets behaves fluidly, and satisfies the condition for evaluating the mechanics of toroidal self-gravitating fluid bodies in context. A rotating mass in the form of a torus allows an effective balance between the gravitational attraction and the force due to centrifugal acceleration, when the angular momentum is adequately large. Ring-shaped masses without a relatively massive central nuclei in equilibrium have been analyzed in the past by Henri Poincaré (1885), Frank W. Dyson (1892), and Sophie Kowalewsky (1885), wherein a condition is allowable for a toroidal rotating mass to be stable with respect to a displacement leading to another toroid. Dyson (1893) investigated other types of distortions and found that the rotating toroidal mass is secularly stable against "fluted" and "twisted" displacements but can become unstable against beaded displacements in which the torus is thicker in some meridians but thinner in some others. In the simple model of parallel sections, beaded instability commences when the aspect ratio of major to minor radius exceeds 3. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=68488098 | 1,113,971 |
173,133 | In November 2020, a new, marginally more infectious strain of SARS-CoV-2 was identified in the United Kingdom, the SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant. The strain rapidly spread around the world. With widespread global use of this form of COVID-19 testing, there was a concern that this variant would render rapid testing obsolete. As part of the UK's accelerated technology evaluation of lateral flow, within 24 hours Public Health England laboratories were able to confirm that RATs in global development were not affected (i.e., that they could identify the new variant). This was because rapid test generally targets the capsid protein and not the spike protein. Some strains have been identified with a nucleocapsid mutation (D399N) that does decrease the sensitivity of at least one RAT (Quidel Sofia 2) up to 1,000-fold. Fortunately, the frequency of mutation D399N was still relatively low globally at ~0.02% as of May 2021. A study published in 2022 found that the sensitivities of six rapid antigen detection tests were 70.0%-92.9% for the Delta variant and 69.6%-78.3% for the Omicron variant across a range of viral loads; however, for Omicron samples with a low viral load, the sensitivities were 0.0%-23.1%. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67708405 | 173,042 |
1,546,449 | Cody and Johnstone (1982) and Rajan and Johnstone (1988a; 1988b) showed that constant acoustic stimulation that in (which evokes a strong MOCS response (Brown et al., 1998)) reduced the severity of acoustic trauma. This protection was negated in the presence of a chemical known to suppress the action of the olivocochlear bundle (OCB) (strychnine), implicating the action of the MOCS in protection of the cochlea from loud sounds. Further evidence for the auditory efferents having a protective role was provided by Rajan (1995a) and Kujawa and Liberman (1997). Both studies showed that the hearing loss sustained by animals due to binaural sound exposure was more severe if the OCB was severed. Rajan (1995b) also showed a frequency dependence of MOC protection roughly consistent with the distribution of MOC fibres in the cochlea. Other studies supporting this function of the MOCS have shown that MOC stimulation reduces the temporary threshold shift (TTS) and permanent threshold shift (PTS) associated with prolonged noise exposure (Handrock and Zeisberg, 1982; Rajan, 1988b; Reiter and Liberman, 1995), and that animals with the strongest MOC reflex sustain less hearing damage to loud sounds (Maison and Liberman, 2000). This proposed biological role of the MOCS, protection from loud sounds, was challenged by Kirk and Smith (2003), who argued that the intensity of sounds used in the experiments (≥105 dB SPL) would rarely or never occur in nature, and therefore a protective mechanism for sounds of such intensities could not have evolved. This claim (that MOC-mediated cochlear protection is an epiphenomenon) was recently challenged by Darrow et al. (2007), who suggested that the LOCS has an anti-excitotoxic effect, indirectly protecting the cochlea from damage. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17523336 | 1,545,575 |
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