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903,184 | According to an IAU draft resolution, the roundness condition generally results in the need for a mass of at least 5 kg, or diameter of at least 800 km. However, Mike Brown claimed that these numbers are only right for rocky bodies like asteroids, and that icy bodies like Kuiper Belt objects reach hydrostatic equilibrium at much smaller sizes, probably somewhere between 200 and 400 km in diameter. It all depends on the rigidity of the material that makes up the body, which is in turn strongly influenced by its internal temperature. Assuming that Methone's shape reflects the balance between the tidal force exerted by Saturn and the moon's gravity, its tiny 3 km diameter suggests Methone is composed of icy fluff. The IAU's stated radius and mass limit are not too far off from what as of 2019 is believed to be the approximate limit for objects beyond Neptune that are fully compact, solid bodies, with ("r" = , "m" = ) and possibly ("r" = , "m" unknown) being borderline cases both for the 2006 Q&A expectations and in more recent evaluations, and with being just above the expected limit. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6502961 | 902,708 |
826,998 | The first performance based interlocks were developed by Borg-Warner Corp. (now BorgWarner, Inc.), in 1969. In 1981, Jeffrey Feit, a student in New Jersey, placed in a statewide innovation contest with a primitive schematic of a breathalyzer based interlock device. In 1983, Hans Doran, a student in Limerick, presented a working prototype at the Young Scientist competition in Dublin. Alcohol-sensing devices became the standard through the 1980s. They employed semiconductor (nonspecific) alcohol sensors. Semiconductor-type (Taguchi) interlocks were sturdy and got the field moving, but did not hold calibration very well, were sensitive to altitude variation, and reacted positively to non-alcohol sources. Commercialization and more widespread adoption of the device was delayed pending improvement of systems for preventing circumvention. By the early 1990s, the industry began to produce “second generation” interlocks with reliable and accurate fuel cell sensors. All current ignition interlocks are required to meet National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) standards. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=827481 | 826,554 |
439,042 | The term "through-silicon via" (TSV) was coined by Tru-Si Technologies researchers Sergey Savastiouk, O. Siniaguine, and E. Korczynski, who proposed a TSV method for a 3D wafer-level packaging (WLP) solution in 2000. Savastiouk later became the co-founder and CEO of ALLVIA Inc. From the beginning, his vision of the business plan was to create a through silicon interconnect since these would offer significant performance improvements over wire bonds. Savastiouk published two articles on the topic in Solid State Technology, first in January 2000 and again in 2010. The first article “Moore’s Law – The Z Dimension” was published in Solid State Technology magazine in January 2000. This article outlined the roadmap of the TSV development as a transition from 2D chip stacking to wafer level stacking in the future. In one of the sections titled Through Silicon Vias, Dr. Sergey Savastiouk wrote, “Investment in technologies that provide both wafer-level vertical miniaturization (wafer thinning) and preparation for vertical integration (through silicon vias) makes good sense.” He continued, “By removing the arbitrary 2D conceptual barrier associated with Moore’s Law, we can open up a new dimension in ease of design, test, and manufacturing of IC packages. When we need it the most – for portable computing, memory cards, smart cards, cellular phones, and other uses – we can follow Moore’s Law into the Z dimension.” This was the first time the term "through-silicon via" was used in a technical publication. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14350137 | 438,828 |
658,274 | Performance testing technology employs one or more PCs or Unix servers to act as injectors, each emulating the presence of numbers of users and each running an automated sequence of interactions (recorded as a script, or as a series of scripts to emulate different types of user interaction) with the host whose performance is being tested. Usually, a separate PC acts as a test conductor, coordinating and gathering metrics from each of the injectors and collating performance data for reporting purposes. The usual sequence is to ramp up the load: to start with a few virtual users and increase the number over time to a predetermined maximum. The test result shows how the performance varies with the load, given as number of users vs. response time. Various tools are available to perform such tests. Tools in this category usually execute a suite of tests which emulate real users against the system. Sometimes the results can reveal oddities, e.g., that while the average response time might be acceptable, there are outliers of a few key transactions that take considerably longer to complete – something that might be caused by inefficient database queries, pictures, etc. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39294 | 657,929 |
1,194,833 | In August 1913, Sir Rashbehari Ghosh, an eminent jurist and scholar, in a letter to Asutosh Mookerjee placed in the hands of the University "a sum of ten lakh rupees" as per the conditions of his gift, there were to be established four chairs - one each for Applied Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Botany, with special reference to Agriculture, and eight studentships to be awarded to the distinguished graduates of this University "to carry on investigation" under the guidance of a professor. Both Palit and Ghosh wanted promotion and diffusion of scientific and technical education among their countrymen by indigenous agency and with the money now available through their endowments, Mookerjee could now launch his projected dream. Thus four days before the expiry of the fourth term of his Vice-Chancellorship, Mookerjee laid the founding stone of the University College of Science and Technology on 27 March 1914 hoping fervently that "although the College of Science and Technology is an integral part of the University of Calcutta, it will be regarded not as a provincial but as an all-India college of Science and Technology to which students will flock from every corner of the Indian Empire, attracted by the excellence of the instruction imparted and of the facilities provided for research." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62858858 | 1,194,193 |
870,439 | The limitations of RISC OS became steadily more apparent, particularly with the appearance of the Risc PC and the demands made on applications taking advantage of its improved hardware capabilities (although merely highlighting issues that were always present), and when contrasted with the gradually evolving Windows and Macintosh System software, these competitors offering or promising new features and usability improvements over their predecessors. Two fundamental deficiencies perceived with RISC OS were a lack of virtual memory support, this permitting larger volumes of data to be handled by using hard disc storage as "slow, auxiliary RAM" (attempted by application-level solutions in certain cases), and the use of cooperative multitasking as opposed to preemptive multitasking to allow multiple applications to run at the same time, with the former relying on applications functioning correctly and considerately, and with the latter putting the system in control of allocating time to applications and thus preventing faulty or inconsiderate applications from hanging or dominating the system. Problems with the storage management and filing systems were also identified. In 1994, the FileCore functionality in RISC OS was still limited to accessing 512 MB of any hard drive, with this being barely larger than the largest supplied Risc PC hard drive at the time. Filing system limitations were also increasingly archaic: 77 files per directory and 10-character filenames, in contrast to more generous constraints imposed by the then-"imminent" Windows 95 and then-current Macintosh System 7 release. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63145 | 869,979 |
864,910 | With the knowledge of the dopaminergic psychostimulant effects of the adamantane derivatives, bromantane, which is 2-(4-bromophenylamino)adamantane, was developed in the 1980s at the Zakusov State Institute of Pharmacology, USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences) in Moscow as "a drug having psychoactivating and adaptogen properties under complicated conditions (hypoxia, high environmental temperature, physical overfatigue, emotional stress, etc.)". It was found to produce more marked and prolonged psychostimulant effects than the other adamantanes, and eventually entered use. The drug was notably given to soldiers in the Soviet and Russian militaries to "shorten recovery times after strong physical exertion". After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, bromantane continued to be researched and characterized but was mainly limited in use to sports medicine (for instance, to enhance athletic performance). In 1996, it was encountered as a doping agent in the 1996 Summer Olympics when several Russian athletes tested positive for it, and was subsequently placed on the World Anti-Doping Agency banned list in 1997 as a stimulant and masking agent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21801602 | 864,450 |
637,734 | Clumped distribution in species acts as a mechanism against predation as well as an efficient mechanism to trap or corner prey. African wild dogs, "Lycaon pictus", use the technique of communal hunting to increase their success rate at catching prey. Studies have shown that larger packs of African wild dogs tend to have a greater number of successful kills. A prime example of clumped distribution due to patchy resources is the wildlife in Africa during the dry season; lions, hyenas, giraffes, elephants, gazelles, and many more animals are clumped by small water sources that are present in the severe dry season. It has also been observed that extinct and threatened species are more likely to be clumped in their distribution on a phylogeny. The reasoning behind this is that they share traits that increase vulnerability to extinction because related taxa are often located within the same broad geographical or habitat types where human-induced threats are concentrated. Using recently developed complete phylogenies for mammalian carnivores and primates it has been shown that the majority of instances threatened species are far from randomly distributed among taxa and phylogenetic clades and display clumped distribution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5509703 | 637,395 |
1,653,543 | The Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering is headed by Dean Yannis Yortsos. Its research centers have played a major role in development of multiple technologies, including early development of the Internet when USC researcher Jonathan Postel was an editor of communications-protocol for the fledgling internet, also known as ARPANET. The school's faculty includes Seymour Ginsburg, Irving Reed, Leonard Adleman, Solomon W. Golomb, Barry Boehm, Clifford Newman, Richard Bellman, Lloyd Welch and Alexander Sawchuk. Previously known as the USC School of Engineering, it was renamed on March 2, 2004, as the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering in honor of Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi and his wife Erna, who had recently donated $52 million to the school. The Viterbi School received other major gifts including gifts from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mark Stevens and his wife Mary who created the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation in 2004; real estate developer Daniel J. Epstein who named the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2002; Energy Corporation of America CEO John Mork and his family who named the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 2005; Ken Klein, CEO and president of Wind River Systems, who established the Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life, also in 2005; Ming Hsieh, founder of Cogent Inc., who named the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering in 2006 with a $35 million gift; and Los Angeles real estate developer Sonny Astani, who named the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a $17 million gift in 2007. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17943590 | 1,652,611 |
1,274,223 | A major recurring theme in Gilovich's work in behavioral economics is the importance of experience over ownership of material things. For instance, a paper he co-authored with Leaf Van Boven found that people overwhelmingly preferred "experiential purchases" to "material purchases." Writing for "The Atlantic", James Hamblin noted the growing body of research, pioneered by Gilovich, showing that experiences tend to bring people more happiness than possessions: "It's the fleetingness of experiential purchases that endears us to them. Either they're not around long enough to become imperfect, or they are imperfect, but our memories and stories of them get sweet with time. Even a bad experience becomes a good story." In a talk about barriers to gratitude, Gilovich further noted that a survey of his students at Cornell found that they enjoyed their conversations about their experiences than their material purchases, and that happiness from experiential purchases is more enduring than that from material purchases. The reason being that experiences make for better stories, cultivate personal identity more, and connect people to each other. Gilovich explained that the implication is that experiential purchases lead to more gratitude and thus to more pro-social behavior. In addition, Gilovich has emphasized the importance of being active and seeking goals: "We evolved to be goal-striving creatures. You’ll regret more the things that you didn’t do rather than the things you did." Along similar lines, in one talk he urged his audience, "mind your peaks and ends. You won’t remember the length of your vacation experience, but you’ll remember the intensity. And do something special at the end." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=881902 | 1,273,531 |
165,257 | Research into high-pressure sodium lamps occurred in both the UK and the US. Increasing the pressure of the sodium vapor broadened the sodium emission spectrum so that the light produced had more energy emitted at wavelengths above and below the 589 nm region. The quartz material used in mercury discharge lamps was corroded by high pressure sodium vapor. A laboratory demonstration of a high pressure lamp was carried out in 1959. The development by General Electric of a sintered aluminum oxide material (with magnesium oxide added to improve light transmission) was an important step in construction of a commercial lamp. The material was available in the form of tubing by 1962, but additional techniques were required to seal the tubes and add the necessary electrodes—the material could not be fused like quartz. The end caps of the arc tube would get as hot as 800 degrees C in operation, then cool to room temperature when the lamp was turned off, so the electrode terminations and arc tube seal had to tolerate repeated temperature cycles. This problem was solved by Michael Arendash at the GE Nela Park plant. The first commercial high-pressure sodium lamps were available in 1965 from companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands; at introduction a 400 watt lamp would produce around 100 lumens per watt. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=641334 | 165,172 |
122,585 | Their inherent focus on "practical" implementation of technology has tended to keep them oriented more towards "incremental"-level redesigns and reconfigurations, as opposed to revolutionary research & development or ideas that would be many years from clinical adoption; however, there is a growing effort to expand this time-horizon over which clinical engineers can influence the trajectory of biomedical innovation. In their various roles, they form a "bridge" between the primary designers and the end-users, by combining the perspectives of being both close to the point-of-use, while also trained in product and process engineering. Clinical engineering departments will sometimes hire not just biomedical engineers, but also industrial/systems engineers to help address operations research/optimization, human factors, cost analysis, etc. Also, see safety engineering for a discussion of the procedures used to design safe systems. The clinical engineering department is constructed with a manager, supervisor, engineer, and technician. One engineer per eighty beds in the hospital is the ratio. Clinical engineers are also authorized to audit pharmaceutical and associated stores to monitor FDA recalls of invasive items. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4827 | 122,536 |
1,616,447 | Red Storm is intended for capability computing. That is, a single application can be run on the entire system. This is in contrast to cluster-style capacity computing, in which portions of a cluster are assigned to run different applications. The performance of the memory subsystem, the processor, and the network must be in proper balance to achieve adequate application progress across the entire machine. System software plays a key role as well. The Portals network programming API is used to ensure inter-processor communication can scale as large as the entire system, and has been used on many different supercomputers, including the Intel Teraflops and Paragon. The compute processors use a custom lightweight kernel operating system named Catamount, which is based on the operating system of ASCI Red called "Cougar". A userspace implementation of the Lustre file system, named liblustre, was ported to the Catamount environment using the libsysio library to provide POSIX-like semantics. This filesystem client ran in the single-threaded Catamount environment without interrupts, and only serviced IO requests when explicitly allowed by the application, to reduce jitter introduced by background file system operations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6016318 | 1,615,536 |
702,064 | During the 1920s, the first Ordinary and Higher Certificates and Diplomas were awarded, and by the 1930s Robert Gordon's Technical College was made up of Schools of Engineering, Chemistry, Maths & Physics, Pharmacy, Art (including architecture), Domestic Science, and Navigation. Around this time the first students began to be prepared for external degree examinations – for the University of Aberdeen's BSc in engineering. A system of student governance also developed, with a Student Representative Council formed in 1931. In the closing years of World War II, candidates started to be prepared to sit exams for external degrees of the University of London, in subjects such as Chemistry and Engineering, but only via part-time and/or evening classes. After 1945, to aid with settling large numbers of returning soldiers into a career, the Government backed a Business Training Scheme which allowed the Technical College to introduce courses in Business Administration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=381864 | 701,699 |
1,413,132 | TSP-1 is antiangiogenic, inhibiting the proliferation and migration of endothelial cells by interactions with CD36 expressed on their surface of these cells. Inhibitory peptides and fragments of TSP1 bind to CD36, leading to the expression of FAS ligand (FasL), which activates its specific, ubiquitous receptor, Fas. This leads to the activation of caspases and apoptosis of the cell. Since tumors overexpressing TSP-1 typically grow slower, exhibit less angiogenesis, and have fewer metastases, TSP1 is an attractive target for cancer treatment. Because TSP1 is extremely large (~120 kDa monomer), not very abundant and exerts multiple actions, its clinical usefulness is questionable. However, small-molecules based on a CD36-binding peptide sequence from TSP1 are being tested. One analog, ABT-510, exhibits potent proapoptotic activity in cultured cells, while clinically it is very well tolerated with therapeutic benefits reported against several malignancies. In 2005, ABT-510 was evaluated in phase II clinical trials for the treatment of several types of cancer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2097931 | 1,412,336 |
849,997 | During the 2005 off-season, after Nomar Garciaparra left the Cubs via free agency, Prior was mentioned by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports as part of a possible deal for Baltimore Orioles's shortstop Miguel Tejada, but this trade did not come to pass. As in 2005, Prior started the 2006 season on the disabled list. This time, though, it was because of a strained right shoulder, and the injury caused him to miss the first two months of the 2006 season. His debut came on June 18, when he had what ESPN called "one of the worst outings of his career" against the Detroit Tigers, giving up six runs in the first inning and lasting just innings before being pulled. Prior was 0–4 in four starts with a 7.71 ERA, until he was once again put on the disabled list on July 14, after straining his left oblique muscle while taking batting practice on July 8. Since he had not pitched since July 4, he was eligible to return on July 21 against the Nationals. He pitched only innings before he was pulled out of the game, allowing four runs and taking a no decision in an eventual 7–6 loss. Against the Brewers on August 10, Prior's pitch speed slowed in the third inning of his start. He was replaced by Juan Mateo in the fourth inning, having allowed six runs (five earned) in an eventual 8–6 defeat. Two days later, he was placed on the disabled list (tendinitis) for the third time that season, missing the remainder of the year. He finished the 2006 season with a 1–6 record and a 7.22 ERA in nine starts, striking out 38 against 28 walks in innings. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=297465 | 849,545 |
327,240 | Natural languages such as English have words for several Boolean operations, in particular conjunction ("and"), disjunction ("or"), negation ("not"), and implication ("implies"). "But not" is synonymous with "and not". When used to combine situational assertions such as "the block is on the table" and "cats drink milk," which naively are either true or false, the meanings of these logical connectives often have the meaning of their logical counterparts. However, with descriptions of behavior such as "Jim walked through the door", one starts to notice differences such as failure of commutativity, for example the conjunction of "Jim opened the door" with "Jim walked through the door" in that order is not equivalent to their conjunction in the other order, since "and" usually means "and then" in such cases. Questions can be similar: the order "Is the sky blue, and why is the sky blue?" makes more sense than the reverse order. Conjunctive commands about behavior are like behavioral assertions, as in "get dressed and go to school". Disjunctive commands such "love me or leave me" or "fish or cut bait" tend to be asymmetric via the implication that one alternative is less preferable. Conjoined nouns such as "tea and milk" generally describe aggregation as with set union while "tea or milk" is a choice. However context can reverse these senses, as in "your choices are coffee and tea" which usually means the same as "your choices are coffee or tea" (alternatives). Double negation as in "I don't not like milk" rarely means literally "I do like milk" but rather conveys some sort of hedging, as though to imply that there is a third possibility. "Not not P" can be loosely interpreted as "surely P", and although "P" necessarily implies "not not "P"" the converse is suspect in English, much as with intuitionistic logic. In view of the highly idiosyncratic usage of conjunctions in natural languages, Boolean algebra cannot be considered a reliable framework for interpreting them. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54476844 | 327,066 |
1,059,271 | After his medical internship, US Army service (1945–48), and working at the military hospital of Nancy, France, he became a researcher at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1948–50). He performed research in Paris (1950–56), relocated to New York University (1956–68), moved to the National Institutes of Health (1968–70), then joined Harvard University medical school in Boston (1970–91) where he became the Fabyan Professor of comparative Pathology, concurrently serving the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute (1980). He began studying allergies in 1948, and discovered the Ir (immune response) genes that govern transplant rejection in the 1960s. Including a variety of different editions, Benacerraf is an author of over 300 books and articles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1432150 | 1,058,721 |
86,130 | Controversial results from one study suggested that traumatic experiences might produce an epigenetic signal that is capable of being passed to future generations. Mice were trained, using foot shocks, to fear a cherry blossom odor. The investigators reported that the mouse offspring had an increased aversion to this specific odor. They suggested epigenetic changes that increase gene expression, rather than in DNA itself, in a gene, M71, that governs the functioning of an odor receptor in the nose that responds specifically to this cherry blossom smell. There were physical changes that correlated with olfactory (smell) function in the brains of the trained mice and their descendants. Several criticisms were reported, including the study's low statistical power as evidence of some irregularity such as bias in reporting results. Due to limits of sample size, there is a probability that an effect will not be demonstrated to within statistical significance even if it exists. The criticism suggested that the probability that all the experiments reported would show positive results if an identical protocol was followed, assuming the claimed effects exist, is merely 0.4%. The authors also did not indicate which mice were siblings, and treated all of the mice as statistically independent. The original researchers pointed out negative results in the paper's appendix that the criticism omitted in its calculations, and undertook to track which mice were siblings in the future. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49033 | 86,096 |
1,148,981 | From the start, Cheptegei went to the front to control the race. He was marked by Luis Grijalva, Jacob Krop and Grant Fisher through three 62 second laps. Then Cheptegei let off the gas, the Kenyans decided to move forward, Krop taking the point, Nicholas Kipkorir dropped in behind him, Daniel Ebenyo came along the outside of the pack to join them. But the pace dropped to 65 second laps. Grijalva and Cheptegei both made minor attempts to displace one of the Kenyans but they would have none of that. After 5 laps, Kipkorir took the lead while Krop dropped back, then he dropped back a little more and the roadblock was broken. Meanwhile, Ingebrigtsen made a leisurely jog along the outside to join the front group, taking a wide detour out to lane 4 for water, only joined by Cheptegei and Edris before dropping in next to Grijalva behind Kipkorir. For the next four laps, the Kenyan cast of leaders kept changing as one would drop back into the pack then rush back to the front while another would drop back. With a kilometer to go, Ingebrigtsen took a shift at the front. Krop made one more effort to take the lead, but no, Ingebrigtsen felt he wanted to be there and would not let him pass again keeping Krop to the outside as the pace got faster and faster. Down the final backstretch, Fisher worked his way past Kipkorir into third, with Ahmed behind him. Through the final turn, Ingebrigtsen separated from the pack and after he had 7 metres, looking back to make sure there was no trouble coming to take his easy win. Behind him, Krop moved to the rail through the turn. With Ahmed passing on his outside, Fisher stepped on the rail with 120 metres to go, losing his balance and momentum. Ahmed and Oscar Chelimo went by, then Grijalva moving faster than any of them. In lane 3, Chelimo ran past Ahmed, who strained for the finish line. As he dived for the finish, Grijalva pipped him for fourth but his closing speed couldn't catch Chelimo. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=71264150 | 1,148,374 |
1,839,537 | Sallan uses big data analytics to study macroevolution, with a particular focus on palaeoichthyology. She uses data mining to identify why some species of fish persist whilst others die off. She joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. She leads a large research lab, which includes undergraduate and graduate students. In 2015, she developed a dataset of fish fossils with then undergraduate student Andrew Galimberti. Their analysis showed that during the Devonian period vertebrates gradually increased in size, obeying Cope's rule. She has continued to study the Hangenberg event, finding small-bodied species with rapid reproduction dominate post-extinction communities. She investigated the fossils of the Aetheretmon and found how ray-finned fishes got their tail fins, which are distinct from the tails of land animals. The fossils were recovered from Scotland, and included some of the smallest (3 cm long) and least studied species. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59777257 | 1,838,485 |
815,781 | The 1880s proved disastrous for Cope. Marsh's close association with the Geological Survey gave him the resources to employ 54 staff members over the course of ten years. His teaching position at Yale meant he had guaranteed access to the "American Journal of Science" for publication. Cope had his interest in the "Naturalist", but it drained him of funds. After Hayden was removed from the survey, Cope lost his source of government funding. His fortune was not enough to support his rivalry, so Cope invested in mining. Most of his properties were silver mines in New Mexico; one mine yielded an ore vein worth $3 million in silver chloride. Cope visited the mines each summer from 1881 to 1885, taking the opportunity to supervise or collect other minerals. For a while he made good money, but the mines stopped producing and by 1886 he had to give up his now-worthless stocks. The same year he received a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued to travel west, but realized he would not be able to best Marsh in cornering the market for bones; he had to release the collectors he had hired and sell his collections. During this period, he published 40 to 75 papers each year. With the failure of his mines, Cope began searching for a job, but was turned down at the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History. He turned to giving lectures for hire and writing magazine articles. Each year, he lobbied Congress for an appropriation with which to finish his work on "Cope's Bible", a volume on Tertiary vertebrates, but was continually turned down. Rather than work with Powell and the survey, Cope tried to inflame sentiment against them. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=415000 | 815,347 |
927,330 | The U.S. Navy funded most of the early ROV technology development in the 1960s into what was then named a "Cable-Controlled Underwater Recovery Vehicle" (CURV). This created the capability to perform deep-sea rescue operation and recover objects from the ocean floor, such as a nuclear bomb lost in the Mediterranean Sea after the 1966 Palomares B-52 crash. Building on this technology base; the offshore oil & gas industry created the work-class ROVs to assist in the development of offshore oil fields. More than a decade after they were first introduced, ROVs became essential in the 1980s when much of the new offshore development exceeded the reach of human divers. During the mid-1980s the marine ROV industry suffered from serious stagnation in technological development caused in part by a drop in the price of oil and a global economic recession. Since then, technological development in the ROV industry has accelerated and today ROVs perform numerous tasks in many fields. Their tasks range from simple inspection of subsea structures, pipelines, and platforms, to connecting pipelines and placing underwater manifolds. They are used extensively both in the initial construction of a sub-sea development and the subsequent repair and maintenance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=299462 | 926,843 |
442,555 | Fluorescent properties in nanodiamonds arise from the presence of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers, nitrogen atoms next to a vacancy. Fluorescent nanodiamond (FND) was invented in 2005 and has since been used in various fields of study. The invention received a US patent in 2008 , and a subsequent patent in 2012 . NV centers can be created by irradiating nanodiamonds with high-energy particles (electrons, protons, helium ions), followed by vacuum-annealing at 600–800°C. Irradiation forms vaccines in the diamond structure while vacuum-annealing migrates these vacancies, which will get trapped by nitrogen atoms within the nanodiamond. This process produces two types of NV centers. Two types of NV centers are formed—neutral (NV0) and negatively charged (NV–)—and these have different emission spectra. The NV– the center is of particular interest because it has an "S" = 1 spin ground state that can be spin-polarized by optical pumping and manipulated using electron paramagnetic resonance. Fluorescent nanodiamonds combine the advantages of semiconductor quantum dots (small size, high photostability, bright multicolor fluorescence) with biocompatibility, non-toxicity, and rich surface chemistry, which means that they have the potential to revolutionize "Vivo" imaging applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4653948 | 442,340 |
748,593 | The organisms of the Ediacaran Period first appeared around and flourished until the cusp of the Cambrian , when the characteristic communities of fossils vanished. A diverse Ediacaran community was discovered in 1995 in Sonora, Mexico, and is approximately 555 million years in age, roughly coeval with Ediacaran fossils of the Ediacara Hills in South Australia and the White Sea on the coast of Russia. While rare fossils that may represent survivors have been found as late as the Middle Cambrian (510 to 500 million years ago), the earlier fossil communities disappear from the record at the end of the Ediacaran leaving only curious fragments of once-thriving ecosystems. Multiple hypotheses exist to explain the disappearance of this biota, including preservation bias, a changing environment, the advent of predators and competition from other life-forms. A sampling, reported in 2018, of late Ediacaran strata across Baltica suggests the flourishing of the organisms coincided with conditions of low overall productivity with a very high percentage produced by bacteria, which may have led to high concentrations of dissolved organic material in the oceans. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10608031 | 748,195 |
259,743 | On 9 July 2021, Public Health England issued Technical Briefing 18 on SARS-CoV-2 variants, documenting 112 deaths among 45,136 UK cases of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant with 28 days follow-up with a fatality rate of 0.2%. Briefing 16 notes that "[M]ortality is a lagged indicator, which means that the number of cases who have completed 28 days of follow up is very low – therefore, it is too early to provide a formal assessment of the case fatality of Delta, stratified by age, compared to other variants." Briefing 18 warns that "Case fatality is not comparable across variants as they have peaked at different points in the pandemic, and so vary in background hospital pressure, vaccination availability and rates and case profiles, treatment options, and impact of reporting delay, among other factors." The most concerning issue is the logistic growth rate of 0.93/week relative to Alpha. This means that per week, the number of Delta samples/cases is growing by a factor of exp (0.93)=2.5 with respect to the Alpha variant. This results, under the same infection prevention measures, in a much greater case load over time until a large fraction of people have been infected by it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67445633 | 259,609 |
535,195 | Since the late 1980s, the Australian government had increasingly called upon the ADF to contribute forces to peacekeeping missions around the world. While most of these deployments involved only small numbers of specialists, several led to the deployment of hundreds of personnel. Large peacekeeping deployments were made to Namibia in early 1989, Cambodia between 1992 and 1993, Somalia in 1993, Rwanda between 1994 and 1995 and Bougainville in 1994 and from 1997 onwards. The 1996 election of the Howard Liberal government resulted in significant reforms to the ADF's force structure and role, with the new government's defence strategy placed less singular emphasis on defending Australia from direct attack and greater emphasis on working in co-operation with regional states and Australia's allies to manage potential security threats in recognition of Australia's global security interests. In line with this new focus, the ADF's force structure changed in an attempt to increase the proportion of combat units to support units and to improve the ADF's combat effectiveness. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1323516 | 534,916 |
1,635,968 | As an active suffragist, Mary Agnes Chase took part in a series of demonstrations lead by the Silent Sentinels, members of the National Woman's Party (NWP) who wanted President Wilson to listen to what women had to say about the vote. These “Silent Sentinels” attempted to infiltrate the White House in every way possible; 300 delegates were sent to meet with the President to discuss the need for a Federal suffrage amendment; Women unfurled a banner saying “Votes for Women” down into the White House gallery while in the attendance of a House of Representatives meeting; Pickets took place at every entrance of the White House gates, with signs and banners reading “What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?” and “Mr. President, How Long Will Women Have to Wait for Liberty?”. Each day was themed so that women from all walks of life could be represented in the suffragist demonstration; There were State Days for women to represent their states, and Professional Days for women to represent their fields of study, such as law, science, and journalism. The “Silent Sentinels” meant to hold out indefinitely until a compromise could be reached, and while other women's suffrage organizations like the National American Woman Suffrage Association believed their actions to be too militaristic, many empathizers of the movement donated money towards the continuation of the picketing and demonstrations, raising over $3000 in total. Chase herself publicly vowed to burn any publication of President Wilson's that used words such as “liberty” and “freedom” until women were given suffrage. In response to these demonstrations, many women in the NWP were arrested and sent to workhouses, with Paul and Chase included. When it was made public that these women had undergone force-feeding after going on a hunger strike in the workhouses, more support was thrown towards the suffragist cause and this sympathy from the public ultimately released Paul, Chase and others arrested from the workhouses. The persistence shown by the NWP played a major role in influencing the ratification of the Suffrage Amendment in 1919 and 19th Amendment in 1920. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31328401 | 1,635,043 |
241,097 | Thorne's work has dealt with the prediction of gravitational wave strengths and their temporal signatures as observed on Earth. These "signatures" are of great relevance to LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), a multi-institution gravitational wave experiment for which Thorne has been a leading proponent – in 1984, he cofounded the LIGO Project (the largest project ever funded by the NSF) to discern and measure any fluctuations between two or more 'static' points; such fluctuations would be evidence of gravitational waves, as calculations describe. A significant aspect of his research is developing the mathematics necessary to analyze these objects. Thorne also carries out engineering design analyses for features of the LIGO that cannot be developed on the basis of experiment and he gives advice on data analysis algorithms by which the waves will be sought. He has provided theoretical support for LIGO, including identifying gravitational wave sources that LIGO should target, designing the baffles to control scattered light in the LIGO beam tubes, and – in collaboration with Vladimir Braginsky's (Moscow, Russia) research group – inventing quantum nondemolition designs for advanced gravity-wave detectors and ways to reduce the most serious kind of noise in advanced detectors: thermoelastic noise. With Carlton M. Caves, Thorne invented the back-action-evasion approach to quantum nondemolition measurements of the harmonic oscillators – a technique applicable both in gravitational wave detection and quantum optics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=238517 | 240,977 |
1,675,638 | Medical doctor Peter Wilmshurst has used the term to describe "poor people in developing countries...being exploited in research for the benefit of patients in the developed world", and advised that "the scientific community has a responsibility to ensure that all scientific research is conducted ethically". Others consider that there is a misappropriation of indigenous drugs in poor countries by drug companies in the developed world. Pharmacologist Elaine Elisabetsky wrote that "ethnopharmacology involves a series of sociopolitical, economic and ethical dilemmas, at various levels...frequently host country scientists, visiting scientists, and informants disagree...research efforts are (often) perceived as scientific imperialism; scientists are accused of stealing plant materials and appropriating traditional plant knowledge for financial profit and/or professional advancement. Many governments, as well as indigenous societies are increasingly reluctant to permit such research...historically neither native populations nor host countries have shared to a significant extent the financial benefits from any drug that reaches the market...unless these issues are amply discussed and fairly resolved, medicinal plant research runs the risk of serving ethically questionable purposes." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9719407 | 1,674,696 |
2,132,778 | Sharma began his academic career as a research and teaching assistant while still a graduate student at Buffalo, and was a research assistant for a year at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware (1989-1990) prior to completing his Ph.D. Shortly after his doctorate degree, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 6 months (1990-1991). He then moved to Sydney (Australia) to work at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW), initially as a Visiting Fellow, soon after as a tenured Lecturer (1992), and successively as a Senior Lecturer (1994), Associate Professor (1998), Head of School (1999-02) and Full Professor (2000-2004). While at UNSW he was named as the Node Director Designate, Sydney Node (2002-2003), and was appointed to the role of Vice President and Director of Sydney Research Lab (2003-2004) within National ICT Australia (NICTA), Australia's national "Centre of Excellence" in information and communications technology, which became part of Data61 division of CSIRO. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=68035752 | 2,131,553 |
1,043,023 | In an article in "Nature" (2011), Whitesides and John M. Deutch challenged the scientific and chemical communities to become more relevant to current social and environmental issues. They criticized academic chemistry for an "increasingly incurious and risk-averse attitude" and for focusing on "familiar questions of familiar disciplines" rather than taking a broad interdisciplinary view and exploring new areas. They recommended that institutions focus on practical problems, and teach entrepreneurial skills along with basic science so as to stimulate the development of practical technologies, encouraging students to take ownership of their own research. A similar approach is taken by the Whitesides Research Group, of which John A. Rogers has said, "Chemistry was the core expertise that provided the competitive advantage, but there was no sense of chemistry as a narrowly defined discipline. It was chemistry to solve problems, not necessarily to do chemistry." The article sparked strong reactions both for and against their ideas. Many in the scientific community asserted that research agendas should be "disinterested" and that education must focus on fundamental research to advance. Whitesides and Deutch argued that teaching science in ways that address current issues can still lead to foundational work and scientific breakthroughs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5573528 | 1,042,479 |
5,581 | Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and, in 1838, devised his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea, prompting immediate joint submission of both their theories to the Linnean Society of London. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871, he examined human evolution and sexual selection in "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex", followed by "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872). His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, "The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms" (1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8145410 | 5,578 |
792,656 | Root exudates come in the form of chemicals released into the rhizosphere by cells in the roots and cell waste referred to as "rhizodeposition." This rhizodeposition comes in various forms of organic carbon and nitrogen that provide for the communities around plant roots and dramatically affect the chemistry surrounding the roots. Exopolysaccharides, such as polyglycolide (PGA), affect the ability of roots to uptake water by maintaining the physical stability of the soil carbon sponge and control the flow of water. For example, a tomato field study showed that exopolysaccharides extracted from the rhizosphere were different (total sugar amounts and mean infrared measurements) depending on the tomato varieties grown, and that under water deficit conditions (limited irrigation) the increase in exopolysaccharide production and microbial activity affected water retention in the soil and field performance of tomato. In potato cultivar root exudates, phenols and lignins comprise the greatest number of ion influencing compounds regardless of growing location; however, the intensity of different compounds was found to be influenced by soils and environmental conditions, resulting in variation amongst nitrogen compounds, lignins, phenols, carbohydrates, and amines. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2915538 | 792,231 |
736,302 | Ultimately, the versatility of the Thury system was hampered by the fragility of series distribution, and the lack of a reliable DC conversion technology that would not show up until the 1940s with improvements in mercury arc valves. The AC "universal system" won by force of numbers, proliferating systems with transformers both to couple generators to high-voltage transmission lines, and to connect transmission to local distribution circuits. By a suitable choice of utility frequency, both lighting and motor loads could be served. Rotary converters and later mercury-arc valves and other rectifier equipment allowed DC load to be served by local conversion where needed. Even generating stations and loads using different frequencies could also be interconnected using rotary converters. By using common generating plants for every type of load, important economies of scale were achieved, lower overall capital investment was required, load factor on each plant was increased allowing for higher efficiency, allowing for a lower cost of energy to the consumer and increased overall use of electric power. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18179220 | 735,914 |
861,913 | A basic Post Keynesian presumption, which Modern Monetary Theory proponents share, and which is central to Keynesian analysis, is that the future is unknowable and so, at best, we can make guesses about it that would be based broadly on habit, custom, gut-feeling, etc. In DSGE modeling, the central equation for consumption supposedly provides a way in which the consumer links decisions to consume "now" with decisions to consume "later" and thus achieves maximum utility in each period. Our marginal Utility from consumption today must equal our marginal utility from consumption in the future, with a weighting parameter that refers to the valuation that we place on the future relative to today. And since the consumer is supposed to always the equation for consumption, this means that all of us do it individually, if this approach is to reflect the DSGE microfoundational notions of consumption. However, post-Keynesians state that: no consumer is the same with another in terms of random shocks and uncertainty of income (since some consumers spend will every cent of any extra income they receive while others, typically higher-income earners, spend comparatively little of any extra income); no consumer is the same with another in terms of access to credit; not every consumer really considers what they will be doing at the end of their life in any coherent way, so there is no concept of a "permanent lifetime income,", which is central to DSGE models; and, therefore, trying to "aggregate" all these differences into one, single "representative agent" is impossible. These assumptions are similar to the assumptions made in the so-called Ricardian equivalence, whereby consumers are assumed to be forward looking and to internalize the government's budget constraints when making consumption decisions, and therefore taking decisions on the basis of practically perfect evaluations of available information. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12052214 | 861,454 |
449,084 | Due to the fact that they believe archaeology to be inherently subjective, post-processualists argue that "all archaeologists... whether they overtly admit it or not", always impose their own views and biases into their interpretations of the archaeological data. In many cases, they hold that this bias is political in nature. Post-processualist Daniel Miller believed that the positivist approach of the processualists, in holding that only that which could be sensed, tested and predicted was valid, only sought to produce technical knowledge that facilitated the oppression of ordinary people by elites. In a similar criticism, Miller and Chris Tilley believed that by putting forward the concept that human societies were irresistibly shaped by external influences and pressures, archaeologists were tacitly accepting social injustice. Many post-processualists took this further and criticised the fact that archaeologists from wealthy, western countries were studying and writing the histories of poorer nations in the second and third worlds. Ian Hodder stated that archaeologists had no right to interpret the prehistories of other ethnic or cultural groups, and that instead they should simply provide individuals from these groups with the ability to construct their own views of the past. While Hodder's viewpoint was not universally accepted among post-processualists, there was enough support for opposing racism, colonialism and professional elitism within the discipline that in 1986 the World Archaeological Congress was established. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=160139 | 448,866 |
1,849,979 | Born in Bijnor in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Singh completed his schooling at Dev Nagri Inter College, Meerut in 1951 and passed the intermediate course from Meerut College of Agra University in 1953. After earning a BSc in physics, chemistry and mathematics in 1955 and an MSc in physics in 1957 from the same institution, he joined Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as a research assistant the same year. Subsequently, taking a sabbatical from service, he enrolled for doctoral studies at University of California, Berkeley and worked under the guidance of Geoffrey Chew, known for his contributions to the fields of mesons and bootstrap model, to secure a PhD in 1962. He stayed in the US to complete his post-doctoral work at three institutions, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1959–62) as a graduate student, California Institute of Technology (1962–63) as a research fellow with Murray Gell-Mann and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1963–64) as a member. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53741227 | 1,848,921 |
26,375 | The spacecraft separated from its service module at around 17:00 UTC on December 11, 2022 and then reentered Earth's atmosphere at 17:20 UTC travelling near . It was the first United States use of a "skip entry", a form of non-ballistic atmospheric entry into the atmosphere, pioneered by Zond 7, in which two phases of deceleration would expose human occupants to relatively less intense G-forces than would be experienced during an Apollo-style reentry. Splashdown of the Orion capsule occurred at 17:40 UTC (9:40 am PST) west of Baja California near Guadalupe Island. Following splashdown, NASA personnel and the crew of recovered the spacecraft after planned ocean testing of the capsule. The recovery team spent about two hours performing tests in open water and imaging the craft, namely to investigate signs of atmospheric re-entry, then used a winch and several tending lines to pull the craft into a securing assembly in the well dock of the USS "Portland". The recovery team included personnel from the US Navy, Space Force, Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, and Lockheed Martin Space. On December 13, the Orion capsule arrived at the Port of San Diego. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36641570 | 26,365 |
2,023,118 | The expression of preimplantation factor in the embryo is strongly correlated with the likelihood of a live birth. This observed viability is not solely due to PIF's ability to mediate the implantation and allografting process but also due to its ability to promote the upregulation and integrity of certain intracellular targets that are positively associated with normal developmental processes. For instance, PIF is known to target the enzyme disulfide isomerase, which reduces intracellular oxidative stress and also heat-shock proteins, which are molecular chaperones that ensure proteins produced by a cell will fold into the correct conformation for their function. Additionally, PIF is known to promote the production of vital cytoskeletal proteins including actin and tubulin that are required for the current morphological development of nerve axons and the viscera of vital organs. Axons use circular tubulin polymers called microtubules to transport intracellular material between the cell body and the axon terminal and require actin to form synapses. They are hence important for the organisation and function of the growing immune system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60620623 | 2,021,954 |
681,080 | In 1928, before leaving for Göttingen, Curry married Mary Virginia Wheatley. The couple lived in Germany while Curry completed his dissertation, then, in 1929, moved to State College, Pennsylvania where Curry accepted a position at Pennsylvania State College. They had two children, Anne Wright Curry (July 27, 1930) and Robert Wheatley Curry (July 6, 1934). Curry remained at Penn State for the next 37 years. He spent one year at University of Chicago in 1931–1932 under a National Research Fellowship and one year in 1938–1939 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1942 he took a leave of absence to do applied mathematics for the United States government during World War II, notably at the Frankford Arsenal. Immediately after the war he worked on the ENIAC project, in 1945 and 1946. Under a Fulbright fellowship, he collaborated with Robert Feys in Louvain, Belgium. After retiring from Penn State in 1966, Curry accepted a position at the University of Amsterdam. In 1970, after finishing the second volume of his treatise on the combinatory logic, Curry retired from the University of Amsterdam and returned to State College, Pennsylvania. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42182 | 680,725 |
423,928 | The Jet Propulsion Laboratory traces its history from the 1930s, when Caltech professor Theodore von Karman conducted pioneering work in rocket propulsion. Funded by Army Ordnance in 1942, JPL's early efforts would eventually involve technologies beyond those of aerodynamics and propellant chemistry. The result of the Army Ordnance effort was JPL's answer to the German V-2 missile, named MGM-5 Corporal, first launched in May 1947. On December 3, 1958, two months after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created by Congress, JPL was transferred from Army jurisdiction to that of this new civilian space agency. This shift was due to the creation of a military focused group derived from the German V2 team. Hence, beginning in 1958, NASA JPL and the Caltech crew became focused primarily on unmanned flight and shifted away from military applications with a few exceptions. The community surrounding JPL drove tremendous innovation in telecommunication, interplanetary exploration and earth monitoring (among other areas). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=319341 | 423,721 |
785,102 | In some European countries a common form of set square combines a 90-45-45 triangle, a ruler and a protractor into a single tool made of stiff or slightly flexible transparent plastic. Being a mandatory tool used by pupils in middle school and higher in German-speaking and neighbouring countries, this specific design is named "" (short form of "", meaning "geometry triangle") or similar. It was originally developed in 1964 by the German-Austrian manufacturer (after several refirmations now "Geotec Schul- und Bürowaren GmbH"). Relatively uncommon in English-speaking countries, this is sometimes called a "protractor triangle", a term, however, also used for other similar designs. The original design has a hypotenuse length of 15.8 cm and features a 2×7 cm symmetry scale in millimeter and degree raster. Variants in larger sizes, with fixed or detachable handles, with or without bevelled edges (facets), and with or without ink nodules or embossed labels exist as well. Some variants have extra markings at angles of 7° and 42° (138° and 173°) in addition to the normal 45° and 90° markings to ease dimetric axonometry per ISO 5456-3, others feature angle scales in gons instead of degrees. Several other somewhat similar designs named "" ("TZ triangle") exist for (larger) technical drawings (TZ from German: ). The scale reaches from 10 to 10 cm, or even 11 to 11 cm. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2075882 | 784,681 |
1,618,227 | While some species-typical behavior is learned from parents, it's also sometimes the product of a fixed action pattern, also known as an innate releasing mechanism (IRM). In these instances, a neural network is 'programmed' to create a hard-wired, instinctive behavior in response to an external stimulus. When a blind child hears news that makes her happy, she's likely to smile in response; she never had to be taught to smile, and she never learned this behavior by seeing others do it. Similarly, when kittens are shown a picture of a cat in a threatening posture, most of them arch their backs, bear their teeth, and sometimes even hiss, even though they've never seen another cat do this. Many IRMs can be explained by the theory of evolution—if an adaptive behavior helps a species survive long enough to be fruitful and multiply (such as a cat hissing in order to discourage an attack from another creature), the genes that coded for those brain circuits are more likely to be passed on. A heavily studied example of a fixed action pattern is the feeding behavior of the Helisoma trivolvis (pulmonata), a type of snail. A study has shown that the intricate connections within the buccal ganglia (see nervous system of gastropods) form a central system whereby sensory information stimulates feeding in the helisoma. More specifically, a unique system of communication between three classes of neurons in the buccal ganglia are responsible for forming the neural network that influences feeding. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17394950 | 1,617,314 |
164,388 | San Lorenzo Colossal Head 2 (also known as San Lorenzo Monument 2) was reworked from a monumental throne. The head stands high and measures wide by deep; it weighs 20 tons. Colossal Head 2 was discovered in 1945 when Matthew Stirling's guide cleared away some of the vegetation and mud that covered it. The monument was found lying on its back, facing the sky, and was excavated in 1946 by Stirling and Philip Drucker. In 1962 the monument was removed from the San Lorenzo plateau in order to put it on display as part of "The Olmec tradition" exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1963. San Lorenzo Colossal Head 2 is currently in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. The head was associated with a number of ceramic finds; they have been dated to the Early Preclassic and Late Classic periods. Colossal Head 2 wears a complex headdress that sports a horizontal band tied at the back of the head; this is decorated with three bird's heads that are located above the forehead and temples. The scalp piece is formed from six strips running towards the back of the head. The front of the headdress above the horizontal band is plain. Two short straps hang down from the headdress in front of the ears. The ear jewellery is formed by large squared hoops or framed discs. The left and right ornaments are different, with radial lines on the left earflare, a feature absent on the right earflare. The head is badly damaged due to an unfinished reworking process. This process has pitmarked the entire face with at least 60 smaller hollows and 2 larger holes. The surviving features appear to depict an ageing man with the forehead creased into a frown. The lips are thick and slightly parted to reveal the teeth; the head has a pronounced chin. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35721801 | 164,303 |
97,391 | The "second era" (personal computers) began in 1965 as microprocessors started to compete with mainframes and minicomputers and accelerated the process of decentralizing computing power from large data centers to smaller offices. In the late 1970s, minicomputer technology gave way to personal computers and relatively low-cost computers were becoming mass market commodities, allowing businesses to provide their employees access to computing power that ten years before would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. This proliferation of computers created a ready market for interconnecting networks and the popularization of the Internet. (The first microprocessor—a four-bit device intended for a programmable calculator—was introduced in 1971, and microprocessor-based systems were not readily available for several years. The MITS Altair 8800 was the first commonly known microprocessor-based system, followed closely by the Apple I and II. It is arguable that the microprocessor-based system did not make significant inroads into minicomputer use until 1979, when VisiCalc prompted record sales of the Apple II on which it ran. The IBM PC introduced in 1981 was more broadly palatable to business, but its limitations gated its ability to challenge minicomputer systems until perhaps the late 1980s to early 1990s.) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=237494 | 97,350 |
433,515 | Trivers studied evolutionary theory with Ernst Mayr and William Drury at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, when he earned his PhD in biology. At Harvard he published a series of some of the most influential and highly cited papers in evolutionary biology. His first major paper as a graduate student was "The evolution of reciprocal altruism", published in 1971. In this paper Trivers offers a solution to the longstanding problem of cooperation among unrelated individuals and by doing so overcame a crucial problem for how to police the system by proposing ways that the process of natural selection could evolve ways to detect cheaters. His next major work, "Parental investment and sexual selection", was published the following year. Here Trivers proposed a general framework for understanding sexual selection that had eluded evolutionary thinkers since Charles Darwin. Arguably his most important paper, it arose from watching male and female pigeons out the window of his third floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by his reading a 1948 paper by Angus Bateman (“Intra-sexual selection in "Drosophila"”) which demonstrated that sex differences in the intensity of selection in fruit flies were based on their ability to obtain mates. The primary insight of Trivers was that the key variable underlying the evolution of sex differences across species was relative parental investment in offspring. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2089648 | 433,301 |
273,269 | Members of the United States armed forces are exposed to CS during initial training, and during training refresher courses or equipment maintenance exercises, using CS tablets that are melted on a hotplate. This is to demonstrate the importance of properly wearing a military gas mask or protective mask, as the agent's presence quickly reveals an improper fit or seal of the mask's rubber gaskets against the face. Following exposure while wearing a mask, recruits are ordered to remove the masks and endure exposure in the room. These exercises also encourage confidence in the ability of the equipment to protect the wearer from such chemical attacks. Such an event is a requirement for graduation from United States Army Basic Training, Air Force Basic Military Training, Navy Basic Training, and Marine Corps recruit training. CS gas in the form of grenades is also used extensively in the United States Marine Corps and United States Army in some service schools. CS gas is used during the final field exercise of the Scout Sniper Basic Course to simulate being compromised. In addition, it is used during the escape-and-evasion exercise ("Trail of Tears"), the last event before graduation from the course. Navy Corpsmen participating in Field Medic training in order to serve with the Marines must go through their second CS gas exercise before finally arriving at their unit. It is also used during several events in the Marine Corps Basic Reconnaissance Course (BRC) including some rucksack runs and escape-and-evasion exercises. While students going through the course are given the opportunity to bring and wear a gas mask for the event, usually none are worn because once donned, gas masks could not be removed until the end of the exercise. This could last anywhere from 3–12 hours and would make running 25 km (15 miles) while wearing of gear virtually impossible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=172147 | 273,121 |
826,991 | The notion of entropy as disorder has been transferred from thermodynamics to psychology by Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński, who admitted being inspired by Erwin Schrödinger. In his theoretical framework devised to explain mental disorders (the information metabolism theory), the difference between living organisms and other systems was explained as the ability to maintain order. Contrary to inanimate matter, organisms maintain the particular order of their bodily structures and inner worlds which they impose onto their surroundings and forward to new generations. The life of an organism or the species ceases as soon as it loses that ability. Maintenance of that order requires continual exchange of information between the organism and its surroundings. In higher organisms, information is acquired mainly through sensory receptors and metabolised in the nervous system. The result is action – some form of motion, for example locomotion, speech, internal motion of organs, secretion of hormones, etc. The reactions of one organism become an informational signal to other organisms. Information metabolism, which allows living systems to maintain the order, is possible only if a hierarchy of value exists, as the signals coming to the organism must be structured. In humans that hierarchy has three levels, i.e. biological, emotional, and sociocultural. Kępiński explained how various mental disorders are caused by distortions of that hierarchy, and that the return to mental health is possible through its restoration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7815174 | 826,547 |
192,352 | On 30 December 2012, the Navy issued an urgent order to install RDR-1700 maritime surveillance radars on nine MQ-8Bs. The RDR-1700 is an X-band synthetic aperture radar housed in a modified radome mounted on the helicopter's underside for 360-degree coverage, interfaced with the UAV and its control station. Detailed range is out to , with a max range of . The RDR-1700 can see through clouds and sandstorms and can perform terrain mapping or weather detection, and track 20 air or surface targets, determining a target's range, bearing, and velocity. In January 2013, the Navy awarded a $33 million contract to Telephonics for the RDR-1700B+ radar, designated "AN/ZPY-4(V)1".<ref name="an/zpy-4">Surveillance Radar Selected for Unmanned MQ-8B Fire Scouts - Ainonline.com, 25 January 2013</ref> The radar gives a beyond the horizon broad area search and track capability to track up to 200 targets and operates in surface search, terrain mapping, emergency beacon detection, and weather avoidance modes, supplementing the FLIR Systems Brite Star II electro-optical/infrared payload. It was first demonstrated on an MQ-8B on 7 May 2014. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3774679 | 192,253 |
433,460 | By the late Devonian, land plants had stabilized freshwater habitats, allowing the first wetland ecosystems to develop, with increasingly complex food webs that afforded new opportunities. The early labyrinthodonts were wholly aquatic, hunting in shallow water along tidal shores or weed filled tidal channels. From their piscine ancestors, they had inherited swim bladders that opened to the esophagus and were capable of functioning as lungs (a condition still found in lungfish and some physostome ray-finned fishes), allowing them to hunt in stagnant water or in waterways where rotting vegetation would have lowered oxygen content. The earliest forms, such as "Acanthostega", had vertebrae and limbs quite unsuited to life on land. This is in contrast to the earlier view that fish had first invaded the land—either in search of prey like modern mudskippers, or to find water when the pond they lived in dried out. Early fossil tetrapods have been found in marine sediments, suggesting marine and brackish areas were their primary habitat. This is further corroborated by fossils of early labyrinthodonts being found scattered all around the world, indicating they must have spread by following the coastal lines rather than through freshwater only. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1227129 | 433,246 |
1,994,327 | Originally opened in 1916 as a shipping and recreational facility, Navy Pier in Chicago extended 3,300 feet into Lake Michigan. In August 1941, Navy Pier was taken over and converted to a major Naval Training School. It was renovated to accommodate a large number of service personnel, primarily for mechanical ratings. Near the end of 1943, BuPers directed that most of this be converted to a fourth secondary school. After extensive renovations, including building 100 new classrooms, the first class began in early June 1944. Captain Edwin A. Wolleson was the commanding officer, and Commander Charles C. Caveny served as the educational officer. Two new classes started weekly, each with up to 120 students; this gave a complement of near 6,000 men, making it the largest school in the ETP. ARM Navy Pier closed in mid-1946. An estimated 18,000 men completed secondary school at Navy Pier, a significant portion of whom came to the school directly from the fleet, rather than through primary school. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36494078 | 1,993,184 |
549,061 | In addition to killing bacteria directly they have been demonstrated to have a number of immunomodulatory functions that may be involved in the clearance of infection, including the ability to alter host gene expression, act as chemokines and/or induce chemokine production, inhibiting lipopolysaccharide induced pro-inflammatory cytokine production, promoting wound healing, and modulating the responses of dendritic cells and cells of the adaptive immune response. Animal models indicate that host defense peptides are crucial for both prevention and clearance of infection. It appears as though many peptides initially isolated as and termed "antimicrobial peptides" have been shown to have more significant alternative functions in vivo (e.g. hepcidin). Dusquetide for example is an immunomodulator that acts through p62, a protein involved in toll like receptor based signalling of infection. The peptide is being examined in a Phase III clinical trial by Soligenix (SGNX) to ascertain if it can assist in repair of radiation-induced damage to oral mucosa arising during cancer radiotherapy of the head and neck. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2065768 | 548,773 |
1,006,283 | Early speculation about nuclear weapons assumed that an "atom bomb" would be a large amount of fissile material, moderated by a neutron moderator, similar in structure to a nuclear reactor or "pile". Only the Manhattan project embraced the idea of a chain reaction of fast neutrons in pure metallic uranium or plutonium. Other moderated designs were also considered by the Americans; proposals included using uranium deuteride as the fissile material. In 1943 Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr considered the possibility of using a "pile" as a weapon. The motivation was that with a graphite moderator it would be possible to achieve the chain reaction without the use of any isotope separation. However, plutonium can be produced ("bred") sufficiently isotopically pure as to be usable in a bomb and then has to be "only" separated chemically, a much easier processes than isotope separation, albeit still a challenging one. In August 1945, when information of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was relayed to the scientists of the German nuclear program, interred at Farm Hall in England, chief scientist Werner Heisenberg hypothesized that the device must have been "something like a nuclear reactor, with the neutrons slowed by many collisions with a moderator". The German program, which had been much less advanced, had never even considered the plutonium-option and didn't discover a feasible method of large scale isotope separation in uranium. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=188896 | 1,005,764 |
1,065,622 | The Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species is an annexe with the aim to conserve the Indian wildlife by using modern biological techniques and assisted reproductive technologies. It has worked extensively with various departments of the Government of India to curb wildlife crime. They have helped identify the source of animal meat in cases of doubt, sources of smuggled animals, and study stress among wild animals via non-invasive measures. They have helped the Directorate of Aerospace Safety to identify the reason on bird hits, and help them in canopy engineering of their airports. They host the National Wildlife Genetic Resource Bank with currently 250 genetic samples of animals, collected from zoos across the country. They can contain up to 17,000 samples. In the past few years, they have worked with the Nehru Zoological Park, Hyderabad to protect the mouse deer from extinction. In August 2018, they started with the phased release of these animals into their original habitats of Amrabad Tiger Reserve. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5867888 | 1,065,068 |
1,408,783 | QTAIM rests on the fact that the dominant topological property of the vast majority of electron density distributions is the presence of strong maxima that occur exclusively at the nuclei, certain pairs of which are linked together by ridges of electron density. In terms of an electron density distribution's gradient vector field, this corresponds to a complete, non-overlapping partitioning of a molecule into three-dimensional basins (atoms) that are linked together by shared two-dimensional separatrices (interatomic surfaces). Within each interatomic surface, the electron density is a maximum at the corresponding internuclear saddle point, which also lies at the minimum of the ridge between corresponding pair of nuclei, the ridge being defined by the pair of gradient trajectories (bond path) originating at the saddle point and terminating at the nuclei. Because QTAIM atoms are always bounded by surfaces having zero flux in the gradient vector field of the electron density, they have some unique quantum mechanical properties compared to other subsystem definitions, including unique electronic kinetic energy the satisfaction of an electronic virial theorem analogous to the molecular electronic virial theorem and some interesting variational properties. QTAIM has gradually become a method for addressing possible questions regarding chemical systems, in a variety of situations hardly handled before by any other model or theory in chemistry. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2843479 | 1,407,992 |
1,335,676 | However, this is not the only technique available: the original EMI scanner solved the tomographic reconstruction problem by linear algebra, but this approach was limited by its high computational complexity, especially given the computer technology available at the time. More recently, manufacturers have developed iterative physical model-based maximum likelihood expectation maximization techniques. These techniques are advantageous because they use an internal model of the scanner's physical properties and of the physical laws of X-ray interactions. Earlier methods, such as filtered back projection, assume a perfect scanner and highly simplified physics, which leads to a number of artifacts, high noise and impaired image resolution. Iterative techniques provide images with improved resolution, reduced noise and fewer artifacts, as well as the ability to greatly reduce the radiation dose in certain circumstances. The disadvantage is a very high computational requirement, but advances in computer technology and high-performance computing techniques, such as use of highly parallel GPU algorithms or use of specialized hardware such as FPGAs or ASICs, now allow practical use. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53857907 | 1,334,946 |
730,295 | For hundreds of years, humans have made use of the chemical reactions of biological organisms in order to create goods. In the mid-1800s, Louis Pasteur was one of the first people to look into the role of these organisms when he researched fermentation. His work also contributed to the use of pasteurization, which is still used to this day. By the early 1900s, the use of microorganisms had expanded, and was used to make industrial products. Up to this point, biochemical engineering hadn't developed as a field yet. It wasn't until 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin that the field of biochemical engineering was established. After this discovery, samples were gathered from around the world in order to continue research into the characteristics of microbes from places such as soils, gardens, forests, rivers, and streams. Today, biochemical engineers can be found working in a variety of industries, from food to pharmaceuticals. This is due to the increasing need for efficiency and production which requires knowledge of how biological systems and chemical reactions interact with each other and how they can be used to meet these needs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=616670 | 729,910 |
353,483 | 20th century developments in plant biochemistry have been driven by modern techniques of organic chemical analysis, such as spectroscopy, chromatography and electrophoresis. With the rise of the related molecular-scale biological approaches of molecular biology, genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, the relationship between the plant genome and most aspects of the biochemistry, physiology, morphology and behaviour of plants can be subjected to detailed experimental analysis. The concept originally stated by Gottlieb Haberlandt in 1902 that all plant cells are totipotent and can be grown "in vitro" ultimately enabled the use of genetic engineering experimentally to knock out a gene or genes responsible for a specific trait, or to add genes such as GFP that report when a gene of interest is being expressed. These technologies enable the biotechnological use of whole plants or plant cell cultures grown in bioreactors to synthesise pesticides, antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals, as well as the practical application of genetically modified crops designed for traits such as improved yield. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4183 | 353,300 |
1,375,647 | Dessler and Edward Parson co-authored, "The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate" in 2006 (2nd ed. 2009). It was described as, "a fascinating hybrid of science and policy directed at a broad or nonspecialist audience" by Wendy Gordon in a 2008 review in "Eos". Gordon's review was positive concluding, "I could comfortably recommend this book to friend and colleagues." and that it would be "an excellent resource for a high school of college-level survey course in either environmental studies or public policy." It also received a favorable review in the "Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society" by Paul Higgins. Higgins noted the book's, "careful reasoning and thoughtful presentation" and stated it was a sound guide to the climate change debate. Concluding a generally positive review Randall Wigle writing in "Canadian Public Policy" stated, "...I believe it is a good candidate for a primer for multidisciplinary classes devoted to climate change policy, but it would have been an even better one with less advocacy of one side of the argument." Maria Ivanova wrote in "Global Environmental Politics" that the book's scholarly value was indisputable. Writing in "New Scientist" in 2006 Adrian Barnett said, "Free copies should be shipped to anyone who doubts the reality of climate change, starting with presidents in denial." The book also received very positive reviews in "Chromatographia", the "Times Higher Education Supplement (THES)" and "Environmental Sciences". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13725293 | 1,374,886 |
1,516,161 | As Richardson developed the ribbon diagram to illustrate her findings over the course of her taxonomic research, her iconic images first appeared in the review journal "Advances in Protein Chemistry" in an article titled "The anatomy and taxonomy of protein structure" 1981, an early hallmark publication in structural bioinformatics. The diagrams have since become a standard way of visualizing protein structure, specifically depicting beta-sheet topology and connections between amino acid sequences, or peptides, that make up proteins. The protein folding process involves four levels: primary structures, secondary structures, tertiary structures, and quaternary structures. Secondary structures result from hydrogen bond interactions between adjacent amino acids sequences to form alpha helices or beta-sheets. Tertiary structures are a higher order of protein folding that depict the conformation of and connectivity between alpha-helices and beta-sheets in 3D. Richardson's ribbon diagrams illustrate beta-sheet topology and connectivity in higher-order protein structures. She formalized general rules about beta-sheets linkage via "hairpin" connections or "crossover" connections. In a hairpin connection a peptide backbone stems out of and loops around to return to the same beta-sheet end from which it left. A crossover connection involves the peptide backbone extending out of one beta-sheet and looping around to enter another beta-sheet on the opposite end of the protein. Her initial drawings and continual discoveries contribute to a broader understanding of protein energetics and evolution. Peter Agre, Nobel laureate and fellow Duke professor, said of the Richardsons' work: "Jane and David’s work allowed us to reveal the form of proteins, and from there it was easier to understand their function". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11502437 | 1,515,309 |
1,638,366 | The Wheeler–Kenyon method is a method of archaeological excavation. The technique originates from the work of Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Wheeler at Verulamium (1930–35), and was later refined by Kathleen Kenyon during her excavations at Jericho (1952–58). The Wheeler–Kenyon system involves digging within a series of squares that can vary in size set within a larger grid. This leaves a freestanding wall of earth—known as a "balk"—that can range from 50 cm for temporary grids, and measure up to 2 metres in width for a deeper square. The normal width of a permanent balk is 1 metre on each side of a unit. These vertical slices of earth allow archaeologists to compare the exact provenance of a found object or feature to adjacent layers of earth ("strata"). During Kenyon's excavations at Jericho, this technique helped discern the long and complicated occupational history of the site. It was believed that this approach allowed more precise stratigraphic observations than earlier "horizontal exposure" techniques that relied on architectural and ceramic analysis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7450620 | 1,637,441 |
1,406,559 | Recently, MNase-seq has also been implemented in determining where transcription factors bind on the DNA. Classical ChIP-seq displays issues with resolution quality, stringency in experimental protocol, and DNA fragmentation. Classical ChIP-seq typically uses sonication to fragment chromatin, which biases heterochromatic regions due to the condensed and tight binding of chromatin regions to each other. Unlike histones, transcription factors only transiently bind DNA. Other methods, such as sonication in ChIP-seq, requiring the use of increased temperatures and detergents, can lead to the loss of the factor. CUT&RUN sequencing is a novel form of an MNase-based immunoprecipitation. Briefly, it uses an MNase tagged with an antibody to specifically bind DNA-bound proteins that present the epitope recognized by that antibody. Digestion then specifically occurs at regions surrounding that transcription factor, allowing for this complex to diffuse out of the nucleus and be obtained without having to worry about significant background nor the complications of sonication. The use of this technique does not require high temperatures or high concentrations of detergent. Furthermore, MNase improves chromatin digestion due to its exonuclease and endonuclease activity. Cells are lysed in an SDS/Triton X-100 solution. Then, the MNase-antibody complex is added. And finally, the protein-DNA complex can be isolated, with the DNA being subsequently purified and sequenced. The resulting soluble extract contains a 25-fold enrichment in fragments under 50bp. This increased enrichment results in cost-effective high-resolution data. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63210872 | 1,405,769 |
566,927 | Originally in development, Lev was not transgender. An early pitch was for Yara (portrayed by Victoria Grace) to be transgender, but Druckmann preferred to keep her a more traditional follower of the Seraphites. Queer and transgender employees of Naughty Dog gave input on the character, and the team consulted with an LGBTQ scholar. When the developers reached out to acting agencies to cast for the character, they found that none represented transgender actors. Some members of the team were fans of "The OA" (2016–2019), which starred Ian Alexander; though he was not represented by an agency at the time, Alexander was invited by Druckmann to audition. When exploring the idea of making Lev transgender, the team found it to be an interesting look into the violence that can be found within organized religion. Alexander was attracted to the role as he underwent similar emotions when transitioning, having come from a religious background and also receiving backlash after cutting his hair. He felt that Lev has been forced to grow up due to his surroundings. Despite some hesitation, the team determined that Lev's deadname being used by the Seraphites demonstrated the difference between their transphobia and Abby and Yara's acceptance. The team hired a religious consultant to ensure the Seraphites' response to Lev's transition was accurate without being unintentionally offensive. Druckmann considered Lev among the most important characters as he represents the same innocence that Ellie did in the first game. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64504979 | 566,637 |
1,205,007 | LOFAR offers a unique possibility in particle physics for studying the origin of high-energy and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (HECRs and UHECRs) at energies between eV. Both the sites and processes for accelerating particles are unknown. Possible candidate sources of these HECRs are shocks in radio lobes of powerful radio galaxies, intergalactic shocks created during the epoch of galaxy formation, so-called Hyper-novae, gamma-ray bursts, or decay products of super-massive particles from topological defects, left over from phase transitions in the early Universe. The primary observable is the intense radio pulse that is produced when a primary CR hits the atmosphere and produces an extensive air shower (EAS). An EAS is aligned along the direction of motion of the primary particle, and a substantial part of its component consists of electron-positron pairs which emit radio emission in the terrestrial magnetosphere (e.g., geo-synchrotron emission). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1524766 | 1,204,362 |
1,347,238 | The first phase, completed 1926, built the wing that forms the west face of the triangle. Its façade dominates the eastern side of the university's Central Plaza, better known as Red Square. The south wing, the second phase of construction, was completed in 1935. Part of this second phase added a floor between the first and second floors of the original building, and the curving Grand Staircase on either side of what was formerly a rotunda. The original plans for the third wing of the library, completed in 1963, were extensively revised, as by this time the university had largely moved away from its earlier architectural style and had adopted instead modernist concrete and glass forms. A fourth and final addition was completed in 1990 with the Kenneth S. Allen Library wing, named for the father of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; the elder Allen was an associate director of the university library system from 1960 to 1982. Between the years 2000 and 2002, Suzzallo Library underwent extensive retrofitting to strengthen the structure's integrity as a precaution against the effects of an earthquake. It remained open to the public throughout the entire renovation process, although sections were closed for periods of time. While the 2001 Nisqually earthquake occurred during the renovation, the library only sustained minor damage as 60 percent of the interior seismic work was completed when it occurred. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=872655 | 1,346,497 |
1,227,043 | Pandemic prevention seeks to prevent pandemics while mitigation of pandemics seeks to reduce their severity and negative impacts. Some have called for a shift from a treatment-oriented society to a prevention-oriented one. Authors of a 2010 study write that contemporary "global disease control focuses almost exclusively on responding to pandemics after they have already spread globally" and argue that the "wait-and-respond approach is not sufficient and that the development of systems to prevent novel pandemics before they are established should be considered imperative to human health". Peter Daszak comments on the COVID-19 pandemic, saying "[t]he problem isn't that prevention was impossible, [i]t was very possible. But we didn't do it. Governments thought it was too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies operate for profit". The WHO reportedly had mostly neither the funding nor the power to enforce the large-scale global collaboration necessary to combat it. Nathan Wolfe criticizes that "our current global public health strategies are reminiscent of cardiology in the 1950s when doctors focused solely on responding to heart attacks and ignored the whole idea of prevention". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63478457 | 1,226,382 |
1,456,438 | Another place that FTICR-MS is useful is in dealing with complex mixtures, such as biomass or waste liquefaction products, since the resolution (narrow peak width) allows the signals of two ions with similar mass-to-charge ratios ("m"/"z") to be detected as distinct ions. This high resolution is also useful in studying large macromolecules such as proteins with multiple charges, which can be produced by electrospray ionization. For example, attomole level of detection of two peptides has been reported. These large molecules contain a distribution of isotopes that produce a series of isotopic peaks. Because the isotopic peaks are close to each other on the "m"/"z" axis, due to the multiple charges, the high resolving power of the FTICR is extremely useful. FTICR-MS is very useful in other studies of proteomics as well. It achieves exceptional resolution in both top-down and bottom-up proteomics. Electron-capture dissociation (ECD), collisional-induced dissociation (CID), and infrared multiphoton dissociation (IRMPD) are all utilized to produce fragment spectra in tandem mass spectrometry experiments. Although CID and IRMPD use vibrational excitation to further dissociate peptides by breaking the backbone amide linkages, which are typically low in energy and weak, CID and IRMPD may also cause dissociation of post-translational modifications. ECD, on the other hand, allows specific modifications to be preserved. This is quite useful in analyzing phosphorylation states, O- or N-linked glycosylation, and sulfating. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2182716 | 1,455,618 |
1,517,585 | Ottilie "Tilly" Edinger was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1897. Her father Ludwig Edinger, himself a pioneer in comparative neurology, provided Tilly with invaluable exposure to his field and the scientific community at large. Tilly had many private tutors before attending Schiller-Schule, the only secondary school for girls in Frankfurt at that time. Tilly Edinger continued her schooling with university studies in zoology, geology, and paleontology. While preparing her doctoral dissertation, Edinger encountered a natural brain endocast of "Nothosaurus", a marine reptile from the Mesozoic era. Edinger's first paper, published in 1921, centered on the characteristics of the "Nothosaurus" specimen. Prior to the publication of her work, inferences about the evolution of the vertebrate brain were made exclusively through comparative anatomy of extant fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal brains. Tilly Edinger's background in neurology and paleontology paved the way for her to integrate comparative anatomy and stratigraphic sequence, thus introducing the concept of time to neurology and creating the field of paleoneurobiology. The field was formally defined with the publication of "Die fossilen Gehirne" ("Fossil Brains") in 1929 which compiled knowledge on the subject that had previously been scattered in a wide variety of journals and treated as isolated events. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27043983 | 1,516,733 |
130,886 | Proof of improved survival benefit from either of these two techniques over conventional radiation therapy (2DXRT) is growing for many tumor sites, but the ability to reduce toxicity is generally accepted. This is particularly the case for head and neck cancers in a series of pivotal trials performed by Professor Christopher Nutting of the Royal Marsden Hospital. Both techniques enable dose escalation, potentially increasing usefulness. There has been some concern, particularly with IMRT, about increased exposure of normal tissue to radiation and the consequent potential for secondary malignancy. Overconfidence in the accuracy of imaging may increase the chance of missing lesions that are invisible on the planning scans (and therefore not included in the treatment plan) or that move between or during a treatment (for example, due to respiration or inadequate patient immobilization). New techniques are being developed to better control this uncertainty – for example, real-time imaging combined with real-time adjustment of the therapeutic beams. This new technology is called image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) or four-dimensional radiation therapy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26350 | 130,834 |
1,509,314 | He did much work on a monorail locomotive which was kept upright by a gyrostat. In 1903 he patented a gyroscopically-balanced monorail system that he designed for military use; he successfully demonstrated the full sized system on 10 November 1909, at Gillingham, England. At the Japan–British Exhibition of 1910 at White City, London he built a mile long monorail track and gave rides for around 40 people at a time on his gyro stabilised 22-ton prototype. Winston Churchill (then Home Secretary) was one of the passengers and then drove the vehicle himself for one circuit. He was so impressed that he brought along the Prime Minister and other cabinet members and family to see it the following week. The exhibit was awarded the Grand Prize for the exhibition. Although the ability of the vehicle to balance itself on a single rail was amazing, especially when stationary, it was not to prove a commercial success, partly due to fears that the gyroscopes might fail, and partly because any wagons or coaches towed by the locomotive would also need powered gyroscopic stabilisation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1054501 | 1,508,465 |
1,818,052 | Recent fMRI studies have begun to elucidate the cognitive and affective neural correlates associated with humor processing. But these correlates, corresponding to the stages of humor detection and humor appreciation respectively, fail to distinguish between these different logical mechanisms. A medley of studies have started to investigate the differences between these steps in humor processing and the neural circuitry that underlie these mechanisms. The pun-intended phrase "the right hemisphere has the last laugh" has been adopted by scientists in this field due to its significance during appreciation, but it is widely accepted that humor appreciation and detection rely on neural circuitry from temporal and prefrontal regions from both hemispheres. These brain areas also contribute to humor processing in three distinct spatiotemporal stages: surface level semantic analysis and two phases of the interpretative integrative processes. The surface level semantic analysis is subserved by bilateral anterior temporal and left inferior prefrontal regions. Interpretive integrative processing comprises detection of ambiguity or conflict between the dominant semantic representations of the punch line and the context, which is reflected in semantic, phonological, metaphorical, and other supralinguistic integrations of the punch line with the preceding sentence. In regards to the detection process, the right medial temporal gyrus is active during detection of semantic violations, and the right middle frontal gyrus is active for context monitoring. The three distinct stages of neural activation during the humor process implies that humor detection and appreciation operate as separate entities and engage different brain regions in an ordered fashion. Therefore, the cascade of neural events required to understand and appreciate humor can be functionally separated, and studies have shown this distinction to be consistent across all genres of comedy. During moments of humor detection, significant activation can be seen in the left posterior middle | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41122131 | 1,817,017 |
209,645 | During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, all intellectuals, including scientists, came under much persecution, and among other things were conscripted into manual labour as part of a campaign to turn "intellectuals into labourers and labourers into intellectuals", which impeded research. Though palaeoanthropology was still able to continue, the field became much less important to the Chinese government with its new resolve to become economically independent, and popular science topics switched from human evolution to production-related matters. As the Revolution's policies relaxed after 1970, palaeoanthropology and academia resurged, especially with the rise of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 (renowned as a "springtime for science"). The Zhoukoudian had been threatened several times by nearby mining operations or acid rain from air pollution, but the post-Mao China also witnessed budding environmentalist actions. To this extent, the United Nations declared the Zhoukoudian to be a World Heritage Site in 1987, and custody of the site was handed over from the IVPP to the city of Beijing (which has greater resources) in 2002. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=253340 | 209,538 |
771,695 | The International Radiotelegraph Union was unofficially established at the first International Radiotelegraph Convention in 1906, and was merged into the International Telecommunication Union in 1932. When the United States entered World War I, private radiotelegraphy stations were prohibited, which put an end to several pioneers' work in this field. By the 1920s, there was a worldwide network of commercial and government radiotelegraphic stations, plus extensive use of radiotelegraphy by ships for both commercial purposes and passenger messages. The transmission of sound (radiotelephony) began to displace radiotelegraphy by the 1920s for many applications, making possible radio broadcasting. Wireless telegraphy continued to be used for private person-to-person business, governmental, and military communication, such as telegrams and diplomatic communications, and evolved into radioteletype networks. The ultimate implementation of wireless telegraphy was telex, using radio signals, which was developed in the 1930s and was for many years the only reliable form of communication between many distant countries. The most advanced standard, CCITT R.44, automated both routing and encoding of messages by short wave transmissions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33131 | 771,281 |
1,949,597 | Suspension array technology (or SAT) is a high throughput, large-scale, and multiplexed screening platform used in molecular biology. SAT has been widely applied to genomic and proteomic research, such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, genetic disease screening, gene expression profiling, screening drug discovery and clinical diagnosis. SAT uses microsphere beads (5.6 um in diameter) to prepare arrays. SAT allows for the simultaneous testing of multiple gene variants through the use of these microsphere beads as each type of microsphere bead has a unique identification based on variations in optical properties, most common is fluorescent colour. As each colour and intensity of colour has a unique wavelength, beads can easily be differentiated based on their wavelength intensity. Microspheres are readily suspendable in solution and exhibit favorable kinetics during an assay. Similar to flat microarrays (e.g. DNA microarray), an appropriate receptor molecule, such as DNA oligonucleotide probes, antibodies, or other proteins, attach themselves to the differently labeled microspheres. This produces thousands of microsphere array elements. Probe-target hybridization is usually detected by optically labeled targets, which determines the relative abundance of each target in the sample. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30990996 | 1,948,476 |
1,627,403 | Although the first known reference to a snapshot hyperspectral imaging device—the Bowen "image slicer"—dates from 1938, the concept was not successful until a larger amount of spatial resolution was available. With the arrival of large-format detector arrays in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of new snapshot hyperspectral imaging techniques were developed to take advantage of the new technology: a method which uses a fiber bundle at the image plane and reformatting the fibers in the opposite end of the bundle to a long line, viewing a scene through a 2D grating and reconstructing the multiplexed data with computed tomography mathematics, the (lenslet-based) integral field spectrograph, a modernized version of Bowen's image slicer. More recently, a number of research groups have attempted to advance the technology in order to create devices capable of commercial use. These newer devices include the HyperPixel Array imager a derivative of the integral field spectrograph, a multiaperture spectral filter approach, a compressive-sensing–based approach using a coded aperture, a microfaceted-mirror-based approach, a generalization of the Lyot filter, and a generalization of the Bayer filter approach to multispectral filtering. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31560201 | 1,626,485 |
1,348,985 | In general, a quadrupedal locomotion is assumed for the ground-dwelling sloths. However, due to the body's center of gravity being shifted far to the rear, it was obviously also possible for them to change to a bipedal position, while being able to support themselves with the powerful - in contrast to today's tree sloths - very long tail. The hind foot of "Paramylodon" is turned inward, so that the main load when the foot is placed on the outer ray (V). This results in the pedolateral gait characteristic of numerous ground sloths, which required significant restructuring in the shape and bearing of the tarsal bones relative to each other, especially in the talus and calcaneus. In "Paramylodon", the outer edge of the foot was little arched up, forming a more or less straight edge, and the calcaneus was in contact with the ground at nearly full length. This is consistent with other mylodonts, but differs greatly from the closely related Scelidotheriidae, which had a highly arched foot with only the posterior end of the calcaneus touching the ground. Another distinctive feature is found in the hind limbs. Here the locomotor system is characterized by an extremely short lower section. In "Paramylodon" the lower section reaches less than 50% of the upper. Such a construction plan, exhibited by nearly all mylodonts, suggests a rather slow and cumbersome locomotion. In comparison, the megatherians had significantly longer lower limb sections. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16886646 | 1,348,240 |
150,875 | In the early 1960s, various executives of US aerospace companies were telling the US public and Congress that there were no technical reasons an SST could not be produced. In April 1960, Burt C Monesmith, a vice president with Lockheed, stated to various magazines that an SST constructed of steel weighing could be developed for $160 million and in production lots of 200 or more sold for around $9 million. But it was the Anglo-French development of the Concorde that set off panic in the US industry, where it was thought that Concorde would soon replace all other long range designs, especially after Pan Am took out purchase options on the Concorde. Congress was soon funding an SST design effort, selecting the existing Lockheed L-2000 and Boeing 2707 designs, to produce an even more advanced, larger, faster and longer ranged design. The Boeing 2707 design was eventually selected for continued work, with design goals of ferrying around 300 passengers and having a cruising speed near to Mach 3. The Soviet Union set out to produce its own design, the Tu-144, which the western press nicknamed the "Concordski". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=215930 | 150,807 |
2,080,692 | The Visible Embryo Project (VEP) is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary research project originally created in the early 1990s as a collaboration between the Developmental Anatomy Center at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and the Biomedical Visualization Laboratory (BVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "to develop software strategies for the development of distributed biostructural databases using cutting-edge technologies for high-performance computing and communications (HPCC), and to implement these tools in the creation of a large-scale digital archive of multidimensional data on normal and abnormal human development." This project related to BVL's other research in the areas of health informatics, educational multimedia, and biomedical imaging science. Over the following decades, the list of VEP collaborators grew to include over a dozen universities, national laboratories, and companies around the world. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70238111 | 2,079,492 |
1,656,570 | As cancer treatments are not cancer cell-specific and are often gonadotoxic (toxic to the ovaries and the testes), children usually face infertility as a consequence of treatment as there is no established way to preserve their fertility yet, especially in prepubertal boys. Infertility after cancer treatment depends on the type and dosage of treatment but can vary from 17% to 82% of patients. Spermatogonial stem cell therapy (SSCT) has been proposed as a potential method to restore fertility in such cancer survivors who desire to have children later in life. The method has been tested in numerous animal models including non-human primates; Hermann "et al". took out and isolated SSCs from prepubertal and adult rhesus macaques before treating them with busulfan (an alkylating agent used in chemotherapy). SSCs were then injected back into the rete testis of the same animal that they were taken from ~10–12 weeks after treatment; and spermatogenesis was observed in almost all recipients (16/17). However, these SSCs were difficult to detect which is why further analysis of the ability of descendant sperm to fertilise could not be determined. The viability of embryos fertilised by donor sperm after SSC transplantation needs to be evaluated to truly determine the usefulness of this technique. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51778204 | 1,655,637 |
479,297 | By not requiring "a priori" specification of a model, symbolic regression isn't affected by human bias, or unknown gaps in domain knowledge. It attempts to uncover the intrinsic relationships of the dataset, by letting the patterns in the data itself reveal the appropriate models, rather than imposing a model structure that is deemed mathematically tractable from a human perspective. The fitness function that drives the evolution of the models takes into account not only error metrics (to ensure the models accurately predict the data), but also special complexity measures, thus ensuring that the resulting models reveal the data's underlying structure in a way that's understandable from a human perspective. This facilitates reasoning and favors the odds of getting insights about the data-generating system, as well as improving generalisability and extrapolation behaviour by preventing overfitting. Accuracy and simplicity may be left as two separate objectives of the regression -- in which case the optimum solutions form a Pareto front -- or they may be combined into a single objective by means of a model selection principle such as minimum description length. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42922637 | 479,057 |
928,644 | Webern's works are concise, distilled, and select; when Boulez, for a second time, recorded all of his then published compositions, including some of those without opus numbers, the results fit on just six CDs. Not all of his works were or could be published in his lifetime, especially after 1934. His music is often considered inaccessible by listeners and difficult by performers alike; Babbitt observed that during Webern's life it "was regarded (to the very limited extent that it was regarded at all) as the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition." Though his "œuvre" comprises stylistic shifts, it is typified by spartan textures, in which every note can be heard; carefully chosen timbres, often resulting in very detailed instructions to the performers and use of extended instrumental techniques (flutter tonguing, col legno, and so on); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave or more; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Op. 9, (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total. The concerns and techniques of his music were cohesive, interrelated, and only very gradually transformed with the overlap of old and new, particularly in the case of his middle-period lieder (for example, his first use of twelve-tone technique in Op. 17, Nos. 2 and 3, was not especially stylistically significant and only eventually became realized as otherwise so in later works). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65676 | 928,155 |
418,688 | In 2004, the Elektron unit shut down due to (initially) unknown causes. Two weeks of troubleshooting resulted in the unit starting up again, then immediately shutting down. The cause was eventually traced to gas bubbles in the unit, which remained non-functional until a Progress resupply mission in October 2004. In 2005 ISS personnel tapped into the oxygen supply of the recently arrived Progress resupply spacecraft, when the Elektron unit failed. In 2006 fumes from a malfunctioning Elektron unit prompted NASA flight engineers to declare a "spacecraft emergency". A burning smell led the ISS crew to suspect another Elektron fire, but the unit was only "very hot". A leak of corrosive, odorless potassium hydroxide forced the ISS crew to don gloves and face masks. It has been conjectured that the smell came from overheated rubber seals. The incident occurred shortly after STS-115 left and just before arrival of a resupply mission (including space tourist Anousheh Ansari). The Elektron did not come back online until November 2006, after new valves and cables arrived on the October 2006 Progress resupply vessel. The ERPTC (Electrical Recovery Processing Terminal Current) was inserted into the ISS to prevent harm to the systems. In October 2020 the Elektron system failed and had to be deactivated for a short time before being repaired. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25850552 | 418,483 |
1,695,063 | In 1999, a new model regarding KIF1A motility, contrary to the widely accepted dimeric, two-headed “walking model,” depicted that KIF1A can move processively on microtubules as a monomer in single molecule experiments. As the debate on whether KIF1A functioned as a monomer or dimer ensued, further research in the cryo-EM field resolved the structure of KIF1A and identified the K-loop, a 12-amino acid insert at the L12 region indicated to increase KIF1A's affinity to microtubules. In other efforts to uncover the function of important KIF1A structures, it was reported that the binding of KIF1A's pleckstrin homology (PH) domain to lipids (PtdIns(4,5)P2) is necessary and sufficient for the binding and transporting of vesicles. Further investigations of how the PtdIns(4,5)P2 lipid subdomain facilitates KIF1A vesicle transport led to the idea that this membrane subdomain may cause KIF1A monomers to cluster or dimerize, which would then activate motor activity. Continuing with KIF1A's monomer vs. dimer debate, the proposition that KIF1A functioned as a monomeric motor was challenged with a mechanism similar to that found in conventional kinesin. It was then suggested that KIF1A can dimerize to operate as a two-headed motor and that motility can be regulated by motor dimerization, leading to the conclusion that KIF1A is monomeric in an inactive state, and dimeric in an active state. As to where the debate stands now, more recent research has shown that KIF1A is dimeric in both active and inactive states and that motor activity is instead regulated by autoinhibition. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31656267 | 1,694,112 |
29,520 | In the 14th century, alchemy became more accessible to Europeans outside the confines of Latin speaking churchmen and scholars. Alchemical discourse shifted from scholarly philosophical debate to an exposed social commentary on the alchemists themselves. Dante, Piers Plowman, and Chaucer all painted unflattering pictures of alchemists as thieves and liars. Pope John XXII's 1317 edict, "Spondent quas non-exhibent" forbade the false promises of transmutation made by pseudo-alchemists. Roman Catholic Inquisitor General Nicholas Eymerich's "Directorium Inquisitorum", written in 1376, associated alchemy with the performance of demonic rituals, which Eymerich differentiated from magic performed in accordance with scripture. This did not, however, lead to any change in the Inquisition's monitoring or prosecution of alchemists. In 1403, Henry IV of England banned the practice of multiplying metals (although it was possible to buy a licence to attempt to make gold alchemically, and a number were granted by Henry VI and Edward IV). These critiques and regulations centered more around pseudo-alchemical charlatanism than the actual study of alchemy, which continued with an increasingly Christian tone. The 14th century saw the Christian imagery of death and resurrection employed in the alchemical texts of Petrus Bonus, John of Rupescissa, and in works written in the name of Raymond Lull and Arnold of Villanova. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=573 | 29,510 |
1,982,368 | Many traditional chemical conversions used in various industries suffer from inherent drawbacks from both an economic and environmental viewpoint. Non-specific reactions can afford low product yields, copious amounts of waste and impure products. The need for elevated temperatures and pressures leads to high energy consumption and high capital investment costs. Disposal of unwanted by-products may be difficult and/or expensive and hazardous solvents may be required. In stark contrast, enzymatic reactions are performed under mild conditions of temperature and pressure, in water as solvent, and exhibit very high rates and are often highly specific. Moreover, they are produced from renewable raw materials and are biodegradable. In addition, the mild operating conditions of enzymatic processes mean that they can be performed in relatively simple equipment and are easy to control. In short, they reduce the environmental footprint of manufacturing by reducing the consumption of energy and chemicals and concomitant generation of waste. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12477587 | 1,981,229 |
1,441,084 | In 1960, the textbook and course materials were first published by D. C. Heath and Company (which became a division of Raytheon during 1966–1995), and a series of coordinating laboratory equipment and an experimental handbook was also released. The otherwise-unrelated Heathkit company marketed a series of its standard electronic instruments (e.g. oscilloscopes and signal generators), specially modified in some cases, to coordinate with the laboratory handbook. Another company marketed a small table-top water-filled tray which could project an image of wave phenomena, which became an influential educational aid used at both the high school and college levels. Doubleday published a "Science Studies Series" of over 50 small paperback books on related scientific subjects at a high school level, covering topics such as crystal growing, waves and beaches, subatomic particles, the universe, and biographies of notable scientists. The non-profit Educational Service Incorporated, which became Education Development Center, was created to continue the work of PSSC. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24165862 | 1,440,274 |
590,544 | The Wirraway was powered by a single 600 hp Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp radial engine, licence-built by CAC and allowing the aircraft to reach speeds of up to 191 knots. The engine drove a three-bladed variable-pitch propeller developed by de Havilland Propellers. Fuel was stored within a pair of 45 gallon tanks. The two-man crew sat within a tandem cockpit, complete with a fully enclosed sliding canopy; both positions were fitted with flying controls. In addition, the rear cockpit featured a rotatable folding seat for the gunner/bomb-aimer, as well as a prone bombing position in the floor of the aircraft. The Wirraway could carry a light armament of a single 500 lb bomb or a pair of 250 lb bombs under the wings; light bombs or flares could also be carried underneath the centerline section. Additionally, a pair of forward-firing Vickers Mk.V machine guns were fitted along with a single swivel-mounted machine gun positioned at the rear of the cockpit. A later variant received strengthened wing struts, which allowed the installation of four 250lb or two 500lb and two 250lb bombs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3943778 | 590,242 |
845,326 | Microwaves propagate solely by line of sight; because of the small refraction due to their short wavelength, the groundwave and ionospheric reflection (skywave or "skip" propagation) seen with lower frequency radio waves do not occur. Although in some cases they can penetrate building walls enough for useful reception, unobstructed rights of way cleared to the first Fresnel zone are usually required. Wavelengths are small enough at microwave frequencies that the antenna can be much larger than a wavelength, allowing highly directional (high gain) antennas to be built which can produce narrow beams. Therefore, they are used in point-to-point terrestrial communications links, limited by the visual horizon to 30–40 miles (48–64 km). Such high gain antennas allow frequency reuse by nearby transmitters. They are also used for communication with spacecraft since the waves are not refracted (bent) when passing through the ionosphere like lower frequencies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=385748 | 844,876 |
475,741 | On March 31, 2013, an industrial accident at the facility killed one person and injured eight other workers, including four seriously. The accident took place "in a non-radiation area, and there was no risk to public health and safety." According to Entergy, the old stator of Unit One's generator fell during an operation to replace it. The falling component ruptured a water pipe, causing water infiltration into the plant's switchgear, which knocked out power to all of Unit One and one train of Unit Two's electrical system, which was online at the time. The electrical failure caused an automatic shutdown of Unit Two. The plant's emergency generators started and restored power to the emergency systems of both units. Unit One was in a refueling outage. Emergency diesel generators, water pumps and feed water were functioning following a loss of all off-site power on Unit One, according to the NRC event notification. The plant was placed under an "unusual event classification", which is the lowest of four emergency classification levels for abnormal events designated by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates American civil nuclear installations. One plant worker died, and ten other injuries required offsite medical treatment. The company released an official statement of condolence. Entergy announced that they would immediately commence repairs to Unit Two and hope to have the unit back online within several weeks. Entergy also acknowledged that Unit One would be offline for an extended time while the company surveyed the damage and established a timeline for repairs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1753613 | 475,504 |
395,964 | In 2003, the U.S. Army contended that the lack of lethality of the 5.56×45mm was more a matter of perception than fact. With good shot placement to the head and chest, the target was usually defeated without issue. The majority of failures were the result of hitting the target in non-vital areas such as extremities. However, a minority of failures occurred in spite of multiple hits to the chest. In 2006, a study found that 20% of soldiers using the M4 Carbine wanted more lethality or stopping power. In June 2010, the United States Army announced it began shipping its new 5.56mm, lead-free, M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round to active combat zones. This upgrade is designed to maximize performance of the 5.56×45mm round, to extend range, improve accuracy, increase penetration and to consistently fragment in soft-tissue when fired from not only standard length M16s, but also the short-barreled M4 carbines. The U.S. Army was so impressed with the M855A1 EPR round] that they also developed the 7.62×51mm M80A1 EPR version. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2471637 | 395,769 |
196,505 | A study by Natural Resources Canada found that cold climate air source heat pumps (CC-ASHPs) work in Canadian winters, based on testing in Ottawa (Ontario) in late December 2012 to early January 2013 using a ducted CC-ASHP. (The report does not explicitly state whether backup heat sources should be considered for temperatures below −30 °C. The record low for Ottawa is −36 °C.) The CC-ASHP provided 60% energy savings compared to natural gas (in energy units). When considering energy efficiency in electricity generation however, more energy would be used with the CC-ASHP, relative to natural gas heating, in provinces or territories (Alberta, Nova Scotia, and the Northwest Territories) where coal-fired generation was the predominant method of electricity generation. (The energy savings in Saskatchewan were marginal. Other provinces use primarily hydroelectric and/or nuclear generation.) Despite the significant energy savings relative to gas in provinces not relying primarily on coal, the higher cost of electricity relative to natural gas (using 2012 retail prices in Ottawa, Ontario) made natural gas the less expensive energy source. (The report did not calculate the cost of operation in the province of Quebec, which has lower electricity rates, nor did it show the impact of time of use electricity rates.) The study found that in Ottawa a CC-ASHP cost 124% more to operate than the natural gas system. However, in areas where natural gas is not available to homeowners, 59% energy cost savings can be realized relative to heating with fuel oil. The report noted that about 1 million residences in Canada (8%) are still heated with fuel oil. The report shows 54% energy cost savings for CC-ASHPs relative to electric baseboard resistance heating. Based on these savings, the report showed a five-year payback for converting from either fuel oil or electric baseboard resistance heating to a CC-ASHP. (The report did not specify whether that calculation considered the possible need for an electrical service upgrade in the case of converting from fuel oil. Presumably no electrical service upgrade would be needed if converting from electric resistance heat.) The report did note greater fluctuations in room temperature with the heat pump due to its defrost cycles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6453717 | 196,405 |
1,677,268 | As the 19th century came to a close, the familiar modern battleship began to emerge; a steel-armoured ship, entirely dependent on steam and carrying a relatively small number of large guns mounted in turrets, typically arranged along the centreline of the main deck. The revolutionary "Dreadnought" of 1906 was the first battleship to almost entirely dispense with smaller guns and used steam turbines for her main propulsion. The "Dreadnought" rendered all existing battleships obsolete, because she was larger, faster, more powerfully armed and more strongly protected than existing battleships, which came to be known as pre-Dreadnoughts. This sudden levelling of the field led to a naval arms race as Britain and Germany and, to a lesser extent, other powers like the United States, France, Russia, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and Chile all rushed to build or acquire Dreadnoughts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3690996 | 1,676,326 |
353,231 | In 1907, the Board of Trustees selected the head of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy at Princeton University, Edgar Odell Lovett, to head the institute, which was still in the planning stages. He came recommended by Princeton's president, Woodrow Wilson. In 1908, Lovett accepted the challenge, and was formally inaugurated as the institute's first president on October 12, 1912. Lovett undertook extensive research before formalizing plans for the new Institute, including visits to 78 institutions of higher learning across the world on a long tour between 1908 and 1909. Lovett was impressed by such things as the aesthetic beauty of the uniformity of the architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, a theme which was adopted by the institute, as well as the residential college system at Cambridge University in England, which was added to the Institute several decades later. Lovett called for the establishment of a university "of the highest grade," "an institution of liberal and technical learning" devoted "quite as much to investigation as to instruction." [We must] "keep the standards up and the numbers down," declared Lovett. "The most distinguished teachers must take their part in undergraduate teaching, and their spirit should dominate it all." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25813 | 353,048 |
1,411,481 | At the same time, both natural and artificial factors of migration have specific prioritization for different contaminants. The primary way of Strontium-90 transportation to the groundwater is its infiltration from contaminated soils and subsequent transition through the porous surfaces of unconfined aquifer. The scholars also fixed two additional alternative ways of migration of this radionuclide. The first one is “technogenous” transition, caused by poor construction of wells for water withdrawal or insufficient quality of materials used for their shells. During electric pumping of deep-laying artesian water, the stream unprotected passes through contaminated layers of upper aquifers and absorbs radioactive particles before getting into a well. This way of contamination was experimentally verified at the Kiev water intake wells. Another abnormal way of radionuclides migration are weak zones of crystalline rocks. The researches of Center of Radio-ecological Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine showed that crustal surface has unconsolidated zones characterized by increased electric productivity, as well as higher moisture and emanation capacity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59803219 | 1,410,688 |
955,032 | Alfred Russel Wallace studied the distribution of flora and fauna in the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago in the mid-19th century. His research was essential to the further development of biogeography, and he was later nicknamed the "father of Biogeography". Wallace conducted fieldwork researching the habits, breeding and migration tendencies, and feeding behavior of thousands of species. He studied butterfly and bird distributions in comparison to the presence or absence of geographical barriers. His observations led him to conclude that the number of organisms present in a community was dependent on the amount of food resources in the particular habitat. Wallace believed species were dynamic by responding to biotic and abiotic factors. He and Philip Sclater saw biogeography as a source of support for the theory of evolution as they used Darwin's conclusion to explain how biogeography was similar to a record of species inheritance. Key findings, such as the sharp difference in fauna either side of the Wallace Line, and the sharp difference that existed between North and South America prior to their relatively recent faunal interchange, can only be understood in this light. Otherwise, the field of biogeography would be seen as a purely descriptive one. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=99358 | 954,527 |
1,468,487 | Although the destructive effects of gunpowder were described in the earlier Tang dynasty by a Daoist alchemist, the earliest-known existent written formulas for gunpowder come from the "Wujing Zongyao" text of 1044, which described explosive bombs hurled from catapults. The earliest developments of the gun barrel and the projectile-fire cannon were found in late Song China. The first art depiction of the Chinese 'fire lance' (a combination of a temporary-fire flamethrower and gun) was from a Buddhist mural painting of Dunhuang, dated circa 950. These 'fire-lances' were widespread in use by the early 12th century, featuring hollowed bamboo poles as tubes to fire sand particles (to blind and choke), lead pellets, bits of sharp metal and pottery shards, and finally large gunpowder-propelled arrows and rocket weaponry. Eventually, perishable bamboo was replaced with hollow tubes of cast iron, and so too did the terminology of this new weapon change, from 'fire-spear' ('huo qiang') to 'fire-tube' ('huo tong'). This ancestor to the gun was complemented by the ancestor to the cannon, what the Chinese referred to since the 13th century as the 'multiple bullets magazine erupter' ('bai zu lian zhu pao'), a tube of bronze or cast iron that was filled with about 100 lead balls. In 1132, at the siege of De'an, Song Chinese forces used fire lances against the rival Jurchen-led Jin dynasty. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10444102 | 1,467,663 |
1,630,127 | Despite the implementation of the Gallion plan, the growing population could not adequately be contained. Accordingly, in 1960, President Norman Topping commissioned William L. Pereira to design another masterplan with an express focus on accommodating growth in enrollment and increase in research activity. Specifically, this plan set out to create housing villages, separate academic and non-academic facilities, establish a campus heart, and develop architecturally unique quadrangles. While Pereira drew inspiration for these quadrangles from Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale, the purpose of USC's quadrangles differ in that they were designed to create memorable public places, thereby creating a "sense of space," instead of solely community making. Specifically, each quadrangle was to contain a "jewel" which was to be a focal point. Moreover, this plan would expand the western boundary of the University to Vermont Avenue, adding 58 acres to the campus. During this time, the campus was entirely shut off from external automobile traffic. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17943835 | 1,629,207 |
1,667,515 | VIL can be used to estimate the potential for downburst, too. A convective downdraft is linked to three forces in the vertical, namely perturbation pressure gradient force, buoyancy force and precipitation loading. The pressure gradient force was neglected as it has significant effect only on the updraft in supercells. With this assumption and other simplifications (e.g. requiring the environment of the air parcel to be static on the time scale of the downdraft). The resulting momentum equation is integrated over height to yield the kinetic energy of the parcel on descending to the surface and is found to be the negative CAPE of a dry air parcel injected into the storm, plus de motion of the convective cell. S. R. Stewart, from NWS, has published in 1991 an equation relating VIL and the echo tops that give the potential for surface gust using this concept. This is a predictive result that gives a certain lead time. With the Doppler velocity data, the meteorologist can see the downdraft and gust fronts happening, but since this a small scale feature, detection algorithms have been developed to point convergence and divergence areas under a thunderstorm on the radar display. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12253521 | 1,666,576 |
338,277 | The holotype skeleton consists of the right humerus (upper arm bone), the right femur (thigh bone), the right ilium (a hip bone), the right coracoid (a shoulder bone), the sacrum (fused vertebrae of the hip), the last seven thoracic (trunk) and two caudal (tail) vertebrae, and several ribs. Riggs described the coracoid as from the left side of the body, but restudy has shown it to be a right coracoid. At the time of discovery, the lower end of the humerus, the underside of the sacrum, the ilium and the preserved caudal vertebrae were exposed to the air and thus partly damaged by weathering. The vertebrae were only slightly shifted out of their original anatomical position; they were found with their top sides directed downward. The ribs, humerus, and coracoid, however, were displaced to the left side of the vertebral column, indicating transportation by a water current. This is further evidenced by an isolated ilium of "Diplodocus" that apparently had drifted against the vertebral column, as well as by a change in composition of the surrounding rocks. While the specimen itself was embedded in fine-grained clay, indicating low-energy conditions at the time of deposition, it was cut off at the seventh presacral vertebra by a thick layer of much coarser sediments consisting of pebbles at its base and sandstone further up, indicating deposition under stronger currents. Based on this evidence, Riggs in 1904 suggested that the missing front part of the skeleton was washed away by a water current, while the hind part was already covered by sediment and thus got preserved. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20598015 | 338,097 |
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