doc_id int32 18 2.25M | text stringlengths 245 2.96k | source stringlengths 38 44 | __index_level_0__ int64 18 2.25M |
|---|---|---|---|
1,327,275 | The mineral industry of Kazakhstan is one of the most competitive and fastest growing sectors of the country. Kazakhstan ranks second to Russia among the countries of the CIS in its quantity of mineral production. It is endowed with large reserves of a wide range of metallic ores, industrial minerals, and fuels, and its metallurgical sector is a major producer of a large number of metals from domestic and imported raw materials. In 2005, its metal mining sector produced bauxite, chromite, copper, iron, lead, manganese, and zinc ores, and its metallurgical sector produced such metals as beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, copper, ferroalloys, lead, magnesium, rhenium, steel, titanium, and zinc. The country produced significant amounts of other nonferrous and industrial mineral products, such as alumina, arsenic, barite, gold, molybdenum, phosphate rock, and tungsten. The country was a large producer of mineral fuels, including coal, natural gas, oil, and uranium. The country's economy is heavily dependent on the production of minerals. Output from Kazakhstan's mineral and natural resources sector for 2004 accounted for 74.1% of the value of industrial production, of which 43.1% came from the oil and gas condensate extraction. In 2004, the mineral extraction sector accounted for 32% of the GDP, employed 191,000 employees, and accounted for 33.1% of capital investment and 64.5% of direct foreign investment, of which 63.5% was in the oil sector. Kazakhstan's mining industry is estimated at US$29.5 billion by 2017. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17967709 | 1,326,548 |
774,066 | A 2017 study by researchers from Northwestern University unveiled a mutation among the Old Order Amish living in Berne, Indiana, that suppressed their chances of having diabetes and extends their life expectancy by about ten years on average. That mutation occurred in the gene called Serpine1, which codes for the production of the protein PAI-1 (plasminogen activator inhibitor), which regulates blood clotting and plays a role in the aging process. About 24% of the people sampled carried this mutation and had a life expectancy of 85, higher than the community average of 75. Researchers also found the telomeres—non-functional ends of human chromosomes—of those with the mutation to be longer than those without. Because telomeres shorten as the person ages, they determine the person's life expectancy. Those with longer telomeres tend to live longer. At present, the Amish live in 22 U.S. states plus the Canadian province of Ontario. They live simple lifestyles that date back centuries and generally insulate themselves from modern North American society. They are mostly indifferent towards modern medicine, but scientists do have a healthy relationship with the Amish community in Berne. Their detailed genealogical records make them ideal subjects for research. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54472601 | 773,650 |
773,989 | Meropenem is the preferred antibiotic therapy for neurological melioidosis and those with septic shock admitted into intensive care units. Co-trimoxazole is recommended in addition to ceftazidime for neurological melioidosis, osteomyelitis, septic arthritis, skin and gastrointestinal infection, and deeply seated abscess. For deep-seated infections such as abscesses of internal organs, osteomyelitis, septic arthritis, and neurological melioidosis, the duration of antibiotics given should be longer (up to 4 to 8 weeks). The time taken for the fever to be resolved can be more than 10 days in those with deep-seated infection. According to the 2020 Revised Royal Darwin Hospital Guideline, the dosage for intravenous ceftazidime is 2g 6-hourly in adults (50 mg/kg up to 2g in children less than 15 years old). The dosage for meropenem is 1g 8-hourly in adults (25 mg/kg up to 1g in children). Acquired resistance to ceftazidime, carbapenems, and co-amoxiclav is rare in the intensive phase but resistance to cotrimoxazole during eradication therapy is technically difficult to assess. There are no differences between using cefoperazone/sulbactam or ceftazidime to treat melioidosis as both shows similar death rates and disease progression following treatment. However, data are lacking to recommend cefoperazone/sulbactam usage. For those with kidney impairment, the dosage of ceftazidime, meropenem, and co-trimoxazole should be lowered. Once the clinical condition improved, meropenem can be switched back to ceftazidime. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=471444 | 773,573 |
238,791 | David Watt also analyzes exception handling in the framework of sequencers (introduced in this article in the previous section on early exits.) Watt notes that an abnormal situation (generally exemplified with arithmetic overflows or input/output failures like file not found) is a kind of error that "is detected in some low-level program unit, but [for which] a handler is more naturally located in a high-level program unit". For example, a program might contain several calls to read files, but the action to perform when a file is not found depends on the meaning (purpose) of the file in question to the program and thus a handling routine for this abnormal situation cannot be located in low-level system code. Watts further notes that introducing status flags testing in the caller, as single-exit structured programming or even (multi-exit) return sequencers would entail, results in a situation where "the application code tends to get cluttered by tests of status flags" and that "the programmer might forgetfully or lazily omit to test a status flag. In fact, abnormal situations represented by status flags are by default ignored!" He notes that in contrast to status flags testing, exceptions have the opposite default behavior, causing the program to terminate unless the programmer explicitly deals with the exception in some way, possibly by adding code to willfully ignore it. Based on these arguments, Watt concludes that jump sequencers or escape sequencers (discussed in the previous section) aren't as suitable as a dedicated exception sequencer with the semantics discussed above. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27695 | 238,671 |
164,383 | The boulders were transported over from the source of the stone. The exact method of transportation of such large masses of rock are unknown, especially since the Olmecs lacked beasts of burden and functional wheels, and they were likely to have used water transport whenever possible. Coastal currents of the Gulf of Mexico and in river estuaries might have made the waterborne transport of monuments weighing 20 tons or more impractical. Two badly damaged Olmec sculptures depict rectangular stone blocks bound with ropes. A largely destroyed human figure rides upon each block, with their legs hanging over the side. These sculptures may well depict Olmec rulers overseeing the transport of the stone that would be fashioned into their monuments. When transport over land was necessary, the Olmecs are likely to have used causeways, ramps and roads to facilitate moving the heads. The regional terrain offers significant obstacles such as swamps and floodplains; avoiding these would have necessitated crossing undulating hill country. The construction of temporary causeways using the suitable and plentiful floodplain soils would have allowed a direct route across the floodplains to the San Lorenzo Plateau. Earth structures such as mounds, platforms and causeways upon the plateau demonstrate that the Olmec possessed the necessary knowledge and could commit the resources to build large-scale earthworks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35721801 | 164,298 |
624,959 | The atomic theory of matter had been proposed again in the early 19th century by the chemist John Dalton and became one of the hypotheses of the kinetic-molecular theory of gases developed by Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell to explain the laws of thermodynamics. The kinetic theory in turn led to the statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) and Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903), which held that energy (including heat) was a measure of the speed of particles. Interrelating the statistical likelihood of certain states of organization of these particles with the energy of those states, Clausius reinterpreted the dissipation of energy to be the statistical tendency of molecular configurations to pass toward increasingly likely, increasingly disorganized states (coining the term "entropy" to describe the disorganization of a state). The statistical versus absolute interpretations of the second law of thermodynamics set up a dispute that would last for several decades (producing arguments such as "Maxwell's demon"), and that would not be held to be definitively resolved until the behavior of atoms was firmly established in the early 20th century. In 1902, James Jeans found the length scale required for gravitational perturbations to grow in a static nearly homogeneous medium. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56661172 | 624,626 |
245,696 | After separating from the command module in lunar orbit, the LM "Antares" had two serious problems. First, the LM computer began getting an ABORT signal from a faulty switch. NASA believed the computer might be getting erroneous readings like this if a tiny ball of solder had shaken loose and was floating between the switch and the contact, closing the circuit. The immediate solution – tapping on the panel next to the switch – did work briefly, but the circuit soon closed again. If the problem recurred after the descent engine fired, the computer would think the signal was real and would initiate an auto-abort, causing the ascent stage to separate from the descent stage and climb back into orbit. NASA and the software teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scrambled to find a solution. The software was hard-wired, preventing it from being updated from the ground. The fix made it appear to the system that an abort had already happened, and it would ignore incoming automated signals to abort. This would not prevent the astronauts from piloting the ship, though if an abort became necessary, they might have to initiate it manually. Mitchell entered the changes with minutes to go until planned ignition. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1968 | 245,569 |
1,959,787 | UFM1 shares several common properties with ubiquitin (Ub) and the other ubiquitin-like proteins (UBLs). Ufm1 has similar tertiary structure to Ub but lacks any obvious sequence similarity. It is synthesized as an inactive precursor form (pro-Ufm1) which has 2 additional amino acids beyond the conserved glycine. The mechanism of Ufm1 conjugation is similar to that of ubiquitin. Mature Ufm1 has an exposed C-terminal glycine which is essential for subsequent activation by its cognate E1 protein (Uba5). This activation step results in the formation of a high-energy thiolester bond in the presence of ATP. The Ufm1 is subsequently transferred to its cognate E2-like enzyme (Ufc1) via a similar thioester linkage with a cysteine at the E2 active site. Ufm1 is conjugated to a variety of target proteins and forms complexes with as yet unidentified proteins. Thus, presumably there exist E3 ligases (none have been identified to date) to perform the final step in Ufm1 conjugation to relevant targets. The modification of proteins with Ufm1 is also reversible. Two novel cysteine proteases have been identified to date (UFSP1 and UFSP2) which cleave Ufm1-peptide C-terminal fusions and also removes Ufm1 from native intracellular conjugates. These proteases have no obvious homology to ubiquitin deconjugating enzymes. The proteins for Ufm1 conjugation (Uba5, Ufc1 and Ufm1) are all conserved in animals and plants (but not yeast) suggesting important roles in multicellular organisms. The exact role of Ufm1 modification "in vivo" is not yet known, but the primary target appear to be uL24/RPL26 in human cells. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15348981 | 1,958,660 |
1,042,060 | Turing's report on the ACE was written in late 1945 and included detailed logical circuit diagrams and a cost estimate of £11,200. He felt that speed and size of memory were crucial and he proposed a high-speed memory of what would today be called 25 kilobytes, accessed at a speed of 1 MHz; he remarked that for the purposes required "the memory needs to be very large indeed by comparison with standards which prevail in most valve and relay work, and [so] it is necessary to look for some more economical form of storage", and that memory "appears to be the main limitation in the design of a calculator, i.e. if the storage problem can be solved all the rest is comparatively straightforward". The ACE implemented subroutine calls, whereas the EDVAC did not, and what also set the ACE apart from the EDVAC was the use of "Abbreviated Computer Instructions," an early form of programming language. Initially, it was planned that Tommy Flowers, the engineer at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill in north London, who had been responsible for building the Colossus computers should build the ACE, but because of the secrecy around his wartime achievements and the pressure of post-war work, this was not possible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=988735 | 1,041,517 |
1,854,480 | The secondary chemicals produced by endophytic fungi when associated with their host plants can be very harmful to mammals including livestock and humans, causing more than 600 million dollars in losses due to dead livestock every year. For example, the ergot alkaloids produced by Claviceps spp. have been dangerous contaminants of rye crops for centuries. When not lethal, defense chemicals produced by fungal endophytes may lead to lower productivity in cows and other livestock feeding on infected forage. Reduced nutritional quality of infected plant tissue also lowers the performance of farm animals, compounding the effect of reduced feed uptake when provided with infected plant matter. Reduced frequency of pregnancy and birth has also been reported in cattle and horses fed with infected forage. Endophytic fungi can even cause severe toxicity in grazing livestock, which is often referred to as fescue toxicosis. Cattle that graze on tall fescue ("Festuca arundinacea") develop symptoms such as fescue foot, fat necrosis and summer slump, which is a general malady of fescue toxicosis. Fungi, plants and herbivore population sizes can have a cyclical predator-prey pattern. Infection rates of endophytic fungi in plants tend to increase with rise in grazing pressure. If endophytic fungi becomes highly prevalent in grazer food sources, it can even lead to population crashes in grazing animals. Consequently, the dairy and meat-production industries must endure substantial economic losses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31533830 | 1,853,414 |
721,909 | Economists have come up with many ideas to answer the above question. The one which currently dominates the academic literature on real business cycle theory was introduced by Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott in their 1982 work "Time to Build And Aggregate Fluctuations". They envisioned this factor to be technological shocks—i.e., random fluctuations in the productivity level that shifted the constant growth trend up or down. Examples of such shocks include innovations, bad weather, imported oil price increase, stricter environmental and safety regulations, etc. The general gist is that something occurs that directly changes the effectiveness of capital and/or labour. This in turn affects the decisions of workers and firms, who in turn change what they buy and produce and thus eventually affect output. RBC models predict time sequences of allocation for consumption, investment, etc. given these shocks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29815196 | 721,529 |
2,170,183 | Ultrasonic testing (UT) can offer detailed NDT information for welded thermoplastic composites. Tests can be done with shear wave or transverse waves, though the composite materials often attenuate the signals significantly and care must be taken to account for this. Contact methods using either manual or automated transducers coupled to the part being inspected or non-contact methods using water immersion or a bubbler (i.e. a continuous stream of water through which the ultrasound passes) can be effective if designed and calibrated properly. Amplitude of reflection data may be used to generate B-scan or C-scan images, which can show the materials being welded at various, discrete depths or cross sections, a capability not available with traditional radiographic methods. Ultrasound can detect delaminations, lack of fusion, porosity, voids, inclusions and other defects mostly regardless of their orientation. Deterring factors include that the method is time consuming and the data are open to some interpretation, requiring skilled technician to perform and interpret the test. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56316763 | 2,168,945 |
723,273 | He began working on it in 1912, after he had realized that "most of meteorology is nothing but a collection of innumerable empirical findings, mainly numerical data, with traces of physics used to explain some of them... Mathematics was even less applied, nothing more than elementary calculus... Advanced mathematics had no role in that science..." His first work described the present climate on Earth and how the Sun's rays determine the temperature on Earth's surface after passing through the atmosphere. He published the first paper on the subject entitled "Contribution to the mathematical theory of climate" in Belgrade on 5 April 1912. His next paper was entitled ""Distribution of the sun radiation on the earth's surface"" and was published on 5 June 1913. He correctly calculates the intensity of insolation and developed a mathematical theory describing Earth's climate zones. His aim was an integral, mathematically accurate theory which connects thermal regimes of the planets to their movement around the Sun. He wrote: "...such a theory would enable us to go beyond the range of direct observations, not only in space, but also in time... It would allow reconstruction of the Earth's climate, and also its predictions, as well as give us the first reliable data about the climate conditions on other planets." Then he tried to find a mathematical model of a cosmic mechanism to describe the Earth's climatic and geological history. He published a paper on the subject entitled "About the issue of the astronomical theory of ice ages" in 1914. But the cosmic mechanism was not an easy problem, and Milanković took three decades to develop an astronomical theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=150014 | 722,893 |
283,581 | A space settlement would set a precedent that would raise numerous socio-political questions. The mere construction of the needed infrastructure presents a daunting set of technological and economic challenges. Space settlements are generally conceived as organizational and material structures that have to provide for nearly all (or all) the needs of larger numbers of humans, in an environment out in space that is very hostile to human life and inaccessible for maintenance and supply from Earth. It would involve technologies, such as controlled ecological life-support systems, that have yet to be developed in any meaningful way. It would also have to deal with the as-yet-unknown issue of how humans would behave and thrive in such places long-term. Because of the present cost of sending anything from the surface of the Earth into orbit (around $1400 per kg, or $640 per pound, to low Earth orbit by Falcon Heavy), a space settlement would currently be a massively expensive project. On the technological front, there is ongoing progress in making access to space cheaper (reusable launch systems could reach $20 per kg to orbit), and in creating automated manufacturing and construction techniques. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29248 | 283,428 |
298,140 | Constructivism asks why students do not learn deeply by listening to a teacher, or reading from a textbook. To design effective teaching environments, it believes one needs a good understanding of what children already know when they come into the classroom. The curriculum should be designed in a way that builds on the pupil's background knowledge and is allowed to develop with them. Begin with complex problems and teach basic skills while solving these problems. The learning theories of John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and David A. Kolb serve as the foundation of the application of constructivist learning theory in the classroom. Constructivism has many varieties such as active learning, discovery learning, and knowledge building, but all versions promote a student's free exploration within a given framework or structure. The teacher acts as a facilitator who encourages students to discover principles for themselves and to construct knowledge by working answering open-ended questions and solving real-world problems. To do this, a teacher should encourage curiosity and discussion among his/her students as well as promoting their autonomy. In scientific areas in the classroom, constructivist teachers provide raw data and physical materials for the students to work with and analyze. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17994 | 297,980 |
1,889,581 | Washington State communities have integrated OCL into educational efforts in innovative ways. For instance, Bellevue College, Washington, the state's largest community college, with help with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, purchased 500 inexpensive netbook laptop computers in November 2011 for its students to rent for $35 per quarter to "download and read Internet material." The anticipation was that the machines would also be used with OCL material. Since its initiation, OCL is credited with inspiring open textbook initiatives by the legislatures of California (2012), British Columbia (2012) and actions by the legislatures of Illinois, Minnesota, and Virginia all similar to California's. North Dakota proposed a resolution asking faculty and college administrations to support the use of open textbooks. Further, the Trade Adjustment Community College and Career Training grants program requires that all material created using federal funds be available to the public through an open license. Materials produced through this vehicle will be added to the OCL. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42174228 | 1,888,498 |
1,968,279 | Letters in winter 1966 from W.A. Fowler unexpectedly invited Clayton to return to Caltech in order to coauthor a book on nucleosynthesis with Fowler and Fred Hoyle. In his autobiography Clayton quotes these letters. He accepted that offer but the book was never written because while he was resident at Caltech Clayton was invited by Fred Hoyle to Cambridge University (UK) in spring 1967 to advise a research program in nucleosynthesis at Hoyle's newly created Institute of Astronomy. The award to Clayton of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1966–68) facilitated leaves of absence from Rice University for this purpose. Clayton exerted that research leadership in Cambridge during 1967-72 by bringing his research students from Rice University with him. That prolific period ended abruptly by Hoyle's unexpected resignation from Cambridge University in 1972. Clayton was during these years a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall. At Rice University W.D. Arnett, S.E. Woosley, and W.M. Howard published jointly numerous innovative studies with Clayton on the topic of explosive supernova nucleosynthesis. During his Cambridge years, Clayton proposed radioactive gamma-ray-emitting nuclei as nucleosynthesis sources for the field of gamma-ray astronomy of line transitions from radioactive nuclei with coauthors (Stirling Colgate, Gerald J. Fishman, and Joseph Silk). Detection of these gamma-ray lines two decades later provided the decisive proof that iron had been synthesized explosively in supernovae in the form of radioactive nickel isotopes rather than as iron itself, which Fowler and Hoyle had both advocated. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36061850 | 1,967,149 |
559,072 | Studies of the brain became more sophisticated after the invention of the microscope and the development of a staining procedure by Camillo Golgi during the late 1890s that used a silver chromate salt to reveal the intricate structures of single neurons. His technique was used by Santiago Ramón y Cajal and led to the formation of the neuron doctrine, the hypothesis that the functional unit of the brain is the neuron. Golgi and Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for their extensive observations, descriptions and categorizations of neurons throughout the brain. The hypotheses of the neuron doctrine were supported by experiments following Galvani's pioneering work in the electrical excitability of muscles and neurons. In 1898, British scientist John Newport Langley first coined the term "autonomic" in classifying the connections of nerve fibers to peripheral nerve cells. Langley is known as one of the fathers of the chemical receptor theory, and as the origin of the concept of "receptive substance". Towards the end of the nineteenth century Francis Gotch conducted several experiments on nervous system function. In 1899 he described the "inexcitable" or "refractory phase" that takes place between nerve impulses. His primary focus was on how nerve interaction affected the muscles and eyes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4794482 | 558,783 |
909,918 | Cells alter their phenotype in response to numerous environmental stimuli and can lose the expression of genes typically used to mark their identity, making it difficult to research the contribution of certain cell types to disease. Therefore, researchers often use transgenic mice expressing CreER recombinase induced by tamoxifen administration, under the control of a promoter of a gene that marks the specific cell type of interest, with a Cre-dependent fluorescent protein reporter. The Cre recombinase is fused to a mutant form of the oestrogen receptor, which binds the synthetic oestrogen 4-hydroxytamoxifen instead of its natural ligand 17β-estradiol. CreER(T2) resides within the cytoplasm and can only translocate to the nucleus following tamoxifen administration, allowing tight temporal control of recombination. The fluorescent reporter cassette will contain a promoter to permit high expression of the fluorescent transgene reporter (e.g. a CAG promoter) and a loxP flanked stop cassette, ensuring the expression of the transgene is Cre-recombinase dependent and the reporter sequence. Upon Cre driven recombination, the stop cassette is excised, allowing reporter genes to express specifically in cells in which the Cre expression is being driven by the cell-specific marker promoter. Since removal of the stop cassette is permanent, the reporter genes are expressed in all the progeny produced by the initial cells where the Cre was once activated. Such conditional lineage tracing has proved to be extremely useful to efficiently and specifically identify vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) and VSMC-derived cells and has been used to test effects on VSMC and VSMC-derived cells "in vivo." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4363576 | 909,439 |
544,531 | Sparassodonta (from Greek ['], to tear, rend; and , gen. [', '], tooth) is an extinct order of carnivorous metatherian mammals native to South America, related to modern marsupials. They were once considered to be true marsupials, but are now thought to be a separate side branch that split before the last common ancestor of all modern marsupials. A number of these mammalian predators closely resemble placental predators that evolved separately on other continents, and are cited frequently as examples of convergent evolution. They were first described by Florentino Ameghino, from fossils found in the Santa Cruz beds of Patagonia. Sparassodonts were present throughout South America's long period of "splendid isolation" during the Cenozoic; during this time, they shared the niches for large warm-blooded predators with the flightless terror birds. Previously, it was thought that these mammals died out in the face of competition from "more competitive" placental carnivorans during the Pliocene Great American Interchange, but more recent research has showed that sparassodonts died out long before eutherian carnivores arrived in South America (aside from procyonids, which sparassodonts probably did not directly compete with). Sparassodonts have been referred to as borhyaenoids by some authors, but currently the term Borhyaenoidea refers to a restricted subgroup of sparassodonts comprising borhyaenids and their close relatives. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2552745 | 544,249 |
2,194,324 | is an international collaboration aimed simulating the integrated cardiovascular function of the rat and supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences as a National Center for Systems Biology. The project is motivated by the fact that, although there exist both a depth of knowledge of basic cardiovascular physiology and a host of physiological and genomic data from animal models of disease, there is a lack of understanding of how multiple genes and environmental factors interact to determine cardiovascular phenotype. The Virtual Physiological Rat Project is focused on developing computational tools to capture the underlying systems physiology as well as the pathophysiological perturbations associated with disease. These tools are being developed and validated based on experimental characterization of physiological function across a number of organ systems in rat strains engineered to show relevant disease phenotypes. Computer simulation is used to integrate disparate data (genomic, anatomic, physiological, etc.) to explain and predict function, and to translate the findings from animal models to yield new information on specific interrelated complex diseases in humans, including hypertension, kidney disease, heart failure, and metabolic syndrome. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36307309 | 2,193,074 |
1,546,537 | Accum became involved with the production of gas for lighting purposes through the efforts of Friedrich Albert Winsor (1763–1830), another German émigré, who had been waging a longstanding publicity campaign. In 1809, Accum was asked to appear before a Parliamentary committee that was considering granting a charter for a gaslight company Winsor had been promoting. While unsuccessful in its first attempt, the bill passed in 1810 and the company was incorporated under the name "Gas Light and Coke Company". The newly incorporated company met the conditions laid out in the bill and began operating in 1812 with Accum as a member of its board of directors. Accum oversaw the construction of a gas plant on Curtain Road, which was the first such plant in the history of gaslight. After that time, gaslight was no longer limited to industrial mills and was introduced into urban life. Westminster Bridge was lighted with gas lamps in 1813, and a year later, the streets in Westminster followed. In 1815, Accum published "Description of the Process of Manufacturing Coal-Gas". In the introduction, Accum compared the newly formed gas utility with the water companies that had been operating in London since the early 18th century: "Through gas, it will be possible to have light in all rooms, as is presently the case with water." When this book was translated into German in Berlin in 1815, an explanatory note had to be added, as no such water utilities existed there: "There are many private homes in England that are provided with pipes in the walls so that in almost all rooms, all one needs to do to get water is open a faucet." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=287779 | 1,545,661 |
444,404 | Behavior and motivation are broad concepts and have sparked a lot of debate on the etic vs. emic perspective. One of the current major motivational theories is self-determination theory, which has been claimed to be etic universal, or, in other words, the validatity of this theory can be empirically identified across cultures. Most studies supporting this claim of cross-cultural generalizability have been focused on comparing industrialized countries in high- and middle-income regions, but could not establish the global validity of this theory. Recently, some studies attempted to bridge this gap. For example, a study compared self-determination theory models predicting physical activity in diabetes patients across diverse disadvantaged populations (i.e. immigrant populations in urban Sweden and South Africa, and a population in rural Uganda) using multigroup structural equation modelling. The motivational process models did not correspond entirely and the study could not provide sufficient evidence for the etic validity of self-determination theory. The authors concluded that more research is needed which is in alignment with the lack of evidence for many other psychosocial domains for which research has been limited to western, industrialised and high-income countries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11507939 | 444,189 |
761,408 | Anthony Cordesman wrote of NATO's theater air supremacy during its 1999 intervention in the Kosovo War of 1998–1999. According to several reports, including reports by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that quote Russian sources, the Russian Federation has in recent decades formulated explicit strategies for using tactical nuclear weapons. These new strategies have in part resulted from the assumption of obtaining air supremacy and use by the U.S. Air Force of precision munitions with little collateral damage in the Kosovo conflict in what amounted to quick mass destruction of military assets once only possible with nuclear weapons or massive bombing against fellow Slavic Serbians; it also assumed that Russia and its allies do not have the strategic economic capacity of current NATO and allied nations to meet this threat with conventional weapons. In response Vladimir Putin, then secretary of the Security Council of Russia, developed a concept of using both tactical and strategic nuclear threats and strikes to de-escalate or cause an enemy to disengage from a conventional conflict threatening what Russia considered a strategic interest. This concept was formalized when Putin took power in Russia in the following year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=537478 | 761,001 |
740,020 | Due partly to their ready availability and the ease with which they may be grown in the laboratory, "C. micaceus" and other coprinoid mushrooms were common subjects in cytological studies of the 19th and 20th centuries. The German botanist Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link reported his observations of the structure of the hymenium (the fertile spore-bearing surface) in 1809, but misinterpreted what he had seen. Link thought that microscopic structures known today as basidia were "thecae", comparable in form to the asci of the Ascomycetes, and that each theca contained four series of spores. His inaccurate drawings of the hymenium of "C. micaceus" were copied in subsequent mycological publications by other authors, and it was not until microscopy had advanced that mycologists were able to determine the true nature of the basidia, when nearly three decades later in 1837 Joseph-Henri Léveillé and August Corda independently published correct descriptions of the structure of the hymenium. In 1924, A. H. Reginald Buller published a comprehensive description and analysis of the processes of spore production and release in the third volume of his "Researches on Fungi". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22449893 | 739,628 |
1,599,467 | Though, mRNA structures are generally short-lived and single-stranded, there are an abundance of non-coding RNAs with different secondary and tertiary folding (tRNA, rRNA etc.) which contain a preponderance of the canonical Watson-Crick (WC) base-pairs, together with significant number of non-Watson Crick (NWC) base-pairs - for which such RNA also qualify for regular structural validation that apply for nucleic acid helices. The standard practice is to analyse the intra- (Transnational: Shift, Slide, Rise; Rotational: Tilt, Roll, Twist) and inter-base-pair geometrical parameters (Transnational: Shear, Stagger, Stretch, Rotational: Buckle, Propeller, Opening) - whether in-range or out-of-range with respect to their suggested values. These parameters describe the relative orientations of the two paired bases with respect to each other in two strands (intra) along with those of the two stacked base pairs (inter) with respect to each other, and, hence, together, they serve to validate nucleic acid structures in general. Since, RNA-helices are small in length (average: 10-20 bps), the use of electrostatic surface potential as a validation parameter has been found to be beneficial, particularly for modelling purposes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41100419 | 1,598,567 |
1,219,918 | Despite theoretical elegance of Ertel's potential vorticity, early applications of Ertel PV are limited to tracer studies using special isentropic maps. It is generally insufficient to deduce other variables from the knowledge of Ertel PV fields only, since it is a product of wind (formula_81) and temperature fields (formula_51 and formula_83). However, large-scale atmospheric motions are inherently quasi-static; wind and mass fields are adjusted and balanced against each other (e.g., gradient balance, geostrophic balance). Therefore, other assumptions can be made to form a closure and deduce the complete structure of the flow in question:(1) introduce balancing conditions of certain form. These conditions must be physically realizable and stable without instabilities such as static instability. Also, the space and time scales of the motion must be compatible with the assumed balance;(2) specify a certain reference state, such as distribution of temperature, potential temperature, or geopotential height;(3) assert proper boundary conditions and invert the PV field globally.The first and second assumptions are expressed explicitly in the derivation of quasi-geostrophic PV. Leading-order geostrophic balance is used as the balancing condition. The second-order terms such as ageostrophic winds, perturbations of potential temperature and perturbations of geostrophic height should have consistent magnitude, i.e., of the order of Rossby number. The reference state is zonally averaged potential temperature and geopotential height. The third assumption is apparent even for 2-dimensional vorticity inversion because inverting the Laplace operator in equation (21), which is a second-order elliptic operator, requires knowledge of the boundary conditions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5837036 | 1,219,264 |
941,561 | In the first year, fourteen hours of lectures each week were on military subjects, including military history, while seventeen hours were non-military, which included general history, mathematics, science and a choice of French or Russian. Roughly the same time allocations were used in the last two years. Lectures were supplemented by visits to fortifications, arms factories and exercises of the railway regiment. During the three month summer breaks the students attended manoeuvres and were taken on field tactical exercises in which they commanded imaginary units. At the end of the course they took their second examination. Only about thirty students passed this extremely difficult test. They were then assigned ("kommandiert") to the Great General Staff, while retaining their regimental attachments. After two years they took their third and final examination, after which five to eight officers were permanently posted to fill vacancies in the General Staff a remarkable winnowing from the many who had entered the competition. Occasionally, an exceptional officer was appointed without this training: for example Max Bauer, who was trained as an artilleryman, became a prominent member of the Great General Staff, with the reputation of being the smartest man in the army. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=438600 | 941,059 |
905,866 | Many software solutions have been developed to organize and integrate the different phases of a product's lifecycle. PLM should not be seen as a single software product but a collection of software tools and working methods integrated together to address either single stages of the lifecycle or connect different tasks or manage the whole process. Some software providers cover the whole PLM range while others have a single niche application. Some applications can span many fields of PLM with different modules within the same data model. An overview of the fields within PLM is covered here. The simple classifications do not always fit exactly; many areas overlap and many software products cover more than one area or do not fit easily into one category. It should also not be forgotten that one of the main goals of PLM is to collect knowledge that can be reused for other projects and to coordinate simultaneous concurrent development of many products. It is about business processes, people and methods as much as software application solutions. Although PLM is mainly associated with engineering tasks it also involves marketing activities such as product portfolio management (PPM), particularly with regards to new product development (NPD). There are several life-cycle models in each industry to consider, but most are rather similar. What follows below is one possible life-cycle model; while it emphasizes hardware-oriented products, similar phases would describe any form of product or service, including non-technical or software-based products: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=597229 | 905,390 |
57,670 | Early in his life, Schrödinger experimented in the fields of electrical engineering, atmospheric electricity, and atmospheric radioactivity, but he usually worked with his former teacher Franz Exner. He also studied vibrational theory, the theory of Brownian motion, and mathematical statistics. In 1912, at the request of the editors of the "Handbook of Electricity and Magnetism", Schrödinger wrote an article titled "Dielectrism". That same year, Schrödinger gave a theoretical estimate of the probable height distribution of radioactive substances, which is required to explain the observed radioactivity of the atmosphere, and in August 1913 executed several experiments in Zeehame that confirmed his theoretical estimate and those of Victor Franz Hess. For this work, Schrödinger was awarded the 1920 Haitinger Prize (Haitinger-Preis) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Other experimental studies conducted by the young researcher in 1914 were checking formulas for capillary pressure in gas bubbles and the study of the properties of soft beta radiation produced by gamma rays striking metal surface. The last work he performed together with his friend Fritz Kohlrausch. In 1919, Schrödinger performed his last physical experiment on coherent light and subsequently focused on theoretical studies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9942 | 57,646 |
1,211,395 | As a teenager, Ayrton became deeply involved in the women's suffrage movement, joining the WSPU in 1907 after attending a celebration with released prisoners. In 1909 Ayrton opened the second day of the Knightsbridge "Women's Exhibition and Sale of Work in the Colours" which included new model bicycles painted in purple, white and green and raised from 50 stalls and tea etc. £5,664 for the movement. Ayrton was with the delegation that went with Emily Pankhurst to see the Prime Minister and met his private secretary instead on 18 November 1910 (Black Friday). Ayrton permitted Christabel Pankhurst to transfer sums to her bank account to avoid confiscation in 1912, and hosted Pankhurst in times of recovery from imprisonment and force feeding. One attempt to re-arrest Pankhurst on 29 April 1913 to continue her sentence was driven back by suffragettes picketing outside, but Pankhurst was eventually re-arrested outside Ayrton's home on her way to the funeral of Emily Davison (who was killed after running in front of the King's horse at the Derby). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1805181 | 1,210,743 |
89,053 | In 1925 it was determined by Fricke that the thickness of erythrocyte and yeast cell membranes ranged between 3.3 and 4 nm, a thickness compatible with a lipid monolayer. The choice of the dielectric constant used in these studies was called into question but future tests could not disprove the results of the initial experiment. Independently, the leptoscope was invented in order to measure very thin membranes by comparing the intensity of light reflected from a sample to the intensity of a membrane standard of known thickness. The instrument could resolve thicknesses that depended on pH measurements and the presence of membrane proteins that ranged from 8.6 to 23.2 nm, with the lower measurements supporting the lipid bilayer hypothesis. Later in the 1930s, the membrane structure model developed in general agreement to be the paucimolecular model of Davson and Danielli (1935). This model was based on studies of surface tension between oils and echinoderm eggs. Since the surface tension values appeared to be much lower than would be expected for an oil–water interface, it was assumed that some substance was responsible for lowering the interfacial tensions in the surface of cells. It was suggested that a lipid bilayer was in between two thin protein layers. The paucimolecular model immediately became popular and it dominated cell membrane studies for the following 30 years, until it became rivaled by the fluid mosaic model of Singer and Nicolson (1972). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33051527 | 89,017 |
1,159,196 | The existence of a mutant spectrum was experimentally evidenced first by clonal analyses of RNA bacteriophage Qβ populations whose replication had been initiated by a single virus particle. Individual genomes differed from the consensus sequence in an average of one to two mutations per individual genome. Fitness of biological clones was inferior to that of the parental, uncloned population, a difference also documented for vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). The replicative capacity of a population ensemble need not coincide with that of its individual components. The finding that a viral population was essentially a pool of mutants came at a time when mutations in general genetics were considered rare events, and virologists associated a viral genome with a defined nucleotide sequence, as still implied today in the contents of data banks. The cloud nature of Qβ was understood as a consequence of its high mutation rate, calculated in 10 mutations introduced per nucleotide copied, together with tolerance of individual genomes to accept an undetermined proportion of the newly arising mutations, despite fitness costs. The error rate estimated for bacteriophage Qβ has been confirmed, and is comparable to values calculated for other RNA viruses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6962692 | 1,158,582 |
279,673 | Though most of this work dealt with the theoretical and experimental relations between propellant, rocket mass, thrust, and velocity, a final section, entitled "Calculation of minimum mass required to raise one pound to an 'infinite' altitude," discussed the possible uses of rockets, not only to reach the upper atmosphere but to escape from Earth's gravitation altogether. He determined, using an approximate method to solve his differential equation of motion for vertical flight, that a rocket with an effective exhaust velocity (see specific impulse) of 7000 feet per second and an initial weight of 602 pounds would be able to send a one-pound payload to an infinite height. Included as a thought experiment was the idea of launching a rocket to the Moon and igniting a mass of flash powder on its surface, so as to be visible through a telescope. He discussed the matter seriously, down to an estimate of the amount of powder required. Goddard's conclusion was that a rocket with starting mass of 3.21 tons could produce a flash "just visible" from Earth, assuming a final payload weight of 10.7 pounds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=210597 | 279,523 |
920,032 | In 2015, on March 24, Germanwings Flight 9525 (an Airbus A320-200) crashed northwest of Nice, in the French Alps, after a constant descent that began one minute after the last routine contact with air traffic control and shortly after the aircraft had reached its assigned cruise altitude. All 144 passengers and six crew members were killed. The crash was intentionally caused by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz. Having been declared "unfit to work" without telling his employer, Lubitz reported for duty, and during the flight locked the Captain out of the flightdeck. In response to the incident and the circumstances of Lubitz's involvement, aviation authorities in Canada, New Zealand, Germany and Australia implemented new regulations that require two authorized personnel to be present in the cockpit at all times. Three days after the incident the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members, including at least one pilot, are in the cockpit at all times of the flight. Several airlines announced they had already adopted similar policies voluntarily. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=682931 | 919,546 |
463,808 | In the "Bad Nauheim Debate" (1920) between Einstein and (among others) Philipp Lenard, the latter stated the following objections: He criticized the lack of "illustrativeness" of Einstein's version of relativity, a condition that he suggested could only be met by an aether theory. Einstein responded that for physicists the content of "illustrativeness" or "common sense" had changed in time, so it could no longer be used as a criterion for the validity of a physical theory. Lenard also argued that with his relativistic theory of gravity Einstein had tacitly reintroduced the aether under the name "space". While this charge was rejected (among others) by Hermann Weyl, in an inaugural address given at the University of Leiden in 1920, shortly after the Bad Nauheim debates, Einstein himself acknowledged that according to his general theory of relativity, so-called "empty space" possesses physical properties that influence matter and "vice versa". Lenard also argued that Einstein's general theory of relativity admits the existence of superluminal velocities, in contradiction to the principles of special relativity; for example, in a rotating coordinate system in which the Earth is at rest, the distant points of the whole universe are rotating around Earth with superluminal velocities. However, as Weyl pointed out, it is incorrect to handle a rotating extended system as a rigid body (neither in special nor in general relativity)—so the signal velocity of an object never exceeds the speed of light. Another criticism that was raised by both Lenard and Gustav Mie concerned the existence of "fictitious" gravitational fields in accelerating frames, which according to Einstein's Equivalence Principle are no less physically real than those produced by material sources. Lenard and Mie argued that physical forces can only be produced by real material sources, while the gravitational field that Einstein supposed to exist in an accelerating frame of reference has no concrete physical meaning. Einstein responded that, based on Mach's principle, one can think of these gravitational fields as induced by the distant masses. In this respect the criticism of Lenard and Mie has been vindicated, since according to the modern consensus, in agreement with Einstein's own mature views, Mach's principle as originally conceived by Einstein is not actually supported by general relativity, as already mentioned above. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30694430 | 463,578 |
131,941 | An example of Al-Biruni's analysis is his summary of why many Hindus hate Muslims. Biruni notes in the beginning of his book how the Muslims had a hard time learning about Hindu knowledge and culture. He explains that Hinduism and Islam are totally different from each other. Moreover, Hindus in 11th century India had suffered waves of destructive attacks on many of its cities, and Islamic armies had taken numerous Hindu slaves to Persia, which – claimed Al-Biruni – contributed to Hindus becoming suspicious of all foreigners, not just Muslims. Hindus considered Muslims violent and impure, and did not want to share anything with them. Over time, Al-Biruni won the welcome of Hindu scholars. Al-Biruni collected books and studied with these Hindu scholars to become fluent in Sanskrit, discover and translate into Arabic the mathematics, science, medicine, astronomy and other fields of arts as practiced in 11th-century India. He was inspired by the arguments offered by Indian scholars who believed earth must be globular in shape, which they felt was the only way to fully explain the difference in daylight hours by latitude, seasons and Earth's relative positions with Moon and stars. At the same time, Al-Biruni was also critical of Indian scribes, who he believed carelessly corrupted Indian documents while making copies of older documents. He also criticized the Hindus on what he saw them do and not do, for example finding them deficient in curiosity about history and religion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=271975 | 131,889 |
1,989,248 | Aside from calculating the "net additions to stock" (NAS) as a balancing item, flows within the economy are not considered (advances are currently being made in the field of dynamic stock modelling). MFA covers all solid, gaseous, and liquid materials, mobilized by humans or by their livestock, with the exception of bulk water and air. The unit of measurement is most commonly (metric) tonnes per year (t/a). Flows are distinguished by whether they are extracted domestically ("domestic extraction", DE) or are trade flows ("imports or exports"). Materials are most commonly grouped according to four main material categories: biomass, fossil energy carriers, metals, and non-metallic minerals. The former category may be further differentiated by type of use into industrial and construction minerals. It is very important to note that MFA seeks to provide a complete picture of an economy's material use so that materials are included in these accounts irrespective of whether or not they have direct market value. The most prominent non-market flows covered by MFA are grazed biomass and used crop residues as well as waste rock extracted during mining activities. In 2010, these material flows accounted for 21% of global extraction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11438515 | 1,988,106 |
1,124,388 | Gray bats, as is the case in other organisms, acquire and use energy for growth and maintenance of their bodies before reaching sexual maturity, at which point much of their energy expenditure is devoted to reproductive processes. Gray bats prefer caves located near appropriate foraging sites to reduce the energy costs of flying long distances to find food. Gray bats roost in large colonies to reduce the cost of temperature regulation on the individual. Female bats must maintain relatively high body temperatures in comparison to the cooler temperatures of the cave during lactation, requiring large amounts of energy. During the peak lactation period, when young are roughly 20–30 days old, females may spend as many as 7 hours a night feeding. Because of the high energy demands on the females, larger roosts are more beneficial so that all may share the burden of maintaining body temperature. The formation of large colonies does at some point, however, have a negative trade-off. As the size of the colony increases, intraspecific competition for food resources increase, forcing an individual to forage over a larger range. This increased foraging range will lead to greater energy expenditure, potentially reducing growth in gray bat juveniles. The distance a gray bat travels from the roosting area to foraging area has been shown to be negatively correlated to the average weight of gray bats (the longer the distance the bat must fly to forage, the less the bat will weigh), lending support to the idea that long flights are energetically costly. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=827802 | 1,123,814 |
599,811 | Early regenerative applications of adult stem cells has focused on intravenous delivery of blood progenitors known as Hematopetic Stem Cells (HSC's). CD34+ hematopoietic Stem Cells have been clinically applied to treat various diseases including spinal cord injury, liver cirrhosis and Peripheral Vascular disease. Research has shown that CD34+ hematopoietic Stem Cells are relatively more numerous in men than in women of reproductive age group among spinal cord Injury victims. Other early commercial applications have focused on Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs). For both cell lines, direct injection or placement of cells into a site in need of repair may be the preferred method of treatment, as vascular delivery suffers from a "pulmonary first pass effect" where intravenous injected cells are sequestered in the lungs. Clinical case reports in orthopedic applications have been published. Wakitani has published a small case series of nine defects in five knees involving surgical transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells with coverage of the treated chondral defects. Centeno et al. have reported high field MRI evidence of increased cartilage and meniscus volume in individual human clinical subjects as well as a large n=227 safety study. Many other stem cell based treatments are operating outside the US, with much controversy being reported regarding these treatments as some feel more regulation is needed as clinics tend to exaggerate claims of success and minimize or omit risks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2777285 | 599,505 |
1,444,181 | Some proponents of Dual Systems Theory have been accused of forwarding certain agendas involving expansion of universal education, including the idea that youth are biologically predisposed to immaturity, which is then corrected by them pursuing education. This accusation goes back to the early 20th century, when G. Stanley Hall theorized that adolescence was an inevitable and necessary stage of life. He advocated for the undergraduate to be exempt from adult responsibilities, and that students have the freedom to be lazy. His definition of adolescence included girls going through it from age twelve to twenty one and males from age fourteen to twenty five. This may be where the commonly cited myth of the male and female brain maturing at these ages originates from. However, Hall's claims were not supported by any evidence. He would propose a new stage of life that would delay entry into the world of work and that any attempt to restrict the time spent in school or college was "an attempt to return to more savage conditions". This provides some credence that the troubled teen industry is driven by motivation to expand the education system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55377516 | 1,443,368 |
1,516,816 | Humberto Campins (born in Barquisimeto, 1946) is an international expert on asteroids and comets. He attended the University of Kansas, where he earned a bachelor's degree in astronomy. He went onto the University of Arizona, where he earned a PhD in planetary sciences. As a graduate student he was named a representative to the Committee for Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the General Assembly of the United Nations. He conducts research at observatories around the world, including Arizona, Chile, France, Hawaii, Spain and the Vatican. In 2010 he discovered water ice and organic molecules on the asteroid 24 Themis and later on 65 Cybele adding weight to the growing theory that Earth's water may have come from asteroids. His expertise have landed him on NASA and European Space Agency teams preparing interplanetary vehicles that will launch in the coming few years, including the OSIRIS-REx project and the Marco Polo-R mission. Since 2002 worked at the University of Central Florida and University of Arizona. He has earned several prestigious awards including a Fulbright and the Don Quijote Award. The asteroid, 3327 Campins, was named after him. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29302481 | 1,515,964 |
107,850 | In pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates were both high, and fluctuated rapidly according to natural events, such as drought and disease, to produce a relatively constant and young population. Family planning and contraception were virtually nonexistent; therefore, birth rates were essentially only limited by the ability of women to bear children. Emigration depressed death rates in some special cases (for example, Europe and particularly the Eastern United States during the 19th century), but, overall, death rates tended to match birth rates, often exceeding 40 per 1000 per year. Children contributed to the economy of the household from an early age by carrying water, firewood, and messages, caring for younger siblings, sweeping, washing dishes, preparing food, and working in the fields. Raising a child cost little more than feeding him or her; there were no education or entertainment expenses. Thus, the total cost of raising children barely exceeded their contribution to the household. In addition, as they became adults they became a major input to the family business, mainly farming, and were the primary form of insurance for adults in old age. In India, an adult son was all that prevented a widow from falling into destitution. While death rates remained high there was no question as to the need for children, even if the means to prevent them had existed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=231079 | 107,805 |
1,416,136 | The pioneer work to the implementation of the phase-contrast method to X-ray physics was presented in 1965 by Ulrich Bonse and Michael Hart, Department of Materials Science and Engineering of Cornell University, New York. They presented a crystal interferometer, made from a large and highly perfect single crystal. Not less than 30 years later the Japanese scientists Atsushi Momose, Tohoru Takeda and co-workers adopted this idea and refined it for application in biological imaging, for instance by increasing the field of view with the assistance of new setup configurations and phase retrieval techniques. The Bonse–Hart interferometer provides several orders of magnitude higher sensitivity in biological samples than other phase-contrast techniques, but it cannot use conventional X-ray tubes because the crystals only accept a very narrow energy band of X-rays (Δ"E"/"E" ~ 10). In 2012, Han Wen and co-workers took a step forward by replacing the crystals with nanometric phase gratings. The gratings split and direct X-rays over a broad spectrum, thus lifting the restriction on the bandwidth of the X-ray source. They detected sub nanoradian refractive bending of X-rays in biological samples with a grating Bonse–Hart interferometer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35154335 | 1,415,339 |
1,154,595 | On June 11, 2010, the Bulgarian government announced that it would freeze indefinitely the planned construction of the Belene nuclear power plant because it was uncertain when the investment would be returned. Five months later, on December 2, a non-binding memorandum of understanding was signed between NEK EAD, Rosatom, Altran and Fortum, setting up a 6.3 bln. euro price on the power station, after months of unsuccessful talks on the cost and redeemability of the project itself. Further disagreement and the persistent demands of the Bulgarian government to lower the cost under 5.0 billion euro led to the termination of the project in March 2012. However, in late 2012 the opposition initiated a referendum petition which was signed by 1,385,283 people and the first national referendum in the history of modern Bulgaria was held on January 27, 2013. A majority of the people had voted ′Yes' to the construction of a new nuclear power plant, but despite that, the number of voters who attended the voting was too low for it to pass. The referendum passed the question further to the Parliament, which decided on 27 February 2013 to suspend it. In June 2018 the Bulgarian Parliament voted to abolish the moratorium on the construction of the power plant and in December 2019 Minister of Energy announced that five companies placed bids and have been selected as prospective strategic investors in the project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6370024 | 1,153,985 |
2,149,733 | The Chicago Air Shower Array (CASA) was a significant ultra high high-energy astrophysics experiment operating in the 1990s. It consisted of a very large array of scintillation detectors located at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, USA, approximately 80 kilometers southwest of Salt Lake City. The full CASA detector, consisting of 1089 detectors began operating in 1992 in conjunction with a second instrument, the Michigan Muon Array (MIA), under the name CASA-MIA. MIA was made of 2500 square meters of buried muon detectors. At the time of its operation, CASA-MIA was the most sensitive experiment built to date in the study of gamma ray and cosmic ray interactions at energies above 100 TeV (10 electronvolts). Research topics on data from this experiment covered a wide variety of physics issues, including the search for gamma rays from Galactic sources (especially the Crab Nebula and the X-ray binaries Cygnus X-3 and Hercules X-1) and extragalactic sources (active Galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts), the study of diffuse gamma-ray emission (an isotropic component or from the Galactic plane), and measurements of the cosmic ray composition in the region from 100 to 100,000 TeV. For the topic of composition, CASA-MIA worked in conjunction with several other experiments at the same site: the Broad Laterial Non-imaging Cherenkov Array (BLANCA), the Dual Imaging Cherenkov Experiment (DICE) and the Fly's Eye HiRes prototype experiment. CASA-MIA operated continuously between 1992 and 1999. In summer 1999, it was decommissioned. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1529011 | 2,148,502 |
1,250,683 | The site features artifacts donated in 1955 from the Bell family's personal museum, located in the Kite House at Beinn Bhreagh. The site also features memorabilia associated with Bell's experiments, including: the original hull of a hydrofoil boat, the HD-4, that set a world marine speed record in Baddeck by reaching speeds of over 112 km/h (over 70 mph) in 1919; a full-scale replica of that boat; the AEA Silver Dart which in 1909 J.A.D. MacCurdy piloted up into the air over the ice of Baddeck Bay to become the first controlled heavier-than-air craft to be flown in the British Empire—plus many other exhibits and documents from Bell's years of research activities on the transmission of speech and sound by wire and by light, as well as his experiments with kites, planes and high speed boats. The museum also features displays relating to Bell's work with in the field of deaf education and how it led to the invention of the telephone. The Alexander Graham Bell Historic Site was designed by Canadian government architect O. Howard Leicester, R.I.B.A. The architects for the Museum building were the Canadian architecture firm of Wood, Blachford, Ship (A. Campbell Wood, Hugh W. Blachford, Harold Ship). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35471671 | 1,250,007 |
862,646 | Fixed, forward-firing guns were found to be the most effective armament for a majority of World War I era fighter planes, but it was nearly impossible to fire them through the spinning propeller of one's own aircraft without destroying one's own plane. Roland Garros, working with Morane Saulnier Aéroplanes, was the first to solve this problem by attaching steel deflector wedges to the propeller. He achieved three kills but was shot down by ground fire and landed behind German lines. Anthony Fokker inspected the plane's wreckage and learned to improve the design by connecting the firing mechanism of the gun to the timing of the engine, thus allowing the gun to fire through the propeller without making contact with the propeller. As technology rapidly advanced, new and young aviators began defining the realm of air-to-air combat, such as Max Immelmann, Oswald Boelcke, and Lanoe Hawker. One of the greatest of these "ace pilots" of World War I, Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), wrote in his book "The Red Fighter Pilot", "The great thing in air fighting is that the decisive factor does not lie in trick flying but solely in the personal ability and energy of the aviator. A flying man may be able to loop and do all the stunts imaginable and yet he may not succeed in shooting down a single enemy." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=770634 | 862,186 |
619,944 | The Airbus A300 was to be the first aircraft to be developed, manufactured and marketed by Airbus. By early 1967 the "A300" label began to be applied to a proposed 320 seat, twin engined airliner. Following the 1967 tri-government agreement, Roger Béteille was appointed technical director of the A300 development project. Béteille developed a division of labour that would be the basis of Airbus' production for years to come: France would manufacture the cockpit, flight control and the lower centre section of the fuselage; Hawker Siddeley, whose Trident technology had impressed him, was to manufacture the wings; West Germany should make the forward and rear fuselage sections, as well as the upper centre section; the Dutch would make the flaps and spoilers; finally Spain (yet to become a full partner) would make the horizontal tailplane. On 26 September 1967 the West German, French and British governments signed a Memorandum of Understanding in London which allowed continued development studies. This also confirmed Sud Aviation as the "lead company", that France and the UK would each have a 37.5% work share with West Germany taking 25%, and that Rolls-Royce would manufacture the engines. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57333683 | 619,629 |
1,483,522 | How can understanding of species' natural history aid their effective conservation in human-dominated ecosystems? Humans often conduct activities that allow for the incorporation of other species, whether as a by-product or as a result of a focus on nature. Traditional natural history can only inform how best to do this to a certain degree, because landscapes have been changed so dramatically. However, there is much more to learn through direct study of species' ecology in human-dominated ecosystems, through what is known as focused natural history. Rosenzweig cites four examples: shrikes (Laniidae) thrived in altered landscapes when wooden fence post perches allowed them easy access to pouncing on prey, but inhospitable steel fence posts contributed to their decline. Replacing steel fence posts with wood fence posts reverses the shrikes' decline and allows humans to determine the reasons for the distribution and abundance of shrikes. Additionally, the cirl bunting ("Emberiza cirlus") thrived on farms when fields alternated between harvests and hay, but declined where farmers began to plant winter grain crops, natterjack toads ("Bufo calamatus") declined when reductions in sheep grazing ceased to alter ponds to their preferred shape and depth, and longleaf pine ("Pinus palustris") declined in the Southeastern United States when lack of wildfires prevented its return after timbering. Thus, applying focused natural history in human-dominated landscapes can contribute to conservation efforts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1810870 | 1,482,686 |
125,248 | Several reactions occur between the concrete and the corium melt. Free and chemically bound water is released from the concrete as steam. Calcium carbonate is decomposed, producing carbon dioxide and calcium oxide. Water and carbon dioxide penetrate the corium mass, exothermically oxidizing the non-oxidized metals present in the corium and producing gaseous hydrogen and carbon monoxide; large amounts of hydrogen can be produced. The calcium oxide, silica, and silicates melt and are mixed into the corium. The oxide phase, in which the nonvolatile fission products are concentrated, can stabilize at temperatures of for a considerable period of time. An eventually present layer of more dense molten metal, containing fewer radioisotopes (Ru, Tc, Pd, etc., initially composed of molten zircaloy, iron, chromium, nickel, manganese, silver, and other construction materials and metallic fission products and tellurium bound as zirconium telluride) than the oxide layer (which concentrates Sr, Ba, La, Sb, Sn, Nb, Mo, etc. and is initially composed primarily of zirconium dioxide and uranium dioxide, possibly with iron oxide and boron oxides), can form an interface between the oxides and the concrete farther below, slowing down the corium penetration and solidifying within a few hours. The oxide layer produces heat primarily by decay heat, while the principal heat source in the metal layer is exothermic reaction with the water released from the concrete. Decomposition of concrete and volatilization of the alkali metal compounds consumes a substantial amount of heat. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26266872 | 125,196 |
1,659,016 | Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a serious condition of the spinal cord with symptoms including rapid onset of arm or leg weakness, decreased reflexes, difficulty moving the eyes, speaking, or swallowing may also occur. Occasionally numbness or pain may be present and complications can include trouble breathing. In August 2019, Lipkin and Dr. Nischay Mishra published a collaborative study with the CDC in analyzing serological data for serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples of AFM patients. The Lipkin team utilized high-density peptide arrays (also known as Serochips) to identify antibodies to EV-D68 in those samples. The technology was featured on the Dr. Oz Show in mid-September, illustrating how the enterovirus affects the CSF and the actual Serochip used to do the analysis. In October, the University of California, San Francisco published a separate collaborative study with the CDC that confirmed the presence of antibodies to enterovirus in AFM patient CSF samples using phage display (VirScan). "It's always good to see reproducibility. It gives more confidence in the findings for sure," commented Lipkin in an October 2019 CNN article. "This gives us more support of what we found." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20485252 | 1,658,083 |
651,663 | Building on earlier work by Metcalfe and Mischel on delayed gratification, Baumeister, Miller, and Delaney explored the notion of willpower by first defining the self as being made up of three parts: reflexive consciousness, or the person's awareness of their environment and of himself as an individual; interpersonal being, which seeks to mold the self into one that will be accepted by others; and executive function. They stated, "[T]he self can free its actions from being determined by particular influences, especially those of which it is aware". The three prevalent theories of willpower describe it as a limited supply of energy, as a cognitive process, and as a skill that is developed over time. Research has largely supported that willpower works like a "moral muscle" with a limited supply of strength that may be depleted (a process referred to as Ego depletion), conserved, or replenished, and that a single act requiring much self-control can significantly deplete the "supply" of willpower. While exertion reduces the ability to engage in further acts of willpower in the short term, such exertions actually improve a person's ability to exert willpower for extended periods in the long run. Additional research has been conducted that may cast doubt on the idea of ego-depletion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1040741 | 651,321 |
1,969,135 | During the late 1990s, OECD member countries began to assess chemical categories and to use quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) results to create OECD guidance documents, as well as a computerized QSAR toolbox. In 1998, the global chemical industry, organized in the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) initiative, offered to join OECD efforts. The ICCA promised to sponsor by 2013 about 1,000 substances from the OECD's HPV chemicals list "to establish as priorities for investigation", based on "presumed wide dispersive use, production in two or more global regions or similarity to another chemical, which met either of these criteria". OECD in turn agreed to refocus and to "increase transparency, efficiency and productivity and allow longer-term planning for governments and industry". The OECD refocus was on initial hazard assessments of HPV chemicals only, and no longer extensive exposure information gathering and evaluation. Detailed exposure assessments within national (or regional) programmes and priority setting activities were postponed as post-SIDS work. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12563713 | 1,968,001 |
1,779,825 | The Zygnemataceae are a family of filamentous or unicellular, uniseriate (unbranched) green algae. The filaments are septated and reproduction is by conjugation; "Spirogyra" is commonly used in schools to demonstrate this kind of reproduction. The family is notable for its diversely shaped chloroplasts, such as stellate in "Zygnema", helical in "Spirogyra", and flat in "Mougeotia". The Zygnemataceae are cosmopolitan, but though all generally occur in the same types of habitats, "Mougeotia", "Spirogyra", and "Zygnema" are by far the most common; in one study across North America, 95% of the Zygnemataceae collected were in these three genera. Classification and identification is primarily by the morphology of the conjugation, which is somewhat rare to find in natural populations of permanent water bodies; when in the vegetative state, the rarer genera resemble the three most common, and are often mistaken for them and catalogued as such. Conjugation can be induced in low-nitrogen culture. While they occupy many habitats, in North America all are found solely in freshwater or subaerial habitats. Species typically exist as floating mats in stagnant water in ditches and ponds, but some also grow in moving water, attaching themselves to a substrate by rhizoid-like projections of the basal cells of the filament. The mat species rise to the surface in early spring, grow rapidly through the summer, disappearing by late summer. Members of the Zygnemataceae, such as "Spirogyra", fall prey to parasites, especially chytrids. Most genera (all except "Mesotanium" and "Spirotaenia") previously assigned to Mesotaeniaceae as well as the Desmidiales actually emerged in the Zygnematacae. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1646446 | 1,778,822 |
124,838 | In the hands of an expert pilot with a tactical advantage, the Wildcat could prove a difficult opponent even against the formidable Zero. After analyzing Fleet Air Tactical Unit Intelligence Bureau reports describing the new carrier fighter, USN Commander "Jimmy" Thach devised a defensive tactic that allowed Wildcat formations to act in a coordinated maneuver to counter a diving attack, called the "Thach Weave". The most widely employed tactic during the Guadalcanal Campaign was high-altitude ambush, where hit-and-run maneuvers were executed using altitude advantage. This was possible due to an early warning system composed of Coastwatchers and radar. On rare occasions, when Wildcats were unable to gain altitude in time, they would suffer many losses. On 2 October 1942, a Japanese air raid from Rabaul was not detected in time and the Cactus Air Force lost six Wildcats to only one Zero destroyed. During the most intense initial phase of the Guadalcanal Campaign, between 1 August and 15 November, combat records indicate that US lost 115 Wildcats and Japanese lost 106 Zeros to all causes; the Japanese lost many more pilots compared to the US. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=518897 | 124,786 |
2,063,392 | At the beginning scientific personnel of LBMC consisted of 45 researchers, that carried out research in fields of molecular virology, nucleic acid chemistry, virus like particles and molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases. In 2000, LU BMC established a long term collaboration with the Swiss company „Cytos Biotechnology” Ltd. concerning research of virus structural gene exploration in order to construct virus like particles that could serve as vaccines or immunomodulating therapeutics. New research area of cancer immunology in LBMC developed with investigation of anti-cancer humoral immune response triggering proteins. In 2001, novel collaboration project financed by the Latvian Council of Science “Genofond research of population of Latvia and its application for human pathology diagnostics and prevention” begun that promoted research of human genetics in Latvia. That led to establishment of the Latvian Genome Data Base (LGDB) in 2006. The LGDB now contains over 17,000 samples that are available for research use for scientists of different research institutes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34935370 | 2,062,201 |
1,508,612 | During subsequent five-year plans to 2050, new industries will be established in fields such as mobile, multi-media, nano- and space technologies, robotics, genetic engineering and alternative energy. Food processing enterprises will be developed with an eye to turning the country into a major regional exporter of beef, dairy and other agricultural products. Low-return, water-intensive crop varieties will be replaced with vegetable, oil and fodder products. The "Kazakhstan 2050 Strategy" fixes a target of halving the share of energy revenue in GDP and ensuring that non-resource goods represent 70% of exports by 2050. As part of the shift to a ‘green economy’ by 2030, 15% of acreage will be cultivated with water-saving technologies. Experimental agrarian and innovational clusters will be established and drought-resistant genetically modified crops developed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54181703 | 1,507,764 |
1,005,804 | These foot-soldiers fought in close-ranked rectangular or square formations, of which the smallest tactical unit was the 256 men strong "syntagma" or "speira". This formation typically fought eight or sixteen men deep and in a frontage of thirty-two or sixteen men accordingly. Each file of 16 men, a "lochos", was commanded by a "lochagos" who was in the front rank. Junior officers, one at the rear and one in the centre, were in place to steady the ranks and maintain the cohesion of the formation, similar to modern-day NCOs. The commander of the "syntagma" theoretically fought at the head of the extreme far-right file. According to Aelian, a "syntagma" was accompanied by five additional individuals to the rear: a herald (to act as a messenger), a trumpeter (to sound out commands), an ensign (to hold the unit's standard), an additional officer (called "ouragos"), and a servant. This array of both audial and visual communication methods helped to make sure that even in the dust and din of battle orders could still be received and given. Six "syntagmata" formed a "taxis" of 1,500 men commanded by a "strategos", a variable number of "taxeis" formed a "phalanx" under a phalangiarch. On his Asian campaign, Alexander, had a phalanx of 6 veteran "taxeis", numbering 9,000 men. Between Susa and India a seventh "taxis" was created. Antipater, as regent in Macedonia, was left with 8 "taxeis" of younger, less-experienced recruits. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2529634 | 1,005,285 |
652,881 | Cancer is a stochastic effect of radiation, meaning that it only has a probability of occurrence, as opposed to deterministic effects which always happen over a certain dose threshold. The consensus of the nuclear industry, nuclear regulators, and governments, is that the incidence of cancers due to ionizing radiation can be modeled as increasing linearly with effective radiation dose at a rate of 5.5% per sievert. Individual studies, alternate models, and earlier versions of the industry consensus have produced other risk estimates scattered around this consensus model. There is general agreement that the risk is much higher for infants and fetuses than adults, higher for the middle-aged than for seniors, and higher for women than for men, though there is no quantitative consensus about this. This model is widely accepted for external radiation, but its application to internal contamination is disputed. For example, the model fails to account for the low rates of cancer in early workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory who were exposed to plutonium dust, and the high rates of thyroid cancer in children following the Chernobyl accident, both of which were internal exposure events. Chris Busby of the self styled "European Committee on Radiation Risk", calls the ICRP model "fatally flawed" when it comes to internal exposure. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35993194 | 652,538 |
434,276 | In 2021, BEE released a review of research on 61 studies of 51 different programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. 84% were randomized experiments and 16% quasi-experiments. The vast majority were done in the US, the programs are replicable, and the studies, done between 1990 and 2018, had a minimum duration of 12 weeks. Many of the programs used phonics-based teaching and/or one or more of the following: cooperative learning, technology-supported adaptive instruction (see Educational technology), metacognitive skills, phonemic awareness, word reading, fluency, vocabulary, multisensory learning, spelling, guided reading, reading comprehension, word analysis, structured curriculum, and balanced literacy (non-phonetic approach). Significantly, table 5 (pg. 88) shows the mean weighted effect sizes of the programs by the manner in which they were conducted (i.e. by school, by classroom, by technology-supported adaptive instruction, by one-to-small-group tutoring, and by one-to-one tutoring). Table 8 (pg. 91) lists the 22 programs meeting ESSA standards for strong and moderate ratings, and their effect size. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25572436 | 434,062 |
1,780,566 | To begin the conference season, the Bulldogs travelled to Firestone Fieldhouse on January 3 to play Pepperdine, where they would beat the Waves 78–62. David Stockton came off the bench and keyed the Zags with four steals to hold off a Pepperdine team that was down two with 12 minutes left. Despite scoring a season-low 43.4% from the field, Elias Harris scored 18 points and Kelly Olynyk added 16. Two days later, they went to Santa Clara and beat the Broncos 81–74. The team managed to withstand a Santa Clara rally late when Olynyk made a key putback with 1:55 remaining. He led the team with a career-high 33 points and 10 rebounds, while Harris added 14 points for the Zags. After this, Gonzaga would go back home to play conference rival Saint Mary's, whom they would beat 83–78. Saint Mary's would have one field goal in the final minutes of the first half to help the Bulldogs to a 46–28 halftime advantage. However, Stephen Holt would hit three shots and two free throws in a 90-second span to cut the lead to 55–44. With 26 seconds left, Kevin Pangos missed and fouled Matthew Dellavedova, who made it 79–78. Gonzaga held on for the win and was led by 31 points from Olynyk. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36171940 | 1,779,562 |
301,672 | Like hydroponics, a few minerals and micronutrients can be added to improve plant growth. Iron is the most deficient nutrient in aquaponics, but it can be added through mixing Iron Chelate powder with water. Potassium can be added as potassium sulfate through foliar spray. Less vital nutrients include magnesium as epsom salt, calcium as calcium chloride, and boron. Biological filtration of aquaculture wastes yield high nitrate concentrations, which is great for leafy greens. For flowering plants with high nutrient demands, it is recommended to introduce supplemental nutrients such as magnesium, calcium, potassium, and phosphorus. Common sources are sulfate of potash, potassium bicarbonate, monoammonium phosphate, etc. Nutrient deficiency in wastewater from fish component (RAS) can be completely masked using raw or mineralized sludge, usually containing 3–17 times higher nutrient concentrations. RAS effluents (wastewater and sludge combined) contain adequate N, P, Mg, Ca, S, Fe, Zn, Cu, Ni to meet most aquaponic crop needs. Potassium is generally deficient requiring full-fledged fertilization. Micronutrients B, Mo are partly sufficient and can be easily ameliorated by increasing sludge release. The presumption surrounding 'definite' phyto-toxic sodium levels in RAS effluents should be reconsidered – practical solutions available too. No threat of heavy metal accumulation exists within the aquaponics loop. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=466801 | 301,511 |
1,708,355 | Accents are the distinctive variations in the pronunciation of a language. They can be native or foreign, local or national and can provide information about a person’s geographical locality, socio-economic status and ethnicity. The perception of accents is normal within any given group of language users and involves the categorisation of speakers into social groups and entails judgments about the accented speaker, including their status and personality. Accents can significantly alter the perception of an individual or an entire group, which is an important fact considering that the frequency that people with different accents are encountering one another is increasing, partially due to inexpensive international travel and social media. As well as affecting judgments, accents also affect key cognitive processes (e.g., memory) that are involved in a myriad of daily activities. The development of accent perception occurs in early childhood. Consequently, from a young age accents influence our perception of other people, decisions we make about when and how to interact with others, and, in reciprocal fashion, how other people perceive us. A better understanding of the role accents play in our (often inaccurate) appraisal of individuals and groups, may facilitate greater acceptance of people different from ourselves and lessen discriminatory attitudes and behavior. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40912579 | 1,707,397 |
276,748 | AFM has several advantages over the scanning electron microscope (SEM). Unlike the electron microscope, which provides a two-dimensional projection or a two-dimensional image of a sample, the AFM provides a three-dimensional surface profile. In addition, samples viewed by AFM do not require any special treatments (such as metal/carbon coatings) that would irreversibly change or damage the sample, and does not typically suffer from charging artifacts in the final image. While an electron microscope needs an expensive vacuum environment for proper operation, most AFM modes can work perfectly well in ambient air or even a liquid environment. This makes it possible to study biological macromolecules and even living organisms. In principle, AFM can provide higher resolution than SEM. It has been shown to give true atomic resolution in ultra-high vacuum (UHV) and, more recently, in liquid environments. High resolution AFM is comparable in resolution to scanning tunneling microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. AFM can also be combined with a variety of optical microscopy and spectroscopy techniques such as fluorescent microscopy of infrared spectroscopy, giving rise to scanning near-field optical microscopy, nano-FTIR and further expanding its applicability. Combined AFM-optical instruments have been applied primarily in the biological sciences but have recently attracted strong interest in photovoltaics and energy-storage research, polymer sciences, nanotechnology and even medical research. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=227982 | 276,598 |
306,878 | Objects in motion within a SAR scene alter the Doppler frequencies of the returns. Such objects therefore appear in the image at locations offset in the across-range direction by amounts proportional to the range-direction component of their velocity. Road vehicles may be depicted off the roadway and therefore not recognized as road traffic items. Trains appearing away from their tracks are more easily properly recognized by their length parallel to known trackage as well as by the absence of an equal length of railbed signature and of some adjacent terrain, both having been shadowed by the train. While images of moving vessels can be offset from the line of the earlier parts of their wakes, the more recent parts of the wake, which still partake of some of the vessel's motion, appear as curves connecting the vessel image to the relatively quiescent far-aft wake. In such identifiable cases, speed and direction of the moving items can be determined from the amounts of their offsets. The along-track component of a target's motion causes some defocus. Random motions such as that of wind-driven tree foliage, vehicles driven over rough terrain, or humans or other animals walking or running generally render those items not focusable, resulting in blurring or even effective invisibility. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=645554 | 306,714 |
359,935 | Turning his attention elsewhere, Potemkin established his headquarters in Elisabethgrad and planned future operations. He assembled an army of forty or fifty thousand, including the newly formed Kuban Cossacks. He divided his time between military preparation (creating a fleet of a hundred gunboats to fight within the shallow liman) and chasing the wives of soldiers under his command. Meanwhile, the Austrians remained on the defensive across central Europe, though they did manage to hold their lines. Despite advice to the contrary, Potemkin pursued an equally defensive strategy, though in the Caucasus Generals Tekeeli and Pavel Potemkin were making some inroads. In early summer 1788, fighting intensified as Potemkin's forces won their naval confrontation with the Turks with few losses, and began the siege of Ochakov, a Turkish stronghold and the main Russian war aim. Less promising was that St. Petersburg, exposed after Russia's best forces departed for the Crimea, was now under threat from Sweden in the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–90. Potemkin refused to write regularly with news of the war in the south, compounding Catherine's anxiety. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=475101 | 359,748 |
403,710 | "The Secret Armory of General Knoxx" was unofficially announced on January 21, 2010, via the official Gearbox forums, posted by Gearbox level designer Jason Reiss saying the pack will increase the level cap to level 61, and is "the biggest DLC we have made". A tweet by Gearbox creative director Mike Neumann on January 21, 2010, said the pack would also include "more Scooter", who is a character in the game. This was followed by an official announcement from Gearbox via Gearboxity on January 29, 2010, confirming the release, level cap increase, brand new weapons, and "brutal, never-before-seen enemies in a huge new environment complete with tons of brand new missions." The plot of this DLC revolves around Athena, a rogue agent for Atlas who is self-described as the best, a woman sick of Atlas' lies who wants to bring them to their knees, and General Knoxx (Steele's superior), a man with extreme loathing for his job to the point of literally hating his life, who is tasked to destroy Athena and the protagonist(s). Along the way you also run into Moxxi who aids the player in taking on Atlas as well (if you help her face down her ex-husband) and Scooter, who reveals he is related to Moxxi. The DLC package became available February 23 for Xbox 360, and February 25 for PlayStation 3 and PC. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12785426 | 403,510 |
535,657 | Rotating drum memory provided 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 words of memory at addresses 0000 to 0999, 1999, or 3999 respectively. Each word had 10 bi-quinary coded decimal digits, representing a signed 10-digit number or five characters. (Counting a bi-quinary coded digit as 7 bits, 4000 words would be equivalent to 35 kilobytes.) Words on the drums were organized in bands around the drum, fifty words per band, and 20, 40, or 80 bands for the respective models. A word could be accessed when its location on the drum surface passed under the read/write heads during rotation (rotating at 12,500 rpm, the non-optimized average access time was 2.5 ms). Because of this timing, the second address in each instruction was the address of the next instruction. Programs could then be optimized by placing instructions at addresses that would be immediately accessible when execution of the previous instruction was completed. IBM provided a form with ten columns and 200 rows to allow programmers to keep track of where they put instructions and data. Later an assembler, SOAP (Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program), was provided that performed rough optimization. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=143676 | 535,378 |
1,255,363 | Tye was raised in Ithaca, New York, where both of her parents worked at Cornell University. Her parents Henry Tye and Bik Kwoon Tye had emigrated from Hong Kong. As a child, Tye worked in her mother's laboratory organizing pipette tips. She completed a Bachelor of Science with a major in cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1999 to 2003. After graduating, she spent time learning breakdancing and backpacked around Australia for a year before returning to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to begin her graduate studies in neuroscience. She joined the laboratory of neurobiologist Patricia Janak where she completed her thesis showing that neuronal activity was increased in a region of the brain associated with processing of emotions, called the amygdala, in rats learning to associate a stimulus with a reward. Her thesis work was published in "Nature" and won the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience and the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award. Tye received her PhD in 2008. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48542628 | 1,254,680 |
234,470 | Following the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device—the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to use an electronic display—the first true video games were created in the early 1950s. Initially created as technology demonstrations, such as the "Bertie the Brain" and Nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951, video games also became the purview of academic research. A series of games, generally simulating real-world board games, were created at various research institutions to explore programming, human–computer interaction, and computer algorithms. These include "OXO" and Christopher Strachey's draughts program in 1952, the first software-based games to incorporate a CRT display, and several chess and checkers programs. Possibly the first video game created simply for entertainment was 1958's "Tennis for Two", featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope. As computing technology improved over time, computers became smaller and faster, and the ability to work on them was opened up to university employees and undergraduate students by the end of the 1950s. These new programmers began to create games for non-academic purposes, leading up to the 1962 release of "Spacewar!" as one of the earliest known digital computer games to be available outside a single research institute. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19992532 | 234,351 |
1,190,212 | A program package MatchMiner was used to scan HUGO names for cloned genes of interest are scanned, then are input into GoMiner, which leveraged the GO to identify the biological processes, functions and components represented in the gene profile. Also, Database for Annotation, Visualization, and Integrated Discovery (DAVID) and KEGG database can be used for the analysis of microarray expression data and the analysis of each GO biological process (P), cellular component (C), and molecular function (F) ontology. In addition, DAVID tools can be used to analyze the roles of genes in metabolic pathways and show the biological relationships between genes or gene-products and may represent metabolic pathways. These two databases also provide bioinformatics tools online to combine specific biochemical information on a certain organism and facilitate the interpretation of biological meanings for experimental data. By using a combined approach of Microarray-Bioinformatic technologies, a potential metabolic mechanism contributing to colorectal cancer (CRC) has been demonstrated Several environmental factors may be involved in a series of points along the genetic pathway to CRC. These include genes associated with bile acid metabolism, glycolysis metabolism and fatty acid metabolism pathways, supporting a hypothesis that some metabolic alternations observed in colon carcinoma may occur in the development of CRC. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1872854 | 1,189,578 |
677,014 | At Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, Diffie "performed competently" but "never did apply himself to the degree his father hoped." Although he graduated with a local diploma, he did not take the statewide Regents examinations that would have awarded him an academic diploma because he had previously secured admission to Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the basis of "stratospheric scores on standardized tests." While he received a B.S. in mathematics from the institution in 1965, he remained unengaged and seriously considered transferring to the University of California, Berkeley (which he perceived as a more hospitable academic environment) during the first two years of his undergraduate studies. At MIT, he began to program computers (in an effort to cultivate a practical skill set) while continuing to perceive the devices "as very low class... I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was very interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=427776 | 676,661 |
1,636,588 | In 2020 the Ministry of Environment and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development published a guide which recommended various social, environmental and technical best practices, including that the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that the concentration of foul smelling gas in the air should not exceed 7 μg/m3 in an average of 30 minutes. The WHO says that due to the strong public reaction against odor from geothermal power plants and the resulting social perceptions, the odor problem needs to be taken very seriously and solutions need to be implemented. WHO recommended technologies that guarantee the re-injection of the entire source (liquid + non-condensable gases) during operation as the most effective method to prevent gases from being released into the atmosphere. WHO further advised that could be reinjected together with , as is sometimes done in Iceland. However the carbon price in Iceland is the same as the EU Allowance (around 80 euros a tonne in mid-2022), whereas in Turkey there is no immediate financial penalty for releasing it because there is no carbon price. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16733934 | 1,635,663 |
2,037,940 | The best lithological profile of the productive section of the Blanowice Formation was developed on the basis of the exposure in the trench made in Kierszula near Poręba. On this exposure, the major data of the Blanowice strata was recovered. The lower layers are above the Hettangian to Sinemurian Zagaje Formation. Mostly the local successions start with the "Blanowice Formation", which rests with a large stratigraphic hiatus on Upper Triassic strata. While some terrestrial sediments maybe were deposited here during Hettangian–Sinemurian, but removed during the Late Sinemurian. From the upper part is developed an initial level of up to 0.61 m thick, where there are clay deposits separated by a layer of Sandstone, mostly carbonaceous with numerous plant detritus, with a total thickness of 1.82 m. At 2.43 m of depth, a shoal of slightly weathered coal, and below, at a distance of 0.62 m - a coal layer of 1.09 m thick, where the contact of the coal with the surrounding rocks is clearly marked. This strata is laminated separating series of layers with anthracoliths, characterized by an abundance of plant detritus. Near the floor of this section, the amount of sand increases and there are sections with transition into Mud, and even Sandstone. At the bottom, with a depth of 4.75 m a major layer of clay is present, which in the lower section is characterized by an abundance of plant detritus. Finally, on the Kierszula pit, under the bottom surface of the coal seam and the accompanying shoal, fragments of root plants arranged most often in the position of their growth were found. These formations, up to 6.0 cm in length and up to 0.4 cm in thickness, mark the levels of the "root soil" that document the autochthonous and Tracolite genesis. The upper part of the formation is dominated by alluvial and Lacustrine/Backswamp sand and coal-bearing sediments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64249358 | 2,036,765 |
214,917 | Regardless of whether planets with similar physical attributes to the Earth are rare or not, some argue that life tends not to evolve into anything more complex than simple bacteria without being provoked by rare and specific circumstances. Biochemist Nick Lane argues that simple cells (prokaryotes) emerged soon after Earth's formation, but since almost half the planet's life had passed before they evolved into complex ones (eukaryotes), all of whom share a common ancestor, this event can only have happened once. According to some views, prokaryotes lack the cellular architecture to evolve into eukaryotes because a bacterium expanded up to eukaryotic proportions would have tens of thousands of times less energy available to power its metabolism. Two billion years ago, one simple cell incorporated itself into another, multiplied, and evolved into mitochondria that supplied the vast increase in available energy that enabled the evolution of complex eukaryotic life. If this incorporation occurred only once in four billion years or is otherwise unlikely, then life on most planets remains simple. An alternative view is that the evolution of mitochondria was environmentally triggered, and that mitochondria-containing organisms appeared soon after the first traces of atmospheric oxygen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=827792 | 214,809 |
1,899,312 | Gallaudet was the first person to experiment with warped wings in 1896, and in 1898 he built a warping-wing kite to test his invention of a warping-wing mechanism; this kite survives and is on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1911 he obtained US pilot's license No. 32 with the Aero Club of America, flying a Wright biplane in Garden City, New York. Also in 1911 he earned a pilot's brevet with the Aero Club of France flying a Nieuport monoplane.In 1908 Gallaudet founded the Gallaudet Engineering Company in Norwich, Connecticut where, as President, he did work as a mechanical and consulting engineer and, in 1909, built his first airplane. In 1914 he patented a radical new aircraft propulsion system that was later incorporated into his first seaplane prototype, the Gallaudet D-1 that was first tested on the Thames River in Connecticut. The need for larger facilities and a better location to test his seaplanes, he moved his company to Chepiwanoxet Point on the Narragansett Bay coast in Rhode Island The Gallaudet Engineering Company was incorporated as the Gallaudet Aircraft Corporation in 1917. In 1923 Gallaudet built an all-metal aircraft , the TW-3 that first flew on June 20, 1923 at Wilbur Wright Field in Ohio. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17442591 | 1,898,227 |
1,492,817 | In 1832, the first classes in physics at Princeton were taught by Joseph Henry, who later served as the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and President of the National Academy of Sciences. Henry taught as a Professor of Natural Philosophy from 1832 to 1846, during which he earned a salary of $1,000 per year. Additional scholars that joined Princeton's physics department included Cyrus Fogg Brackett, William Magie, and Henry B. Fine. In 1873, Brackett became an adviser to the trustees in order to expand funding for scientific subjects. He later founded the department of electrical engineering and wrote the "Textbook of Physics" (1884) for his classes. In 1909, the Palmer Laboratory was established for use between the departments of physics and of electrical engineering. In 1925, four new professors were hired: Henry D. Smyth, Allen G. Shenstone, Louis A. Turner, and Charles Zahn. The hiring of these scholars sparked new interests in research on atomic energy and nuclear physics. In 1927, Arthur Compton was the first faculty member at Princeton win the Nobel Prize in Physics. The physics department officially became independent from the engineering school in 1929. Following this separation, professors Philip Morse and Robert Van de Graaff joined the faculty. Later, theoretical physics grew in popularity with the hiring of Eugene P. Wigner and John von Neumann. Along with Oskar Morgenstern, a professor in the economics department, Wigner and John Archibald Wheeler were part of the Princeton Three, who sought to establish a national science laboratory as part of the American space race. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61605257 | 1,491,978 |
1,227,604 | Each emitter is aligned behind a colored phosphor dot. The accelerated electrons strike the dot and cause it to give off light in a fashion identical to a conventional CRT. Since each dot on the screen is lit by a single emitter, there is no need to steer or direct the beam as there is in a CRT. The quantum tunneling effect, which emits electrons across the slits, is highly non-linear, and the emission process tends to be fully on or off for any given voltage. This allows the selection of particular emitters by powering a single horizontal row on the screen and then powering all the needed vertical columns simultaneously, thereby powering the selected emitters. The half-power received by the rest of the emitters on the row is too small to cause emission, even when combined with voltage leaking from active emitters beside them. This allows SED displays to work without an active matrix of thin-film transistors that LCDs and similar displays require to precisely select every sub-pixel, and further reduces the complexity of the emitter array. However, this also means that changes in voltage cannot be used to control the brightness of the resulting pixels. Instead, the emitters are rapidly turned on and off using pulse-width modulation, so that the total brightness of a spot at any given time can be controlled. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1530649 | 1,226,943 |
1,199,335 | However, by the early 1950s, powerful overhead valve V8s from sister GM Divisions Cadillac, Buick and Oldsmobile, as well as new overhead valve V8s from Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Corporation, made the flathead "Silver Streak" all but obsolete. It was a quiet, smooth running, cheap to produce engine that served the needs of the 1930s and '40s Pontiac buyers adequately for power. By 1953 the Strato Streak V8 was ready to go, with Pontiac chassis and steering already adapted for it, but it was held back by the protesting Buick and Olds divisions. It was a truly modern, durable but affordable design perfectly matched to Pontiac's target market. A few years later (fall of 1956), under the guidance of Bunkie Knudsen Pontiac was determined to change its image into a performance car to boost sales, this led Knudsen to look for further talent, including Pete Estes as chief engineer (taken from Olds division) and John DeLorean as director of advanced engineering, a former Packard and Chrysler engineer. Pontiac became known as a performance division based upon the durable, well performing V8s that came later, all of them based upon the original 287 of 1955. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1430626 | 1,198,694 |
237,917 | Professional programs during the interwar period were limited to just theology and nursing. By the 1940s the McMaster administration was under pressure to modernize and expand the university's programs. During the Second World War and post-war periods the demand for technological expertise, particularly in the sciences, increased. This problem placed a strain on the finances of what was still a denominational Baptist institution. In particular, the institution could no longer secure sufficient funds from denominational sources alone to sustain science research. Since denominational institutions could not receive public funds, the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec decided to reorganize the university, creating two federated colleges. The arts and divinity programs were reconstituted as University College and science was reorganized under the newly incorporated Hamilton College as a separate division capable of receiving provincial grants. Hamilton College was incorporated in 1948 by letters patent under "The Companies Act", although it remained only affiliated with the university. The university traditionally focused on undergraduate studies, and did not offer a PhD program until 1949. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=342555 | 237,798 |
480,862 | There are several techniques, which can greatly improve the performance of search trees in terms of both speed and memory. Pruning techniques such as alpha–beta pruning, Principal Variation Search, and MTD(f) can reduce the effective branching factor without loss of strength. In tactical areas such as life and death, Go is particularly amenable to caching techniques such as transposition tables. These can reduce the amount of repeated effort, especially when combined with an iterative deepening approach. In order to quickly store a full-sized Go board in a transposition table, a hashing technique for mathematically summarizing is generally necessary. Zobrist hashing is very popular in Go programs because it has low collision rates, and can be iteratively updated at each move with just two XORs, rather than being calculated from scratch. Even using these performance-enhancing techniques, full tree searches on a full-sized board are still prohibitively slow. Searches can be sped up by using large amounts of domain specific pruning techniques, such as not considering moves where your opponent is already strong, and selective extensions like always considering moves next to groups of stones which are about to be captured. However, both of these options introduce a significant risk of not considering a vital move which would have changed the course of the game. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=227021 | 480,618 |
333,368 | More recently, work among anthropologists and psychologists has led to the development of sociobiology and later of evolutionary psychology, a field that attempts to explain features of human psychology in terms of adaptation to the ancestral environment. The most prominent example of evolutionary psychology, notably advanced in the early work of Noam Chomsky and later by Steven Pinker, is the hypothesis that the human brain has adapted to acquire the grammatical rules of natural language. Other aspects of human behaviour and social structures, from specific cultural norms such as incest avoidance to broader patterns such as gender roles, have been hypothesised to have similar origins as adaptations to the early environment in which modern humans evolved. By analogy to the action of natural selection on genes, the concept of memes—"units of cultural transmission," or culture's equivalents of genes undergoing selection and recombination—has arisen, first described in this form by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and subsequently expanded upon by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett as explanations for complex cultural activities, including human consciousness. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21147 | 333,190 |
327,771 | Chapter X examines whether patterns in the fossil record are better explained by common descent and branching evolution through natural selection, than by the individual creation of fixed species. Darwin expected species to change slowly, but not at the same rate – some organisms such as "Lingula" were unchanged since the earliest fossils. The pace of natural selection would depend on variability and change in the environment. This distanced his theory from Lamarckian laws of inevitable progress. It has been argued that this anticipated the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis, but other scholars have preferred to emphasise Darwin's commitment to gradualism. He cited Richard Owen's findings that the earliest members of a class were a few simple and generalised species with characteristics intermediate between modern forms, and were followed by increasingly diverse and specialised forms, matching the branching of common descent from an ancestor. Patterns of extinction matched his theory, with related groups of species having a continued existence until extinction, then not reappearing. Recently extinct species were more similar to living species than those from earlier eras, and as he had seen in South America, and William Clift had shown in Australia, fossils from recent geological periods resembled species still living in the same area. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29932 | 327,597 |
1,005,042 | It is typically thought that the diets of early "Homo" had a greater proportion of meat than "Australopithecus", and that this led to brain growth. The main hypotheses regarding this are: meat is energy- and nutrient-rich and put evolutionary pressure on developing enhanced cognitive skills to facilitate strategic scavenging and monopolise fresh carcasses, or meat allowed the large and calorie-expensive ape gut to decrease in size allowing this energy to be diverted to brain growth. Alternatively, it is also suggested that early "Homo", in a drying climate with scarcer food options, relied primarily on underground storage organs (such as tubers) and food sharing, which facilitated social bonding among both male and female group members. However, unlike what is presumed for "H. ergaster" and later "Homo", short-statured early "Homo" were likely incapable of endurance running and hunting, and the long and "Australopithecus"-like forearm of "H. habilis" could indicate early "Homo" were still arboreal to a degree. Also, organised hunting and gathering is thought to have emerged in "H. ergaster". Nonetheless, the proposed food-gathering models to explain large brain growth necessitate increased daily travel distance. Large incisor size in "H. rudolfensis" and "H. habilis" compared to "Australopithecus" predecessors implies these two species relied on incisors more. The large, "Australopithecus"-like molars could indicate more mechanically challenging food compared to later "Homo". The bodies of the mandibles of "H. rudolfensis" and other early "Homo" are thicker than those of modern humans and all living apes, more comparable to "Australopithecus". The mandibular body resists torsion from the bite force or chewing, meaning their jaws could produce unusually powerful stresses while eating. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=303612 | 1,004,524 |
2,114,858 | Over the next four-plus seasons, home games were few and far between, but each one resulted in a win. The Bulldogs eventually reeled off 18 consecutive home victories, tying the all-time stadium record set by head coach Maxie Lambright's great teams of the early 1970s. Some wins have been more magical than others. The endings to three of the biggest wins in school history have taken place in the south endzone ... almost as if the Spirit of '88 willed the Bulldogs to victory. In 1990, only Louisiana Tech's second season in the Division I-A ranks, the Bulldogs trailed Colorado State 30-14 late in the third quarter and their bowl hopes looked bleak. However, 17 unanswered points later, Tech had rallied for a 31–30 win over the bowl-bound Rams to earn their own Independence Bowl berth. The winning touchdown pass from Gene Johnson to Bobby Slaughter in the final minutes came fittingly in the south end zone, just in front of the Spirit of '88. Eleven years later, Tech clinched a share of its first Western Athletic Conference title with a 48–42 win over Boise State at Joe Aillet Stadium. With the Broncos driving towards what looked like a game-winning score late in the contest, the Spirit of '88 magic struck once again. Ryan Dinwiddie's potential game-winning touchdown pass bounced off the helmet of a Tech defender and high into the air before Bulldog defensive lineman Brandon Avance plucked it out of the air, giving Tech the victory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21055134 | 2,113,643 |
205,639 | Skeletons should be carefully managed and protected in order to retain their original state for further research purposes in any circumstances, for instance: educational, archaeological, forensic research. Applying the same case for animal skeletons, there are procedures to follow in the aim of ensuring the skeletal remains are reserved carefully for research purposes in the future. There are various possible sizes of collections that researchers might want to reserve for future investigation. For smaller sizes of bones collections which will be commonly applied to any researchers who retain them for archaeological or zoological educational purposes, it is suggested to organise those bones into categories, for instance: age group, tribal or ethnicity groups, genders. The storage method of such small and sophisticated types of bones is recommended to be placed in a sliding shelf. However, larger collections are served for academic disciplines that need a broad investigation instead of just focusing on a single piece of bone. Thus, the preservation and care management method will be different from above. First, researchers have to note down the basic demographic and mortality information which will be useful for future comparisons between skeletons. Similarly, for the skeletal remains collected for display or research purposes in the museum, the physical characteristics and the skeletal remains’ archaeological category has to be documented in order to acknowledge the background information of the skeletal remains. Next, bones should be carefully labelled and avoid chemical substances that will affect the original state of the bone that will affect accuracy of future investigation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12341699 | 205,533 |
803,620 | Thiophene derivatives have been detected at nanomole levels in 3.5 billions year old Martian soil sediments (Murray Formation, Pahrump Hills) by the rover "Curiosity" at Gale crater (Mars) between 2012 and 2017. It represents an important milestone for the mission of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) in the long and elusive quest of organic matter on the red planet. Heating at high temperature (500° to 820 °C) of lacustrine mudstone samples by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument allowed gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses of the evolved gases and the detection of aromatic and aliphatic molecules including several thiophene compounds. The presence of carbon-sulfur bonds in macromolecules could have contributed to the preservation of organic matter at very long-term. It is estimated that ~ 5 % of organic molecules analysed by the SAM instrument contains organic sulfur. The origin and the mode of formation of these molecules are still unknown whether biotic or abiotic, but their discovery put forward the puzzling question of thiophenic compounds as possible ancient biosignature on Mars. Detailed analyses of carbon isotopes (δC) at trace level by a next generation of Martian rovers, such as "Rosalind Franklin", will be necessary to determine if such organic molecules are enriched in light carbon (C) as living micro-organisms usually are on Earth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=508777 | 803,191 |
1,741,910 | Celecoxib was the first specific inhibitor of COX-2 approved to treat patients with rheumatism and osteoarthritis. A study showed that the absorption rate, when given orally, is moderate, and peak plasma concentration occurs after about 2–4 hours. However, the extent of absorption is not well known. Celecoxib has the affinity to bind extensively to plasma proteins, especially to plasma albumin. It has an apparent volume of distribution (V) of 455 +/- 166 L in humans and the area under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC) increases proportionally to increased oral doses, between 100 and 800 mg. Celecoxib is metabolized primarily by CYP2C9 isoenzyme to carboxylic acid and also by non-CYP-dependent glucuronidation to glucuronide metabolites. The metabolites are excreted in urine and feces, with a small proportion of unchanged drug (2%) in the urine. Its elimination half-life is about 11 hours (6–12 hours) in healthy individuals, but racial differences in drug disposition and pharmacokinetic changes in the elderly have been reported. People with chronic kidney disease appear to have 43% lower plasma concentration compared to healthy individuals, with a 47% increase in apparent clearance, and it can be expected that patients with mild to moderate hepatic impairment have increased steady-state AUC. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20187427 | 1,740,926 |
618,616 | The ground support echelon of the 509th Composite Group, consisting of 44 officers and 815 enlisted men commanded by Major George W. Westcott of the Headquarters Squadron, received movement orders and moved by rail on 26 April 1945 to its port of embarkation at Seattle, Washington. On 6 May the support elements sailed on the "SS Cape Victory" for the Marianas, while group materiel was shipped on the SS "Emile Berliner". The "Cape Victory" made brief port calls at Honolulu and Eniwetok but the passengers were not permitted to leave the dock area. An advance party of the air echelon, consisting of 29 officers and 61 enlisted men commanded by Group Intelligence Officer (S-2) Lieutenant Colonel Hazen Payette, flew by C-54 to North Field, Tinian, between 15 and 22 May. It was joined by the ground echelon on 29 May 1945, marking the group's official change of station. Project Alberta's "Destination Team" also sent most of its members to Tinian to supervise the assembly, loading, and dropping of the bombs under the administrative title of 1st Technical Services Detachment, Miscellaneous War Department Group. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4567536 | 618,302 |
1,449,386 | The couple InAs/AlSb is the most recent QCL material family compared to alloys grown on InP and GaAs substrates. The main advantage of the InAs/AlSb material system is the small effective electron mass in quantum wells, which favors a high intersubband gain. This benefit can be better exploited in long-wavelength QCLs where the lasing transition levels are close to the bottom of the conduction band, and the effect of nonparabolicity is weak. InAs-based QCLs have demonstrated room temperature (RT) continuous wave (CW) operation at wavelengths up to formula_25 with a pulsed threshold current density formula_26 as low as formula_27. Low values of formula_26 have also been achieved in InAs-based QCLs emitting in other spectral regions: formula_29 at formula_30, formula_31 at formula_32 and formula_33 at formula_34 (QCL grown on InAs). Most recently, InAs-based QCLs operating near formula_35 with formula_36 as low as formula_37 at room temperature have been demonstrated. The threshold obtained is lower than the formula_38 of the best reported InP-based QCLs to date without facet treatment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2648839 | 1,448,570 |
1,016,765 | In the late 19th century, Charles Darwin proposed that cognition, or "intelligence," was the product of two combined evolutionary forces: natural selection and sexual selection. Research on human mate choice showed that intelligence is sexually selected for, and is highly esteemed by both sexes. Some evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humans evolved large brains because the cognitive abilities associated with this size increase were successful in attracting mates, consequently increasing reproductive success: brains are metabolically costly to produce and are an honest signal of mate quality. Cognition may be functioning to attract mates in other taxa. If the possession of higher cognitive skills enhances a male's ability to gather resources, then females may benefit directly from choosing more intelligent males, through courtship feeding or allofeeding. Assuming cognitive skills are heritable to some degree, females may also benefit indirectly through their offspring. Additionally, cognitive ability has been shown to vary significantly, both within and between species, and could be under sexual selection as a result. Recently, researchers have started to ask to what extent individuals assess the cognitive abilities of the opposite sex when choosing a mate. In fruit flies, the absence of sexual selection was accompanied by a decline in male cognitive performance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7971785 | 1,016,241 |
1,808,328 | It is commonly reported to present on the trunk and extremities and behave in an aggressive manner. MCS is a cancerous subtype of its benign counterpart, chondroid syringoma, and is the least common variation that has an approximated prevalence of less that 0.005%. These tumours mainly arise "from sebaceous glands, sweat glands, and ectopic salivary glands" (Tural, Selçukbiricik, Günver, Karışmaz, and Serdengecti, 2013) and are rarely encountered in radiopathological and clinical practice. The tumours commonly appear with an asymptomatic "slow-growing, painless, solid subcutaneous or intradermal nodules with a normal margin" (Obaidat, Alsaad, and Ghazarian, 2007) and make up for less than one percent of all primary skin tumours. Commonly appearing in the limbs and body, these asymmetrical tumours range from two millimetres to more than three centimetres. MCS is one of the rarest subtypes of tumours and usually requires aggressive surgery to terminate. Despite accounting for only a small number of tumours recorded each year, malignant mixed tumours are easily confused with other skin conditions (such as epidermal cyst, pilar cyst, calcifying epithelioma, or a solitary trichoepithelioma (Tural, Selçukbiricik, Günver, Karışmaz, and Serdengecti, 2013)) and have high potential for recurrence after surgical excision. The aggressiveness of malignant chondroid syringoma varies, as 49% of cases have had local recurrence whereas some demonstrate regional lymph node or osseous metastasis. The rare neoplasms generally do not follow a determinate development path and are often difficult to diagnose. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23150180 | 1,807,307 |
1,703,428 | Initially, aDNA sequencing involved cloning small fragments into bacteria, which proceeded with low efficiency due to the oxidative damage the aDNA suffered over millennia. aDNA is difficult to analyze due to facile degradation by nucleases; specific environments and postmortem conditions improved isolation and analysis. Extraction and contamination protocols were necessary for reliable analyses. With the development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) in 1983, scientists could study DNA samples up to approximately 100,000 years old, a limitation of the relatively short isolated fragments. Through advances in isolation, amplification, sequencing, and data reconstruction, older and older samples have become analyzable. Over the past 30 years, high copy number mitochondrial DNA was able to answer many questions; the advent of NGS techniques prompted far more. Moreover, this technological revolution allowed the transition from paleogenetics to paleogenomics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58990374 | 1,702,472 |
1,238,884 | After an almost four-month delay, "Oblivion" went gold on March 2, 2006, and was released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 on March 21, 2006. Early rumors notwithstanding, "Oblivion" shipped on a single DVD-DL disc. One journalist voiced concern for the game's release date, as it was set in the same week as that of EA's "". Hines dismissed the suggestion, saying, "We tend to focus on what we can control and not worry about what we can't control. Given the level of interest and the number of pre-orders and so forth, we had a pretty good idea we'd be just fine no matter what else was happening that week." "Oblivion" was the first RPG title to be released for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. In addition to the standard release version, a "Collector's Edition" was released for both Windows and Xbox 360 which includes the 112-page "Pocket Guide to the Empire", a bonus DVD containing concept art, renders, and an approximately 45-minute-long documentary on the making of "Oblivion", and a coin replica of the in-game currency of Tamriel. Its suggested release price of US$69.99 brought back "memories of game prices circa the Nintendo 64" for one Kotaku commentator. Some suggested that the included coin be used to create a "garish piece of jewelry". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12164267 | 1,238,217 |
285,466 | Englishmen in the 18th century such as Eustace Budgell recommended imitating the Chinese examination system. Adam Smith recommended examinations to qualify for employment in 1776. In 1838, the Congregational church missionary Walter Henry Medhurst considered the Chinese exams to be "worthy of imitating". In 1806, the British East India Company established a Civil Service College near London for training of the Company's administrators in India. This was based on the recommendations of East India Company officials serving in China and had seen the Imperial examinations. In 1829, the company introduced civil service examinations in India on a limited basis. This established the principle of qualification process for civil servants in England. In 1847 and 1856, Thomas Taylor Meadows strongly recommended the adoption of the Chinese principle of competitive examinations in Great Britain. Both Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was instrumental in passing the Saint Helena Act 1833, and Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, who prepared the Northcote–Trevelyan Report that catalyzed the British civil service, were familiar with Chinese history and institutions. When the report was brought up in parliament in 1853, Lord Monteagle argued against the implementation of open examinations because it was a Chinese system and China was not an "enlightened country". Lord Stanley called the examinations the "Chinese Principle". The Earl of Granville did not deny this but argued in favor of the examination system, considering that the minority Manchus had been able to rule China with it for over 200 years. In 1854, Edwin Chadwick reported that some noblemen did not agree with the measures introduced because they were Chinese. The examination system was finally implemented in the British Indian Civil Service in 1855, prior to which admission into the civil service was purely a matter of patronage, and in England in 1870. Even as late as ten years after the competitive examination plan was passed, people still attacked it as an "adopted Chinese culture". Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, 1st Baron Lamington insisted that the English "did not know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from the Celestial Empire". In 1875, Archibald Sayce voiced concern over the prevalence of competitive examinations, which he described as "the invasion of this new Chinese culture". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=244479 | 285,312 |
784,891 | The robot's costs range from $1 million to $2.5 million for each unit, and while its disposable supply cost is normally $1,500 per procedure, the cost of the procedure is higher. Additional surgical training is needed to operate the system. Numerous feasibility studies have been done to determine whether the purchase of such systems are worthwhile. As it stands, opinions differ dramatically. Surgeons report that, although the manufacturers of such systems provide training on this new technology, the learning phase is intensive and surgeons must perform 150 to 250 procedures to become adept in their use. During the training phase, minimally invasive operations can take up to twice as long as traditional surgery, leading to operating room tie-ups and surgical staffs keeping patients under anesthesia for longer periods. Patient surveys indicate they chose the procedure based on expectations of decreased morbidity, improved outcomes, reduced blood loss and less pain. Higher expectations may explain higher rates of dissatisfaction and regret. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2629669 | 784,471 |
1,169,980 | However, there are currently many gaps in the attempt to bring together developmental science and neuroscience to produce a more complete understanding of the development of awareness and empathy. Educational research relies on pupil's accurate self-report of emotion, which may not be possible for some pupils, e.g., those with alexithymia—a difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, which is found in 10% of typical adults. Emotional awareness can be measured using neuroimaging methods that show that differing levels of emotional awareness are associated with differential activity in amygdala, anterior insular cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. Studies of brain development in childhood and adolescence show that these areas undergo large-scale structural changes. Hence, the degree to which school-age children and young adults are aware of their emotions may vary across this time period, which may have an important impact on classroom behaviour and the extent to which certain teaching styles and curriculum approaches might be effective. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25935238 | 1,169,361 |
143,844 | A variety of topics in physics such as crystallography, metallurgy, elasticity, magnetism, etc., were treated as distinct areas until the 1940s, when they were grouped together as "solid-state physics". Around the 1960s, the study of physical properties of liquids was added to this list, forming the basis for the more comprehensive specialty of condensed matter physics. The Bell Telephone Laboratories was one of the first institutes to conduct a research program in condensed matter physics. According to founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, physics professor Manuel Cardona, it was Albert Einstein who created the modern field of condensed matter physics starting with his seminal 1905 article on the photoelectric effect and photoluminescence which opened the fields of photoelectron spectroscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy, and later his 1907 article on the specific heat of solids which introduced, for the first time, the effect of lattice vibrations on the thermodynamic properties of crystals, in particular the specific heat. Deputy Director of the Yale Quantum Institute A. Douglas Stone makes a similar priority case for Einstein in his work on the synthetic history of quantum mechanics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5387 | 143,786 |
909,956 | Davenport and Petter designed an aircraft to incorporate these features. The Lysander was to be powered by a Bristol Mercury air-cooled radial engine and had high wings and a fixed conventional landing gear mounted on an innovative inverted U square-section tube that supported wing struts at the apex, and contained internal springs for the faired wheels. The large streamlined spats also contained a mounting for a Browning machine gun and fittings for removable stub wings that could carry light bombs or supply canisters. The wings had a reverse taper towards the root, which gave the impression of a bent gull wing from some angles, although the spars were straight. It had a girder type construction faired with a light wood stringers to give the aerodynamic shape. The forward fuselage was duralumin tube joined with brackets and plates, and the after part was welded stainless steel tubes. Plates and brackets were cut from channel extrusions rather than being formed from sheet steel. The front spar and lift struts were extrusions. The wing itself was fabric covered and its thickness was greatest at the strut anchorage, similar to that of later marks of the Stinson Reliant high-winged transport monoplane. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=559595 | 909,477 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.