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1,303,979 | Depending on the set-up chosen (financial recompensation scheme, power plant, extra equipment), prices may vary. According to Practical Action, microgeneration at home which uses the latest in cost saving-technology (wiring harnesses, ready boards, cheap DIY-power plants, e.g. DIY wind turbines) the household expenditure can be extremely low-cost. In fact, Practical Action mentions that many households in farming communities in the developing world spend less than $1 on electricity per month. . However, if matters are handled less economically (using more commercial systems/approaches), costs will be dramatically higher. In most cases however, financial advantage will still be done using microgeneration on renewable power plants; often in the range of 50-90% as local production has no electricity transportation losses on long distance power lines or energy losses from the Joule effect in transformers where in general 8-15% of the energy is lost. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3263679 | 1,303,263 |
681,255 | The IAe 33 Pulqui II project was inexorably linked to the machinations and fortunes of the Peronist regime. Although the "Fábrica Militar de Aviones" was charged with bringing aviation projects to completion, constant political interference contributed to delays and disarray in aviation programs. Severe economic problems led in 1951 to the Perón government using the "Fábrica Militar de Aviones" to build cars, trucks, and motorcycles, including the IAME Rastrojero. Moreover, Tank's team was not primarily focused on the IAe 33, completing the design of the FMA IA 35 Huanquero multi-purpose aircraft (transport, trainer and reconnaissance roles), that eventually entered production at the "Dirección Nacional de Fabricación e Investigación Aeronáutica" (DINFIA) (Spanish: "National Directorate of Aeronautical Manufacturing and Research"). The most devastating political decision was to divert the entire manufacturing program "seemingly overnight" to automotive products and agricultural equipment, essentially closing the aviation divisions. The competing DINFIA projects such as automotive manufacture served to further drain resources in time, money and personnel from the Pulqui II project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2616710 | 680,900 |
1,297,881 | The electrowetting of mercury and other liquids on variably charged surfaces was probably first explained by Gabriel Lippmann in 1875 and was certainly observed much earlier. A. N. Frumkin used surface charge to change the shape of water drops in 1936. The term electrowetting was first introduced in 1981 by G. Beni and S. Hackwood to describe an effect proposed for designing a new type of display device for which they received a patent. The use of a "fluid transistor" in microfluidic circuits for manipulating chemical and biological fluids was first investigated by J. Brown in 1980 and later funded in 1984–1988 under NSF Grants 8760730 & 8822197, employing insulating dielectric and hydrophobic layer(s) (EWOD), immiscible fluids, DC or RF power; and mass arrays of miniature interleaved (saw tooth) electrodes with large or matching Indium tin oxide (ITO) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=491221 | 1,297,169 |
1,226,754 | One of the challenges in thermal therapy is delivering the appropriate amount of heat to the correct part of the patient's body. For this technique to be effective, the temperatures must be high enough, and the temperatures must be sustained long enough, to damage or kill the cancer cells. However, if the temperatures are too high, or if they are kept elevated for too long, then serious side effects, including death, can result. The smaller the place that is heated, and the shorter the treatment time, the lower the side effects. Conversely, tumor treated too slowly or at too low a temperature will not achieve therapeutic goals. The human body is a collection of tissues with differing heat capacities, all connected by a dynamic circulatory system with variable relationship to skin or lung surfaces designed to shed heat energy. All methods of inducing higher temperature in the body are countered by the thermo-regulatory mechanisms of the body. The body as a whole relies mostly on simple radiation of energy to the surrounding air from the skin (50% of heat lost this way) which is augmented by convection (blood shunting) and vaporization through sweat and respiration. Regional methods of heating may be more or less difficult based on the anatomic relationships, and tissue components of the particular body part being treated. Measuring temperatures in various parts of the body may be very difficult, and temperatures may locally vary even within a region of the body. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14905896 | 1,226,093 |
1,139,452 | His book "Νεκροκηδεία" or "The Art of Embalming wherein is shewn the right of burial, and funeral ceremonies, especially that of preserving bodies after the Egyptian method" was published in 1705. Its main concern was to advocate the importance of embalming for the burial of the aristocracy, and make it a task limited to surgeons and not "undertakers and quacks". The argument is based upon appeals to Antiquary, Greek and Roman Classics and Scripture and takes the form of three letters: the first to Charles Bernard, Serjeant Surgeon to Queen Anne, the second, John Lawson, the former president of the Royal College of Physicians and the third to Hans Sloane, secretary to the Royal Society. Its dedication is to Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke, the same person who was the dedicatee of John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding". It was funded by subscription including Thomas Tenison the then Archbishop of Canterbury. The book had little effect and was dismissed by William Hunter in his "The art of embalming dead bodies". It has however been described as providing "rich evidence on attitudes to death, of early eighteenth-century antiquarianism and Egyptology, and the medical politics of the day, in an accessible and interesting blend." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18503931 | 1,138,859 |
2,178,134 | Promising results were obtained in 2003 in a study that merged the newer developments in affinity chromatography with microfluidic devices. Upon the development of microfluidic technology, coupling it with affinity chromatography meant modifying channel surfaces, packing coated beads, or packing with coated porous material, neither of which allow for replenishing the columns. This produces limitations that prevent the packing material from being changed or the column being regenerated. The approach they took to address those challenges meant incorporating TRP particles as a reversibly immobilized stationary phase. What separates this development from other AC methods is that the beads on which the modified TRP are attached can reversibly adhere to the inner surfaces of the microfluidic channels. The formulation of the smart bead matrix is a little complex, but in general PNIPAAm is modified two times, first with NHS, then with polyethylene glycol-biotin (PEG-b) resulting in PEG-b/pNIPAAm beads. The inner surface of the microfluidic channels is composed of polyethylene terephthalate, to which the PEG-b/pNIPAAm beads reversibly bind above the LCST. When the sample solution is passed through the channels, the target analyte binds to the biotin ligand. The temperature can then be brought below the LCST to dissociate and become removed from the inner channels. This allows for a system adept to being reloaded with stationary phase under mild conditions. They successfully separated and eluted Streptavidin. Further application of these procedures allow for portable AC columns which can be packed on site and used for local or clinical analytical separations of complex biological fluids. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37850414 | 2,176,889 |
289,555 | Bombing target tests showed a tendency of flying wings to "hunt" in yaw after turns and when flying in "disturbed" air, degrading bombing accuracy. It was thought that one of the new Honeywell autopilots, with yaw damping, would correct this flaw. Northrop chief test pilot on the YB-35 and YB-49 programs Max Stanley contends in the 1992 Discovery Channel documentary "The Wing Will Fly", the adaptation of the autopilot in this dual function "damped out the directional oscillations to the degree where... I think you would say it met the (military) specifications." Brig. General Robert Cardenas also flew the YB-49 during many of its test flights, praising the aircraft for its marvelous performance, while also noting the YB-49 required a very long bomb run to damp directional oscillations. Many of these challenges would eventually be overcome when fly-by-wire systems were developed in the 1950s, which were first used in regular production for the Convair B-58 Hustler and then when computer-generated artificial stability became available in the 1970s, culminating in the development of the all-wing Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=566037 | 289,398 |
1,003,176 | This orientation field is introduced into the directional total variation optimization model for CS reconstruction through the equation: formula_47. formula_48 is the objective signal which needs to be recovered. Y is the corresponding measurement vector, d is the iterative refined orientation field and formula_49 is the CS measurement matrix. This method undergoes a few iterations ultimately leading to convergence.formula_29 is the orientation field approximate estimation of the reconstructed image formula_51 from the previous iteration (in order to check for convergence and the subsequent optical performance, the previous iteration is used). For the two vector fields represented by formula_48 and formula_53, formula_54 refers to the multiplication of respective horizontal and vertical vector elements of formula_48 and formula_53 followed by their subsequent addition. These equations are reduced to a series of convex minimization problems which are then solved with a combination of variable splitting and augmented Lagrangian (FFT-based fast solver with a closed form solution) methods. It (Augmented Lagrangian) is considered equivalent to the split Bregman iteration which ensures convergence of this method. The orientation field, d is defined as being equal to formula_57, where formula_58 define the horizontal and vertical estimates of formula_53. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11403316 | 1,002,658 |
1,522,955 | Backed by the Chinese government's total stimulus package of RMB 4 trillion ($585bn), Chinese businesses are now among the top producers of electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and energy efficient appliances, according to a report released last month by London-based The Climate Group. In March 2009, the China government introduced the "Solar Roofs Plan" for promoting the application of solar PV building. The Ministry of Finance in July re-introduced the "Golden Sun Project" with more specific details of the related policy. The policy provides that the grid-connected photovoltaic power generation project, the state will in principle by photovoltaic power generation system and its supporting transmission and distribution projects to give 50% of the total investment subsidies. The subsidy will rise to 70% for solar power systems in remote areas that are not currently connected to the grid. Projects with a minimum capacity of 500MW would be eligible for the related incentive. All such financial incentive schemes boosts most of the new development in China solar market, such as the new thin film solar plant of Anwell Technologies and Tianwei, as well as the contract signed by LDK solar to install up to 500 MW of capacity of PV stations over the next five years in Jiangsu Province of China. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11612450 | 1,522,094 |
475,723 | Genetically modified mice are used extensively in research as models of human disease. Mice are a useful model for genetic manipulation and research, as their tissues and organs are similar to that of a human and they carry virtually all the same genes that operate in humans. They also have advantages over other mammals, in regards to research, in that they are available in hundreds of genetically homogeneous strains. Also, due to their size, they can be kept and housed in large numbers, reducing the cost of research and experiments. The most common type is the knockout mouse, where the activity of a single (or in some cases multiple) genes are removed. They have been used to study and model obesity, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, substance abuse, anxiety, aging, temperature and pain reception, and Parkinson disease. Transgenic mice generated to carry cloned oncogenes and knockout mice lacking tumor suppressing genes have provided good models for human cancer. Hundreds of these oncomice have been developed covering a wide range of cancers affecting most organs of the body and they are being refined to become more representative of human cancer. The disease symptoms and potential drugs or treatments can be tested against these mouse models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18293050 | 475,486 |
398,621 | In 1981, the U.S. Air Force developed a requirement for an Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) as a new air superiority fighter to replace the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon. This was made more crucial by the emerging worldwide threats, including development and proliferation of Soviet MiG-29 and Su-27 "Flanker"-class fighter aircraft. It would take advantage of the new technologies in fighter design on the horizon including composite materials, lightweight alloys, advanced flight-control systems, more powerful propulsion systems and stealth technology.<ref name="YF F/S"></ref> In September 1985, the Air Force sent out technical request for proposals (RFP) to a number of aircraft manufacturing teams. The seven bids were submitted in July 1986, and two companies, Lockheed and Northrop, were selected on 31 October 1986. The two teams, Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics and Northrop/McDonnell Douglas, undertook a 50-month demonstration phase, culminating in the flight test of the two teams' prototypes, the YF-22 and the YF-23. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=844110 | 398,425 |
701,923 | MTR has negative effects on surface and ground water quality. Surface water in MTM regions has higher concentrations of arsenic, selenium, lead, magnesium, calcium, aluminum, manganese, sulfates and hydrogen sulfide from overburden. Wastewater from the coal cleaning process contains surfactants, flocculants, coal fines, benzene and toluene, sulfur, silica, iron oxide, sodium, trace metals and other chemicals. Wastewater is often injected and stored underground and has the potential to contaminate other water sources. Ground water samples from domestic wells in mining areas documented contaminations of arsenic, lead, barium, beryllium, selenium, iron, manganese, aluminum and zinc levels surpassing drinking water standards. A statistical study showed that water treatment facilities in MTR counties had significantly higher violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act compared to non-MTR counties and non-mining counties. Another study showed that ecological integrity of streams negatively correlates with cancer mortality rate in West Virginia; unhealthy streams correlates with higher cancer mortality rate. However, more studies are required on MTR impacts on public water and human health, some studies indicate the possibility of the two. Given the evidence that MTR impaired surface and ground water quality, safety of drinking water requires more efforts for protection and prevention. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1685995 | 701,558 |
1,286,569 | Riddoch's description was dismissed by Sir Gordon Holmes in a 1918 paper in which he wrote that" The condition described by Riddoch should not be spoken of as a dissociation of the elements of visual sensation" because "occipital lesions do not produce true dissociations of function with intact retinal sensibility". The idea of a separate representation of visual motion was further dismissed by H.L. Teuber and, in general, such an idea was not accepted until physiological studies in the monkey demonstrated the existence of a cortical area lying outside the primary visual cortex (area V1) in which almost all cells were selective for directional motion. With that new knowledge, a new study of patient GY, who had been used extensively to demonstrate the phenomenon of blindsight (that is to say the ability to discriminate correctly visual stimuli presented to the blind field without conscious awareness) led to interesting findings. The re-examination showed that, when presented with fast-moving, high contrast, visual stimuli in his blind field, he could discriminate their presence and direction of motion "consciously", This, in turn, led to a re-classification of blindsight into Type 1 and Type 2 the former adhering to the previous definition of blindsight while the latter acknowledging the fact that the experience of such subjects can be conscious even if much degraded. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13498040 | 1,285,868 |
598,065 | U.S. military strategy in the European theater was confined to responses to potential Soviet aggression against NATO countries. Soviet military theory was dominated by the theory of the "deep operation" – a large-scale combined-arms offensive into enemy-held territory – rather than a nuclear offensive. Soviet conventional superiority, shown by the fact that the Soviet Union certainly was prepared for war in Europe, having massed armored, mechanized, artillery, and air forces poised along the Inner German and Czech borders, led by the Third Shock Army of the Soviet Union, caused NATO to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons to stop the "steamroller" of the Soviet Army if they decided to take a drive through the Fulda Gap or an amble through the North German Plain. NATO's position changed in the 1970s and 1980s, in favor of trying to stop a Soviet offensive through the employment, at least initially, of a doctrine involving non-nuclear AirLand Battle to try to buy time to either throw back the invader or work out the issues at hand through diplomacy. Both sides, however, were willing to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to not lose the war at hand. Although neither side was actively pursuing a first-strike policy—since the time of Khrushchev, the leaders of orthodox communism believed that "peaceful coexistence" with the "imperialist" powers was possible—both sides relied on military strategies that could have still caused a general nuclear war. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45876 | 597,760 |
19,669 | Psilocybin is present in varying concentrations in over 200 species of Basidiomycota mushrooms. In a 2000 review on the worldwide distribution of hallucinogenic mushrooms, Gastón Guzmán and colleagues considered these to be distributed amongst the following genera: "Psilocybe" (116 species), "Gymnopilus" (14), "Panaeolus" (13), "Copelandia" (12), "Hypholoma" (6), "Pluteus" (6), "Inocybe" (6), "Conocybe" (4), "Panaeolina" (4), "Gerronema" (2), and "Galerina" (1 species). Guzmán increased his estimate of the number of psilocybin-containing "Psilocybe" to 144 species in a 2005 review. The majority of these are found in Mexico (53 species), with the remainder distributed in the United States and Canada (22), Europe (16), Asia (15), Africa (4), and Australia and associated islands (19). The diversity of psilocybin mushrooms is reported to have been increased by horizontal transfer of the psilocybin gene cluster between unrelated mushroom species. In general, psilocybin-containing species are dark-spored, gilled mushrooms that grow in meadows and woods of the subtropics and tropics, usually in soils rich in humus and plant debris. Psilocybin mushrooms occur on all continents, but the majority of species are found in subtropical humid forests. "Psilocybe" species commonly found in the tropics include "P. cubensis" and "P. subcubensis". "P. semilanceata"—considered by Guzmán to be the world's most widely distributed psilocybin mushroom—is found in Europe, North America, Asia, South America, Australia and New Zealand, but is entirely absent from Mexico. Although the presence or absence of psilocybin is not of much use as a chemotaxonomical marker at the familial level or higher, it is used to classify taxa of lower taxonomic groups. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38468 | 19,661 |
1,056,610 | Knowing the twin-radar design was not feasible at all, the 14th Institute design team was determined to win. The original Star of the Sea design consisted of two active arrays: an octagon S-band array with diameter of four meters for search and track, and a much smaller C-band active array with diameter of 60 centimeters for missile control. With an area approximately 0.3 square meter, the small C-band array could not effectively control the HHQ-9 SAM with the increased range and reduced tracking signal. A larger C-band array was needed. The 14th Institute design team abolished the small C-band array, and adopted two larger 0.2 meter by four meter rectangular arrays, and in terms of area, each C-band array is more than two and half time of the original small array with diameter of 0.6 meter. The redesigned APAR fully met the latest requirement of HHQ-9. After two more rounds of discussion between PLAN and the two competitors held in March 1994 and August 1994 respectively, the redesigned Star of the Sea was finalized and submitted to Department of Equipment of PLAN in October 1994. However, there was no response for two months after the submittal because 23rd Institute was exerting political maneuvers through its mother company CASIC in an attempt to influence the then Chinese premier Li Peng to make its decision that would favor its C-band design. In response, the 14th Institute had to resort some political maneuver of its own for help by directly writing to Admiral Liu Huaqing and then Central Military Commission chairman Jiang Zemin, who was the former head of the Electronic Ministry, the predecessor of CETG. Finally in April 1995, PLAN notified the 14th Institute by telephone that another round of evaluation would be conducted in the following month. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51215241 | 1,056,061 |
857,691 | Patients with grade I–II encephalopathy should be transferred to a liver transplant facility and listed for transplantation. Consider a brain computed tomography (CT) scan to rule out other causes of altered or impaired mental status. Stimulation and overhydration can cause elevations in intracranial pressure (ICP) and should be avoided. Unmanageable agitation may be treated with short-acting benzodiazepines in small doses. Lactulose can be considered at this stage. A preliminary report from the ALFSG on 117 patients suggests that use of lactulose in the first 7 days after diagnosis is associated with a small increase in survival time, but with no difference in severity of encephalopathy or in the overall outcome. For patients who progress to grade III–IV encephalopathy, intubation for airway protection is generally required. Many centers use propofol for sedation because it may reduce cerebral blood. The head of the bed should be elevated to 30 degrees, and electrolytes, blood gasses, glucose, and neurologic status monitored frequently. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1226250 | 857,236 |
310,368 | Tigers were usually employed in separate German heavy tank battalions ("schwere-Panzer-Abteilung") under army command. These battalions would be deployed to critical sectors, either for breakthrough operations or, more typically, counter-attacks. The first time the Tiger saw action was on August 29 of 1942 and September 21/22 at Mga, southeast of Leningrad with 1st company of sPzAbt 502. The unsuccessful engagements ended in the new Tiger being captured by the Soviets, who then examined it and exhibited during the captured equipment exhibition in Moscow's Gorky Park in 1943. The failure of the Tiger was attributed to mechanical problems as well as poor terrain conditions, totally unsuitable for heavy tanks. In December 1942, Tigers from sPzAbt 501, saw action near Tunis in North Africa. During their combat service, Tigers destroyed large numbers of enemy tanks and other equipment, creating the myth of their invincibility and fearsome power - "Tiger-phobia". The Tiger also had tremendous effect on morale of both German and Allied soldiers, Germans felt secure, while the Allies thought that every German tank, especially late model PzKpfw IV was a Tiger. On July 7 of 1943, a single Tiger tank commanded by SS-Oberscharfuehrer Franz Staudegger from 2nd Platoon of 13th Panzer Company of 1st SS Panzer Grenadier Division "LSSAH" engaged a Soviet group of some 50 T-34 tanks around Psyolknee (southern sector of the Kursk salient). Staudegger used up his entire ammunition after destroying some 22 Soviet tanks, while the rest retreated. For his achievement, Franz Staudegger was awarded the Knight's Cross. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29073044 | 310,200 |
585,519 | The academic foundations of the subject began with classic texts initially from the Orient such as Sun Tzu’s "Art of War" and went on to gain a European focus with Carl von Clausewitz’s "On War". Like Clausewitz, many academics in this field reject monocausal theories and hypotheses that reduce the study of conflict to one independent variable and one dependent variable. Already in the late eighteenth century, a colourful mathematician named Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow attempted to establish mathematical formulae for the conduct of war. Carl von Clausewitz rejected Bülow’s approach and his popular claim that warfare could be reduced to positivist, teachable principles of war. Instead of formulae, we find Clausewitz stressing, time and again, that the whole purpose of educating the military commander is not to give him a series of answers for the task he will face (the complexities of which cannot be foreseen), but to educate him about different aspects of what will face him so as to let him evaluate the situation for himself, and develop his own strategy. Strategic thinkers on the whole will search for recurrent patterns, which in themselves cannot predict the characteristics of any individual case even if it doubtless fits a larger category; not all patterns of characteristics will be found in all cases. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20749412 | 585,219 |
808,126 | After World War II it was not clear whether the university would be restored or whether Warsaw itself would be rebuilt. However, many professors who had survived the war returned, and began organizing the university from scratch. In December 1945, lectures resumed for almost 4,000 students in the ruins of the campus, and the buildings were gradually rebuilt. Until the late 1940s the university remained relatively independent. However, soon the communist authorities started to impose political controls, and the period of Stalinism started. Many professors were arrested by the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (Secret Police), the books were censored and ideological criteria in employment of new lecturers and admission of students were introduced. On the other hand, education in Poland became free of charge and the number of young people to receive the state scholarships reached 60% of all the students. After Władysław Gomułka's rise to power in 1956, a brief period of liberalization ensued, though communist ideology still played a major role in most faculties (especially in such faculties as history, law, economics, and political science). International cooperation was resumed and the level of education rose. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11157563 | 807,696 |
1,214,998 | Other Image Converter tube based systems emerged in the 1950s which incorporated a modified GenI image intensifier with additional deflector plates which allowed a photon image to be converted to a photoelectron beam. The image, while in this photoelectron state, could be shuttered on and off as short as a few nanoseconds, and deflected to different areas of the large 70 and 90 mm diameter phosphor screens to produce sequences of up to 20+ frames. In the early 1970s these camera attained speeds up to 600 million frame/s, with 1 ns exposure times, with more than 20 frames per event. As they were analog devices there were no digital limitations on data rates and pixel transfer rates. However, image resolution was quite limited, due to the inherent repulsion of electrons and the grain of the phosphor screen, as well as the small size of each individual image. Resolutions of 10 lp/mm were typical. Also, the images were inherently monochrome, as wavelength information is lost in the photon-electron-photon conversion process. There was also a fairly steep trade-off between resolution and number of images. All images needed to fall on the output phosphor screen. Therefore, a four image sequence would mean each image occupies one fourth of the screen; a nine image sequence has each image occupying one ninth, etc. Images were projected and held on the tube's phosphor screen for several milliseconds, long enough to be optically, and later fiber optically, coupled to film for image capture. Cameras of this design were made by Hadland Photonics Limited and NAC. It was difficult to change the exposure time without changing the frame rate with earlier designs, but later models added additional "shuttering" plates to allow exposure time and framing rate to be altered independently. The limiting factor of these systems is the time an image can be swept to the next position. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3582572 | 1,214,346 |
1,737,982 | Soils in Antarctica are nearly two-dimensional habitats, with most biological activity limited to the top four or five inches by the permanently frozen ground below. Environments can be limiting due to soil properties such as unfavorable mineralogy, texture, structure, salts, pH, or moisture relationships. Visible sources of organic matter are absent for most of continental Antarctica. Dry Valley soil ecosystems are characterized by large variations in temperature and light regimes, steep chemical gradients and a high incidence of solar radiation with an elevated ultraviolet B (UVB) light component. Dry Valley soils originate from weathering of bedrock and glacial tills that consist of granites, sandstones, basalts and metamorphic rocks. Space within these rocks provide protection for microorganisms against some (but not all) of these conditions: i.e., protection from wind scouring and surface mobility, a reduction in UV exposure, reduced desiccation and enhanced water availability, and thermal buffering. Half of the soils in the Dry Valleys have subsurface ice, either as buried massive ice or as ice-cemented soil (permafrost). The permafrost layer is typically within of the soil surface. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26376332 | 1,737,005 |
958,772 | Criticisms of the company's response to the event included the time it took the company to report events and the certainty with which they were able to locate the source of various problems. TEPCO's president made a comment the site was a "mess" after visiting post-quake. While the reported amount of leaked radioactivity remained far below what poses a danger to the public, details changed multiple times in the few days after the quake and attracted significant media attention. After the quake, TEPCO was supposedly investigating 50 separate cases of "malfunctioning and trouble," a number that was changed to 63 cases later. Even the radioactivity sensors around the site encountered trouble, the reading from these devices are normally available online, giving the public a direct measure of ambient radioactivity around the site, but due to damage sustained during the earthquake, stopped reporting on the website. The company published an apology on that page, and data from the devices covering the off-line period was released later, showing no artificial abnormalities (note that the readings naturally fluctuate depending on whether it's raining or snowing and a host of other factors). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11996462 | 958,266 |
605,419 | If the shock absorbers of a vehicle's suspension are filled with magnetorheological fluid instead of a plain oil or gas, and the channels which allow the damping fluid to flow between the two chambers is surrounded with electromagnets, the viscosity of the fluid, and hence the critical frequency of the damper, can be varied depending on driver preference or the weight being carried by the vehicle - or it may be dynamically varied in order to provide stability control across vastly different road conditions. This is in effect a magnetorheological damper. For example, the MagneRide active suspension system permits the damping factor to be adjusted once every millisecond in response to conditions. General Motors (in a partnership with Delphi Corporation) has developed this technology for automotive applications. It made its debut in both Cadillac (Seville STS build date on or after 1/15/2002 with RPO F55) as "Magneride" (or "MR") and Chevrolet passenger vehicles (All Corvettes made since 2003 with the F55 option code) as part of the driver selectable "Magnetic Selective Ride Control (MSRC)" system in model year 2003. Other manufacturers have paid for the use of it in their own vehicles, for example Audi and Ferrari offer the MagneRide on various models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=533789 | 605,109 |
375,280 | These facts were completely forgotten after the Second World War. Thus in 2001 the discovery of the typescript from 1843 in the library archives of the University of Giessen and its annotated publication was a scientific sensation. The full text of Baer's original work is available online (234 pages). The editor added to the facsimile reprint a preface in English, two colour permafrost maps of Eurasia and some figures of permafrost features. Baer's text is introduced with detailed comments and references on additional 66 pages written by the Estonian historian Erki Tammiksaar. The work is notable because Baer's observations on permafrost distribution and periglacial morphological descriptions are seen as largely correct to the present day. With his compilation and analysis of all available data on ground ice and permafrost, Baer laid the foundation for the modern permafrost terminology. Baer's southern limit of permafrost in Eurasia drawn in 1843 corresponds well with the actual southern limit on the "Circum-Arctic Map of Permafrost and Ground Ice Conditions" of the International Permafrost Association (edited by J. Brown et al.). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=157774 | 375,085 |
320,631 | An initial order of 48 airframes was made in 2012 to equip the air wings of the planned two "Queen Elizabeth"-class aircraft carriers, with the operation split between the FAA and the Royal Air Force, as was the case with Joint Force Harrier. 809 Naval Air Squadron was announced as the second UK unit to fly the F-35B (the first being 617 Squadron RAF) and will be the first FAA unit to operate the aircraft. It is understood that at least two further frontline squadrons will stand up in the future alongside 809, 617, 17(R) Test and Evaluation Squadron and an RAF-numbered Operational Conversion Unit, creating a total of six squadrons including the OCU and OEU. Under the Strategic Defence and Security Review of November 2015, the UK Government made a commitment to buying 138 F-35B, with at least 24 available for carrier use by 2023. Subsequently, following on the 2021 defence review, the First Sea Lord indicated that the new envisaged number was to be 60 aircraft initially and "then maybe more", up to a maximum of around 80 to hopefully equip four "deployable squadrons". In April 2022, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Richard Knighton, told the House of Commons Defence Select Committee that the MoD was in discussions to purchase a second tranche of 26 F-35B fighters. Plans for frontline F-35B squadrons had been modified and now envisaged a total of three squadrons (rather than four) each deploying 12-16 aircraft. As of 2022, it is planned that at least one of these squadrons will be a Fleet Air Arm Squadron (No 809 Squadron). In surge conditions 24 F-35s might be deployed on the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers but a routine deployment would likely involve 12 aircraft. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51777 | 320,459 |
1,999,007 | Physical therapists can assist immobilized patients with effective cough techniques, secretion clearance, stretching of the thoracic wall, and suggest abdominal support belts when necessary. The amount of time a patient is immobilized may depend on the level of the spinal cord injury. Physical therapists work with the patient to prevent any complications that may arise due to this immobilization. Other complications that arise from immobilization include muscle atrophy and osteoporosis, especially to the lower limbs, increasing the risk of fractures to the femur and tibia. While passive weight bearing of paralyzed lower extremities appears to be ineffective, stressing the bones through muscular contractions initiated by functional electrical stimulation (FES) has yielded positive results in some cases. The intensity, frequency, and duration of stress to the bones appear to be important determinants of improved bone parameters. Generally, the frequency is effective with three or more weekly exercise sessions. Studies of duration suggest that several months to one or more years of FES are necessary. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35738438 | 1,997,863 |
1,617,538 | Independently from the BIR, in August 1915, a submerged cable was laid on the seabed of the Firth of Forth. The idea originated with the Scottish physicist Alexander Crichton Mitchell, who was helped by the Royal Navy at HMS Tarlair. He had shown that the passage of a submarine past a cable formed an induction loop which induced a voltage of approximately a millivolt, detectable by a sensitive galvanometer. Voltages were also induced in the cable by random fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field and electrical noise from the Glasgow tram lines. Mitchell installed an identical loop outside of the channel for vessels, the two loops were connected so that the random fluctuations cancelled each other out. A rheostat was used to give the two loops identical resistances, so that no current flowed until a vessel approached. Unfortunately his report to the BIR was misunderstood and his findings rejected as of no value. Consequently, there was a hiatus in the installation of loops until their utility was demonstrated beyond question. With Bragg's leadership a number were installed. Later in World War I the tiny induced voltages were amplified by vacuum tube amplifiers. Even with this assistance a long loop installed to monitor traffic in the English Channel proved impractical. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17874759 | 1,616,625 |
732,862 | Depending on the part made and its intended use, SLM can help make more lightweight parts with complex dimensions which reduce both energy intensive post-processing machining such as EDM or a computer numerical control (CNC) machining and decrease part weight. Often a direct comparison can only be made by looking at parts made through two different processes. An example is a turbine blade manufactured by investment casting and SLM, where 10853.34 kWh and 10181.57kWh were used to make the same part, respectively. Also conventional manufacturing contributed to 7,325 kgCO while AM had 7,027 kgCO of emissions. This means that in this specific scenario AM is beneficial by 4%, which could be significant over the 25,578 aircraft worldwide. Another example is the 1kg weight reduction through a hydraulic valve body which estimates a saving of 24,500L of jet fuel and 63 tons of CO emissions from a lightweight design and decreased material used compared to traditional manufacturing methods. SLM is often a more sustainable option due to decreased raw material use, less complex tool use, lightweight part potential, near-perfect final geometries, and on-demand manufacturing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29017963 | 732,475 |
1,750,233 | A genetic disorder (discovered in 2003 and 2004) is caused by mutation in the transporter of thyroid hormone, MCT8, also known as SLC16A2, is believed to be account for a significant fraction of the undiagnosed neurological disorders (usually resulting in hypotonic/floppy infants with delayed milestones). This genetic defect was known as Allan–Herndon–Dudley syndrome (since 1944) without knowing its actual cause. It has been shown mutated in cases of X-linked leukoencephalopathy. Some of the symptoms for this disorder as are follows: normal to slightly elevated TSH, elevated T and reduced T (ratio of T/T is about double its normal value). Normal looking at birth and for the first few years, hypotonic (floppy), in particular difficulty to hold the head, possibly difficulty to thrive, possibly with delayed myelination (if so, some cases are reported with an MRI pattern similar to Pelizaeus–Merzbacher disease, known as PMD), possibly with decreased mitochondrial enzyme activities, possibly with fluctuating lactate level. Patients have an alert face, a limited IQ, patients may never talk/walk, 50% need feeding tube, patients have a normal life span. This disease can be ruled out with a simple TSH/T/T thyroid test. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14818895 | 1,749,247 |
2,180,076 | Lotzer returned for the next game against Brantford A.C. but the team was routed by a 4-goal third period from the visitors. They recovered for a 5–3 win in the second match to earn a split. A week later the team headed to Colorado to take on the Colorado College. The Tigers were a tough team but had had a rough go early that left them with a losing record. Illinois was slow out of the gate, shooting just 22 shots in the first game and fell 2–4. The Illini recovered a bit in the second game, earning a 3–3 tie, but their claim on a second intercollege title had taken a hit. Despite their misfortune, however, the team could end the season on a high-note against Michigan. The Wolverines had given the Illini a gift by defeating Minnesota in one of their four games, meaning that the Illini could claim an (unofficial) conference championship with two wins. In the first game the depleted Illini were still heads-and-shoulders above the Wolverines and outshot their opponents 49–27 en route to a 6–2 win. Illinois capped off its season with a convincing 9–4 win to seal a conference title. The game was highlighted by an assist from Jack Gillan in his final game; the goaltender made a save and the puck rebounded half-way down the ice where it was picked up by Benson and slipped to Ferronti, who ended the scoring on a 10-foot shot. It was likely that most of the team had played their final games as most were expected to be drafted shortly thereafter. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67612886 | 2,178,831 |
59,935 | Tyre supplier Pirelli faced criticism early in the season due to the wear of some tyres, with some claiming tyre management had become too important to race strategy. This prompted Pirelli to announce plans to introduce new designs after the Canadian Grand Prix. The testing Pirelli undertook on these proposed new designs led to an official complaint on the eve of the Monaco Grand Prix from Ferrari and Red Bull who claimed the way it was done, using the 2013 Mercedes car and drivers, would give them a competitive advantage in both Monaco and Canada. There were also disputes over the change in the failure mode that were the result of new manufacturing methods, as to whether these increased or decreased safety. As the teams arrived in Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix it was announced that, after further enquiries were made to all teams, the FIA were referring the Mercedes tyre test to its International Tribunal as it may have breached the rules. The FIA cleared an earlier test by Ferrari as it used a 2011 car, which was not a breach of the rules. To reduce the number of delaminations, Pirelli introduced two new specifications of rear tyre in time for the Canadian race, which also reverted to the belt pack used in 2011 and 2012 tyres. In announcing the tyre, Pirelli said there would be no further tyre changes for the 2013 season due to the fact that to doing so would need the agreement of all teams, some of whom did not want their performance to be affected by such a mid-season change. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33534350 | 59,910 |
53,283 | Hospitals were forbidden by law to turn away patients who were unable to pay. Eventually, charitable foundations called waqfs were formed to support hospitals, as well as schools. Part of the state budget also went towards maintaining hospitals. While the services of the hospital were free for all citizens and patients were sometimes given a small stipend to support recovery upon discharge, individual physicians occasionally charged fees. In a notable endowment, a 13th-century governor of Egypt Al-Mansur Qalawun ordained a foundation for the Qalawun hospital that would contain a mosque and a chapel, separate wards for different diseases, a library for doctors and a pharmacy and the hospital is used today for ophthalmology. The Qalawun hospital was based in a former Fatimid palace which had accommodation for 8,000 people – "it served 4,000 patients daily." The waqf stated, ... The hospital shall keep all patients, men and women, until they are completely recovered. All costs are to be borne by the hospital whether the people come from afar or near, whether they are residents or foreigners, strong or weak, low or high, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, blind or sighted, physically or mentally ill, learned or illiterate. There are no conditions of consideration and payment, none is objected to or even indirectly hinted at for non-payment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37477763 | 53,263 |
944,291 | NASA representatives George Low and Astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified that under NASA's selection criteria women could not qualify as astronaut candidates. Glenn also believed that "The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order." They correctly stated that NASA required all astronauts to be graduates of military jet test piloting programs and have engineering degrees, although John Glenn conceded that he had been assigned to NASA's Mercury Project without having earned the required college degree. In 1962, women were still barred from Air Force training schools, so no American women could become test pilots of military jets. Despite the fact that several of the Mercury 13 had been employed as civilian test pilots, and many had considerably more propeller aircraft flying time than the male astronaut candidates (although not in high-performance jets, like the men), NASA refused to consider granting an equivalency for their hours in the more basic propeller aircraft, it was presumed at the time that training and experience in piloting jet and rocket aircraft, such as the X-15 then being developed, would be “most useful for transition to spacecraft.” Jan Dietrich had accumulated 8,000 hours, Mary Wallace Funk 3,000 hours, Irene Leverton 9,000+, and Jerrie Cobb 10,000+. Although some members of the Subcommittee were sympathetic to the women's arguments because of this disparity in accepted experience, no action resulted. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4054350 | 943,789 |
562,007 | Reconstruction of the surface is performed using a distance function which assigns to each point in the space a signed distance to the surface "S". A contour algorithm is used to extracting a zero-set which is used to obtain polygonal representation of the object. Thus, the problem of reconstructing a surface from a disorganized point cloud is reduced to the definition of the appropriate function "f" with a zero value for the sampled points and different to zero value for the rest. An algorithm called marching cubes established the use of such methods. There are different variants for given algorithm, some use a discrete function "f", while other use a polyharmonic radial basis function is used to adjust the initial point set. Functions like Moving Least Squares, basic functions with local support, based on the Poisson equation have also been used. Loss of the geometry precision in areas with extreme curvature, i.e., corners, edges is one of the main issues encountered. Furthermore, pretreatment of information, by applying some kind of filtering technique, also affects the definition of the corners by softening them. There are several studies related to post-processing techniques used in the reconstruction for the detection and refinement of corners but these methods increase the complexity of the solution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16234982 | 561,718 |
1,564,425 | Marmor credited Grünbaum with extensive knowledge of psychoanalytic literature in general and Freud's work in particular, with showing that free association, as well as other aspects of psychoanalytic theory, were scientifically unsupported, and with summarizing much evidence against the view that the success of psychoanalysis or other forms of therapy establishes the correctness of their underlying theories. However, he criticized his style of writing. He also believed that the idea that conflict played a role in the causation of psychopathology retained some validity and noted that Grünbaum failed to discuss this issue, or to explore "the issue of causality as a multifactorial rather than a unifactorial phenomenon". Masling agreed with Grünbaum that cases histories cannot serve as the sole support for psychoanalytic theory. However, he criticized Grünbaum for failing to fully discuss relevant experimental evidence. Pagnini, writing in "Behavioral and Brain Sciences", agreed with Grünbaum that Freud understood psychoanalysis as a natural science and that hermeneutic interpretations of psychoanalysis are incorrect. Reiser praised Grünbaum's discussion of the "Tally Argument" and agreed with him that validation of psychoanalytic claims had to be based ultimately on extraclinical findings. Ruse called the work insightful. He endorsed Grünbaum's criticisms of Popper, and argued that he helped to show that the testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses about homosexuality was suspect. Savodnik described the book as the most important critique of psychoanalysis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34449875 | 1,563,538 |
1,608,583 | According to L.C. Scott, who studied statistical mechanics and biophysics at Oklahoma State University, "Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics" is a popular textbook that begins with some basic postulates based on intuitive classical, empirical, and macroscopic arguments. He found that it is remarkable for the whole edifice of classical thermodynamics to follow from just a few basic assumptions. However, Scott preferred the discussion of temperature in "Heat and Thermodynamics" by Mark W. Zemansky and Richard H. Dittman because it is based on thermometry and forces students to contemplate the empirical basis of concept of temperature, leaving aside the molecular basis of heat. He argued that such an approach yields greater appreciation for the meaning of temperature and its statistical-mechanical basis which students will encounter later. In contrast, Callen's book does not mention temperature till Chapter 2, where Callen defines temperature as the reciprocal of the derivative of entropy with respect to internal energy then shows, using the postulates, that this definition is consistent with our intuition. While Zemansky and Dittman cover the first law of thermodynamics empirically, Callen simply assumes the existence of the internal energy function the invokes the conservative nature of inter-atomic forces. Whereas Zemansky and Dittman treated the second law of thermodynamics using heat engines and simply state the Clausius and Kelvin formulations of it, in Callen's book, the second law is contained within the postulates. Scott was unsure which approach is more understandable for students. In general, Zemansky and Dittman employed an empirical approach while that of Callen is deductive. Scott opined that Zemansky and Dittman's book is more suitable for beginning students while Callen's is more appropriate for an advanced course or as a reference. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63572008 | 1,607,678 |
162,337 | The "Alexander L. Kielland" was a Norwegian semi-submersible drilling rig that capsized whilst working in the Ekofisk oil field in March 1980, killing 123 people. The capsizing was the worst disaster in Norwegian waters since World War II. The rig, located approximately 320 km east of Dundee, Scotland, was owned by the Stavanger Drilling Company of Norway and was on hire to the United States company Phillips Petroleum at the time of the disaster. In driving rain and mist, early in the evening of 27 March 1980 more than 200 men were off duty in the accommodation on the "Alexander L. Kielland". The wind was gusting to 40 knots with waves up to 12 m high. The rig had just been winched away from the "Edda" production platform. Minutes before 18:30 those on board felt a 'sharp crack' followed by 'some kind of trembling'. Suddenly the rig heeled over 30° and then stabilised. Five of the six anchor cables had broken, with one remaining cable preventing the rig from capsizing. The list continued to increase and at 18:53 the remaining anchor cable snapped and the rig turned upside down. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=348898 | 162,252 |
400,225 | Parenteral administration generally acts more rapidly than topical or enteral administration, with onset of action often occurring in 15–30 seconds for IV, 10–20 minutes for IM and 15–30 minutes for SC. They also have essentially 100% bioavailability and can be used for drugs that are poorly absorbed or ineffective when they are given orally. Some medications, such as certain antipsychotics, can be administered as long-acting intramuscular injections. The practice is often carried out through physical force in company of law-enforcement, and often against the will of the patient. However, all doses of long-acting antipsychotics injections are of at extreme risk to the health and well-being of the patient. Extreme ethical concerns should be considered. If the choice is made to use force, care should be taken to use only the smallest dose that is currently scientifically demonstrated to be efficacious for the specific drug. This is because, despite being injected, the drugs are designed with heavy esterifying molecular additions which can cause traces of the drugs to be found in circulation for up to one year. Ongoing IV infusions can be used to deliver continuous medication or fluids. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=334816 | 400,026 |
989,874 | Various (cyclical) scrubbing processes have been proposed to remove CO from the air or from flue gases and release them in a controlled environment, reverting the scrubbing agent. These usually involve using a variant of the Kraft process which may be based on sodium hydroxide. The CO is absorbed into such a solution, transfers to lime (via a process called causticization) and is released again through the use of a kiln. With some modifications to the existing processes (mainly changing to an oxygen-fired kiln) the resulting exhaust becomes a concentrated stream of CO, ready for storage or use in fuels. An alternative to this thermo-chemical process is an electrical one which releases the CO through electrolyzing of the carbonate solution. While simpler, this electrical process consumes more energy as electrolysis, also splits water. To prevent negating the environmental benefit of using electrolysis over the kiln method, the electricity should come from a renewable (or less emissive than the otherwise needed kiln) source . Early incarnations of environmentaly motivated CO capture used electricity as the energy source and were therefore dependent on green energy. Some thermal CO capture systems use heat generated on-site, which reduces the inefficiencies resulting from off-site electricity production, but it still needs a source of (green) heat, which concentrated solar power could provide. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12637359 | 989,357 |
1,950,485 | Anton was born to Peter (1831–1873) and Rosina Handlirsch (born 1841). His father worked as a cook of the Schwarzenberg family. His surname Handlirsch came from "merchant". He went to study at the Gymnasium in Vienna in 1875. Although he began to show an interest in zoology, his father wished that he obtain a degree in pharmacy. Anton obtained a master's degree in pharmacy in 1885. After working for a while as a pharmacist, Anton and his brother Adam met the entomologist Friedrich Moritz Brauer and Anton later became an assistant to him in the department of entomology of the Natural History Museum of Vienna in 1892. In the same year he married Martha Allounek. He became the director of this department in 1922, a function which he held until his retirement. He specialised in the Hymenoptera and the Hemiptera, his work concerning the evolution of these and other insects. His principal work, which appeared between 1906 and 1908, was on insect fossils and he was the founder of insect palaeontology. The University of Graz gave him the title of Doctor of Science honoris causa and he was made a member of the Academy of Science of Vienna. He is best known for "Die Fossilen Insekten" (1906–1908) – 1,433 pages and 51 plates – and his contributions to the third volume of Christoph Schröder's "Handbuch der Entomologie" (1920–1925) – 1,201 pages with 1,040 figures. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14585784 | 1,949,364 |
466,765 | After NASA's NASP program was cut, American scientists began to look at adopting available Russian technology as a less expensive alternative to developing hypersonic flight. On November 17, 1992, Russian scientists with some additional French support successfully launched a scramjet engine named "Kholod" in Kazakhstan. From 1994 to 1998 NASA worked with the Russian Central Institute of Aviation Motors (CIAM) to test a dual-mode scramjet engine and transfer technology and experience to the West. Four tests took place, reaching Mach numbers of 5.5, 5.35, 5.8, and 6.5. The final test took place aboard a modified SA-5 surface-to-air missile launched from the Sary Shagan test range in the Republic of Kazakhstan on 12 February 1998. According to CIAM telemetry data, the first ignition attempt of the scramjet was unsuccessful, but after 10 seconds the engine was started and the experimental system flew 77s with good performance, up until the planned SA-5 missile self-destruction (according to NASA, no net thrust was achieved). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4841481 | 466,532 |
979,473 | Small changes were made to the cylinder head for the 1995 model year. In 1996, the engine block was redesigned for greater strength. The new block had more webbing and a stud girdle for added rigidity of the crankshaft main bearings. Engines installed in 1999 Grand Cherokees carried the "PowerTech" name that had been used intermittently in prior years and on other Chrysler truck and SUV engines. The name was subsequently passed on to 4.0s in the other Jeep models that used the engine, the Cherokee and Wrangler. The cylinder head was again changed for the 2000 model year to a more emissions-friendly design. This head was designated as "0331" in the casting number. Early 0331 heads are prone to cracking, causing coolant to contaminate the oil, which can lead to catastrophic engine failure. The head cracks in the center between #3 and #4 cylinders. The crack is usually discernible with the valve cover removed as a "milky" tan line. This condition is usually discovered before a catastrophic engine failure, but can lead there if not corrected in a timely manner. The casting was fixed in mid to late 2001, but the same casting number was retained. The "fixed" heads have "TUPY" cast in the center where the cracks used to occur. Also new for the 2000 model year, was the distributorless, coil on plug ignition system. Option code: ERH. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1431166 | 978,962 |
1,039,706 | The tree typically grows to < 30 m (98 ft) and bears a rounded crown. The bark of the trunk is rough, furrowed lightly in older trees to form a block pattern. Young branchlets occasionally have corky wings. The shoots are slender compared with those of wych elm. The leaves are smaller than those of the other European species, hence the specific epithet "minor", however they can vary greatly according to the maturity of the tree. Leaves on juvenile growth (suckers, seedlings etc.) are coarse and pubescent, whereas those on mature growth are generally smooth, though remaining highly variable in form; there are generally fewer than 12 pairs of side veins. A common characteristic is the presence of minute black glands along the leaf veins, detectable with the aid of a magnifying glass. The samarae are oval or obovate, glabrous, long, notched at the top, with the seed close to the notch. "Ulmus minor" in France generally begins to flower and fruit when aged 10 years. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4810606 | 1,039,165 |
118,668 | Nevertheless, as Jaffe himself notes in his paper, "no one has shown that source theory or another S-matrix based approach can provide a complete description of QED to all orders." Furthermore, Milonni has shown the necessity of the vacuum field for the formal consistency of QED. In QCD, color confinement has led physicists to abandon the source theory or S-matrix based approach for the strong interactions. The Higgs mechanism, Hawking Radiation and the Unruh effect are also theorized to be dependent on zero-point vacuum fluctuations, the field contribution being an inseparable parts of these theories. Jaffe continues "Even if one could argue away zero-point contributions to the quantum vacuum energy, the problem of spontaneous symmetry breaking remains: condensates [ground state vacua] that carry energy appear at many energy scales in the Standard Model. So there is good reason to be skeptical of attempts to avoid the standard formulation of quantum field theory and the zero-point energies it brings with it." It is difficult to judge the physical reality of infinite zero-point energies that are inherent in field theories, but modern physics does not know any better way to construct gauge-invariant, renormalizable theories than with zero-point energy and they would seem to be a necessity for any attempt at a unified theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=84400 | 118,622 |
2,056,692 | The solution of the LFQCD Hamiltonian eigenvalue equation will utilize the available mathematical methods of quantum mechanics and contribute to the development of advanced computing techniques for large quantum systems, including nuclei. For example, in the discretized light-cone quantization method (DLCQ), periodic conditions are introduced such that momenta are discretized and the size of the Fock space is limited without destroying Lorentz invariance. Solving a quantum field theory is then reduced to diagonalizing a large sparse Hermitian matrix. The DLCQ method has been successfully used to obtain the complete spectrum and light-front wave functions in numerous model quantum field theories such as QCD with one or two space dimensions for any number of flavors and quark masses. An extension of this method to supersymmetric theories, SDLCQ, takes advantage of the fact that the light-front Hamiltonian can be factorized as a product of raising and lowering ladder operators. SDLCQ has provided new insights into a number of supersymmetric theories including direct numerical evidence for a supergravity/super-Yang–Mills duality conjectured by Maldacena. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44607491 | 2,055,508 |
1,459,629 | Questions of subjectivity, agency, actors, and structures have always been of interest in social and cultural anthropology. In cyborg anthropology the question of what type of cybernetic system constitutes an actor/subject becomes all the more important. Is it the actual technology that acts on humanity (the Internet), the general techno-culture (Silicon Valley), government sanctions (net neutrality), specific innovative humans (Steve Jobs), or some type of combination of these elements? Some academics believe that only humans have agency and technology is an object humans act upon, while others argue that humans have no agency and culture is entirely shaped by material and technological conditions. Actor-network theory (ANT), proposed by Bruno Latour, is a theory that helps scholars understand how these elements work together to shape techno-cultural phenomena. Latour suggests that actors and the subjects they act on are parts of larger networks of mutual interaction and feedback loops. Humans and technology both have the agency to shape one another. ANT best describes the way cyborg anthropology approaches the relationship between humans and technology. Similarly, Wells explain how new forms of networked political expression such as the Pirate Party movement and free and open-source software philosophies are generated from human reliance on information technologies in all walks of life. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33264144 | 1,458,808 |
470,112 | In 2006, the small school virtual competition was created for schools with 650 or fewer students. Two years later, the medium school virtual competition was added to accommodate schools with a student population between 650 and 1,300. These two separate contests are held via the Internet and, as such, the interview and speech events are excluded. The remaining eight tests are completed on the computer and results are submitted electronically to USAD for scoring. Because only the seven multiple choice tests and essay are used, team scores are out of 48,000 points instead of 60,000. Although it is only a virtual competition, winning schools are awarded trophies and medals for their efforts. University High School, from Fresno, California, has won 6 of 7 Small School National Championships. Coached by Sean Canfield, the team has won both the California and National Small School titles for the past 6 years. UHS has a current enrollment of 465 students, yet placed eighth overall at the 2013 California State, competing against schools several times its size. According to USAD, the goal of the small and medium school competitions is to "enhance learning, growth and recognition". In 2010, the United States Academic Decathlon announced the beginning of a large school e-Nationals for the second-highest performing large school in each state. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=562034 | 469,876 |
1,181,503 | Comparative studies of the cytochrome "b" gene, which are frequently used to determine phylogenetic relationships among mammals—particularly within families and genera—have been used to show that lemurs share common ancestry with lorisoids. This conclusion is also corroborated by the shared strepsirrhine toothcomb, an unusual trait that is unlikely to have evolved twice. If adapiforms were the ancestors of the living strepsirrhines, then the last common ancestor of modern strepsirrhines would have to predate the early Eocene, a view supported by molecular phylogenetic studies by Anne D. Yoder and Ziheng Yang in 2004, which showed that lemurs split from lorises approximately 62 to 65 mya. These dates were confirmed by more extensive tests by Julie Horvath "et al". in 2008. These molecular studies also showed that lemuroids diversified before the modern lorisoids. Using a more limited data set and only nuclear genes, another study in 2005 by Céline Poux "et al". dated the split between lemurs and lorises at 60 mya, lemur diversification at 50 mya, and the lemur colonization of Madagascar somewhere between these two approximate dates. However, the 2003 discovery of fossil lorisoids at the Fayum Depression in Egypt pushed the date of lorisoid divergence back to the Eocene, matching the divergence dates predicted by Yoder and Horvath. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26770557 | 1,180,879 |
573,818 | The Cabral-Dahab Science Park Management Paradigm, was first presented by Regis Cabral in ten points in 1990. According to this management paradigm, a science park must: "have access to qualified research and development personnel in the areas of knowledge in which the park has its identity; be able to market its high valued products and services; have the capability to provide marketing expertise and managerial skills to firms, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, lacking such a resource; be inserted in a society that allows for the protection of product or process secrets, via patents, security or any other means; be able to select or reject which firms enter the park". A science park should: "have a clear identity, quite often expressed symbolically, as the park's name choice, its logo or the management discourse; have a management with established or recognized expertise in financial matters, and which has presented long-term economic development plans; have the backing of powerful, dynamic and stable economic actors, such as a funding agency, political institution or local university; include in its management an active person of vision, with the power of decision and with the high and visible profile, who is perceived by relevant actors in society as embodying the interface between academia and industry, long-term plans and good management; and include a prominent percentage of consultancy firms, as well as technical service firms, including laboratories and quality control firms". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=590109 | 573,524 |
1,399,635 | Following the success of Hafler and Keroes, American manufacturers like Eico, The Fisher, Harman/Kardon and Marantz disposed with "obsolete" power triodes and switched to ultralinear designs. Mullard, Britain's largest valve manufacturer and provider of reference designs to the European industry, publicly supported the novelty. Williamson's former employer, General Electric Company, followed suit and published a reference "30-Watt Williamson" design built around a pair of ultralinear-connected KT88. The original Williamson amplifier lost the race, just like alternative designs by Peter Walker and Frank McIntosh. In September 1952 Williamson and Walker (then business partners in the development of the Quad Electrostatic Loudspeaker) agreed that the ultralinear stage was, indeed, preferable in mass production. Williamson gradually stepped aside from audio engineering. He made his living by designing milling machines and flexible manufacturing systems, which later earned him election to the Royal Society, and never considered audio design a serious occupation for himself. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1019188 | 1,398,860 |
320,724 | The name "deep stall" first came into widespread use after the crash of the prototype BAC 1-11 G-ASHG on 22 October 1963, which killed its crew. This led to changes to the aircraft, including the installation of a stick shaker (see below) to clearly warn the pilot of an impending stall. Stick shakers are now a standard part of commercial airliners. Nevertheless, the problem continues to cause accidents; on 3 June 1966, a Hawker Siddeley Trident (G-ARPY), was lost to deep stall; deep stall is suspected to be cause of another Trident (the British European Airways Flight 548 "G-ARPI") crash – known as the "Staines Disaster" – on 18 June 1972, when the crew failed to notice the conditions and had disabled the stall-recovery system. On 3 April 1980, a prototype of the Canadair Challenger business jet crashed after initially entering a deep stall from 17,000 ft and having both engines flame-out. It recovered from the deep stall after deploying the anti-spin parachute but crashed after being unable to jettison the chute or relight the engines. One of the test pilots was unable to escape from the aircraft in time and was killed. On 26 July 1993, a Canadair CRJ-100 was lost in flight testing due to a deep stall. It has been reported that a Boeing 727 entered a deep stall in a flight test, but the pilot was able to rock the airplane to increasingly higher bank angles until the nose finally fell through and normal control response was recovered. A 727 accident on 1 December 1974, has also been attributed to a deep stall. The crash of West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 in 2005 was also attributed to a deep stall. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=81511 | 320,552 |
556,204 | The most prominent sculptor was Artus Quellinus the Elder, member of a family of famous sculptors and painters, and the cousin and master of another prominent Flemish sculptor, Artus Quellinus the Younger. Born in Antwerp, he had spent time in Rome where he became familiar with local Baroque sculpture and that of his compatriot François Duquesnoy. On his return to Antwerp in 1640, he brought with him a new vision of the role of the sculptor. The sculptor was no longer to be an ornamentalist but a creator of a total artwork in which architectural components were replaced by sculptures. The church furniture became an occasion for the creation of large-scale compositions, incorporated into the church interior. From 1650 onwards, Quellinus worked for 15 years on the new city hall of Amsterdam together with the lead architect Jacob van Campen. Now called the Royal Palace on the Dam, this construction project, and in particular the marble decorations he and his workshop produced, became an example for other buildings in Amsterdam. The team of sculptors that Artus supervised during his work on the Amsterdam city hall included many sculptors, mainly from Flanders, who would become leading sculptors in their own right such as his cousin Artus Quellinus II, Rombout Verhulst, Bartholomeus Eggers and Gabriël Grupello and probably also Grinling Gibbons. They would later spread his Baroque idiom in the Dutch Republic, Germany and England. Another important Flemish Baroque sculptor was Lucas Faydherbe (1617-1697) who was from Mechelen, the second important centre of Baroque sculpture in the Southern Netherlands. He trained in Antwerp in Rubens's workshop and played a major role in the spread of High Baroque sculpture in the Southern Netherlands. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8608509 | 555,915 |
1,002,105 | The sudden death of Sigismund Kęstutaitis left the office of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania empty. The Voivode of Trakai, Jonas Goštautas, and other magnates of Lithuania, supported Casimir as a candidate to the throne. However many Polish noblemen hoped that the thirteen-year-old boy would become a Vice-regent for the Polish King in Lithuania. Casimir was invited by the Lithuanian magnates to Lithuania, and when he arrived in Vilnius in 1440, he was proclaimed as the Grand Duke of Lithuania on 29 June 1440 by the Council of Lords. Casimir succeeded his brother Władysław III (killed at the Battle of Varna in 1444) as King of Poland after a three-year interregnum on 25 June 1447. In 1454, he married Elisabeth of Austria, daughter of the late King of the Romans Albert II of Habsburg by his late wife Elisabeth of Bohemia. Her distant relative Frederick of Habsburg became Holy Roman Emperor and reigned as Frederick III until after Casimir's own death. The marriage strengthened the ties between the house of Jagiellon and the sovereigns of Hungary-Bohemia and put Casimir at odds with the Holy Roman Emperor through internal Habsburg rivalry. Becoming a King of Poland Casimir also freed himself from the control the Lithuanian oligarchy had imposed on him; in the Vilnius Privilege of 1447 he declared the Lithuanian nobility having equal rights with Polish "szlachta". In time Kazimierz Jagiellończyk was able to remove from power Cardinal Oleśnicki and his group, basing his own power on the younger middle nobility camp instead. A conflict with the pope and the local Church hierarchy over the right to fill vacant bishop positions Casimir also resolved in his favor. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34960337 | 1,001,587 |
139,789 | The Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle was an (with capsule and escape system) single-stage launch vehicle used for suborbital (ballistic) flights. It had a liquid-fueled engine that burned alcohol and liquid oxygen producing about of thrust, which was not enough for orbital missions. It was a descendant of the German V-2, and developed for the U.S. Army during the early 1950s. It was modified for Project Mercury by removing the warhead and adding a collar for supporting the spacecraft together with material for damping vibrations during launch. Its rocket motor was produced by North American Aviation and its direction could be altered during flight by its fins. They worked in two ways: by directing the air around them, or by directing the thrust by their inner parts (or both at the same time). Both the Atlas-D and Redstone launch vehicles contained an automatic abort sensing system which allowed them to abort a launch by firing the launch escape system if something went wrong. The Jupiter rocket, also developed by Von Braun's team at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, was considered as well for intermediate Mercury suborbital flights at a higher speed and altitude than Redstone, but this plan was dropped when it turned out that man-rating Jupiter for the Mercury program would actually cost more than flying an Atlas due to economics of scale. Jupiter's only use other than as a missile system was for the short-lived Juno II launch vehicle, and keeping a full staff of technical personnel around solely to fly a few Mercury capsules would result in excessively high costs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19812 | 139,732 |
550,699 | Shortly after World War II, a second approach to drug therapy of cancer began. Sidney Farber, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School, studied the effects of folic acid on leukemia patients. Folic acid, a vitamin crucial for DNA metabolism (the significance of DNA was not known at that time), had been discovered by Lucy Wills, when she was working in India, in 1937. It seemed to stimulate the proliferation of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cells when administered to children with this cancer. In one of the first examples of rational drug design (rather than accidental discovery), Farber used folate analogues synthesized by Harriett Kiltie and Yellapragada Subbarow of Lederle Laboratories. These analogues — first aminopterin and then amethopterin (now methotrexate) were antagonistic to folic acid, and blocked the function of folate-requiring enzymes. When administered to children with ALL in 1948, these agents became the first drugs to induce remission in children with ALL. Remissions were brief, but the principle was clear — antifolates could suppress proliferation of malignant cells, and could thereby re-establish normal bone-marrow function. Farber met resistance to conducting his studies at a time when the commonly held medical belief was that leukemia was incurable, and that the children should be allowed to die in peace. Afterwards, Farber's 1948 report in the New England Journal of Medicine was met with incredulity and ridicule. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1914242 | 550,411 |
833,173 | Historians have judged the Qing dynasty's vulnerability and military weakness in the 19th century to be based mainly on its maritime naval weakness while it achieved military success against Western armies on land, the historian Edward L. Dreyer said that "China's nineteenth-century humiliations were strongly related to her weakness and failure at sea. At the start of the Opium War, China had no unified navy and no sense of how vulnerable she was to attack from the sea; British forces sailed and steamed wherever they wanted to go...In the Arrow War (1856–60), the Chinese had no way to prevent the Anglo-French expedition of 1860 from sailing into the Gulf of Zhili and landing as near as possible to Beijing. Meanwhile, new but not exactly modern Chinese armies suppressed the midcentury rebellions, bluffed Russia into a peaceful settlement of disputed frontiers in Central Asia, and defeated the French forces on land in the Sino-French War (1884-85). But the defeat of the fleet, and the resulting threat to steamship traffic to Taiwan, forced China to conclude peace on unfavorable terms." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=407942 | 832,724 |
561,812 | The simple linear approximation applied by Hamaker's law degrades under higher voltages and longer deposition times. Under higher voltage, chemical reactions, such as reduction, driven by the influence of the applied field can obscure the kinetics. So, solvents with high reduction-oxidation potentials should be used to avoid electrolysis and the gas evolution. And if the deposited particles are insulating, then as the deposited layer grows thicker the effective electric field will decrease. In addition, the area surrounding the electroactive region near the electrodes will be depleted of particles. Particle diffusion from the bulk to the electroactive region may limit the rate of growth. The diffusion of particles from high to low concentration can be approximated by Fick's laws and its rate will be determined by the difference in particle concentration as well as solvent viscosity, particle mass, and colloidal stability. Eventually, as deposition thickness increases and field strength decreases, the growth will saturate. The change in thickness that occurs at the onset of saturation is described by the following equation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1476858 | 561,523 |
288,792 | Contrast ratio is the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of an image, measured in discrete steps, at any given moment. Generally, the higher the contrast ratio, the more realistic the image is (though the "realism" of an image depends on many factors including color accuracy, luminance linearity, and spatial linearity). Contrast ratios for plasma displays are often advertised as high as 5,000,000:1. On the surface, this is a significant advantage of plasma over most other current display technologies, a notable exception being organic light-emitting diode. Although there are no industry-wide guidelines for reporting contrast ratio, most manufacturers follow either the ANSI standard or perform a full-on-full-off test. The ANSI standard uses a checkered test pattern whereby the darkest blacks and the lightest whites are simultaneously measured, yielding the most accurate "real-world" ratings. In contrast, a full-on-full-off test measures the ratio using a pure black screen and a pure white screen, which gives higher values but does not represent a typical viewing scenario. Some displays, using many different technologies, have some "leakage" of light, through either optical or electronic means, from lit pixels to adjacent pixels so that dark pixels that are near bright ones appear less dark than they do during a full-off display. Manufacturers can further artificially improve the reported contrast ratio by increasing the contrast and brightness settings to achieve the highest test values. However, a contrast ratio generated by this method is misleading, as content would be essentially unwatchable at such settings. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=175859 | 288,635 |
1,568,941 | The CNS consists of neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes that are generated from multipotent stem cells. NCRP Report No. 153 provides the following excellent and short introduction to the composition and cell types of interest for radiation studies of the CNS: “The CNS consists of neurons differing markedly in size and number per unit area. There are several nuclei or centers that consist of closely packed neuron cell bodies (e.g., the respiratory and cardiac centers in the floor of the fourth ventricle). In the cerebral cortex the large neuron cell bodies, such as Betz cells, are separated by a considerable distance. Of additional importance are the neuroglia which are the supporting cells and consist of astrocytes, oligodendroglia, and microglia. These cells permeate and support the nervous tissue of the CNS, binding it together like a scaffold that also supports the vasculature. The most numerous of the neuroglia are Type I astrocytes, which make up about half the brain, greatly outnumbering the neurons. Neuroglia retain the capability of cell division in contrast to neurons and, therefore, the responses to radiation differ between the cell types. A third type of tissue in the brain is the vasculature which exhibits a comparable vulnerability for radiation damage to that found elsewhere in the body. Radiation-induced damage to oligodendrocytes and endothelial cells of the vasculature accounts for major aspects of the pathogenesis of brain damage that can occur after high doses of low-LET radiation.” Based on studies with low-LET radiation, the CNS is considered a radioresistant tissue. For example: in radiotherapy, early brain complications in adults usually do not develop if daily fractions of 2 Gy or less are administered with a total dose of up to 50 Gy. The tolerance dose in the CNS, as with other tissues, depends on the volume and the specific anatomical location in the human brain that is irradiated. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39761773 | 1,568,054 |
947,673 | Kam Wong published a paper questioning the bathtub curve—see also reliability-centered maintenance. During this decade, the failure rate of many components dropped by a factor of 10. Software became important to the reliability of systems. By the 1990s, the pace of IC development was picking up. Wider use of stand-alone microcomputers was common, and the PC market helped keep IC densities following Moore's law and doubling about every 18 months. Reliability engineering was now changing as it moved towards understanding the physics of failure. Failure rates for components kept dropping, but system-level issues became more prominent. Systems thinking became more and more important. For software, the CMM model (Capability Maturity Model) was developed, which gave a more qualitative approach to reliability. ISO 9000 added reliability measures as part of the design and development portion of certification. The expansion of the World-Wide Web created new challenges of security and trust. The older problem of too little reliability information available had now been replaced by too much information of questionable value. Consumer reliability problems could now be discussed online in real time using data. New technologies such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), handheld GPS, and hand-held devices that combined cell phones and computers all represent challenges to maintain reliability. Product development time continued to shorten through this | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1724836 | 947,170 |
596,971 | According to Margaret Murray, female mathematicians in the United States have almost always been a minority. Although the exact difference fluctuates with the times, as she has explored in her book "Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating a Professional Identity in Post-World War II America", "Since 1980, women have earned over 17 percent of the mathematics doctorates... [In The United States]". The trends in gender are by no means clear, but perhaps parity is still a way to go. Since 1995, studies have shown that the gender gap favored males in most mathematical standardized testing as boys outperformed girls in 15 out of 28 countries. However, as of 2015 the gender gap has almost been reversed, showing an increase in female presence. This is being caused by women's steadily increasing their performance on math and science testing and enrollment, but also from males' losing ground at the same time. This role reversal can largely be associated with the gender normative stereotypes that are found in the Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field, deeming "who math is for" and "who STEM careers are for". These stereotypes can fuel mathematical anxiety that is already present among young female populations. Thus parity will take more work to overcome mathematical anxiety and this is one reason why women in mathematics are role models for younger women. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8111444 | 596,666 |
2,062,285 | Following Pittendrigh and Daan's behavioral characterization of the dual oscillator model, it took several years before scientists discovered the mechanistic basis of it. In 2000, Anita Jagota, Horacio de la Iglesia, and William J. Schwartz were the first group to show two distinct peaks of electrical activity in the mammalian suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) after studying horizontally sectioned hamster hypothalamus. Further experiments need to be conducted to validate that the two peaks represent the E and M oscillators. In 2004, Brigette Grima and Dan Stoleru independently investigated E and M activity peaks in "Drosophila melanogaster" (fruit flies) using different gene expression manipulations. They found two separate circadian neuron groups control the E and M peaks of activity in "Drosophila melanogaster". They also found the lateral neurons are responsible for the morning and evening peaks. In 2007, Stoleru found that the M cells dominate the circadian rhythm on short days while the E cells dominate the rhythm on long days. This alternating domination pattern allows the circadian rhythms in animals to persist on both short and long days, respectively. Stoleru's work significantly contributed to the field of chronobiology by revealing the mechanism through which animals are able to adapt to environmental changes such as seasonal variations in daylight length. His research has also provided insights into the circadian clock's role in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and other related mood disorders that are responsive to light therapy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60472185 | 2,061,095 |
1,386,329 | The Ceramic Technology Laboratory was established in 1977 under the direction of Dr. Prudence Rice, then UF professor of anthropology. Pottery analysis plays an integral role in archaeological research at the museum as it constitutes the predominant material remaining at most archaeological sites investigated by museum curators. In addition pottery constitutes a very significant proportion of the Anthropology collections. The Ceramic Technology Laboratory is equipped for basic paste characterization studies: binocular microscope for gross identification of temper or paste constituents; a petrographic microscope for precise mineral identification in thin section; an electric furnace used for refiring experiments and for comparative investigation of clay samples collected from the vicinity of archaeological sites. Analysis of physical and mineralogical properties of the pottery are undertaken to provide precise data to address research questions regarding chronology, provenience or manufacturing origins, processes of production, culture change, and the development of social and economic complexity in prehistoric Florida, the Southeastern US, and the Caribbean Basin. The department is committed to the continuance of this research program as the capacity for in-house specialized analysis of pottery enhances the competitiveness for research grants. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1143787 | 1,385,562 |
877,230 | The university has a history of interaction with South Africa and a number of its leading figures. It was the first university to award Nelson Mandela an honorary doctorate upon his release from prison in 1990 in recognition of his leadership during the anti-apartheid movement. In accepting the honour, Mandela asked the university to offer support for reconstruction and development in South Africa and the university developed in this regard several projects to assist in research and training at a number of South African universities. Mandela officially received the honorary degree in June 1996 at a special ceremony in Buckingham Palace, and suggested the renaming of the university's Health Building after his close associate, Govan Mbeki, who was imprisoned in the cell next to him on Robben Island. The Govan Mbeki Building was officially inaugurated by Mbeki's son, President Thabo Mbeki, in June 2001 and a specially-commissioned portrait of Nelson Mandela was unveiled that year at the Building's foyer by Mandela's wife, Graça Machel. The university is also home to two significant scholarly collections on South Africa: the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Scotland Archive and the George Johannes Collection. In 2012, GCU began designing and developing work-based programmes in railway operations management for Transnet Freight Rail, South Africa's largest freight rail organisation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=712587 | 876,768 |
58,955 | Convolutional layers convolve the input and pass its result to the next layer. This is similar to the response of a neuron in the visual cortex to a specific stimulus. Each convolutional neuron processes data only for its receptive field. Although fully connected feedforward neural networks can be used to learn features and classify data, this architecture is generally impractical for larger inputs such as high-resolution images. It would require a very high number of neurons, even in a shallow architecture, due to the large input size of images, where each pixel is a relevant input feature. For instance, a fully connected layer for a (small) image of size 100 × 100 has 10,000 weights for "each" neuron in the second layer. Instead, convolution reduces the number of free parameters, allowing the network to be deeper. For example, regardless of image size, using a 5 × 5 tiling region, each with the same shared weights, requires only 25 learnable parameters. Using regularized weights over fewer parameters avoids the vanishing gradients and exploding gradients problems seen during backpropagation in traditional neural networks. Furthermore, convolutional neural networks are ideal for data with a grid-like topology (such as images) as spatial relations between separate features are taken into account during convolution and/or pooling. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40409788 | 58,930 |
1,089,534 | Genetic mutations occur when nucleotide sequences in an organism are altered. These mutations lead to not only observable phenotypic influences in an individual, but also alterations that are undetectable phenotypically. The sources for these mutations can be errors during replication, spontaneous mutations, and chemical and physical mutagens (UV and ionizing radiation, heat). Silencers, being encoded in the genome, are susceptible to such alterations which, in many cases, can lead to severe phenotypical and functional abnormalities. In general terms, mutations in silencer elements or regions could lead to either the inhibition of the silencer's action or to the persisting repression of a necessary gene. This can then lead to the expression or suppression of an undesired phenotype which may affect the normal functionality of certain systems in the organism. Among the many silencer elements and proteins, REST/NSRF is an important silencer factor that has a variety of impacts, not only in neural aspects of development. In fact, in many cases, REST/NSRF acts in conjunction with RE-1/NRSE to repress and influence non-neuronal cells. Its effects range from frogs ("Xenopus laevis") to humans, with innumerous effects in phenotype and also in development. In "Xenopus laevis", REST/NRSF malfunction or damage has been associated to abnormal ectodermal patterning during development and significant consequences in neural tube, cranial ganglia, and eye development. In humans, a deficiency in the REST/NSRF silencer element has been correlated to Huntington's disease due to the decrease in the transcription of BDNF. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3190493 | 1,088,974 |
1,970,124 | The WNT gene family consists of structurally related genes that encode secreted signaling lipid modified glycoproteins. These proteins have been implicated in oncogenesis and in several developmental processes, including regulation of cell fate and patterning during embryogenesis. This gene is a member of the WNT gene family. The WNT5A is highly expressed in the dermal papilla of depilated skin. It encodes a protein showing 98%, 98%, and 87% amino acid identity to the mouse, rat and the xenopus Wnt5a protein, respectively. Wnts, specifically Wnt5a, have also been positively correlated and implicated in inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, tuberculosis, and atherosclerosis. A central player and active secretor of Wnt5a in both cancer and these inflammatory diseases are macrophages. Experiments performed in Xenopus laevis embryos have identified that human frizzled-5 (hFz5) is the receptor for the Wnt5a ligand and the Wnt5a/hFz5 signaling mediates axis induction. However, non-canonical Wnt5a has also been shown to bind to Ror1/2, RYK, and RTK depending on cell and receptor context to mediate a variety of functions ranging from cell proliferation, polarity, differentiation and apoptosis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14759760 | 1,968,990 |
2,246,466 | MOF-5 is an early and heavily studied example of a MOF material. The material is an example of a cubic 3-dimensional extended lattice composed of ZnO inorganic clusters connected by terephthalate linkers. Each cluster involves 6 carboxylate groups of 6 terephthalate molecules bridging zinc atoms leading to an octahedral type arrangement around the cluster which, when expanded in three dimensions, reproduces the cubic arrangement of the material. The structure is retained upon solvent removal and the literature states that the Langmuir surface area (a monolayer-equivalent surface area) is stated to be of the order of 3000 mg, significantly higher than that of most zeolites and at the time, among the highest of all known materials. One downside to the large open pore structure is the potential for interpenetration of 2 frameworks. In the case of MOF-5 and the IRMOF family of isoreticular structures, if the pore size is sufficient to contain a ZnO cluster and the dicarboxylate is of sufficient length, then the formation of a second extended lattice can occur within the first. This interpenetration or catenation of two frameworks results in a significant reduction in the porosity as the majority of the void space in the cage is filled with the other framework. Examples of interpenetration are reported for some members of the IRMOF series. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=71321817 | 2,245,194 |
389,664 | Analyzing the comorbid state of patient S, 73 years of age, using the most used international comorbidity assessment scales, a doctor would come across totally different evaluation. The uncertainty of these results would somewhat complicate the doctors judgment about the factual level of severity of the patient's condition and would complicate the process of prescribing rational medicinal therapy for the identified disorders. Such problems are faced by doctors on everyday basis, despite all their knowledge about medical science. The main hurdle in the way of inducting comorbidity evaluation systems in broad based diagnostic-therapeutic process is their inconsistency and narrow focus. Despite the variety of methods of evaluation of comorbidity, the absence of a singular generally accepted method, devoid of the deficiencies of the available methods of its evaluation, causes disturbance. The absence of a unified instrument, developed on the basis of colossal international experience, as well as the methodology of its use does not allow comorbidity to become doctor "friendly". At the same time due to the inconsistency in approach to the analysis of comorbid state and absence of components of comorbidity in medical university courses, the practitioner is unclear about its prognostic effect, which makes the generally available systems of associated pathology evaluation unreasoned and therefore un-needed as well. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=217631 | 389,469 |
1,721,481 | While the nonlinearity of neural color-coding, as evidenced by the classical understanding of the Abney effect and its use of white light to particular wavelengths of light, has been thoroughly studied in the past, a new method was undertaken by researchers at the University of Nevada. Rather than adding white light to monochromatic light, the bandwidth of the spectrum was varied. This variation of bandwidth directly targeted the three classes of cone receptors as a means of identifying any hue shifts as perceived by the human eye. The overall goal of the research was to determine whether the appearance of color was affected by the filtering effects of the spectral sensitivity of the eye. Experiments showed that the cone ratios signaled a hue was adjusted so as to produce a constant hue that matched the central wavelength of the light source. Also, the experiments conducted essentially showed that the Abney effect does not hold for all changes in light purity, but is limited very much to certain means of purity degradation, namely the addition of white light. Since the experiments undertaken varied the bandwidth of the light, a similar albeit different means of altering the purity and therefore hue of the monochromatic light, the nonlinearity of the results displayed differently from what had traditionally been seen. Ultimately, the researchers came to the conclusion that variations in spectral bandwidth cause postreceptoral mechanisms to compensate for the filtering effects imposed by cone sensitivities and preretinal absorption and that the Abney effect occurs because the eye has, in a sense, been tricked into seeing a color that would not naturally occur and must therefore approximate the color. This approximation to compensate for the Abney effect is a direct function of the cone excitations experienced with a broadband spectrum. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2503147 | 1,720,511 |
1,974,253 | The animal moves through the water via rhythmic muscle contraction, aided by its side cilia, and a tuft of longer cilia on its back. The organism can also use its musculature to roll up into a ball, and maintain that form for several months. Adults are known to have a symbiotic relationship with bacterial species. Genetic data confirms that its diet includes bivalve mollusks. However, it has never been observed feeding, so it is unknown if it eats bivalve carcasses, eggs, sperm, mucus, feces, or live larval or adult bivalves. It lacks any visible means to get through the shells of adult bivalves. Captive specimens survived for several months without food, and showed no interest in any of the proposed food items afterwards. This has led some to suggest that it feeds by absorbing dissolved organic matter through its skin. At least one specimen that has been proposed to show a consumed bivalve larvae is preserved in the Swedish Natural History Museum. This species burrows, and has been observed to make tunnels as deep as into substrate in a laboratory aquarium. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56317112 | 1,973,118 |
97,903 | Pterosaur fossils are very rare, due to their light bone construction. Complete skeletons can generally only be found in geological layers with exceptional preservation conditions, the so-called "Lagerstätten". The pieces from one such "Lagerstätte", the Late Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone in Bavaria, became much sought after by rich collectors. In 1784, the Italian naturalist Cosimo Alessandro Collini was the first scientist in history to describe a pterosaur fossil. At that time the concepts of evolution and extinction were only imperfectly developed. The bizarre build of the pterosaur was therefore shocking, as it could not clearly be assigned to any existing animal group. The discovery of pterosaurs would thus play an important role in the progress of modern paleontology and geology. Scientific opinion at the time was that if such creatures were still alive, only the sea was a credible habitat; Collini suggested it might be a swimming animal that used its long front limbs as paddles. A few scientists continued to support the aquatic interpretation even until 1830, when the German zoologist Johann Georg Wagler suggested that "Pterodactylus" used its wings as flippers and was affiliated with Ichthyosauria and Plesiosauria. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24824 | 97,862 |
984,828 | Pemphigus defines a group of autoimmune intraepithelial blistering diseases that are characterized by loss of normal cell-cell adhesion (acantholysis), and by the presence of pathogenic (predominantly IgG) autoantibodies reacting against epithelial adhesion molecules. Pemphigus is further divided in two major subtypes: pemphigus vulgaris (PV) and pemphigus foliaceus (PF). However, several other disorders such as IgA pemphigus, IgE pemphigus, pemphigus herpetiformis, drug-induced pemphigus, Senear Usher syndrome, and endemic pemphigus foliaceus exist, and are recognized by a dermatologist from the appearance and distribution of the skin lesions. It is also commonly diagnosed by specialists practicing otolaryngology- head and neck surgery, periodontists, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, and eye doctors, as lesions can affect the eyes and mucous membranes of the oral cavity. Intraorally, it resembles the more common diseases lichen planus and mucous membrane pemphigoid. Definitive diagnosis requires examination of a skin or mucous membrane biopsy by a dermatopathologist or oral pathologist. The skin biopsy is taken from the edge of a blister, prepared for histopathology and examined with a microscope. The pathologist looks for an intraepidermal vesicle caused by the breaking apart of epidermal cells (acantholysis). Thus, the superficial (upper) portion of the epidermis sloughs off, leaving the bottom layer of cells on the "floor" of the blister. This bottom layer of cells is said to have a "tombstone" appearance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1209518 | 984,314 |
1,204,596 | The word "addiction" has been traced to the 17th century. The consumption of addictive substances, such as alcohol, opioids, cocaine, and cannabis, has been traced back to ancient history of Syria, China, and South America. During this time period, addiction was defined as being compelled to act out any number of bad habits. Persons abusing narcotics were called opium and morphine "eaters", and the term "drunkard" referred to abusers of alcohol. Medical textbooks categorized these "bad habits" as dipsomania or alcoholism However, it wasn't until the 19th century when the diagnosis of addiction was first printed in medical literature. In the 1880s, Sigmund Freud and William Halsted began experimenting with users of cocaine. Freud in particular was convinced that cocaine could be the answer to many mental and physical problems and published a paper "On Coca" about its benefits. Being unaware of the drug's powerful addictive qualities, Freud began to commend it as a means to overcome morphine addictions. Over time, Freud and Halsted inadvertently became guinea pigs in their own research and, as a result, their contributions to psychology and medicine changed the world. Freud publicly endorsed cocaine and its uses, theorizing that cocaine could be used as an anesthetic. This idea was later tested and found to be true. However, most of his other claims about cocaine turned out to be false and his advocacy for cocaine severely hurt his career. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37697843 | 1,203,951 |
358,465 | In May 1985, Robert and Sinsheimer organized a workshop at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to discuss the feasibility of building a systematic reference genome using gene sequencing technologies. In March 1986, the Santa Fe Workshop was organized by Charles DeLisi and David Smith of the Department of Energy's Office of Health and Environmental Research (OHER). At the same time Renato Dulbecco, President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, first proposed the concept of whole genome sequencing in an essay in "Science". The published work, titled "A Turning Point in Cancer Research: Sequencing the Human Genome", was shortened from the original proposal of using the sequence to understand the genetic basis of breast cancer. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix shape of DNA in the 1970s, followed two months later with a workshop held at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Thus the idea for obtaining a reference sequence had three independent origins: Sinsheimer, Dulbecco and DeLisi. Ultimately it was the actions by DeLisi that launched the project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5219699 | 358,279 |
106,143 | Generally speaking, the process of decompression is simply a matter of translating the stream of prefix codes to individual byte values, usually by traversing the Huffman tree node by node as each bit is read from the input stream (reaching a leaf node necessarily terminates the search for that particular byte value). Before this can take place, however, the Huffman tree must be somehow reconstructed. In the simplest case, where character frequencies are fairly predictable, the tree can be preconstructed (and even statistically adjusted on each compression cycle) and thus reused every time, at the expense of at least some measure of compression efficiency. Otherwise, the information to reconstruct the tree must be sent a priori. A naive approach might be to prepend the frequency count of each character to the compression stream. Unfortunately, the overhead in such a case could amount to several kilobytes, so this method has little practical use. If the data is compressed using canonical encoding, the compression model can be precisely reconstructed with just formula_19 bits of information (where is the number of bits per symbol). Another method is to simply prepend the Huffman tree, bit by bit, to the output stream. For example, assuming that the value of 0 represents a parent node and 1 a leaf node, whenever the latter is encountered the tree building routine simply reads the next 8 bits to determine the character value of that particular leaf. The process continues recursively until the last leaf node is reached; at that point, the Huffman tree will thus be faithfully reconstructed. The overhead using such a method ranges from roughly 2 to 320 bytes (assuming an 8-bit alphabet). Many other techniques are possible as well. In any case, since the compressed data can include unused "trailing bits" the decompressor must be able to determine when to stop producing output. This can be accomplished by either transmitting the length of the decompressed data along with the compression model or by defining a special code symbol to signify the end of input (the latter method can adversely affect code length optimality, however). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13883 | 106,098 |
550,443 | The lung/swim bladder originated as an outgrowth of the gut, forming a gas-filled bladder above the digestive system. In its primitive form, the air bladder was open to the alimentary canal, a condition called physostome and still found in many fish. The primary function is not entirely certain. One consideration is buoyancy. The heavy scale armour of the early bony fishes would certainly weigh the animals down. In cartilaginous fishes, lacking a swim bladder, the open sea sharks need to swim constantly to avoid sinking into the depths, the pectoral fins providing lift. Another factor is oxygen consumption. Ambient oxygen was relatively low in the early Devonian, possibly about half of modern values. Per unit volume, there is much more oxygen in air than in water, and vertebrates are active animals with a high energy requirement compared to invertebrates of similar sizes. The Devonian saw increasing oxygen levels which opened up new ecological niches by allowing groups able to exploit the additional oxygen to develop into active, large-bodied animals. Particularly in tropical swampland habitats, atmospheric oxygen is much more stable, and may have prompted a reliance of lungs rather than gills for primary oxygen uptake. In the end, both buoyancy and breathing may have been important, and some modern physostome fishes do indeed use their bladders for both. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38046595 | 550,155 |
663,834 | In the late 1950s, Szent-Györgyi developed a research interest in cancer and developed ideas on applying the theories of quantum mechanics to the biochemistry (quantum biology) of cancer. The death of Rath, who had acted as the financial administrator of the Institute for Muscle Research, left Szent-Györgyi in a financial mess. Szent-Györgyi refused to submit government grants which required him to provide minute details on exactly how he intended to spend the research dollars and what he expected to find. After Szent-Györgyi commented on his financial hardships in a 1971 newspaper interview, attorney Franklin Salisbury contacted him and later helped him establish a private nonprofit organization, the National Foundation for Cancer Research. Late in life, Szent-Györgyi began to pursue free radicals as a potential cause of cancer. He came to see cancer as being ultimately an electronic problem at the molecular level. In 1974, reflecting his interests in quantum physics, he proposed the term "syntropy" replace the term "negentropy". Ralph Moss, a protégé of his in the years he performed his cancer research, wrote a biography entitled "Free Radical: Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and the Battle over Vitamin C." Aspects of this work are an important precursor to what is now dubbed redox signaling. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=240540 | 663,488 |
593,096 | "Porpoising", also known as running, is a high speed surface behaviour of small cetaceans where long jumps are alternated with swimming close to the surface. Despite the name, porpoising behaviour is seen in dolphins and porpoises, as well as other marine species such as penguins and pinnipeds. When marine mammals are travelling at speed they are forced to stay close to the surface in order to maintain respiration for the energetic exercise. At leisurely cruising speeds below 4.6 m/s, dolphins swim below the water's surface and only briefly expose their blowholes along with up to one third of their body at any one time. This results in little splashing as they have a very streamlined shape. Porpoising occurs mainly when dolphins and porpoises are swimming at speeds greater than 4.6 m/s. Here, jump length is roughly equal to distance traveled when the cetaceans are submerged. This exposes the blowhole for longer which is needed to get enough oxygen to maintain metabolism and therefore high speeds over long periods of time. Studies have also shown that leaping is more energetically efficient than swimming above a certain threshold speed. This is due to the reduction in friction when travelling in air compared to water which saves more energy than is needed to produce the leap. These benefits also outweigh the energy wasted due to the large amount of splashing often seen when groups are porpoising. Porpoising is therefore a result of high speed swimming which cetaceans use for important pursuit and escape activities. For example, dolphins may be seen porpoising away from their main predator, sharks or the direction of incoming boats to avoid collision. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=755842 | 592,792 |
2,022,880 | In the context of chemistry and molecular modelling, the Interface force field (IFF) is a force field for classical molecular simulations of atoms, molecules, and assemblies up to the large nanometer scale, covering compounds from across the periodic table. It employs a consistent classical Hamiltonian energy function for metals, oxides, and organic compounds, linking biomolecular and materials simulation platforms into a single platform. The reliability is often higher than that of density functional theory calculations at more than a million times lower computational cost. IFF includes a physical-chemical interpretation for all parameters as well as a surface model database that covers different cleavage planes and surface chemistry of included compounds. The Interface Force Field is compatible with force fields for the simulation of primarily organic compounds and can be used with common molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo codes. Structures and energies of included chemical elements and compounds are rigorously validated and property predictions are up to a factor of 100 more accurate relative to earlier models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64170778 | 2,021,716 |
56,602 | The bidding process for the 2016 Summer Olympics was officially launched on 16 May 2007. The first step for each city was to submit an initial application to the International Olympic Committee by 13 September 2007, confirming their intention to bid. Completed official bid files containing answers to a 25-question IOC form were to be submitted by each city by the deadline of 14 January 2008. On 4 June 2008, two months before the Beijing Olympics, four candidate cities were chosen for the shortlist: Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, which had already hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964. Three cities—Baku, Doha, and Prague—failed to reach the candidature phase. Doha was not promoted, despite scoring higher than the selected candidate city Rio de Janeiro, because of their proposal to host the Olympics in October, outside the IOC's sporting calendar, added with its problems while hosting the 2006 Asian Games, including deaths and illnesses involving athletes and volunteers. Others included lack of infrastructures, including beds for athletes and media reporters at that time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=961522 | 56,578 |
965,591 | The message passing interface effort began in the summer of 1991 when a small group of researchers started discussions at a mountain retreat in Austria. Out of that discussion came a Workshop on Standards for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment, held on April 29–30, 1992 in Williamsburg, Virginia. Attendees at Williamsburg discussed the basic features essential to a standard message-passing interface and established a working group to continue the standardization process. Jack Dongarra, Tony Hey, and David W. Walker put forward a preliminary draft proposal, "MPI1", in November 1992. In November 1992 a meeting of the MPI working group took place in Minneapolis and decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing. The MPI working group met every 6 weeks throughout the first 9 months of 1993. The draft MPI standard was presented at the Supercomputing '93 conference in November 1993. After a period of public comments, which resulted in some changes in MPI, version 1.0 of MPI was released in June 1994. These meetings and the email discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open to all members of the high-performance-computing community. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=221466 | 965,082 |
260,633 | A procedure using a long thin tube with a camera passed through your mouth into the first part of your small intestine to locate, diagnose, and treat disorders related to your bile and pancreatic ducts. These ducts carry fluids that help with digesting food from your liver, gallbladder, and pancreas and can become narrowed or blocked as a result of gallstones, infection, inflammation, pancreatic pseudocysts, and tumors of the bile ducts or pancreas. As a result one may experience back pain, yellowing of the skin, and an abnormal lab test showing an elevated bilirubin level which could necessitate this procedure. However, the procedure is not recommended if the patient has acute pancreatitis unless the level of bilirubin remains high or is increasing which could suggest the blockage is still present. The patient will likely be required to not eat or drink anything starting 8 hours prior to the procedure. After the patient is sedated, the physician will pass the scope through the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and into the duodenum to locate the opening where the ducts drain into the small intestine. The physician can then inject dye into these ducts and take X-rays which show a real time view, via fluoroscopy, allowing the physician to locate and relieve the blockage. This is done through multiple techniques including cutting the opening and creating a bigger hole for drainage, removing gallstones and other debris, dilating narrow parts of the ducts, or placing a stent which keeps the ducts open. The physician can also take a biopsy of the ducts to evaluate for cancer, infection, or inflammation. Side effects include bloating, nausea, or a sore throat for 1 to 2 days. Complications include pancreatitis, infection of the bile ducts or gallbladder, bleeding, reaction to the anesthesia, and perforation of any structures that the scope or its instruments pass but particularly the duodenum, bile duct, and pancreatic duct. Signs of a serious complication requiring urgent or emergent medical attention include bloody or black tarry stool, chest pain, fever, worsening abdominal pain, worsening throat pain, problems breathing, problems swallowing, vomit that is bloody or looks like coffee-grounds. Most of the time complications from this procedure require hospitalization for treatment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12976 | 260,499 |
266,017 | The day's next task was to deploy the ALSEP; while they were parking the lunar rover, on which the TV camera was mounted, to observe the deployment, the rear steering began functioning. After ALSEP deployment, they collected samples in the vicinity. About four hours after the beginning of EVA-1, they mounted the lunar rover and drove to the first geologic stop, Plum Crater, a crater on the rim of Flag Crater, about across. There, at a distance of from the LM, they sampled material in the vicinity, which scientists believed had penetrated through the upper regolith layer to the underlying Cayley Formation. It was there that Duke retrieved, at the request of Mission Control, the largest rock returned by an Apollo mission, a breccia nicknamed Big Muley after mission geology principal investigator William R. Muehlberger. The next stop of the day was Buster Crater, a small crater located north of the larger Spook Crater, about from the LM. There, Duke took pictures of Stone Mountain and South Ray Crater, while Young deployed the LPM. By this point, scientists were beginning to reconsider their pre-mission hypothesis that Descartes had been the setting of ancient volcanic activity, as the two astronauts had yet to find any volcanic material. Following their stop at Buster, Young did a "Grand Prix" demonstration drive of the lunar rover, which Duke filmed with a 16 mm movie camera. This had been attempted on Apollo 15, but the camera had malfunctioned. After completing more tasks at the ALSEP, they returned to the LM to close out the moonwalk. They reentered the LM 7hours, 6minutes, and 56 seconds after the start of the EVA. Once inside, they pressurized the LM cabin, went through a half-hour debriefing with scientists in Mission Control, and configured the cabin for the sleep period. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1970 | 265,873 |
831,622 | Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) proposed a different theory. Unlike Saussure who approached the conceptual question from a study of linguistics and phonology, Peirce, the so-called father of the Pragmatist school of philosophy, extended the concept of sign to embrace many other forms. He considered "word" to be only one particular kind of sign, and characterized sign as any mediational means to understanding. He covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also all semblances (such as kindred sensible qualities), and all indicators (such as mechanical reactions). He counted as symbols all terms, propositions, and arguments whose interpretation is based upon convention or habit, even apart from their expression in particular languages. He held that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs". The setting of Peirce's study of signs is philosophical logic, which he defined as formal semiotic, and characterized as a normative field following esthetics and ethics, as more basic than metaphysics, and as the art of devising methods of research. He argued that, since all thought takes time, all thought is in signs, that all thought has the form of inference (even when not conscious and deliberate), and that, as inference, "logic is rooted in the social principle", since inference depends on a standpoint that, in a sense, is unlimited. The result is a theory not of language in particular, but rather of the production of meaning, and it rejects the idea of a static relationship between a sign and what it represents: its "object". Peirce believed that signs are meaningful through recursive relationships that arise in sets of three. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=562907 | 831,173 |
333,381 | Fatty acyls, a generic term for describing fatty acids, their conjugates and derivatives, are a diverse group of molecules synthesized by chain-elongation of an acetyl-CoA primer with malonyl-CoA or methylmalonyl-CoA groups in a process called fatty acid synthesis. They are made of a hydrocarbon chain that terminates with a carboxylic acid group; this arrangement confers the molecule with a polar, hydrophilic end, and a nonpolar, hydrophobic end that is insoluble in water. The fatty acid structure is one of the most fundamental categories of biological lipids and is commonly used as a building-block of more structurally complex lipids. The carbon chain, typically between four and 24 carbons long, may be saturated or unsaturated, and may be attached to functional groups containing oxygen, halogens, nitrogen, and sulfur. If a fatty acid contains a double bond, there is the possibility of either a "cis" or "trans" geometric isomerism, which significantly affects the molecule's configuration. "Cis"-double bonds cause the fatty acid chain to bend, an effect that is compounded with more double bonds in the chain. Three double bonds in 18-carbon "linolenic acid", the most abundant fatty-acyl chains of plant "thylakoid membranes", render these membranes highly "fluid" despite environmental low-temperatures, and also makes linolenic acid give dominating sharp peaks in high resolution 13-C NMR spectra of chloroplasts. This in turn plays an important role in the structure and function of cell membranes. Most naturally occurring fatty acids are of the "cis" configuration, although the "trans" form does exist in some natural and partially hydrogenated fats and oils. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17940 | 333,203 |
1,162,715 | At discovery, the transient had an absolute magnitude of , making it faint in comparison to a typical core-collapse supernova but bright in comparison to a classical nova. Additionally, the photometric and spectroscopic properties of the OT imply that it is not a luminous blue variable either. Since its peak, brightness dropped smoothly through September 2008 while becoming continuously redder. After September 2008, brightness continued to fall at a lower rate in the optical spectrum but with strong Hα emissions. Further, the optical spectrum is mostly made up of fairly narrow Hydrogen Balmer and Ca II emission lines coupled with strong Ca II H&K absorption. Research into historical Hubble images provide an accurate upper bound on the progenitor star's brightness. This suggested a low-mass main sequence star as progenitor with the transient resulting from a stellar merger similar to red Galactic nova V838 Monocerotis. Analysis of historical images of the area of the OT suggest with 70% certainty that the progenitor formed in a burst of stars around 8–13 Myr ago and implies the progenitor's mass to be 12–25 M assuming the OT is due to an evolving massive star. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=613611 | 1,162,098 |
409,576 | The NTSB has asked for the installation of cockpit image recorders in large transport aircraft to provide information that would supplement existing CVR and FDR data in accident investigations. They have recommended that image recorders be placed into smaller aircraft that are not required to have a CVR or FDR. The rationale is that what is seen on an instrument by the pilots of an aircraft is not necessarily the same as the data sent to the display device. This is particularly true of aircraft equipped with electronic displays (CRT or LCD). A mechanical instrument panel is likely to preserve its last indications, but this is not the case with an electronic display. Such systems, estimated to cost less than $8,000 installed, typically consist of a camera and microphone located in the cockpit to continuously record cockpit instrumentation, the outside viewing area, engine sounds, radio communications, and ambient cockpit sounds. As with conventional CVRs and FDRs, data from such a system is stored in a crash-protected unit to ensure survivability. Since the recorders can sometimes be crushed into unreadable pieces, or even located in deep water, some modern units are self-ejecting (taking advantage of kinetic energy at impact to separate themselves from the aircraft) and also equipped with radio emergency locator transmitters and sonar underwater locator beacons to aid in their location. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=938385 | 409,374 |
353,499 | Phytochemistry is a branch of plant biochemistry primarily concerned with the chemical substances produced by plants during secondary metabolism. Some of these compounds are toxins such as the alkaloid coniine from hemlock. Others, such as the essential oils peppermint oil and lemon oil are useful for their aroma, as flavourings and spices (e.g., capsaicin), and in medicine as pharmaceuticals as in opium from opium poppies. Many medicinal and recreational drugs, such as tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient in cannabis), caffeine, morphine and nicotine come directly from plants. Others are simple derivatives of botanical natural products. For example, the pain killer aspirin is the acetyl ester of salicylic acid, originally isolated from the bark of willow trees, and a wide range of opiate painkillers like heroin are obtained by chemical modification of morphine obtained from the opium poppy. Popular stimulants come from plants, such as caffeine from coffee, tea and chocolate, and nicotine from tobacco. Most alcoholic beverages come from fermentation of carbohydrate-rich plant products such as barley (beer), rice (sake) and grapes (wine). Native Americans have used various plants as ways of treating illness or disease for thousands of years. This knowledge Native Americans have on plants has been recorded by enthnobotanists and then in turn has been used by pharmaceutical companies as a way of drug discovery. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4183 | 353,316 |
218,116 | The formal medical description of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and the more severe, related diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) goes back at least 70 years to a paper presented at the New York Academy of Medicine by Robert T. Frank titled "Hormonal Causes of Premenstrual Tension". The specific term premenstrual syndrome appears to date from an article published in 1953 by Dalton and Greene in the "British Medical Journal". Since then, PMS has been a continuous presence in popular culture, occupying a place that is larger than the research attention accorded it as a medical diagnosis. Some have argued that women are partially responsible for the medicalization of PMS. They claim that women are partially responsible for legitimizing this disorder and have thus contributed to the social construction of PMS as an illness. It has also been suggested that the public debate over PMS and PMDD was impacted by organizations who had a stake in the outcome including feminists, the American Psychiatric Association, physicians and scientists. Until the 1950s, there was little research done surrounding PMS and it was not seen as a social problem. By the 1980s, however, viewing PMS in a social context had begun to take place. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=217947 | 218,008 |
1,400,578 | These curves are often consulted in the therapeutic setting. Normally, the body's various physiological rhythms will be synchronized within an individual organism (human or animal), usually with respect to a master biological clock. Of particular importance is the sleep–wake cycle. Various sleep disorders and externals stresses (such as jet lag) can interfere with this. People with non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder often experience an inability to maintain a consistent internal clock. Extreme chronotypes usually maintain a consistent clock, but find that their natural clock does not align with the expectations of their social environment. PRC curves provide a starting point for therapeutic intervention. The two common treatments used to shift the timing of sleep are light therapy, directed at the eyes, and administration of the hormone melatonin, usually taken orally. Either or both can be used daily. The phase adjustment is generally cumulative with consecutive daily administrations, and — at least partially — additive with concurrent administrations of distinct treatments. If the underlying disturbance is stable in nature, ongoing daily intervention is usually required. For jet lag, the intervention serves mainly to accelerate natural alignment, and ceases once desired alignment is achieved. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1556918 | 1,399,791 |
1,547,077 | The School expanded rapidly and was moved along with its newly established library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science to No. 10 Adelphi Terrace in September 1896, continuing to expand through the next couple of years thanks to Shaw. In 1902, The Coefficients dining club was regularly meeting in the Library, and they affected the development of LSE along with the Fabians and the Suffragettes movement (who also first met at LSE). In 1900, the School became officially recognised as a Faculty of Economics within the much larger University of London in Bloomsbury, and began enrolling students for bachelor's degrees and doctorates in the same year. At the same time, the LSE began expanding into other areas of social sciences, including, initially, geography (in 1902) and philosophy (in 1903), pioneering the study of international relations, as well as teaching history, law, psychology and sociology. By 1902, it was apparent the School had and would continue to outgrow its Adelphi Terrace location, and moved to its present campus in Clare Market off the Aldwych and aside Kingsway - not far from Whitehall, in 1902. The Old Building, which remains a significant office and classroom building, was opened on Houghton Street in 1922. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23735472 | 1,546,200 |
1,718,022 | In 1975, the Army conducted the Intelligence Organization and Stationing Study, which recommended significant changes to Army intelligence, including the 203rd. At the same time, the military had a growing need for analysis and exploitation of a flood of material captured by Israeli intelligence, which in turn had been sold to the United States. The findings led to the inactivation of D Company at Fort Bragg, and the reorganization of the unit as the 11th Military Intelligence Company, stood up September 30, 1978, at Aberdeen Proving Ground, under the command of LTC Dwight W. Galda. During the period of 1975 to 1988, the unit operated out of old wooden WWII-era buildings on the base. The newly independent company was assigned to the Army's Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center, and tasked additionally with providing assistance to the Army's Opposing Forces (OPFOR) Support mission, operating Soviet equipment and weaponry in full scale mock battles at Fort Irwin National Training Center, California. As a result of the Army's increasing demands, the unit grew in size, redesignated the 11th Military Intelligence Battalion (Provisional), February 29, 1980, with LTC James A. Bartlette assuming command. After the transition, the OPFOR mission was tasked to Company C, a detachment permanently located at Ft. Irwin. In 1996, Charlie Detachment grew to a company and would continue to provide support to the NTC OPFOR until the late 2000s (approx. 2004) when it was inactivated. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67447284 | 1,717,052 |
1,283,816 | Born in England, Withering attended Edinburgh Medical School from 1762 to 1766. In 1767 he started as a consultant at Stafford Royal Infirmary. He married Helena Cookes (an amateur botanical illustrator, and a former patient of his) in 1772; they had three children (the first, Helena was born in 1775 but died a few days later, William was born in 1776, and Charlotte in 1778). In 1775 he was appointed physician to Birmingham General Hospital (at the suggestion of Erasmus Darwin, a physician and founder member of the Lunar Society), but in 1783 he diagnosed himself as having pulmonary tuberculosis and went twice to Portugal hoping the better winter climate would improve his health; it did not. On the way home from his second trip there, the ship he was in was chased by pirates. In 1785 he was elected a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society and also published his "Account of the Foxglove" (see below). The following year he leased Edgbaston Hall, in Birmingham. He was one of the members of the Lunar Society. During the Birmingham riots of 1791 (in which Joseph Priestley's home was demolished) he prepared to flee from Edgbaston Hall, but his staff kept the rioters at bay until the military arrived. In 1799 he decided that he could not tolerate another winter in the cold and draughty Hall, so he bought "The Larches" in the nearby Sparkbrook area; his wife did not feel up to the move and remained at Edgbaston Hall. After moving to The Larches on 28 September, he died on 6 October 1799. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33065 | 1,283,118 |
1,762,120 | DRDO ARM has a range of 100–250 km which is made to be integrated with Sukhoi Su-30MKI as its primary test platform, although can be used with Dassault Mirage 2000, SEPECAT Jaguar, HAL Tejas and HAL Tejas Mark 2/MWF in future. According to the then Director of Research Centre Imarat (RCI), G. Satheesh Reddy, the missile will feature a millimetre wave seeker (mmW) transmitting on frequencies of 30 Gigahertz (GHz) and above while capable of lock-on before launch and lock-on after launch modes. Mid-course guidance is accomplished through inertial navigation system (INS) and two-way datalink combined with GPS/NavIC satellite guidance through digital filtering as fall back to correct accumulated errors and a passive homing head (PHH) seeker which is developed by DLRL that can detect radio frequency emissions from 100 km away. PHH is a wide-band receiver system operating within D band to J band frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Its compact front-end structure is due to the use of monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) technology for identification of radiation emitting sources. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49474371 | 1,761,127 |
998,948 | Development work started in 1968 at the Klimov Design Bureau, led by Sergey Isotov. The first few engines for the 9.01 MiG-29 prototype were equipped with a longer nozzle, without the double wall design, which is featured on the current RD-33 and RD-33MK models. This design had an extra controllable section after the critical cross section in the Laval type nozzle. The reason was the control of the jet blast contour at high altitude, low ambient air pressure, where the exhaust gases over expanding after the exhaust section. Right after the first few example and the first few MiG-29 prototype models, this difficult control system was removed, due to the operational altitude limit of the upcoming fighter. The first few series of the basic RD-33 version had some issue with the oil system, where a leakage caused a series of problems for the test pilots, because the oil leakage generated toxic particles in the air conditioning system. After the production line was going, these kinds of teething problems were solved. The only disadvantage was a low service life, and heavy smoke, which was fixed only in the later models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4166892 | 998,430 |
2,167,619 | Iliffe took the engineering view that it should be possible to offer a way, based on the memory management techniques already demonstrated in the Rice R1 to ensure the integrity of concurrent programs without resorting to relatively expensive mechanisms involving the frequent swapping of process state vectors seen in most other systems. He developed a design based on the use of codewords to represent all memory references. A codeword included a "base address", a "limit" specifying the length of a data object and some "type information". The internal representation of codewords was opaque to user programs but specific machine instructions were provided to manipulate them in ways that maintained the data structure. That represented a substantial refinement of the Rice R1 architecture, providing for the efficient management of multiple processes, each having a separate tree-structured data and instruction store. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60155126 | 2,166,382 |
305,872 | Soon afterwards, the morphology became much better known. In 1823, Thomas Clark reported an almost complete skull, probably belonging to "Thalassiodracon", which is now preserved by the British Geological Survey as specimen BGS GSM 26035. The same year, commercial fossil collector Mary Anning and her family uncovered an almost complete skeleton at Lyme Regis in Dorset, England, on what is today called the Jurassic Coast. It was acquired by the Duke of Buckingham, who made it available to the geologist William Buckland. He in turn let it be described by Conybeare on 24 February 1824 in a lecture to the Geological Society of London, during the same meeting in which for the first time a dinosaur was named, "Megalosaurus". The two finds revealed the unique and bizarre build of the animals, in 1832 by Professor Buckland likened to "a sea serpent run through a turtle". In 1824, Conybeare also provided a specific name to "Plesiosaurus": "dolichodeirus", meaning "longneck". In 1848, the skeleton was bought by the British Museum of Natural History and catalogued as specimen BMNH 22656. When the lecture was published, Conybeare also named a second species: "Plesiosaurus giganteus". This was a short-necked form later assigned to the Pliosauroidea. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1398078 | 305,709 |
668,988 | In Xenopus oocytes, β-catenin is initially equally localized to all regions of the egg, but it is targeted for ubiquitination and degradation by the β-catenin destruction complex. Fertilization of the egg causes a rotation of the outer cortical layers, moving clusters of the "Frizzled" and "Dsh" proteins closer to the equatorial region. β-catenin will be enriched locally under the influence of Wnt signaling pathway in the cells that inherit this portion of the cytoplasm. It will eventually translocate to the nucleus to bind TCF3 in order to activate several genes that induce dorsal cell characteristics. This signaling results in a region of cells known as the grey crescent, which is a classical organizer of embryonic development. If this region is surgically removed from the embryo, gastrulation does not occur at all. β-Catenin also plays a crucial role in the induction of the blastopore lip, which in turn initiates gastrulation. Inhibition of GSK-3 translation by injection of antisense mRNA may cause a second blastopore and a superfluous body axis to form. A similar effect can result from the overexpression of β-catenin. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5602902 | 668,638 |
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