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134,713 | White mustard ("Sinapis alba") grows wild in North Africa, West Asia, and Mediterranean Europe, and has spread farther by long cultivation; brown mustard ("Brassica juncea"), originally from the foothills of the Himalayas, is grown commercially in India, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Bangladesh and the United States; black mustard ("Brassica nigra") is grown in Argentina, Chile, the US, and some European countries. Canada and Nepal are the world's major producers of mustard seed, between them accounting for around 57% of world production in 2010. White mustard is commonly used as a cover crop in Europe (between UK and Ukraine). Many varieties exist, "e.g.", in Germany and the Netherlands, mainly differing in lateness of flowering and resistance against white beet-cyst nematode ("Heterodera schachtii"). Farmers prefer late-flowering varieties, which do not produce seeds; they may become weeds in the subsequent year. Early vigor is important to cover the soil quickly and suppress weeds and protect the soil against erosion. In rotations with sugar beets, suppression of the white beet-cyst nematode is an important trait. Resistant white mustard varieties reduce nematode populations by 70–90%. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2028368 | 134,658 |
375,494 | The most ambitious peaceful application of nuclear explosions was pursued by the USSR with the aim of creating a 112 km long canal between the Pechora river basin and the Kama river basin, about half of which was to be constructed through a series of underground nuclear explosions. It was reported that about 250 nuclear devices might be used to get the final goal. The "Taiga" test was to demonstrate the feasibility of the project. Three of these "clean" devices of 15 kiloton yield each were placed in separate boreholes spaced about 165 m apart at depths of 127 m. They were simultaneously detonated on March 23, 1971, catapulting radioactive plume into the air that was carried eastward by wind. The resulting trench was around 700 m long and 340 m wide, with an unimpressive depth of just 10–15m. Despite their "clean" nature, the area still exhibits a noticeably higher (albeit mostly harmless) concentration of fission products, the intense neutron bombardment of the soil, the device itself and the support structures also activated their stable elements to create a significant amount of man-made radioactive elements like Co. The overall danger posed by the concentration of radioactive elements present at the site created by these three devices is still negligible, but a larger scale project as was envisioned would have had significant consequences both from the fallout of radioactive plume and the radioactive elements created by the neutron bombardment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=172911 | 375,299 |
1,747,895 | In late August 1914, with war declared the Japanese had wasted no time in deploying their powerful naval assets in support of allied efforts against German commerce raiders in the Asia-Pacific. The battlecruiser was immediately dispatched to patrol the sealanes and three days later on August 26, at the request of the British government, the together with the light cruiser were ordered to Singapore in order to provide support in the search for German commerce raiders, particularly the light cruiser . Whilst the "Chikuma" stayed in the area patrolling unsuccessfully as far south as Ceylon, on September 18, the "Ibuki" was soon dispatched back eastwards to begin the task of escorting allied troop convoys carrying ANZAC contingents from Australia and New Zealand to the Middle East, from German raiders. The hunt for German commerce raiders continued and the together with the light cruisers and , were sent to watch the sea lanes around Australia. During October, in an effort to hunt down German ships the Japanese force in the Indian Ocean was greatly strengthened with all vessels coming under the command of Vice-Admiral Sojiro Tochinai; ultimately employing two battlecruisers, "Ibuki" and ; three armoured cruisers, , and , and three light cruisers, "Hirado", "Yahagi" and "Chikuma". On November 1, in response to a British request, the Japanese assumed temporary responsibility for all Allied naval activity in the Indian Ocean east of 90 degrees longitude and remained in command for the rest of the month. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56104666 | 1,746,909 |
1,309,839 | Element collecting presents many challenges: some elements, such as mercury, beryllium, thallium, plutonium, and arsenic are toxic and so are difficult to find or their sale is restricted. Others are extremely rare in commercial use, such as scandium, lutetium, and thulium, and are therefore hard to source or are comparatively expensive. Some, such as caesium, white phosphorus, and fluorine, are too reactive and have restrictions on their shipping; others, such as gallium, react corrosively and very fast with aluminium (e.g., as structural material in aircraft). Some, such as phosphorus and iodine, are controlled due to use in clandestine chemistry. Others, like radon and astatine, are radioactive and have half-lives too short for practical collection in addition to their radioactive hazards. Usually only the stable elements from hydrogen to bismuth (except the radioactive technetium and promethium) are collected, with the exceptions of the extremely long-lived thorium and uranium. It is possible to source other radioactive elements, such as radium (usually in the form of radium sulfate as part of luminescent paint on antique watch hands), americium (in the form of radioactive buttons containing 0.29 micrograms of americium extracted from older smoke detectors), promethium (often in the form of luminous paint in signal lights) and, technetium (which is sold by vendors, usually at very high prices). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22379986 | 1,309,123 |
836,640 | The implication of this is that hence "one might ... imagine two kinds of creature, one whose essence it was to create and the other not, undergoing similarly toilsome histories because of similarly adverse circumstances. In one case, but not the other, the toil would be a self-alienating exercise of essential powers" (p. 170). Hence, "historical materialism and Marxist philosophical anthropology are independent of, though also consistent with, each other" (p. 174, see especially sections 10 and 11). The problem is this: it seems as though the motivation most people have for the work they do isn't the exercise of their creative capacity; on the contrary, labour is alienated by definition in the capitalist system based on salary, and people only do it because they have to. They go to work not to express their human nature but to find theirs means of subsistence. So in that case, why do the productive forces grow – does human nature have anything to do with it? The answer to this question is a difficult one, and a closer consideration of the arguments in the literature is necessary for a full answer than can be given in this article. However, it is worth bearing in mind that Cohen had previously been committed to the strict view that human nature (and other "asocial premises") were "sufficient" for the development of the productive forces – it could be that they are only one "necessary" constituent. It is also worth considering that by 1988 (see quotation above), he appears to consider that the problem is resolved. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5317064 | 836,191 |
447,334 | The success of gene therapy depends on the efficient insertion of therapeutic genes at an appropriate chromosomal target site within the human genome, without causing cell injury, oncogenic mutations, or an immune response. The construction of plasmid vectors is simple and straightforward. Custom-designed ZFNs that combine the non-specific cleavage domain (N) of "Fok"I endonuclease with zinc-finger proteins (ZFPs) offer a general way to deliver a site-specific DSB to the genome, and stimulate local homologous recombination by several orders of magnitude. This makes targeted gene correction or genome editing a viable option in human cells. Since ZFN-encoding plasmids could be used to transiently express ZFNs to target a DSB to a specific gene locus in human cells, they offer an excellent way for targeted delivery of the therapeutic genes to a pre-selected chromosomal site. The ZFN-encoding plasmid-based approach has the potential to circumvent all the problems associated with the viral delivery of therapeutic genes. The first therapeutic applications of ZFNs are likely to involve "ex vivo" therapy using a patients own stem cells. After editing the stem cell genome, the cells could be expanded in culture and reinserted into the patient to produce differentiated cells with corrected functions. Initial targets likely include the causes of monogenic diseases, such as the IL2Rγ gene and the β-globin gene for gene correction and CCR5 gene for mutagenesis and disablement. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6476735 | 447,117 |
1,900,087 | Despite the fact that it was 17 miles away, Seyfarth enjoyed the advantage of the school's convenient location. The railway depot that marked the beginning of his trip was a two-block walk from his home at Grove Street and Western Avenue, with the end of the ride being at the Illinois Central's Twelfth Street Station, which was located directly across the street from the school. The ride would have taken him directly over the Midway Plaisance of the World's Columbian Exposition, where he would have a clear view to the west of the great Ferris Wheel and to the east of the Beaux Arts majesty of the main body of the Fair. It is difficult to imagine that to a boy from small-town America in the early 1890s this would not have created an impression and provided him with enormous inspiration, as it did the architectural world at large for the next forty years. In her book "A Poet's Life - Seventy Years in a Changing World", the writer, founder of the magazine Poetry and social critic Harriet Monroe succinctly noted forty-five years after the closing of the Fair that "... like all great achievements of beauty, it has become an incalculably inspiring force which lasted into the next 'age'." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24940492 | 1,899,001 |
1,991,040 | Early in his reign, Akhenaten used art in order to emphasize his intentions of doing things very differently unlike his precedents. Colossi and wall-reliefs from the Karnak Aten Temple are highly exaggerated and almost grotesque when compared to the Egyptian royal and elite art during the millennium preceding Akhenaten's birth. Art before Akhenaten was characterized by its formality and restraint. Since art during Akhenaten period such as Karnak Temple is strangely beautiful today, it is hard for us to understand the shocking effect that such representations must have had on the senses of people who were never exposed to any similar art before. It was quite striking for them to find such extravagant art after being used to the traditional formal Egyptian art. With the move to Amarna, art becomes less exaggerated, it is often described as 'naturalistic' however, it remains highly stylized in its portrayal of the human figure. The royal family members are usually shown with elongated skulls and pear-shaped bodies with skinny torsos and arms but fuller hips, stomachs and thighs. Although formal worshipping scenes of the king while worshipping the Gods remain important, there was an increase emphasis on ordinary, day-to-day activities. Some of the very interesting portrayals were those intimate portrayals of Akhenaten and Nefertiti while playing with their daughters under the rays of the Aten. Also, there were portrayals of animals and birds playing under the sun rays in the decoration of the royal tomb. While traditional Egyptian art tends to emphasize the idea of eternity, Amarna art focuses on the small details of life which only occur because of the light of the sun that gives the living power to all living beings. Not only Akhenaten is famous for the changes he made in the religious practices and art but he also was known for the changes in temple architecture and building methods. He shifted to smaller blocks of stone set in a strong mortar in order to create his stone structure. Even official inscriptions changed from the old-fashioned language used in traditional earlier periods to monumental texts to reflect the spoken language of the time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44625317 | 1,989,897 |
996,051 | For hitting a distant target an appropriate positive elevation angle is required that is achieved by angling the line of sight from the shooter's eye through the centerline of the sighting system downward toward the line of departure. This can be accomplished by simply adjusting the sights down mechanically, or by securing the entire sighting system to a sloped mounting having a known downward slope, or by a combination of both. This procedure has the effect of elevating the muzzle when the barrel must be subsequently raised to align the sights with the target. A projectile leaving a muzzle at a given elevation angle follows a ballistic trajectory whose characteristics are dependent upon various factors such as muzzle velocity, gravity, and aerodynamic drag. This ballistic trajectory is referred to as the bullet path. If the projectile is spin stabilized, aerodynamic forces will also predictably arc the trajectory slightly to the right, if the rifling employs "right-hand twist." Some barrels are cut with left-hand twist, and the bullet will arc to the left, as a result. Therefore, to compensate for this path deviation, the sights also have to be adjusted left or right, respectively. A constant wind also predictably affects the bullet path, pushing it slightly left or right, and a little bit more up and down, depending on the wind direction. The magnitude of these deviations are also affected by whether the bullet is on the upward or downward slope of the trajectory, due to a phenomenon called "yaw of repose," where a spinning bullet tends to steadily and predictably align slightly off center from its point mass trajectory. Nevertheless, each of these trajectory perturbations are predictable once the projectile aerodynamic coefficients are established, through a combination of detailed analytical modeling and test range measurements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=584911 | 995,534 |
659,057 | Although physical characteristics and sizes at various instars have been used to estimate fly age, a more recent study has been conducted to determine the age of an egg based on the expression of particular genes. This is particularly useful in determining developmental stages that are not evidenced by change in size; such as the egg or pupa and where only a general time interval can be estimated based on the duration of the particular developmental stage. This is done by breaking the stages down into smaller units separated by predictable changed in gene expression. Three genes were measured in an experiment with "Drosophila melanogaster": bicoid (bcd), slalom (sll), and chitin synthase (cs). These three genes were used because they are likely to be in varied levels during different times of the egg development process. These genes all share a linear relationship in regards to age of the egg; that is, the older the egg is the more of the particular gene is expressed. However, all of the genes are expressed in varying amounts. Different genes on different loci would need to be selected for another fly species. The genes expressions are mapped in a control sample to formulate a developmental chart of the gene expression at certain time intervals. This chart can then be compared to the measured values of gene expression to accurately predict the age of an egg to within two hours with a high confidence level. Even though this technique can be used to estimate the age of an egg, the feasibility and legal acceptance of this must be considered for it to be a widely utilized forensic technique. One benefit of this would be that it is like other DNA-based techniques so most labs would be equipped to conduct similar experiments without requiring new capital investment. This style of age determination is in the process of being used to more accurately find the age of the instars and pupa; however, it is much more complicated, as there are more genes being expressed during these stages. The hope is that with this and other similar techniques a more accurate PMI can be obtained. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61289 | 658,712 |
753,677 | After the new specimens were announced, it was rumoured that a looted skull had found its way to a European museum through the black market. The poached elements were spotted in a private European collection by the French fossil trader François Escuillé, who notified Belgian palaeontologist Pascal Godefroit about them in 2011. They suspected the remains belonged to "Deinocheirus", and contacted the Korean-Mongolian team. Escuillé subsequently acquired the fossils and donated them to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The recovered material consisted of a skull, a left hand, and feet, which had been collected in Mongolia, sold to a Japanese buyer, and resold to a German party (the fossils also passed through China and France). The team concluded that these elements belonged to specimen MPC-D 100/127, as the single leftover toe bone fit perfectly into the unprepared matrix of a poached foot, the bone and matrix matched in colour, and because the elements belonged to an individual of the same size, with no overlap in skeletal elements. On May 1, 2014, the fossils were repatriated to Mongolia by a delegation from the Belgian Museum, during a ceremony held at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. The reunited skeleton was deposited at the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs in Ulaanbaatar, along with a "Tarbosaurus" skeleton which had also been brought back after being stolen. American palaeontologist Thomas R. Holtz stated in an interview that the new "Deinocheirus" remains looked like the "product of a secret love affair between a hadrosaur and "Gallimimus"". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1952495 | 753,275 |
858,099 | At the moment of a large enough meteor or comet impact, bolide detonation, a nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, or theoretical antimatter weapon detonation, a flux of so many gamma ray, x-ray, ultraviolet, visual light and heat photons strikes matter in a such brief amount of time (a great number of high-energy photons, many overlapping in the same physical space) that all molecules lose their atomic bonds and "fly apart". All atoms lose their electron shells and become positively charged ions, in turn emitting photons of a slightly lower energy than they had absorbed. All such matter becomes a gas of nuclei and electrons which rise into the air due to the extremely high temperature or bond to each other as they cool. The matter vaporized this way is immediately a plasma in a state of maximum entropy and this state steadily reduces via the factor of passing time due to natural processes in the biosphere and the effects of physics at normal temperatures and pressures. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=204762 | 857,644 |
1,573,166 | There are four main themes that underline the complex systems within biogeomorphology. The first of which is multiple casualty. Multiple casualty is the way in which biota is deposited. More specifically, multiple casualty is caused by various processes. That is, processes such as fires, floods and hillslope instability directly or indirectly determining the distribution of flora and in turn fauna. Ecosystem engineers are another theme underlying complex system of biogeomorphology. These organisms have the most profound effect on the overall ecosystem structure. Some of the most common ecosystem engineers are earthworms. Earthworms aid in the production of humus and increase both soil aeration and area for roots and root hairs to utilize. With more space for roots, this can increase soil stability. Another strong example of ecosystem engineers are beavers. Beavers can increase the sedimentation in a channel as well as increase runoff rates due to a reduction of vegetative cover needed to build their dams. Ecological topology is another theme of complex systems in biogeomorphology. This theme focuses on how the biota varies based on geographic location. This ecological topology is controlled by a concept called stability domain. Stability domain describes the interaction of a set species and certain abiotic factors that act as a medium to the function and structure of an environment. The final of the four underlying themes of the complex systems in biogeomorphology is ecological memory. Ecological memory is where certain biotic and abiotic factors have a recursive relationship and therefore can be encoded in organisms and the immediate environment. An example of this can simply be the flame retardant properties in the bark of Coastal Sequoias due to the recurrence of fires | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3964562 | 1,572,277 |
1,152,951 | A pivotal moment in UCSF history was the deal between Vice-Chancellor Bruce Spaulding and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown for the development of the Mission Bay campus in 1999. Renowned scientist J. Michael Bishop, recipient of both the Lasker Award and Nobel Prize in Medicine (together with UCSF professor Harold Varmus), became the eighth Chancellor in 1998. He oversaw one of UCSF's major transition and growth periods, including the expanding Mission Bay development and philanthropic support recruitment. During his tenure, he unveiled the first comprehensive, campus-wide, strategic plan to promote diversity and foster a supportive work environment. During this time, UCSF also adopted a new mission: "advancing health worldwide"™. The 2010s saw increased construction and expansion at Mission Bay, with the "Smith Cardiovascular Research Building", the "UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay", and the Benioff Children's Hospital in 2010, the "Sandler Neuroscience Center" in 2012, and "Mission Hall" and the "Baker Cancer Hospital" in 2013. In 2012, the school opened the UCSF Anatomy learning center. The Children's Hospital was named after Mark Benioff, who donated $100 million toward the new facility. In 2015, the Mission Bay campus saw the grand opening of the new UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, a 289-bed integrated hospital complex dedicated to serving children, women and cancer patients. The school started the new Bridges curriculum in 2016 with the class of 2020. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46793698 | 1,152,341 |
551,170 | The RPG-43 externally was shaped like an oversized stick grenade with a 95 mm HEAT warhead on the end. It weighed of which was high explosive. When thrown, a cylindrical metal cone was released from the rear of the grenade and held by fabric strips to stabilise flight and increase the likelihood of a 90 degree hit. Its range was limited by how far a user could throw it, and was obviously shorter than the contemporary rocket-propelled US Bazooka and recoilless German Panzerfaust, so that the user had to get closer and was in more danger of being seen. However, it was much smaller than rocket weapons and produced no sound, smoke, or light when launched, and thus did not betray a thrower's position. Despite its limits, it was cheap and fast to manufacture, allowing it to become the main Soviet infantry anti-tank weapon of World War II. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6539389 | 550,882 |
675,400 | They are found in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. "Psychrolutes phrictus" have been reported near the Mexican Pacific coast, which extends the southern range by 1,733 km. "Myoxocephalus thompsonii," deepwater sculpin, have even been reported in Lake Ontario which were once thought to be extirpated. Psychrolutidae species tend to habituate the northern most region of the Pacific ocean due to lower temperatures, and Indian Oceans. They are found in depths ranging from 300–1,700 meters. The adults live on the sea floor, between deep, The intense biological pressure to conserve energy within deep sea fish seems to be true across many species; most of them are long lived, have a slow rate of reproduction, growth, and aging. In this case the blobfish can live to be roughly 130 years old. Categorized as the predator of the deep sea they have no real predatory issues; a big help to aid in their energy saving. Their diet also helps in their energy saving abilities. They feed on small crustaceans, sea pens, sea worms, and any other small organisms that swim right in front of them. Their name is derived from the Greek "psychrolouteo", meaning "to have a cold bath". They tend to live in colder waters, although some range into warm-temperate seas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2455979 | 675,047 |
98,694 | In 1974 Frank Sherwood Rowland, Chemistry Professor at the University of California at Irvine, and his postdoctoral associate Mario J. Molina suggested that long-lived organic halogen compounds, such as CFCs, might behave in a similar fashion as Crutzen had proposed for nitrous oxide. James Lovelock had recently discovered, during a cruise in the South Atlantic in 1971, that almost all of the CFC compounds manufactured since their invention in 1930 were still present in the atmosphere. Molina and Rowland concluded that, like , the CFCs would reach the stratosphere where they would be dissociated by UV light, releasing chlorine atoms. A year earlier, Richard Stolarski and Ralph Cicerone at the University of Michigan had shown that Cl is even more efficient than NO at catalyzing the destruction of ozone. Similar conclusions were reached by Michael McElroy and Steven Wofsy at Harvard University. Neither group, however, had realized that CFCs were a potentially large source of stratospheric chlorine—instead, they had been investigating the possible effects of HCl emissions from the Space Shuttle, which are very much smaller. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44183 | 98,651 |
273,698 | The idea of using chaff developed independently in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Japan. In 1937, British researcher Gerald Touch, while working with Robert Watson-Watt on radar, suggested that lengths of wire suspended from balloons or parachutes might overwhelm a radar system with false echoes and R. V. Jones had suggested that pieces of metal foil falling through the air might do the same. In early 1942, Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) researcher Joan Curran investigated the idea and came up with a scheme for dumping packets of aluminium strips from aircraft to generate a cloud of false echoes. An early idea was to use sheets the size of a notebook page; these would be printed so they would also serve as propaganda leaflets. It was found that the most effective version was strips of black paper backed with aluminium foil, exactly and packed into bundles each weighing . The head of the TRE, A. P. Rowe, code-named the device "Window". In Germany, similar research had led to the development of "Düppel". The German code name came from the estate where the first German tests with chaff took place, circa 1942. Once the British had passed the idea to the US via the Tizard Mission, Fred Whipple developed a system for dispensing strips for the USAAF, but it is not known if this was ever used. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1550386 | 273,550 |
2,084,289 | "A. carneus" contributes to both medicine and industry, often simultaneously. The fungus produces a unique alkaline lipase ("Aspergillus carneus" lipase) with high pH and temperature tolerance, 1,3-regioselectivity, stability in organic solvents and esterification and transesterification properties. The lipase hydrolyzes a variety of oils and triglycerides, most notably sunflower oil. It is also extracellular, which improves yield during purification, and is resistant to inhibition by sodium propionate, a common food preservative. No other known fungal lipase exhibits this precise combination of abilities, making it a promising catalyst for industrial processes including synthesis of pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, dairy products and detergents. Media containing glucose, sunflower oil, nitrogen and phosphorus may be used to maximize lipase yield from "A. carneus". The "Aspegillus carneus" lipase is also capable of producing synthetic plant polyphenolics through deactylation, compounds which may protect against oxidative damage in human neurodegenerative disease. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61751564 | 2,083,089 |
1,878,940 | Combining his expertise in sedimentology and geobiology, Grotzinger's research on stromatolites shows that they are vital tools in understanding the interactions between ancient microorganisms and their environment. Stromatolites are attached, lithified sedimentary growth structures, accretionary away from a point or limited surface of initiation. Though the accretion process is commonly regarded to result from the sediment trapping or precipitation-inducing activities of microbial mats, only rarely is evidence of this process preserved in Precambrian stromatolites. Grotzinger's research has applied a process-based approach, oriented toward deconvolving the replacement textures of ancient stromatolites. The effects of diagenetic recrystallization first must be accounted for, followed by analysis of lamination textures and deduction of possible accretion mechanisms. Accretion hypotheses can be tested using numerical simulations based on modern stromatolite growth processes. Application of this approach has shown that stromatolites were originally formed largely through in situ precipitation of laminae during Archean and older Proterozoic times, but that younger Proterozoic stromatolites grew largely through the accretion of carbonate sediments, most likely through the physical process of microbial trapping and binding. This trend most likely reflects long-term evolution of the earth's environment rather than microbial communities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26158825 | 1,877,860 |
2,201,477 | Shkel was educated at the Moscow State University where in 1991 he got his diploma in applied mechanics. In 1997, he got his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and from 1997 to 1999 served as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2000, Shkel is a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine, and from 2009 to 2013, he was on leave from academia serving as a Program Manager in the Microsystems Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dr. Shkel has been on a number of editorial boards, most recently as Editor of IEEE/ASME Journal of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (JMEMS), Editor of the Journal on Gyroscopy and Navigation, and the founding chair of the IEEE Inertial Sensors (INERTIAL). Dr. Shkel has been also awarded in 2013 the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, the 2009 IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award, and the 2005 NSF CAREER award. His professional interests, reflected in over 270 publications, three books, and 42 U.S. Patents, include high performance inertial sensors, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and implantable vestibular prosthetics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53755740 | 2,200,224 |
1,463,771 | In the early 1950s, the federal government built the Savannah River Plant (SRP) to create materials for hydrogen bombs. The plant, located on 306 miles of land, was the largest construction project in the history of the country at the time. During construction, up to 40,000 workers were employed by the SRP resulting in increased wages throughout the region. Civil rights groups fought for equal employment opportunities at the plant. In the 1950s, the vast majority of African Americans in the state worked in agriculture because the textile industry was dominated by whites. The jobs the SRP created in western South Carolina enabled many of that area's white citizens to enter the middle class. But, African Americans whom made up 20% of the plant's workforce almost all worked as common day laborers. In the 1990s, the plant was renamed the Savannah River Site (SRS). According to the SRS it is now an "industrial complex responsible for disposition of nuclear materials, waste management, environmental cleanup and environmental stewardship" with an annual budget of $2 billion and a workforce of almost 11,000. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21927183 | 1,462,948 |
1,577,902 | With Land-grant colleges being required to provide military training as part of its core curriculum. The Junior Unit of Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) was inaugurated in 1919. This two-year program continued until the Senior Division R.O.T.C. was established in 1942, followed by the senior Air Force unit in 1951. In 1925, Dr. Ferdinand D. Bluford was selected as the third president of the college, and A&T became a member of the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (now known as the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association). The next year, the College's National Alumni Association was established. In 1928, the 27-year ban on female students was lifted as the college once again was granted co-educational status. By December 1931, female students are allowed, for the first time, to participate in the student government as members of the student council. In 1939, the college was authorized to grant the Master of Science degree in education and certain other fields. Two years later, the first Master of Science degree was awarded to Roy Elloy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42220009 | 1,577,013 |
1,317,791 | In the mid 2010s several techniques combined with Next Generation Sequencing were developed that employ the "tag" principle for "digital gene expression profiling" but without the use of the tagging enzyme. The "MACE" approach, (=Massive Analysis of cDNA Ends) generates tags somewhere in the last 1500 bps of a transcript. The technique does not depend on restriction enzymes anymore and thereby circumvents bias that is related to the absence or location of the restriction site within the cDNA. Instead, the cDNA is randomly fragmented and the 3'ends are sequenced from the 5' end of the cDNA molecule that carries the poly-A tail. The sequencing length of the tag can be freely chosen. Because of this, the tags can be assembled into contigs and the annotation of the tags can be drastically improved. Therefore, MACE is also use for the analyses of non-model organisms. In addition, the longer contigs can be screened for polymorphisms. As UTRs show a large number of polymorphisms between individuals, the MACE approach can be applied for allele determination, allele specific gene expression profiling and the search for molecular markers for breeding. In addition, the approach allows determining alternative polyadenylation of the transcripts. Because MACE does only require 3’ ends of transcripts, even partly degraded RNA can be analyzed with less degradation dependent bias. The MACE approach uses unique molecular identifiers to allow for identification of PCR bias. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1743649 | 1,317,066 |
911,562 | Telehealth is the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long-distance patient and clinician contact, care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, monitoring, and remote admissions. Telemedicine is sometimes used as a synonym, or is used in a more limited sense to describe remote clinical services, such as diagnosis and monitoring. Remote monitoring, also known as self-monitoring or testing, enables medical professionals to monitor a patient remotely using various technological devices. This method is primarily used for managing chronic diseases or specific conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes mellitus, or asthma. These services can provide comparable health outcomes to traditional in-person patient encounters, supply greater satisfaction to patients, and may be cost-effective. Telerehabilitation (or e-rehabilitation[40][41]) is the delivery of rehabilitation services over telecommunication networks and the Internet. Most types of services fall into two categories: clinical assessment (the patient's functional abilities in his or her environment), and clinical therapy. Some fields of rehabilitation practice that have explored telerehabilitation are: neuropsychology, speech-language pathology, audiology, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. Telerehabilitation can deliver therapy to people who cannot travel to a clinic because the patient has a disability or because of travel time. Telerehabilitation also allows experts in rehabilitation to engage in a clinical consultation at a distance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=351581 | 911,083 |
1,515,176 | One of Stupp’s major discoveries occurred soon after his arrival at Northwestern. In 2001, Stupp and postdoctoral fellow Jeffrey Hartgerink discovered a new class of peptide amphiphiles with the ability to self-assemble into nanoscale filaments that mimic components of the extracellular matrix. Consisting of a hydrophobic alkyl tail grafted onto specially designed peptide sequences, these peptide amphiphiles spontaneously form high-aspect ratio nanofibers in water that can present extremely high densities of biological signals on their surface. These molecules have revolutionized the field of bioactive materials for regenerative medicine, with potential applications in bone and cartilage regeneration, angiogenesis for ischemia or peripheral artery disease, cancer therapy, novel therapies for neurodegenerative diseases, stem cell differentiation, spinal cord injury, diabetes, and many other areas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34210292 | 1,514,325 |
127,038 | The university also offers a continuing and public education program through UC San Diego Extension. Approximately 50,000 enrollees per year are educated in this branch of the university, which offers over 100 professional and specialized certificate programs. Courses are offered at Extension facilities, located both on the main campus and off-campus, and also online. UC San Diego Extension offers programs in Arts & Humanities, Business & Leadership, Data Analysis & Mathematics, Digital Arts, Education, Engineering, Environment & Sustainability, International Programs, Languages, Law, Occupational Safety & Health, Pre-College, Sciences, Technology, and Writing, as well as public programs such as the UC San Diego Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the Helen Edison Lecture Series. UC San Diego Extension also plans to open a 66,000-square-foot hub at the corner of Park Boulevard and Market Street in East Village referred to as the Innovative Cultural and Education Hub. The project is slated to be completed in 2020 and plans to "advance the burgeoning tech ecosystem downtown, contribute to the city's lively arts and culture scene, and connect in multiple ways with diverse neighborhoods such as Barrio Logan, the Diamond District, and Golden Hill." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31927 | 126,986 |
1,934,833 | The onset of the Depression in the 1930s caused the matter to be raised once again, since it was felt that the project would provide much-needed work for the depressed building industry. Professor Sampson, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was brought in as consultant. After examining several sites he came down strongly in favour of Balgay Hill as being by far the most suitable site, both in terms of astronomical suitability and for public access. This decision has stood the test of time, since other observatories have had their seeing conditions ruined by sodium lighting and other forms of modern pollution. The concept of a public observatory is, in a way, a contradiction in terms, since by definition, an observatory should be as far away from the public as possible. Most of the modern research observatories are situated on mountain-tops or desert areas. However, the geography of Dundee is unique, in that it has Balgay Hill overlooking a river estuary, protected from the main lights of the city by trees which also help to provide a purer atmosphere, and at the same time very accessible to the public. Something like 40% of all nights are observable. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9898493 | 1,933,725 |
370,044 | Holst composed few large-scale works in his final years. "A Choral Fantasia" of 1930 was written for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester; beginning and ending with a soprano soloist, the work, also involving chorus, strings, brass and percussion, includes a substantial organ solo which, says Imogen Holst, "knows something of the 'colossal and mysterious' loneliness of "Egdon Heath"". Apart from his final uncompleted symphony, Holst's remaining works were for small forces; the eight "Canons" of 1932 were dedicated to his pupils, though in Imogen's view that they present a formidable challenge to the most professional of singers. The "Brook Green Suite" (1932), written for the orchestra of St Paul's School, was a late companion piece to the "St Paul's Suite". The "Lyric Movement" for viola and small orchestra (1933) was written for Lionel Tertis. Quiet and contemplative, and requiring little virtuosity from the soloist, the piece was slow to gain popularity among violists. Robin Hull, in "Penguin Music Magazine", praised the work's "clear beauty—impossible to mistake for the art of any other composer"; in Dickinson's view, however, it remains "a frail creation". Holst's final composition, the orchestral scherzo movement of a projected symphony, contains features characteristic of much of Holst's earlier music—"a summing up of Holst's orchestral art", according to Short. Dickinson suggests that the somewhat casual collection of material in the work gives little indication of the symphony that might have been written. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49241 | 369,850 |
728,195 | PAR draws on a wide range of influences, both among those with professional training and those who draw on their life experience and those of their ancestors. Many draw on the work of Paulo Freire, new thinking on adult education research, the Civil Rights Movement, South Asian social movements such as the Bhumi Sena, and key initiatives such as the Participatory Research Network created in 1978 and based in New Delhi. "It has benefited from an interdisciplinary development drawing its theoretical strength from adult education, sociology, political economy, community psychology, community development, feminist studies, critical psychology, organizational development and more". The Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda and others organized the first explicitly PAR conference in Cartagena, Colombia in 1977. Based on his research with peasant groups in rural Boyaca and with other underserved groups, Fals Borda called for the 'community action' component to be incorporated into the research plans of traditionally trained researchers. His recommendations to researchers committed to the struggle for justice and greater democracy in all spheres, including the business of science, are useful for all researchers and echo the teaching from many schools of research: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2819542 | 727,811 |
653,875 | Another category of plant defenses are those features that indirectly protect the plant by enhancing the probability of attracting the natural enemies of herbivores. Such an arrangement is known as mutualism, in this case of the "enemy of my enemy" variety. One such feature are semiochemicals, given off by plants. Semiochemicals are a group of volatile organic compounds involved in interactions between organisms. One group of semiochemicals are allelochemicals; consisting of allomones, which play a defensive role in interspecies communication, and kairomones, which are used by members of higher trophic levels to locate food sources. When a plant is attacked it releases allelochemics containing an abnormal ratio of these s (HIPVs). Predators sense these volatiles as food cues, attracting them to the damaged plant, and to feeding herbivores. The subsequent reduction in the number of herbivores confers a fitness benefit to the plant and demonstrates the indirect defensive capabilities of semiochemicals. Induced volatiles also have drawbacks, however; some studies have suggested that these volatiles attract herbivores. Crop domestication has increased yield sometimes at the expense of HIPV production. Orre Gordon et al 2013 tests several methods of artificially restoring the plant-predator partnership, by combining companion planting and synthetic predator attractants. They describe several strategies which work and several which do not. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4189740 | 653,531 |
252,245 | Poliovirus is a positive-stranded RNA virus. Thus, the genome enclosed within the viral particle can be used as messenger RNA and immediately translated by the host cell. On entry, the virus hijacks the cell's translation machinery, causing inhibition of cellular protein synthesis in favor of virus-specific protein production. Unlike the host cell's mRNAs, the 5' end of poliovirus RNA is extremely long—over 700 nucleotides—and highly structured. This region of the viral genome is called an internal ribosome entry site (IRES). This region consists of many secondary structures and 3 or 4 domains. Domain 3 is a self folding RNA element that contains conserved structural motifs in various stable stem loops linked by two four-way junctions. As IRES consists of many domains, these domains themselves consist of many loops that contribute to modified translation without a 5’ end cap by hijacking ribosomes. The interaction loop of domain 3 is known as GNRA tetraloop. The residues of adenosines A180 and A181 in the GUAA tetraloop form hydrogen bonds via non canonical base pairing interactions with the base pairs of the receptors C230/G242 and G231/C241, respectively. Genetic mutations in this region prevent viral protein production. The first IRES to be discovered was found in poliovirus RNA. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=357756 | 252,112 |
368,301 | Whorf's most elaborate argument for linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi. He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years," but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns. Ekkehart Malotki later claimed that he had found no evidence of Whorf's claims in 1980's era speakers, nor in historical documents dating back to the arrival of Europeans. Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calendars, historical documents, and modern speech; he concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time in the way Whorf suggested. Universalist scholars such as Pinker often see Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi, whereas relativist scholars such as Lucy and Penny Lee criticized Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a model of analysis that doesn't fit the data. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26915 | 368,108 |
2,177,382 | The mathematical model for the Santos skeleton was developed based on the Denavit-Hartenberg method for kinematic and dynamic analysis. Optimization is used to determine postures and motions that are governed by various human performance measures (objective functions) and constrained by the restrictions imposed by the skeleton, the laws of physics, and the environment. The Santos simulation platform is being used by the US Military, industry (for example automotive industry), and academia. The Virtual Soldier Research team transitioned a product from the Santos environment called Enhanced Technologies for the Optimization of Warfighter Load (ETOWL) funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to the US Marines. The product was later renamed as GruntSim. This human modeling and simulation environment is now being used to study human factors and ergonomics in many applications. This model includes not only Predictive Dynamics but also stability criteria called Zero Moment Point. The use of the Santos Digital Human Model for example in assessing assembly issues in the design stage have been demonstrated and for gait prediction as well. Running for example, which substantially more difficult to predict for a virtual human, was accomplished. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50798140 | 2,176,138 |
644,006 | Until the 2010s, the impact of open science movement was largely limited to scientific publications: it "has tended to overlook the importance of social structures and systemic constraints in the design of new forms of knowledge infrastructures." In 1997, Robert D. Cameron called for the development of an open databases of citation that would completely alter the condition of science communication: "Imagine a universal bibliographic and citation database linking every scholarly work ever written—no matter how published—to every work that cites and every work that cites it. Imagine that such a citation database was freely available over the Internet and was updated every day with all the new works published that day, including papers in traditional and electronic journals, conference papers, theses, technical reports, working papers, and preprints." Despite the development of specific indexes focused on open access works like Citeseer, a large open alternative to the Science Citation Index failed to materialize. The collection of citation data, remained dominated by large commercial structure such as the direct descendant of the Scientific Citation Index, the Web of Science. This had the effect of maintaining the emerging ecosystem of open resources at the periphery of academic networks: "common pool of resources is not governed or managed by the current scholarly commons initiative. There is no dedicated hard infrastructure and though there may be a nascent community, there is no formal membership." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1223245 | 643,666 |
1,916,972 | One prominent iatrophysicist was Giovanni Borelli, who modeled the human body, various animals, and their motions using mechanical principles. A colleague of Marcello Malphigi, Borelli was a mathematician who made connections between what he observed in living things and inanimate but relatively simple systems. He dissected animals and examined how muscles were to increase mechanical advantage, observed how a variety of living things performed different movements and activities such as running, carrying loads, swimming, and flying naturally rather than by his intervention, and devised simple methods to calculate a person's center of mass. He also devised relatively simple experiments and devices to make his observations such as a plank and rod for center of mass and a spirometer for volume of air. At the end of his life, his work culminated in "De Motu Animalium" (1679), a publication showcasing his investigations in similarities and differences in muscles across living things and his understanding of the underlying mechanism of muscle contraction, expansion via influx of fluids or gases released from nerves. He also attempted to describe more complicated processes such as nerve transmission and digestion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10512779 | 1,915,873 |
772,103 | Healy was selected in the Australian squad for the Rose Bowl series against New Zealand in February 2010 due to an injury to the incumbent wicketkeeper and captain Jodie Fields. The selection committee released a statement saying "Alyssa has been identified for higher honours for a number of years and now gets the chance to display her wicket-keeping skills and attacking batting on the international stage". Healy made her ODI debut at the Adelaide Oval and played in all five ODIs in the Australian leg of the series. In her first match, she scored 21 from 11 balls in the death overs, hitting four fours as Australia made 241 before bowling out the visitors for 126 to seal a 115-run win. She took one catch, removing Amy Satterthwaite from the bowling of Rene Farrell. Healy made consecutive ducks in the next two matches, and made four in the final match at Junction Oval. She had only brief opportunities with the bat in the closing stages of the innings. She ended the series with 25 runs at 6.25 and a strike rate of 100.00, five catches and a stumping. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18501459 | 771,689 |
273,643 | Video sampling tends to work on a completely different scale altogether thanks to the highly nonlinear response both of cathode ray tubes (for which the vast majority of digital video foundation work was targeted) and the human eye, using a "gamma curve" to provide an appearance of evenly distributed brightness steps across the display's full dynamic range - hence the need to use RAMDACs in computer video applications with deep enough color resolution to make engineering a hardcoded value into the DAC for each output level of each channel impractical (e.g. an Atari ST or Sega Genesis would require 24 such values; a 24-bit video card would need 768...). Given this inherent distortion, it is not unusual for a television or video projector to truthfully claim a linear contrast ratio (difference between darkest and brightest output levels) of 1000:1 or greater, equivalent to 10 bits of audio precision even though it may only accept signals with 8-bit precision and use an LCD panel that only represents 6 or 7 bits per channel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=92943 | 273,495 |
456,160 | The human body can briefly survive the hard vacuum of space unprotected, despite contrary depictions in much popular science fiction. Human flesh expands to about twice its size in such conditions, giving the visual effect of a body builder rather than an overfilled balloon. Consciousness is retained for up to 15 seconds as the effects of oxygen starvation set in. No snap freeze effect occurs because all heat must be lost through thermal radiation or the evaporation of liquids, and the blood does not boil because it remains pressurized within the body but when the veins explode, due to the flesh expanding to about twice its size, the blood, stomach contents, brain, heart, eyeballs and muscles will begin to boil until one's body explodes due to 0 pressure in space. The greatest danger is in attempting to hold one's breath before exposure, as the subsequent explosive decompression can damage the lungs. These effects have been confirmed through various accidents (including in very high altitude conditions, outer space and training vacuum chambers). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1810164 | 455,937 |
588,734 | An objection to the practicality of building a Tipler cylinder was discovered by Stephen Hawking, who argued that according to general relativity it is impossible to build a time machine in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy. The Tipler cylinder, on the other hand, does not involve any negative energy. Tipler's original solution involved a cylinder of infinite length, which is easier to analyze mathematically, and although Tipler suggested that a finite cylinder might produce closed timelike curves if the rotation rate were fast enough, he did not prove this. But Hawking comments "it can't be done with positive energy density everywhere! I can prove that to build a finite time machine, you need negative energy." Hawking's argument appears in his 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture (though the argument is distinct from the conjecture itself, since the argument asserts that classical general relativity predicts a finite region containing closed timelike curves can only be created if there is a violation of the weak energy condition in that region, whereas the conjecture predicts that closed timelike curves will prove to be impossible in a future theory of quantum gravity which replaces general relativity). In the paper, he examines "the case that the causality violations appear in a finite region of spacetime without curvature singularities" and proves that "[t]here will be a Cauchy horizon that is compactly generated and that in general contains one or more closed null geodesics which will be incomplete. One can define geometrical quantities that measure the Lorentz boost and area increase on going round these closed null geodesics. If the causality violation developed from a noncompact initial surface, the averaged weak energy condition must be violated on the Cauchy horizon." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=661465 | 588,432 |
98,321 | On October 8, 1976, Bryant and Scott delivered a 20-page treatment, "", which executives Barry Diller, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner liked. In it, Kirk and his crew encounter beings they believe to be the mythical Titans and travel back millions of years in time, accidentally teaching early man to make fire. "Planet of the Titans" also explored the concept of the third eye. With the studio's acceptance of this treatment, Roddenberry immediately stopped work on other projects to refocus on "Star Trek", and the screenwriters and Isenberg were deluged with grateful fan mail. Isenberg began scouting filming locations and hired designers and illustrators. Key among these were famed production designer Ken Adam, who said, "I was approached by Gene Roddenberry and we got on like a house on fire"; he was employed to design the film. Adam hired artist Ralph McQuarrie, fresh off the yet to be released "Star Wars". They worked on designs for planets, planetary and asteroid bases, a black hole "shroud", a crystalline "super brain", and new concepts for the "Enterprise", including interiors that Adam later revisited for the film "Moonraker" and a flat-hulled starship design (frequently credited to McQuarrie, but which McQuarrie's own book identifies as an Adam design). McQuarrie wrote that "there was no script" and that much of the work was "winging it". When that film folded after three months for Adam and "a month and a half" for McQuarrie, their concepts were shelved, although a handful of them were revisited in later productions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=277006 | 98,279 |
1,718,269 | Carotenoids are essential for animal life, but animals cannot produce them. Indeed, animals obtain carotenoids from diet, with herbivores sourcing them from plants or algae, and carnivores, in turn, sourcing them from herbivores. However, there is a general consensus that "meso"-zeaxanthin is not present in plants, except for marine species. Originally, it was suggested that "meso"-zeaxanthin was non-dietary in origin and generated at the macula (the central part of the retina) from retinal lutein (another xanthophyll carotenoid found in the human diet), but this work (limited to animal studies) has since been refuted. Indeed, and consistent with the work by Maoka in 1986, Nolan et al. have shown that "meso"-zeaxanthin is present in the skin of trout, sardine and salmon, and in the flesh of trout. In a subsequent publication, Nolan's group detected and quantified the three stereoisomers of zeaxanthin, including "meso"-zeaxanthin, in the flesh of two different trout species. This is the first publication to report the concentrations of "meso"-zeaxanthin in a habitually consumed food. Using data from this publication, it is estimated that when an average sized trout (circa 200 g) is consumed, 0.2 mg of natural "meso"-zeaxanthin is obtained from this source. Moreover, canned sardines can also be considered as a habitual source of "meso"-zeaxanthin for humans, as sardines presented commercially in this way contain a significant amount of skin, which contains "meso"-zeaxanthin. However, the concentration of "meso"-zeaxanthin in sardine skin has not been determined yet. Previously to this research, a publication from Khachick et al., (2002) reported that liver from Japanese Quail ("Coturnix japonica") and frog plasma contain "meso"-zeaxanthin. Of note, frog legs are consumed habitually in France, as they are considered a delicacy of French cuisine. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49287862 | 1,717,299 |
1,920,725 | The general preexisting consensus on hadrosaurid paleobiology was challenged in 1964 by John Ostrom, who found little evidence to support either a diet of aquatic plants or an amphibious lifestyle. Unlike previous depictions, he interpreted hadrosaurids as terrestrial foragers that browsed on land plants, not aquatic plants. Like Lull and Wright, he drew attention to the robust dental batteries, and found that hard, resistant foods were the most likely diet (such as woody, silica–rich, or fibrous materials). Unlike Lull and Wright, he interpreted hadrosaur jaws as using a complex rodent–like forward–backward grinding motion, and did not comment on the possibility of cheeks. Drawing on an older proposal made during study of a hadrosaur specimen with a preserved beak, he noted the possibility that the animals stripped leaves and shoots from branches by closing the beak over branches and pulling back. A terrestrial diet was also supported by the 1922 gut content study, which found conifer needles and twigs, seeds, and fruits inside the specimen. There was also more circumstantial evidence for terrestrial feeding. Ostrom found that hadrosaurid skeletal anatomy indicated that the animals were well–adapted to move on land, and were well–supported by ossified tendons along the vertebral spines, which would have hindered swimming. He also reported that aquatic plant pollen was rare in the rock units hadrosaurids are known from, which indicates that aquatic plants were uncommon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23481302 | 1,919,622 |
406,760 | The name "Erlang", attributed to Bjarne Däcker, has been presumed by those working on the telephony switches (for whom the language was designed) to be a reference to Danish mathematician and engineer Agner Krarup Erlang and a syllabic abbreviation of "Ericsson Language". Erlang was designed with the aim of improving the development of telephony applications. The initial version of Erlang was implemented in Prolog and was influenced by the programming language PLEX used in earlier Ericsson exchanges. By 1988 Erlang had proven that it was suitable for prototyping telephone exchanges, but the Prolog interpreter was far too slow. One group within Ericsson estimated that it would need to be 40 times faster to be suitable for production use. In 1992, work began on the BEAM virtual machine (VM) which compiles Erlang to C using a mix of natively compiled code and threaded code to strike a balance between performance and disk space. According to co-inventor Joe Armstrong, the language went from lab product to real applications following the collapse of the next-generation AXE telephone exchange named in 1995. As a result, Erlang was chosen for the next Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) exchange "AXD". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9646 | 406,559 |
648,091 | There is an alternate strategy for identifying fit mates which does not rely on one gender having exaggerated sexual ornaments or other handicaps, but is generally applicable to most, if not all sexual creatures. It derives from the concept that the change in appearance and functionality caused by a non-silent mutation will generally stand out in a population. This is because that altered appearance and functionality will be unusual, peculiar, and different from the norm within that population. The norm against which these unusual features are judged is made up of fit attributes that have attained their plurality through natural selection, while less adaptive attributes will be in the minority or frankly rare. Since the overwhelming majority of mutant features are maladaptive, and it is impossible to predict evolution's future direction, sexual creatures would be expected to prefer mates with the fewest unusual or minority features. This will have the effect of a sexual population rapidly shedding peripheral phenotypic features and canalizing the entire outward appearance and behaviour so that all the members of that population will begin to look remarkably similar in every detail, as illustrated in the accompanying photograph of the African pygmy kingfisher, "Ispidina picta". Once a population has become as homogeneous in appearance as is typical of most species, its entire repertoire of behaviours will also be rendered evolutionarily stable, including any altruistic, cooperative and social characteristics. Thus, in the example of the selfish individual who hangs back from the rest of the hunting pack, but who nevertheless joins in the spoils, that individual will be recognized as being different from the norm, and will therefore find it difficult to attract a mate. Its genes will therefore have only a very small probability of being passed on to the next generation, thus evolutionarily stabilizing cooperation and social interactions at whatever level of complexity is the norm in that population. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2021591 | 647,750 |
23,521 | The university has embarked on numerous 'green' initiatives. In 2009, a new gas-fired combined heat and power facility replaced a coal-fired steam plant, resulting in a reduction in carbon emissions to 7% below 1990 levels, and projected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 75,000 tons per year. This facility satisfies 15% of campus electrical needs, and a university-run, on-campus hydroelectric plant in the Fall Creek Gorge provides an additional 2%. The university has a lake source cooling project that uses Cayuga Lake to air condition campus buildings, with an 80% energy savings over conventional systems. In 2007, Cornell established a Center for a Sustainable Future. Cornell has been rated "A−" by the 2011 College Sustainability Report Card for its environmental and sustainability initiatives. However, the university has drawn criticism from student groups for a planned North Campus expansion for which they have not released an environmental impact statement. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7954422 | 23,512 |
149,483 | The big news at the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring in Mogyoród was that Ayrton Senna had informed Lotus that he would not be staying with the team in 1988. Team boss Peter Warr moved quickly and signed Nelson Piquet, who was unhappy that Frank Williams would not give him clear number one status at Williams. Senna was going to join Alain Prost at McLaren. Qualifying for the race at Hungaroring saw Ferrari making a step forward as Gerhard Berger qualified second behind Nigel Mansell's Williams-Honda. Nelson Piquet was third with Alain Prost fourth in his McLaren while Michele Alboreto was fifth in the second Ferrari and Senna sixth. The top ten was completed by Thierry Boutsen (Benetton-Ford), Stefan Johansson's McLaren, Derek Warwick in the Arrows-Megatron/BMW and Riccardo Patrese's Brabham-BMW. Mansell took the lead at the start with Berger making a slightly hesitant start which allowed Piquet to take second before Berger retook the place with a brave outside overtaking maneuver at the first corner. Piquet then lost third place to Alboreto and so it was Mansell being chased by the two Ferraris, with Piquet fourth ahead of Senna, Prost, Boutsen and Johansson. Berger's race would be short-lived as he retired after 13 laps with differential failure. This moved Alboreto to second and Piquet to third and the order stayed the same until Piquet overtook Alboreto on lap 29. Senna was fourth with Boutsen fifth and Prost sixth. The order remained unchanged until lap 44 when Alboreto disappeared with an engine problem and then in the closing laps Prost moved ahead of Boutsen. On lap 71 of 76 Mansell's car lost its right rear wheel nut and he was forced to retire, and victory went to Piquet- this was a major blow to Mansell's championship hopes. Senna was second with Prost third ahead of Boutsen, Patrese and Warwick. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1139093 | 149,418 |
1,051,349 | But in the 1980s and in subsequent decades, women's athletics were becoming more prominent. Marshall's first competition was the qualifying meet for the 1979 Empire State Games in White Plains, New York. She won her first national championship in 1981. During the 1980s, Marshall won her weight class six times out of seven and set 45 national records. In 1983, Marshall learned from men's coach Mark LeMenager that the women's weightlifting record had been set 75 years earlier when circus performer Katie Sandwina lifted overhead; according to Drechsler, the Sandwina record inspired Marshall to work harder. Her training regimen included "more squatting, pressing and other strength building exercises." In 1984, she made it into the "Guinness Sports Record Book" with a "clean and jerk", an Olympic event featuring a two-stage lift of a barbell above one's head. This lift topped the Sandwina record. In 1984, she was recognized as the world record holder for women's weightlifting in the 82.5 kg category, based on her results from a competition in Florida. In 1985, Marshall lifted in the "clean-and-jerk" lift. In 1987, the first year in which there was a world championship for women in weightlifting, Marshall competed for the United States against a surprisingly strong team from China. She not only won her bodyweight category by but she outlifted all athletes in the unlimited bodyweight category. She made the highest total in the competition to earn the title of "World's Strongest Woman". The "Guinness Sports Record Book" credited her as being the "world's most powerful female" by lifting overhead. She won the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) World Championship. She was described as the "top American finisher" in the pound weight class. She said: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21905958 | 1,050,803 |
1,273,769 | Since transistor technology was still in its infancy, these machines used vacuum tubes, cold-cathode tubes, and Dekatrons in their circuits, and cold-cathode Nixie tubes for their displays. This technology was fairly robust and cost effective; the Dekatron counter tube being the equivalent of an integrated circuit counter. The ANITA Mk VII was marketed in continental Europe while the ANITA Mk VIII was marketed in Britain and the rest of the world, both for delivery from early 1962. The Mk VII was a slightly earlier design with a more complicated mode of multiplication and was soon dropped in favour of the simpler Mark VIII version. The logic circuits, although digital, were based on decimal notation rather than binary; as Kitz himself stated at a symposium "no binary stunts here!". Similar to the Comptometer calculating machines of the time, the ANITA had a full keyboard, a feature that was unique to it and the later Sharp CS-10A among electronic calculators. Being silent and very quick in operation, and the only electronic desktop calculator available, the ANITA sold well, reaching nearly 10,000 units per year by 1964. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=211929 | 1,273,077 |
728,376 | The Garden city movement was founded by Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928). His ideas were expressed in the book Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898). His influences included Benjamin Walter Richardson, who had published a pamphlet in 1876 calling for low population density, good housing, wide roads, an underground railway and for open space; Thomas Spence who had supported common ownership of land and the sharing of the rents it would produce; Edward Gibbon Wakefield who had pioneered the idea of colonizing planned communities to house the poor in Adelaide (including starting new cities separated by green belts at a certain point); James Silk Buckingham who had designed a model town with a central place, radial avenues and industry in the periphery; as well as Alfred Marshall, Peter Kropotkin and the back-to-the-land movement, which had all called for the moving of masses to the countryside. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45346 | 727,992 |
873,255 | Value chain based on product processing involves such operations as actual mining (or extraction), vertical transport, storing, offloading, transport, metallurgical processing for final products. Unlike the exploration phase, the value increases after each operation on processed material eventually delivered to the metal market. Logistics involves technologies analogous to those applied in land mines. This is also the case for the metallurgical processing, although rich and polymetallic mineral composition which distinguishes marine minerals from its land analogs requires special treatment of the deposit. Environmental monitoring and impact assessment analysis relate to the temporal and spatial discharges of the mining system if they occur, sediment plumes, disturbance to the benthic environment and the analysis of the regions affected by seafloor machines. The step involves an examination of disturbances near the seafloor, as well as disturbances near the surface. Observations include baseline comparisons for the sake of quantitative impact assessments for ensuring the sustainability of the mining process. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10431114 | 872,795 |
61,171 | In "Du "Cubisme"" Metzinger and Gleizes explicitly related the sense of time to multiple perspective, giving symbolic expression to the notion of ‘duration’ proposed by the philosopher Henri Bergson according to which life is subjectively experienced as a continuum, with the past flowing into the present and the present merging into the future. The Salon Cubists used the faceted treatment of solid and space and effects of multiple viewpoints to convey a physical and psychological sense of the fluidity of consciousness, blurring the distinctions between past, present and future. One of the major theoretical innovations made by the Salon Cubists, independently of Picasso and Braque, was that of "simultaneity", drawing to greater or lesser extent on theories of Henri Poincaré, Ernst Mach, Charles Henry, Maurice Princet, and Henri Bergson. With simultaneity, the concept of separate spatial and temporal dimensions was comprehensively challenged. Linear perspective developed during the Renaissance was vacated. The subject matter was no longer considered from a specific point of view at a moment in time, but built following a selection of successive viewpoints, i.e., as if viewed simultaneously from numerous angles (and in multiple dimensions) with the eye free to roam from one to the other. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37803 | 61,146 |
1,285,686 | Smallholders were discouraged from growing tobacco in favour of maize. Growing maize as a cash crop requires reasonable sale prices, low input costs (particularly fertilizer) and farmers having some financial reserves. Farm incomes were declining by 1976 and, from 1981 to 1986, the real value of Malawi maize producer prices fell to 40% to 60% of those of other Central and East African states. Even with low fertilizer prices, maize growing was difficult. From 1971, ADMARC subsidised fertilizer prices for every farmer. Estates benefited most, as tobacco needs more fertilizer than maize, and few smallholders could buy enough fertilizer, even if subsidised. After 1985, declining world tobacco prices and supporting the estates made ADMARC insolvent. The Malawi government agreed to partially privatise it to obtain World Bank loans, which required a phased but complete elimination of fertilizer subsidies. These subsidies decreased from 30.5% in 1983–84 to nothing in 1988–89, which prevented most smallholders from buying fertilizer. Between 1989–90 and 1994–95, subsidies were twice restored and twice removed. Privatisation left ADMARC short of funds to supply fertilizer and seed to smallholders, and it was unable to give credit. All these factors increased the possibility of food shortages and lessened the ability of government or smallholders to cope with them. After its privatisation, ADMARC had to support Mozambican refugees, who numbered over 500,000 by 1988, but it could not replenish its stocks from the poor harvests of the late 1980s. Cassava pests, rare before 1987, severely depleted this main alternative to maize. It only needed a significant fall in rainfall to cause a crisis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14543243 | 1,284,985 |
462,037 | During the course of composition, the work passed through different forms. In 1854 it began as a sonata for two pianos. By July 27 of that year it was being transformed into a four-movement symphony. Brahms sought advice from his close friend Julius Otto Grimm. "Brahms was in the habit of showing his orchestrations to Grimm, who, with his conservatory training, was better schooled in orchestration." After incorporating some of Grimm's suggestions Brahms then sent the orchestrated first movement to Joachim. Evidently Joachim liked it. Brahms wrote to him 12 September 1854 "As usual, you've viewed my symphony movement through rose-coloured spectacles – I definitely want to change and improve it; there's still a great deal lacking in the composition, and I don't even understand as much of the orchestration as appears in the movement, since the best of it I owe to Grimm." By January 1855 Brahms had composed second and third movements, for piano. He ultimately decided to make the work a concerto for piano, his favored instrument, in 1855–56, still consulting friends about the orchestration. Avins writes that "In all the many volumes of correspondence to and from Brahms, nothing quite approaches the letters he and Joachim exchanged over his First Piano Concerto (there are more than twenty of them) ... Joachim's answers, lengthy, detailed, thoughtful, and skilled, are extraordinary testimonials to his own talent, and to the awe and admiration he felt for his friend." Brahms only retained the original material from the work's first movement; the remaining movements were discarded and two new ones were composed, a second movement adagio, which Gál called "calm and dreamlike", and a third movement rondo, in which Gál heard "healthy, exuberant creativity". The result was a work in the more usual three-movement concerto structure. As late as early February 1858, Joachim sent the manuscript back to Brahms "completely revised", hoping that he liked the reorchestrated sections. Brahms did not complete his Symphony No. 1 until 1876. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=365141 | 461,808 |
366,600 | Historically, a common criticism of neural networks, particularly in robotics, was that they require a large diversity of training samples for real-world operation. This is not surprising, since any learning machine needs sufficient representative examples in order to capture the underlying structure that allows it to generalize to new cases. Dean Pomerleau, in his research presented in the paper "Knowledge-based Training of Artificial Neural Networks for Autonomous Robot Driving," uses a neural network to train a robotic vehicle to drive on multiple types of roads (single lane, multi-lane, dirt, etc.). A large amount of his research is devoted to (1) extrapolating multiple training scenarios from a single training experience, and (2) preserving past training diversity so that the system does not become overtrained (if, for example, it is presented with a series of right turns—it should not learn to always turn right). These issues are common in neural networks that must decide from amongst a wide variety of responses, but can be dealt with in several ways, for example by randomly shuffling the training examples, by using a numerical optimization algorithm that does not take too large steps when changing the network connections following an example, or by grouping examples in so-called mini-batches. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1729542 | 366,408 |
1,386,754 | Carbonyl cyanide "m"-chlorophenyl hydrazone (CCCP; also known as [(3-chlorophenyl)hydrazono]malononitrile) is a chemical inhibitor of oxidative phosphorylation. It is a nitrile, hydrazone and protonophore. In general, CCCP causes the gradual destruction of living cells and death of the organism, although mild doses inducing partial decoupling have been shown to increase median and maximum lifespan in "C. elegans" models, suggesting a degree of hormesis. CCCP causes an uncoupling of the proton gradient that is established during the normal activity of electron carriers in the electron transport chain. The chemical acts essentially as an ionophore and reduces the ability of ATP synthase to function optimally. It is routinely used as an experimental uncoupling agent in cell and molecular biology, particularly in the study of mitophagy, where it was integral in discovering the role of the Parkinson's disease-associated ubiquitin ligase Parkin. Outside of its effects on mitochondria, CCCP may also disrupt lysosomal degradation during autophagy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10324249 | 1,385,987 |
1,859,352 | Lateral movement of nutrients and energy from the stream to the surrounding riparian zone and terrestrial environment beyond serve an important role in food webs. Flooding of a stream and the movement of organisms both act to transfer nutrients and energy sources to the terrestrial environment. Algae and fine organic matter washed up from high flows provide resources to herbivorous species and promote plant germination. These lateral movements are limited in how far they make it away from the stream without help, but terrestrial species can increase the distance that these subsidies travel. For example, the emergence of adult aquatic insects from streams is one of the most distinct and well studied forms of aquatic subsidies. They supply 25-100% of the energy or carbon to riparian species such as spiders, bats, birds, and lizards. Emergence of aquatic insects typically peaks in the summer of temperate zones, prompting predators to aggregate and forage along riparian and stream boundaries. These species typically feed near the water's edge but then when they leave to travel elsewhere, their feces will add nutrients to other environments. Another example of a terrestrial species that moves aquatic subsidies further inland is that of the brown bear. Brown bears consume a massive amount of salmon from streams, so much so, they are considered a keystone species. Brown bears have been shown to deliver as much as 84% of the nitrogen found in white spruce trees that are up to 500 meters from the stream on the Kenai Peninsula (Alaska, USA) through their interactions with aquatic subsidies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41384413 | 1,858,284 |
964,197 | Traditional neuropsychological research widely acknowledged that when an internal representation of the outside world is activated somewhere in the brain, it leads to a perceptual experience. Embodied cognition challenges this claim by stating that the existence of cortical maps in the brain fails to explain and account for the subjective character of people's perceptual experiences. For example, they cannot sufficiently explain the apparent stability of the visual world despite eye movements, the filling-in of the blind spot, the "change blindness", and other such visual illusions that unveil the (seemingly) imperfections of the visual system. From an embodied cognition perspective, perception is not a passive reception of (incomplete) sensory inputs for which the brain must compensate to provide us with a coherent picture. The brain interprets the outside world based on an individual's intentions, memories, and emotions, as well as the environment and the specific situation the individual is in. Perception involves more complex processes than simply receiving inputs (or visual stimuli) from the external world to output actions in response to them. Perception is an active process conducted by a perceiving agent (a perceiver), it entails an engaged perceiver and is influenced by the agent's experiences and intentions, his bodily states, and the interaction between the agent's body and the environment around it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33034640 | 963,688 |
965,111 | Shocked by how close the world had come to thermonuclear war, Khrushchev proposed easing of tensions with the US. In a letter to President Kennedy dated 30 October 1962, Kurshchev outlined a range of bold initiatives to forestall the possibility of nuclear war, including proposing a non-aggression treaty between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact or even the disbanding these military blocs, a treaty to cease all nuclear weapons testing and even the elimination of all nuclear weapons, resolution of the hot-button issue of Germany by both East and West formally accepting the existence of West Germany and East Germany, and US recognition of the government of mainland China. The letter invited counter-proposals and further exploration of these and other issues through peaceful negotiations. Khrushschev invited Norman Cousins, the editor of a major US periodical and an anti-nuclear weapons activist, to serve as liaison with President Kennedy, and Cousins met with Khrushchev for four hours in December 1962. Cousins' secret mission was aided by Pope John XXIII, who served as an intermediary; officially, Cousins was traveling to Rome on a personal basis, but from the Vatican he continued to the Soviet Union. Through Cousins' shuttle diplomacy in 1962 and 1963, the pontiff remained at the center of negotiations and helped ease misunderstandings between the two world leaders. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30592 | 964,602 |
155,908 | For signal processing, the Wiener filter is a filter proposed by Wiener during the 1940s and published in 1942 as a classified document. Its purpose is to reduce the amount of noise present in a signal by comparison with an estimate of the desired noiseless signal. Wiener developed the filter at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT to predict the position of German bombers from radar reflections. It is necessary to predict the position, because by the time the shell reaches the vicinity of the target, the target will have moved, and may have changed direction slightly. They even modeled the muscle response of the pilot, which led eventually to cybernetics. The unmanned V1's were particularly easy to model, and on a good day, American guns fitted with Wiener filters would shoot down 99 out of 100 V1's as they entered Britain from the English channel, on their way to London. What emerged was a mathematical theory of great generality—a theory for predicting the future as best one can on the basis of incomplete information about the past. It was a statistical theory that included applications that did not, strictly speaking, predict the future, but only tried to remove noise. It made use of Wiener's earlier work on integral equations and Fourier transforms. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63185 | 155,837 |
1,378,268 | Selection cutting or systems are generally considered to be more challenging to implement and maintain than even-aged management, due to the difficulty of managing multiple age classes in a shared space, but there are significant ecological benefits associated with it. Uneven-aged stands generally exhibit higher levels of vertical structure (key for many species of birds and mammals), have higher levels of carbon sequestration, and produce a more constant flow of market and non-market forest resources than even-aged stands. Although a forest composed of many stands with varied maturity ages maybe comparable, this would be at the forest rather than the stand level. This silvicultural method also protects forest soils from the adverse effects of many types of even-aged silviculture, including nutrient loss, erosion and soil compaction and the rapid loss of organic material from a forested system. Selection silviculture is especially adept at regenerating shade-tolerant species of trees (those able to function under conditions of low solar energy, both cooler and less light), but can also be modified to suit the regeneration and growth of intolerant and mid-tolerant species. This is one of many different ways of harvesting trees. Selection cutting as a silvicultural system can be modified in many ways and would be so done be a forester to take into account varied ownership goals, local site conditions and the species mix found from past forest conditions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6646417 | 1,377,506 |
32,046 | In a number of von Neumann's papers, the methods of argument he employed are considered even more significant than the results. In anticipation of his later study of dimension theory in algebras of operators, von Neumann used results on equivalence by finite decomposition, and reformulated the problem of measure in terms of functions. A major contribution von Neumann made to measure theory was the result of a paper written to answer a question of Haar regarding whether there existed an algebra of all bounded functions on the real number line such that they form "a complete system of representatives of the classes of almost everywhere-equal measurable bounded functions". He proved this in the positive, and in later papers with Stone discussed various generalizations and algebraic aspects of this problem. He also proved by new methods the existence of disintegrations for various general types of measures. Von Neumann also gave a new proof on the uniqueness of Haar measures by using the mean values of functions, although this method only worked for compact groups. He had to create entirely new techniques to apply this to locally compact groups. He also gave a new, ingenious proof for the Radon–Nikodym theorem. His lecture notes on measure theory at the Institute for Advanced Study were an important source for knowledge on the topic in America at the time, and were later published. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15942 | 32,035 |
1,233,886 | The MMN is a response to a deviant within a sequence of otherwise regular stimuli; thus, in an experimental setting, it is produced when stimuli are presented in a many-to-one ratio; for example, in a sequence of sounds "s s s s s s s d s s s s d s s s...", the "d" is the deviant or oddball stimulus, and will elicit an MMN response. The mismatch negativity occurs even if the subject is not consciously paying attention to the stimuli. Processing of sensory stimulus features is essential for humans in determining their responses and actions. If behaviourally relevant aspects of the environment are not correctly represented in the brain, then the organism's behaviour cannot be appropriate. Without these representations our ability to understand spoken language, for example, would be seriously impaired. Cognitive neuroscience has consequently emphasised the importance of understanding brain mechanisms of sensory information processing, that is, the sensory prerequisites of cognition. Most of the data obtained, unfortunately, do not allow the objective measurement of the accuracy of these stimulus representations. In addition, recent cognitive neuroscience seems to have succeeded in extracting such a measure, however. This is the mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of the event-related potential (ERP), first reported by Näätänen, Gaillard, and Mäntysalo (1978). An in-depth review of MMN research can be found in Näätänen (1992) while other recent reviews also provide information on the generator mechanisms of MMN, its magnetic counterpart, MMNm (Näätänen, Ilmoniemi & Alho, 1994), and its clinical applicability. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6240439 | 1,233,223 |
823,498 | Jeff LaVell joined Motorola in 1966 and worked in the computer industry marketing organization. LaVell had previously worked for Collins Radio on their C8500 computer that was built with small scale ECL ICs. In 1971, he led a group that examined the needs of their existing customers such as Hewlett-Packard, National Cash Register, Control Data Corporation (CDC), and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They would study the customer's products and try to identify functions that could be implemented in larger integrated circuits at a lower cost. The result of the survey was a family of 15 building blocks; each could be implemented in an integrated circuit. Some of these blocks were implemented in the initial M6800 release and more were added over the next few years. To evaluate the 6800 architecture while the chip was being designed, LaVell's team built an equivalent circuit using 451 small scale TTL ICs on five 10 by 10 inch (25 by 25 cm) circuit boards. Later they reduced this to 114 ICs on one board by using ROMs and MSI (medium scale integration) logic devices. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20301 | 823,055 |
1,502,225 | Images and videos of the three-dimensional visual environments come from a common class: the class of natural scenes. Natural scenes from a tiny subspace in the space of all possible signals, and researchers have developed sophisticated models to characterize these statistics. Most real-world distortion processes disturb these statistics and make the image or video signals unnatural. The VIF index employs natural scene statistical (NSS) models in conjunction with a distortion (channel) model to quantify the information shared between the test and the reference images. Further, the VIF index is based on the hypothesis that this shared information is an aspect of fidelity that relates well with visual quality. In contrast to prior approaches based on human visual system (HVS) error-sensitivity and measurement of structure, this statistical approach uses in an information-theoretic setting, yields a full reference (FR) quality assessment (QA) method that does not rely on any HVS or viewing geometry parameter, nor any constants requiring optimization, and yet is competitive with state of the art QA methods. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53785121 | 1,501,379 |
648,090 | There are striking parallels between altruistic acts and exaggerated sexual ornaments displayed by some animals, particularly certain bird species, such as, amongst others, the peacock. Both are costly in fitness terms, and both are generally conspicuous to other members of the population or species. This led Amotz Zahavi to suggest that both might be fitness signals rendered evolutionarily stable by his handicap principle. If a signal is to remain reliable, and generally resistant to falsification, the signal has to be evolutionarily costly. Thus, if a (low fitness) liar were to use the highly costly signal, which seriously eroded its real fitness, it would find it difficult to maintain a semblance or normality. Zahavi borrowed the term "handicap principle" from sports handicapping systems. These systems are aimed at reducing disparities in performance, thereby making the outcome of contests less predictable. In a horse handicap race, provenly faster horses are given heavier weights to carry under their saddles than inherently slower horses. Similarly, in amateur golf, better golfers have fewer strokes subtracted from their raw scores than the less talented players. The handicap therefore correlates with unhandicapped performance, making it possible, if one knows nothing about the horses, to predict which unhandicapped horse would win an open race. It would be the one handicapped with the greatest weight in the saddle. The handicaps in nature are highly visible, and therefore a peahen, for instance, would be able to deduce the health of a potential mate by comparing its handicap (the size of the peacock's tail) with those of the other males. The loss of the male's fitness caused by the handicap is offset by its increased access to females, which is as much of a fitness concern as is its health. An altruistic act is, by definition, similarly costly. It would therefore also signal fitness, and is probably as attractive to females as a physical handicap. If this is the case altruism is evolutionarily stabilized by sexual selection. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2021591 | 647,749 |
1,605,174 | In 1910, an industrial boom began, which continued until the First World War. From 1910 to 1913, the production of iron increased to 55.3 million poods (by 29.9%), finished metal products - up to 40.8 million poods (by 9.6%). But the share of the Ural factories in the all-Russian iron smelting fell to 21.6%. Commercial banks actively invested in the development of the metallurgy of the Urals. The most important role in the Urals was played by the Azov-Don, St. Petersburg International, and Russian-Asian banks. The volume of investments at the turn of the 20th century was estimated at 10.8 million rubles. Modernization and reconstruction of mountain districts continued. In 1911, a new blast furnace with a volume of 150 m³ and an open-hearth furnace with a capacity of 25 tons were launched at the Nizhniy Tagil plant; two Bessemer converters and two new blast furnaces were installed at the Nizhnesaldinsky plant. The Votkinsk plant was reconstructed for the production of steam locomotives and river vessels. The factories that produced weapons were reconstructed and switched over to the production of civilian products. Also in the pre-war years, the concentration of production at large factories increased: in 1914, out of 49 Ural plants, 16 had the productivity of more than 1 million poods of iron per year and produced 65% of the total volume, including 5 factories with a capacity of more than 2 million poods of iron per year. Nadezhdinsky, Nizhnesaldinsky, Zlatoustovsky, Chusovskoy, and Votkinsky produced 36.1% of the total volume. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66141214 | 1,604,271 |
700,349 | However, its modeling of real behavior is not sufficient for many applications, and by 1949, had fallen out of favor, with the Beattie–Bridgeman and Benedict–Webb–Rubin equations of state being used preferentially, both of which contain more parameters than the Van der Waals equation. The Redlich–Kwong equation was developed by Redlich and Kwong while they were both working for the Shell Development Company at Emeryville, California. Kwong had begun working at Shell in 1944, where he met Otto Redlich when he joined the group in 1945. The equation arose out of their work at Shell - they wanted an easy, algebraic way to relate the pressures, volumes, and temperatures of the gasses they were working with - mostly non-polar and slightly polar hydrocarbons (the Redlich–Kwong equation is less accurate for hydrogen-bonding gases). It was presented jointly in Portland, Oregon at the "Symposium on Thermodynamics and Molecular Structure of Solutions" in 1948, as part of the 14th Meeting of the American Chemical Society. The success of the Redlich–Kwong equation in modeling many real gases accurately demonstrate that a cubic, two-parameter equation of state can give adequate results, if it is properly constructed. After they demonstrated the viability of such equations, many others created equations of similar form to try to improve on the results of Redlich and Kwong. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19851252 | 699,984 |
25,949 | After AQUATONE was funded and security handled by the CIA, the agency referred to all its high altitude aircraft as "articles". This was intended to reduce the chances of a security breach as part of a compartmented security system. These three-digit "article" numbers were factory assigned. Article 341 was the original U-2 prototype, and it never received a USAF serial. The first flight took place at Groom Lake on 1 August 1955, during what was intended to be only a high-speed taxi test. The sailplane-like wings were so efficient that the aircraft jumped into the air at , amazing LeVier who, as he later said, "had no intentions whatsoever of flying". The lake bed had no markings, making it difficult for LeVier to judge the distance to the ground, and the brakes proved too weak; he bounced the U-2 once before it stopped rolling, but the aircraft suffered only minor damage. LeVier again found landing the U-2 difficult during the first intentional test flight three days later. On his sixth try, he found that landing the aircraft by touching down on the rear wheel first was better than making the initial touchdown with the front wheel. Pilots continued to have difficulty during landing because the ground effect held the aircraft off the runway for long distances. On a test flight on 8 August, the U-2 reached , proving that Johnson had met his promised specifications and deadline. By 16 August, the prototype flew at , an altitude never before reached in sustained flight; by 8 September, it reached . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32310 | 25,940 |
393,222 | The Clinton administration initiated the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) program on 29 September 1993, that involved Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, USCAR, the DoE, and other various governmental agencies to engineer the next efficient and clean vehicle. The United States National Research Council (USNRC) cited automakers' moves to produce HEVs as evidence that technologies developed under PNGV were being rapidly adopted on production lines, as called for under Goal 2. Based on information received from automakers, NRC reviewers questioned whether the "Big Three" would be able to move from the concept phase to cost effective, pre-production prototype vehicles by 2004, as set out in Goal 3. The program was replaced by the hydrogen-focused FreedomCAR initiative by the George W. Bush administration in 2001, an initiative to fund research too risky for the private sector to engage in, with the long-term goal of developing effectively carbon emission- and petroleum-free vehicles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8166749 | 393,027 |
1,897,434 | Mark's specialty was in the field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience). He authored or coauthored more than 230 scholarly papers which have been cited over 10,000 times. He researched cognitive and linguistic foundations of how geographic information is conceptualized and used. In the 1970s and 1980s, he pioneered methods for representing topography for digital computers, including the earliest methods for the Triangular Irregular Network data model. He is credited for a popular water flow routing GIS algorithm, which specifies how to eliminate spurious pits from digital elevation models. In 1990, David Mark organized with Andrew U. Frank the NATO Advanced Study Institute in Las Navas del Marquez (Spain). This meeting was the origin of research in spatial cognition and linguistics for the field of GIScience. Mark co-authored several widely cited papers on geographic categorization, geographic reasoning, and the ontology of geographic features. In the early 2000s, Mark and Andrew Turk created the area of study called "Ethnophysiography" to study how language and culture are related to people's naïve conceptualizations of the physical landscape. Until his death, he continued to work on most of these topics, with special focus on establishing a foundational ontology of the landscape. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38978809 | 1,896,350 |
1,367,887 | In practice, ice XI is most easily prepared from a dilute (10 mM) KOH solution kept just below 72 K for about a week (for DO a temperature just below 76 K will suffice). The hydroxide ions create defects in the hexagonal ice, allowing protons to jump more freely between the oxygen atoms (and so this structure of ice XI breaks the 'ice rules'). More specifically, each hydroxide ion creates a Bjerrum L defect and an ionized vertex. Both the defect and the ion can move throughout the lattice and 'assist' with proton reordering. The positive K ion may also play a role because it is found that KOH works better than other alkali hydroxides. The exact details of these ordering mechanisms are still poorly understood and under question because experimentally the mobility of the hydroxide and K ions appear to be very low around 72 K. The current belief is that KOH acts only to assist with the hydrogen reordering and is not required for the lower-energy stability of ice XI. However, calculations by Toshiaki Iitaka in 2010 call this into question. Iitaka argues that the KOH ions compensate for the large net electric dipole moment of the crystal lattice along the c-axis. The aforementioned electronic structure calculations are done assuming an infinite lattice and ignore the effects of macroscopic electric fields created by surface charges. Because such fields are present in any finite size crystal, in non-doped ice XI, domains of alternating dipole moment should form as in conventional ferroelectrics. It has also been suggested that the ice I => ice XI transition is enabled by the tunneling of protons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10293534 | 1,367,131 |
1,408,592 | As-synthesized UCNPs are usually capped with organic ligands that aid in size and shape control during preparation. These ligands make their surface hydrophobic and hence are not dispersible in aqueous solution, preventing their biological applications. One simple method to increase solubility in aqueous solvents is direct ligand exchange. This requires a more favored ligand to replace the initial ones. The hydrophobic native ligand capping the NP during synthesis (usually a long chain molecule like oleic acid) is directly substituted with a more polar hydrophilic one, which are usually multi-chelating (e.g. polyethylene glycol (PEG)-phosphate, polyacrylic acid) and hence provides better stabilization and binding, resulting in their exchange. A shortcoming of this method is the slow kinetics associated with the exchange. Generally the new ligand is also functionalized with a group like thiol that allows for facile binding to the NP surface. The protocol for direct exchange is simple, generally involving mixing for an extended period of time, but the work-up can be tedious, conditions must be optimized for each system, and aggregation may occur. However the two-step process of ligand exchange involves the removal of original ligands followed by coating hydrophilic ones, which is a better method. The ligand removal step here was reported through various ways. A simple way was wash the particles with ethanol under ultrasonic treatment. Reagents like nitrosonium tetrafluoroborate or acids are used to strip the native ligands off of the NP surface to attach favorable ones later on. This method shows less tendency for NP aggregation than the direct exchange, and can be generalized to other types of nanoparticles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52499698 | 1,407,801 |
1,801,930 | From January to March 1973, the Armament Development and Test Center conducted a competitive evaluation of the two prototype GAU-8/A 30mm cannon designs by Philco-Ford, Newport Beach, California, and General Electric, Burlington, Virginia. On 2 April 1973, The Armament Development and Test Center selected the General Electric version of the GAU-8/A 30mm cannon over the Philco-Ford model for the A-10 Thunderbolt II. Test Site C-74L on Range 21 West in Walton County was used for weapons testing of the pre-production Gatling-type rotary cannon from 1974 to 1978 using various types of rounds, including depleted uranium. An estimated 16,315 pounds of DU was expended at the site. Approximately 9,257 pounds of DU were collected and disposed of during remediation activities conducted between March 1978 and June 1987. The remainder of the material has since been remediated, was dispersed or vaporized as part of DU ordnance testing, or remains onsite and requires remediation. The test area currently consists of a radiologically controlled area, fire control/ballistics building, gun corridor, target area, well house building, drum storage area, and surrounding land. The Department of the Air Force has proposed shutting down and remediating Site C-74L, post-2002. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33714574 | 1,800,919 |
235,071 | "Pipeline and Gas Journal"'s worldwide survey figures indicate that of pipelines are planned and under construction. Of these, represent projects in the planning and design phase; reflect pipelines in various stages of construction. Liquids and gases are transported in pipelines, and any chemically stable substance can be sent through a pipeline. Pipelines exist for the transport of crude and refined petroleum, fuels – such as oil, natural gas and biofuels – and other fluids including sewage, slurry, water, beer, hot water or steam for shorter distances. Pipelines are useful for transporting water for drinking or irrigation over long distances when it needs to move over hills, or where canals or channels are poor choices due to considerations of evaporation, pollution, or environmental impact. Oil pipelines are made from steel or plastic tubes which are usually buried. The oil is moved through the pipelines by pump stations along the pipeline. Natural gas (and similar gaseous fuels) are pressurized into liquids known as Natural Gas Liquids (NGLs). Natural gas pipelines are constructed of carbon steel. Hydrogen pipeline transport is the transportation of hydrogen through a pipe. Pipelines are one of the safest ways of transporting materials as compared to road or rail, and hence in war, pipelines are often the target of military attacks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51111 | 234,952 |
1,009,747 | At the climax of the game, we discover that the hooded figure is Andreas, who did not die in the events of Act II due to his apprentice Caspar's sacrifice. Living with the guilt of not only Caspar's death, but the deaths which he decided in Acts I and II, deaths founded on incomplete and inconclusive evidence, he has become a broken man, retreating from society and surviving in secret for the past two decades. Andreas and Magdalene work together to solve the murders; they eventually find that the local priest, Thomas, is the culprit. Exploring the ancient Roman ruins underneath the town, he discovered that the two Christian saints, Saint Moritz and Satia, are actually reinterpretations of the pagan gods Mars and Diana. Appalled that the faith of the town was based upon heresy, he killed those who were close to finding the secret of the town. Baron Rothvogel was killed because he intended to donate a rare copy of a history book, which might have revealed this, to the abbot. Otto was killed after he found the head of Saint Moritz, really the head of a broken Mars statue, intending to reveal it as a divine artifact to motivate the villagers because he was unable to read the name "Mars Pater" written on its brow. Finally, he attacked Magdalene's father because his mural work was to be a history of the town, and vocally advocated for the mural to be cancelled. The ornate letters which were sent to those that might have cause against the victims were written by an anchorite under Thomas' manipulation, in fits in which Thomas pretended to be God, giving her "divine" messages to write down. His panoptic letters to the possible suspects are due to his breaking of the seal of confession, purposefully using the townspeople's confessions to frame them. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70997952 | 1,009,226 |
217,888 | Russian sources have claimed that the electronic warfare systems of Su-30MKK utilizes the latest technologies available in Russia and the radar warning receivers are so effective that the information provided by RWR alone would be enough to provide targeting information for Kh-31P anti-radiation missile without using other detection systems on board, though information can also be provided by L-150 ELINT system, which can be used in conjunction with Kh-31P. The maximum range of the RWR is termed at several hundred kilometers, and based on the 200 km maximum range of the Kh-31P anti-radiation missile, the maximum should be at least that much. The threat information obtained from RWRs can be either provided on the LCD MFDs (showing the most dangerous four targets) for the pilot in the manual mode, or be used automatically. The active jamming pods are mounted on the wing tips, and the APP-50 decoy launcher is mounted near the tail cone with 96 decoys of different kinds. Domestic Chinese electronic warfare systems including BM/KG300G and KZ900 can also be carried after modification of onboard system, but such modification was neither part of the original deal nor the upgrade deal with Russians, instead, this was implemented indigenously by Chinese themselves during the incremental upgrades. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7541645 | 217,780 |
375,100 | Later in 2017, the university released its 2030 vision which will see an exponential growth of its main campus in order to remain "world-class" and cope with the growing number of applications it receives each year, especially from non-UK students (41% of the student population). This growth will include a new £33 million Faculty of Arts, a £55 million new sports centre (finished in April 2019), a new £54.3 million Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building (IBRB), a new type of student accommodation called "Cryfield village", the expansion of Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), a redevelopment for the Art centre and a new Library (scheduled in 5 years time). For this occasion, Stuart Croft, vice chancellor of the university declared "New buildings are and will continue to be a part of our everyday existence. We need to open one new academic building a year from now until at least 2023. In order to do this and to keep Warwick as one of the world’s leading universities, we need to do this together, involving the whole community." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61115 | 374,905 |
433,497 | SUMO attachment to its target is similar to that of ubiquitin (as it is for the other ubiquitin-like proteins such as NEDD 8). The SUMO precursor has some extra amino acids that need to be removed, therefore a C-terminal peptide is cleaved from the SUMO precursor by a protease (in human these are the SENP proteases or Ulp1 in yeast) to reveal a di-glycine motif. The obtained SUMO then becomes bound to an E1 enzyme (SUMO Activating Enzyme (SAE)) which is a heterodimer (subunits SAE1 and SAE2). It is then passed to an E2, which is a conjugating enzyme (Ubc9). Finally, one of a small number of E3 ligating proteins attaches it to the protein. In yeast, there are four SUMO E3 proteins, Cst9, Mms21, Siz1 and Siz2. While in ubiquitination an E3 is essential to add ubiquitin to its target, evidence suggests that the E2 is sufficient in SUMOylation as long as the consensus sequence is present. It is thought that the E3 ligase promotes the efficiency of SUMOylation and in some cases has been shown to direct SUMO conjugation onto non-consensus motifs. E3 enzymes can be largely classed into PIAS proteins, such as Mms21 (a member of the Smc5/6 complex) and Pias-gamma and HECT proteins. On Chromosome 17 of the human genome, SUMO2 is near SUMO1+E1/E2 and SUMO2+E1/E2, among various others. Some E3's, such as RanBP2, however, are neither. Recent evidence has shown that PIAS-gamma is required for the SUMOylation of the transcription factor yy1 but it is independent of the zinc-RING finger (identified as the functional domain of the E3 ligases). SUMOylation is reversible and is removed from targets by specific SUMO proteases. In budding yeast, the Ulp1 SUMO protease is found bound at the nuclear pore, whereas Ulp2 is nucleoplasmic. The distinct subnuclear localisation of deSUMOylating enzymes is conserved in higher eukaryotes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4411416 | 433,283 |
383,942 | Michelson and Morley and other early experimentalists using interferometric techniques in an attempt to measure the properties of the luminiferous aether, used (partially) monochromatic light only for initially setting up their equipment, always switching to white light for the actual measurements. The reason is that measurements were recorded visually. Purely monochromatic light would result in a uniform fringe pattern. Lacking modern means of environmental temperature control, experimentalists struggled with continual fringe drift even when the interferometer was set up in a basement. Because the fringes would occasionally disappear due to vibrations caused by passing horse traffic, distant thunderstorms and the like, an observer could easily "get lost" when the fringes returned to visibility. The advantages of white light, which produced a distinctive colored fringe pattern, far outweighed the difficulties of aligning the apparatus due to its low coherence length. As Dayton Miller wrote, "White light fringes were chosen for the observations because they consist of a small group of fringes having a central, sharply defined black fringe which forms a permanent zero reference mark for all readings." Use of partially monochromatic light (yellow sodium light) during initial alignment enabled the researchers to locate the position of equal path length, more or less easily, before switching to white light. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=91100 | 383,747 |
242,790 | Considering the hypothesis that Broca's area may be most involved in articulation, its activation in all of these tasks may be due to subjects' covert articulation while formulating a response. Despite this caveat, a consensus seems to be forming that whatever role Broca's area may play, it may relate to known working memory functions of the frontal areas. (There is a wide distribution of Talairach coordinates reported in the functional imaging literature that are referred to as part of Broca's area.) The processing of a passive voice sentence, for example, may require working memory to assist in the temporary retention of information while other relevant parts of the sentence are being manipulated (i.e. to resolve the assignment of thematic roles to arguments). Miyake, Carpenter, and Just have proposed that sentence processing relies on such general verbal working memory mechanisms, while Caplan and Waters consider Broca's area to be involved in working memory specifically for syntactic processing. Friederici (2002) breaks Broca's area into its component regions and suggests that Brodmann's area 44 is involved in working memory for both phonological and syntactic structure. This area becomes active first for phonology and later for syntax as the time course for the comprehension process unfolds. Brodmann's area 45 and Brodmann's area 47 are viewed as being specifically involved in working memory for semantic features and thematic structure where processes of syntactic reanalysis and repair are required. These areas come online after Brodmann's area 44 has finished its processing role and are active when comprehension of complex sentences must rely on general memory resources. All of these theories indicate a move towards a view that syntactic comprehension problems arise from a computational rather than a conceptual deficit. Newer theories take a more dynamic view of how the brain integrates different linguistic and cognitive components and are examining the time course of these operations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40166 | 242,663 |
463,100 | Ira Pastan, who discovered mesothelin, said that Andraka's method "makes no scientific sense. I don't know anybody in the scientific community who believes his findings." George M. Church, professor of genetics at Harvard University, also raised concerns about the cost, speed, and sensitivity claims. The novelty of Andraka's work has also been questioned. In 2005, seven years before Andraka won the Intel ISEF, a group of researchers at Jefferson Medical College and the University of Delaware reported a carbon-nanotube based sensor for use in breast cancer diagnostics that uses a methodology nearly identical to Andraka's purportedly novel methodology. In addition, a carbon-nanotube based sensor similar to Andraka's was reported in 2009 by Wang et al., a group of researchers at Jiangnan University and University of Michigan, and a carbon-nanotube based sensor for applications in cancer diagnosis was reported in a 2008 paper by Shao et al. that used a methodology similar to Andraka's. In an explanation for why he was not on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, "Forbes" editor Matthew Herper said that he overrode an expert judging panel to keep Andraka off the list was because his work was not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and because experts saw holes in his work. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35973708 | 462,871 |
177,885 | Seeking to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling, Simon became best known for his theory of corporate decision in his book "Administrative Behavior". In this book he based his concepts with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision making. His organization and administration interest allowed him to not only serve three times as a university department chairman, but he also played a big part in the creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948; administrative team that administered aid to the Marshall Plan for the U.S. government, serving on President Lyndon Johnson's Science Advisory Committee, and also the National Academy of Sciences. Simon has made a great number of contributions to both economic analysis and applications. Because of this, his work can be found in a number of economic literary works, making contributions to areas such as mathematical economics including theorem, human rationality, behavioral study of firms, theory of casual ordering, and the analysis of the parameter identification problem in econometrics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14205 | 177,792 |
825,374 | By discovering many geological forms that are typically formed from large amounts of water, the images from the orbiters caused a revolution in our ideas about water on Mars. Huge river valleys were found in many areas. They showed that floods of water broke through dams, carved deep valleys, eroded grooves into bedrock, and travelled thousands of kilometers. Large areas in the southern hemisphere contained branched stream networks, suggesting that rain once fell. The flanks of some volcanoes are believed to have been exposed to rainfall because they resemble those caused on Hawaiian volcanoes. Many craters look as if the impactor fell into mud. When they were formed, ice in the soil may have melted, turned the ground into mud, then flowed across the surface. Normally, material from an impact goes up, then down. It does not flow across the surface, going around obstacles, as it does on some Martian craters. Regions, called "Chaotic Terrain," seemed to have quickly lost great volumes of water, causing large channels to be formed. The amount of water involved was estimated to ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi River. Underground volcanism may have melted frozen ice; the water then flowed away and the ground collapsed to leave chaotic terrain. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38082 | 824,931 |
316,365 | At the start of World War I strategy was dominated by the offensive thinking that had been in vogue since 1870, despite the more recent experiences of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), where the machine gun demonstrated its defensive capabilities. By the end of 1914, the Western Front was a stalemate and all ability to maneuver strategically was lost. The combatants resorted to a "strategy of attrition". The German battle at Verdun, the British on the Somme and at Passchendaele were among the first wide-scale battles intended to wear down the enemy. Attrition was time-consuming so the duration of World War I battles often stretched to weeks and months. The problem with attrition was that the use of fortified defenses in depth generally required a ratio of ten attackers to one defender, or a level of artillery support which was simply not feasible until late 1917, for any reasonable chance of victory. The ability of the defender to move troops using interior lines prevented the possibility of fully exploiting any breakthrough with the level of technology then attainable. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=91515 | 316,196 |
18,044 | The F-15E prototype was a modification of the two-seat F-15B. Despite its origins, it includes significant structural changes as well as more powerful engines. The aft fuselage was designed to incorporate the more powerful engines with advanced engine bay structures and doors, which incorporate Superplastic forming and diffusion bonding technologies. The back seat is equipped for a weapon systems officer (WSO, pronounced "wizzo") to work the air-to-ground avionics via multiple screens; these view the radar, electronic warfare, or thermographic cameras, monitor aircraft or weapons status and possible threats, select targets, and use an electronic moving map to navigate. Two hand controls are used to select new displays and to refine targeting information; displays can be moved from one screen to another using a menu of display options. Unlike previous two-place jets (e.g. the F-14 Tomcat and Navy variants of the F-4), whose back seat omitted flying controls, the F-15E's back seat is equipped with its own stick and throttle so the WSO can take over flying, albeit with reduced visibility. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=495724 | 18,038 |
387,458 | In 1812, Laplace issued his "Théorie analytique des probabilités" in which he laid down many fundamental results in statistics. The first half of this treatise was concerned with probability methods and problems, the second half with statistical methods and applications. Laplace's proofs are not always rigorous according to the standards of a later day, and his perspective slides back and forth between the Bayesian and non-Bayesian views with an ease that makes some of his investigations difficult to follow, but his conclusions remain basically sound even in those few situations where his analysis goes astray. In 1819, he published a popular account of his work on probability. This book bears the same relation to the "Théorie des probabilités" that the "Système du monde" does to the "Méchanique céleste". In its emphasis on the analytical importance of probabilistic problems, especially in the context of the "approximation of formula functions of large numbers," Laplace's work goes beyond the contemporary view which almost exclusively considered aspects of practical applicability. Laplace's Théorie analytique remained the most influential book of mathematical probability theory to the end of the 19th century. The general relevance for statistics of Laplacian error theory was appreciated only by the end of the 19th century. However, it influenced the further development of a largely analytically oriented probability theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=344783 | 387,263 |
2,148,622 | In 1999 August Schick, Maria Klatte and Markus Meis presented conclusions on research related to classroom acoustics, which have been significant for the construction of schools. Hearing and noise researcher Schick led nine symposia on the psychology of acoustics at the University of Oldenburg in which he brought together scholars from different fields to form an interdisciplinary research group that is still working productively in Oldenburg to this day. While their research has not necessarily received wide reception within the field of environmental psychology, it is of significance to the international community of psycho-acoustic researchers, such as those affiliated with the Inter-Noise conference, the International Congress on Noise Control Engineering, and the German Society for Acoustics. August Schick helped found all of these organizations. For twenty years (1985-2005), Schick and Rainer Guski were involved in the research group "" [Interdisciplinary sound effect research] at the Federal Environmental Agency in Berlin. Rainer Guski has been devoted to the protection of resident populations from street and air-traffic noise since the 1970s. His work establishes the connection between outdoor noise and noise pollution, and he consults politicians on setting noise-level limits for communities. Current research on office acoustics is being conducted by Sabine Schlittmeier and Jürgen Hellbrück at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. The effects of acoustics on work performance and feeling of well-being as well as different methods for controlling acoustics are of particular interest to architects, building and room acousticians and interior architects and designers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39119819 | 2,147,391 |
3,002 | Air Force F-X proponents remained hostile to the concept because they perceived it as a threat to the F-15 program, but the USAF's leadership understood that its budget would not allow it to purchase enough F-15 aircraft to satisfy all of its missions. The Advanced Day Fighter concept, renamed "F-XX", gained civilian political support under the reform-minded Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, who favored the idea of competitive prototyping. As a result, in May 1971, the Air Force Prototype Study Group was established, with Boyd a key member, and two of its six proposals would be funded, one being the Lightweight Fighter (LWF). The request for proposals issued on 6 January 1972 called for a class air-to-air day fighter with a good turn rate, acceleration, and range, and optimized for combat at speeds of Mach 0.6–1.6 and altitudes of . This was the region where USAF studies predicted most future air combat would occur. The anticipated average flyaway cost of a production version was $3 million. This production plan, though, was only notional, as the USAF had no firm plans to procure the winner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11642 | 3,002 |
85,842 | In late 1945, Stravinsky received a commission from Europe, his first since "Perséphone", in the form of a string piece for the 20th anniversary for Paul Sacher's Basle Chamber Orchestra. The "Concerto in D" premiered in 1947. In January 1946, Stravinsky conducted the premiere of his "Symphony in Three Movements" at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It marked his first premiere in the US. In 1947, Stravinsky was inspired to write his English-language opera "The Rake's Progress" by a visit to a Chicago exhibition of the same-titled series of paintings by the eighteenth-century British artist William Hogarth, which tells the story of a fashionable wastrel descending into ruin. Auden and writer Chester Kallman worked on the libretto. The opera premiered in 1951 and marks the final work of Stravinsky's neoclassical period. While composing "The Rake's Progress", Stravinsky befriended Robert Craft, who became his personal assistant and close friend and encouraged the composer to write serial music. This began Stravinsky's third and final distinct musical period which lasted until his death. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38172 | 85,808 |
1,489,760 | The epigenome is governed by both genetic and environmental factors, causing it to be highly dynamic and complex. Epigenetic information exists in the cell as DNA and histone marks, as well as non-coding RNAs. DNA methylation (DNAm) patterns change over time, and vary between developmental stage and tissue type. The main type of DNAm is at cytosines within CpG dinucleotides which is known to be involved in gene expression regulation. DNAm pattern changes have been extensively studied in complex diseases such as cancer and diabetes. In a normal cell, the bulk genome is highly methylated at CpGs, whereas CpG islands (CPI) at gene promoter regions remain highly unmethylated. Aberrant DNAm is the most common type of molecular abnormality in cancer cells, where the bulk genome becomes globally ‘hypomethylated’ and CPIs in promoter regions become ‘hypermethylated’, usually leading to silencing of tumour suppressor genes. More recently, studies on diabetes have uncovered further evidence to support an epigenetic component of diseases, including differences in disease-associated epigenetic marks between monozygotic twins, the rising incidence of type 1 diabetes in the general population, and developmental reprogramming events in which "in utero" or childhood environments can influence disease outcome in adulthood. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53362498 | 1,488,921 |
1,922,361 | The earliest strand of Brown's research was on the physiology of plant parasitism by fungi and the host–parasite interaction. He used "Botrytis cinerea" as a model system, which causes grey mould, a type of fungal soft rot, in many different plants; he chose lettuce and broad bean for hosts. Anton de Bary and H. Marshall Ward had previously shown in other soft rots that the damage was partly due to breakdown of the plant cell wall structure by an unidentified enzyme and partly from the fungus killing the plant protoplasts. Brown identified fungal pectinase enzymes produced at the ends of young hyphae (filaments) as the cause of both effects. He studied infection by germinating fungal spores, demonstrating that nutrients from the leaf or petal pass through the plant's cuticle and help the germinating spore to grow and infect. He also discovered that nutrients diffuse out of pollen grains, which have subsequently been shown also to facilitate fungal infection. With C. C. Harvey, he investigated in detail how the fungus breaks through the protective cuticle layer to infect the plant, showing that a specialised needle-like hypha pushes through the cuticle purely mechanically by growing through it, without involving any enzyme action. They also showed that if the underlying plant tissue is plasmolysed (flaccid) then it is less able to resist penetration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66719750 | 1,921,258 |
860,771 | Given that the capsule landed in a rural area with a tracking system that had an accuracy between 50 and 70 kilometers, the landing site was not immediately known. It was even admitted by General Nikolai Kamanin that officials were unaware of the successful landing for multiple hours after touch down. Approximately 4 hours after the capsule touched down a helicopter spotted the capsule and crew. The location in which the capsule touched down was too dense for a helicopter to land and recover the crew. Leonov and Belyayev could have likely been recovered by a helicopter with the use of a rope and ladder or rescue basket but Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev strictly prohibited cosmonauts to be rescued with those methods. This resulted in Leonov and Belyayev spending a total of 3 days, two nights, in the forest before finally being recovered. The cosmonauts did come partially equipped for this situation taking a survival kit which included a knife and a pistol. Also, the two cosmonauts had experience that would aid them in this situation. Belyayev grew up in Chelishchevo with the dream of becoming a hunter while Leonov had spent time in the wilderness alone as an artistic outlet. This led the crew to not be too concerned upon landing. Throughout the nights the temperature would drop to a freezing -30 °C (-22 °F). During this time helicopters dropped supplies for the cosmonauts including warm clothes, boots, water containers, and more. Helicopters also dropped doctors and technicians close to the landing site so they could trek to the landing site and support the cosmonauts. Others were also dropped by helicopters to start clearing a landing pad that was closer to the capsule. With more resources and supplies after their first night the landing site was more sustainable. This included a fire, a makeshift log cabin and they were even brought cheese, sausage, and bread for supper. Finally, after spending two cold nights in a dense forest, Leonov and Belyayev were able to ski 9 kilometers with the help of some rescuers to reach the helicopters landing site. The cosmonauts were then flown to Perm and ultimately to Baikonur where they would have their first debriefing about the mission. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=195223 | 860,312 |
1,262,103 | In 2019, a book chapter written by Ramseyer titled "Privatizing Police: Japanese Police, the Korean Massacre, and Private Security Firms" was accepted for publication in the forthcoming "Cambridge Handbook on Privatization". In the original draft of the chapter, Ramseyer relied on contemporary Japanese-language newspaper accounts to claim that in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake ethnic Koreans "torched buildings, planted bombs, poisoned water supplies, murdered, pillaged and raped." Ramseyer argued that "young Koreans were a high crime group in Japan," and suggested that the massacre of Koreans at the hands of Japanese police in the chaos that followed the earthquake may have been partially justified. When scholars disputed the accuracy of these claims, the Handbook's co-editor Alon Harel asserted that the chapter would be significantly revised prior to publication, calling the disputed content "an innocent and very regrettable mistake on our part," and adding, "We assumed that Professor Ramseyer knows the history better than us. In the meantime, we have learnt a lot about the events and we sent a list of detailed comments on the paper that were written by professional historians and lawyers." Harel also said, "I genuinely regret that a misguided description of the history can be found now in the SSRN (and that we are associated with it), but I assure you that the mistake will not be repeated in the forthcoming volume." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3070786 | 1,261,416 |
15,727 | Wilhelm Schickard designed and constructed the first working mechanical calculator in 1623. In 1673, Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated a digital mechanical calculator, called the Stepped Reckoner. Leibniz may be considered the first computer scientist and information theorist, because of various reasons, including the fact that he documented the binary number system. In 1820, Thomas de Colmar launched the mechanical calculator industry when he invented his simplified arithmometer, the first calculating machine strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment. Charles Babbage started the design of the first "automatic mechanical calculator", his Difference Engine, in 1822, which eventually gave him the idea of the first "programmable mechanical calculator", his Analytical Engine. He started developing this machine in 1834, and "in less than two years, he had sketched out many of the salient features of the modern computer". "A crucial step was the adoption of a punched card system derived from the Jacquard loom" making it infinitely programmable. In 1843, during the translation of a French article on the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace wrote, in one of the many notes she included, an algorithm to compute the Bernoulli numbers, which is considered to be the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer. Around 1885, Herman Hollerith invented the tabulator, which used punched cards to process statistical information; eventually his company became part of IBM. Following Babbage, although unaware of his earlier work, Percy Ludgate in 1909 published the 2nd of the only two designs for mechanical analytical engines in history. In 1937, one hundred years after Babbage's impossible dream, Howard Aiken convinced IBM, which was making all kinds of punched card equipment and was also in the calculator business to develop his giant programmable calculator, the ASCC/Harvard Mark I, based on Babbage's Analytical Engine, which itself used cards and a central computing unit. When the machine was finished, some hailed it as "Babbage's dream come true". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5323 | 15,722 |
653,893 | The variation of plant susceptibility to pests was probably known even in the early stages of agriculture in humans. In historic times, the observation of such variations in susceptibility have provided solutions for major socio-economic problems. The hemipteran pest insect phylloxera was introduced from North America to France in 1860 and in 25 years it destroyed nearly a third (100,000 km) of French vineyards. Charles Valentine Riley noted that the American species "Vitis labrusca" was resistant to Phylloxera. Riley, with J. E. Planchon, helped save the French wine industry by suggesting the grafting of the susceptible but high quality grapes onto "Vitis labrusca" root stocks. The formal study of plant resistance to herbivory was first covered extensively in 1951 by Reginald Henry Painter, who is widely regarded as the founder of this area of research, in his book "Plant Resistance to Insects". While this work pioneered further research in the US, the work of Chesnokov was the basis of further research in the USSR. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4189740 | 653,549 |
453,481 | CCPs "mutualize" (share among their members) counterparty credit risk in the markets in which they operate. A CCP reduces the settlement risks by netting offsetting transactions between multiple counterparties, by requiring collateral deposits (also called "margin deposits"), by providing independent valuation of trades and collateral, by monitoring the creditworthiness of the member firms, and in many cases, by providing a guarantee fund that can be used to cover losses that exceed a defaulting member's collateral on deposit. CCPs require a pre-set amount of collateral — referred to as ‘initial margin’ — to be posted to the CCP by each party in a transaction. The first line of defense is collateral provided by the defaulting member. CCPs typically adjust initial margin demands in response to changes in market conditions. For instance, a CCP may increase initial margin requirements in response to high price volatility. Variation margin is the second line of defense against fluctuation in the prices of securities pledged as collateral. If those prices fall, the member must deposit a corresponding amount of cash, and if those prices go up, the member may withdraw a corresponding amount of cash. This is done either on a daily basis or sometimes more frequently. For some financial products, members’ net payment obligations to or from the CCP are settled on a daily basis (or more frequently if there are large movements during the course of the day) to prevent the build-up of large exposures. The advantages of a central counterparty clearing arrangement are greater transparency of the risks, reduced processing costs, and greater certainty in cases of default by a member. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13973130 | 453,260 |
1,835,505 | the condition of self-consistency between bond length and π-electron density distribution. He justified this assumption by finding agreement between measured and theoretically predicted absorption spectra. Later this assumption was theoretically verified. This effect is often called Peierls instability: starting from a linear chain of equally spaced atoms Peierls considered first order perturbation theory with Bloch functions showing the instability, but he did not consider the self-consistency resulting in the transition to alternation of single and double bonds. The particular properties of conducting polymers are based on the theoretical relation between bond alternation and equalization. The FEMO and its improvements led to a theory on the light absorption of organic dyes. In Marburg, shortly before the age of digital computers, Kuhn and Fritz Peter Schäfer developed an analogue computer to solve the 2-dimensional Schrödinger equation. This room-filling analogue computer was applied by Kuhn's research group to calculate bond lengths in π-electron systems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21444263 | 1,834,456 |
390,599 | The limited engagement of private actors slows down the process of addressing space debris to some degree. Ties existing between dissimilar stakeholders in the governance network offer access to diverse resources. Different competence among stakeholders can help allocate the tasks more reasonably. In that case, the expertise and experience of private operators are critical to help the world achieve space sustainability. The complementary strengths of different stakeholders enable the governance network to be more adaptable to changes and reach common goals more effectively. In recent years, many private actors have seen commercial opportunities of eliminating space debris. It is estimated that by 2022 the global market for debris monitoring and removal will generate a revenue of around $2.9 billion. For example, Astroscale has contracted with European and Japanese space agencies to develop the capacity of removing orbital debris. Despite that, they are still in small quantity compared to the number of those who have placed satellites in space. Privateer Space, a Hawaiian-based startup company started by American engineer Alex Fielding, space environmentalist Dr. Moriba Jah, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, announced plans in September 2021 to launch hundreds of satellites into orbit in order to study space debris. However, the company stated it is in "stealth mode" and no such satellites have been launched. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=266344 | 390,404 |
1,420,901 | In the early 1960s Communication Studies began to move towards becoming a more independent field, and move out of the departments of sociology, political science, psychology, and English. The changes in the department are considered a result of the historical events taking place at the time. “Despite the different interpretations given to the changes around the time of World War II, mostly shaped by increasing technological innovations in the ways people communicate, communication became a relevant and recurrent issue in human and social science, opening the doors to the centrality of communication in social theories in the 1960s and 1970s.” As a result of many of these sociological changes taking place in society, communication and mass media acquired the role of explaining these changes to the public. In response to the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, and other dramatic cultural shifts, critics using Marxist and feminist theory to study dominant cultures became prominent in scholarly conversations. Cultural Studies related to mass media and critics asked why a number of big organizations had such an influence on society. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35040464 | 1,420,101 |
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