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1,715,022 | At the time of Lindow's work on ice-minus "P. syringae", genetic engineering was considered to be very controversial. Jeremy Rifkin and his Foundation on Economic Trends (FET) sued the NIH in federal court to delay the field trials, arguing that NIH had failed to conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment and had failed to explore the possible effects "Ice-minus" bacteria might have on ecosystems and even global weather patterns. Once approval was granted, both test fields were attacked by activist groups the night before the tests occurred: "The world's first trial site attracted the world's first field trasher". The BBC quoted Andy Caffrey from Earth First!: "When I first heard that a company in Berkley was planning to release these bacteria Frostban in my community, I literally felt a knife go into me. Here once again, for a buck, science, technology and corporations were going to invade my body with new bacteria that hadn't existed on the planet before. It had already been invaded by smog, by radiation, by toxic chemicals in my food, and I just wasn't going to take it anymore." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9516977 | 1,714,055 |
312,522 | Despite common objections, sensational news stories continue to attract a large audience. A 2003 analysis of 736 stories from 1700 to 2001 by Hank Davis and S. Lyndsay McLeod reveals that these stories could be categorized according themes with reproductive value, such as cheater detection and treatment of offspring. Davis and McLeod propose that sensational journalism serves the same purpose as gossip. Gossip is the sharing of both positive and negative information about a third person who may or may not be absent from the group, and as such is useful for acquiring potentially useful information about the social structure, rivals, as well as allies. It may also be used for the purposes of intrasexual competition, or the denigration of rivals in order to elevate oneself, with men gossiping about access to resources (wealth and achievement) and women about looks and reputations. However, women appear to be more likely to gossip than men and to think of it positively than men. Furthermore, much gossip concerns social affairs. According to Frank T. McAndrew, the same psychological reasons that underlie more traditional forms gossip carry over to gossip about "celebrities" in the modern world because, on the evolutionary timescale, the birth of celebrity culture is a recent phenomenon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41162624 | 312,354 |
492,181 | The deficiencies of the Corporal II led to the design and development of Corporal III. The objectives of Corporal III were to produce a much improved weapon system with improved reliability, ground support equipment, and especially ground guidance equipment, to provide the Army with a fully developed weapon. Only small changes to the Corporal IIb missile would be required. In 1956 all research and development work on the Corporal II had been completed. A study at Redstone Arsenal noted that the MGM-29 Sergeant missile system would become available for service in 1963 and that Corporal III equipment should only be procured for additional Corporal units. Though a Type III Corporal was flown in 1957 it was too late for the eternally developing Corporal system. On May 23, 1957 all work on the Corporal III was ended to conserve funds for Sergeant following defense budget cuts. In 1963 the solid-fueled Sergeant missiles with self-contained inertial guidance systems which was jamming proof, and which took only an hour from occupying the site to launch of the missile, started replacing the Corporal IIb in Europe. By June 1964 the Corporal system was history in American service. In June 1966 the last Corporal unit, the 27th Guided Weapons Regiment Royal Artillery, retired its Corporals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1956534 | 491,927 |
174,482 | The next major production version was the "ATR 42−500" series, the development of which having been originally announced on 14 June 1993. Performing its maiden flight on 16 September 1994, and awarded certification by the British Civil Aviation Authority and France's (DGCA) during July 1995; the -500 model was an upgraded aircraft, equipped with new PW127 engines, new six-bladed propellers, improved hot and high performance, increased weight capacity and an improved passenger cabin. On 31 October 1995, the first ATR 42-500 was delivered to Italian operator Air Dolomiti; on 19 January 1996, the first revenue service to be performed by the type was conducted. In addition to new aircraft models, various organisational changes were also implemented. On 10 July 1998, ATR launched its new Asset Management Department. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=250004 | 174,391 |
194,481 | Robert S. Mulliken, who actively participated in the advent of molecular orbital theory, considers each molecule to be a self-sufficient unit. He asserts in his article: ...Attempts to regard a molecule as consisting of specific atomic or ionic units held together by discrete numbers of bonding electrons or electron-pairs are considered as more or less meaningless, except as an approximation in special cases, or as a method of calculation […]. A molecule is here regarded as a set of nuclei, around each of which is grouped an electron configuration closely similar to that of a free atom in an external field, except that the outer parts of the electron configurations surrounding each nucleus usually belong, in part, jointly to two or more nuclei...An example is the MO description of benzene, , which is an aromatic hexagonal ring of six carbon atoms and three double bonds. In this molecule, 24 of the 30 total valence bonding electrons—24 coming from carbon atoms and 6 coming from hydrogen atoms—are located in 12 σ (sigma) bonding orbitals, which are located mostly between pairs of atoms (C-C or C-H), similarly to the electrons in the valence bond description. However, in benzene the remaining six bonding electrons are located in three π (pi) molecular bonding orbitals that are delocalized around the ring. Two of these electrons are in an MO that has equal orbital contributions from all six atoms. The other four electrons are in orbitals with vertical nodes at right angles to each other. As in the VB theory, all of these six delocalized π electrons reside in a larger space that exists above and below the ring plane. All carbon-carbon bonds in benzene are chemically equivalent. In MO theory this is a direct consequence of the fact that the three molecular π orbitals combine and evenly spread the extra six electrons over six carbon atoms. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=589303 | 194,381 |
108,132 | Other thinkers, even in Taylor's own time, also proposed considering the individual worker's needs, not just the needs of the process. Critics said that in Taylorism, "the worker was taken for granted as a cog in the machinery." James Hartness published "The Human Factor in Works Management" in 1912, while Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth offered their own alternatives to Taylorism. The human relations school of management (founded by the work of Elton Mayo) evolved in the 1930s as a counterpoint or complement of scientific management. Taylorism focused on the organization of the work process, and human relations helped workers adapt to the new procedures. Modern definitions of "quality control" like ISO-9000 include not only clearly documented and optimized manufacturing tasks, but also consideration of human factors like expertise, motivation, and organizational culture. The Toyota Production System, from which lean manufacturing in general is derived, includes "respect for people" and teamwork as core principles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=389401 | 108,087 |
983,079 | As the golden age of capitalism came to a close in the 1970s, unemployment once again rose, and this time generally remained relatively high for the rest of the century, across most advanced economies. Several economists once again argued that this may be due to innovation, with perhaps the most prominent being Paul Samuelson. Overall, the closing decades of the 20th century saw most concern expressed over technological unemployment in Europe, though there were several examples in the U.S. A number of popular works warning of technological unemployment were also published. These included James S. Albus's 1976 book titled "Peoples' Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution"; David F. Noble with works published in 1984 and 1993; Jeremy Rifkin and his 1995 book "The End of Work"; and the 1996 book "The Global Trap". Yet for the most part, other than during the periods of intense debate in the 1930s and 60s, the consensus in the 20th century among both professional economists and the general public remained that technology does not cause long-term joblessness. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32040137 | 982,566 |
1,087,471 | Those who served in government had a privileged position in Han society that was just one tier below the nobles (yet some high officials were also ennobled and had fiefs). They could not be arrested for crimes unless permission was granted by the emperor. However, when officials were arrested, they were imprisoned and fettered like commoners. Their punishments in court also had to gain the approval of the emperor. Officials were not exempt from execution, yet they were often given a chance to commit suicide as a dignified alternative. The most senior posts were the Three Excellencies—excluding the Grand Tutor, a post that was irregularly occupied. The individual titles and functions of the Three Excellencies changed from Western to Eastern Han. However, their annual salaries remained at 10,000 "dan" (石) of grain, largely commuted to payments in coin cash and luxury items like silk. Below them were the Nine Ministers, each of whom headed a major government bureau and earned 2,000 bushels a year. The lowest-paid government employees made Equivalent to 100 bushels annually. It was thought that wealthy officials would be less tempted by bribes. Therefore, in the beginning of the dynasty, having a total assessed taxable wealth of one hundred thousand coins was a prerequisite for holding office. This was reduced to forty thousand coins in 142 BCE, yet from Emperor Wu's reign onwards this policy was no longer enforced. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21786810 | 1,086,912 |
390,538 | Many impacts have been confirmed since. For example, on 24 July 1996, the French microsatellite Cerise was hit by fragments of an Ariane-1 H-10 upper-stage booster which exploded in November 1986. On 29 March 2006, the Russian Ekspress AM11 communications satellite was struck by an unknown object and rendered inoperable. On 13 October 2009, Terra suffered a single battery cell failure anomaly and a battery heater control anomaly which were subsequently considered likely the result of an MMOD strike. On 12 March 2010, Aura lost power from one-half of one of its 11 solar panels and this was also attributed to an MMOD strike. On 22 May 2013, GOES 13 was hit by an MMOD which caused it to lose track of the stars that it used to maintain an operational attitude. It took nearly a month for the spacecraft to return to operation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=266344 | 390,343 |
1,914,608 | Wilson's review was published in 1906 and began with an expression of distaste for the "imminent encroachment by pure mathematics of territory that traditionally belonged to applied mathematics", but then quickly states that at that time "there seems no immediate danger" as three recent books published by the Cambridge University Press were "highly important volumes" that "exhibit great mathematical power and attainments directed firmly and unerringly along the direction of physical research". Noting the novelty of many of the sections in the book, Wilson wrote that the book "breaks the barricade and opens the way to fruitful advance". He then noted that the book is advanced and, though it is self-contained, it is not for a beginning student. He elaborated by writing that "the book is mathematical in nature, written with a precision and developed with a logic sure to appeal to mathematicians" and the "diversity of method taken with the compact style makes the book hard reading for any but the somewhat advanced student". Wilson also expressed a desire to have topics such as statistical mechanics added to the textbook. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65496619 | 1,913,509 |
55,077 | "It is difficult to believe that until approximately year 1900 it was not known that neurons are the basic units of the brain (Santiago Ramón y Cajal). Equally surprising is the fact that the concept of chemical transmission in the brain was not known until around 1930 (Henry Hallett Dale and Otto Loewi). We began to understand the basic electrical phenomenon that neurons use in order to communicate among themselves, the action potential, in the 1950s (Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley and John Eccles). It was in the 1960s that we became aware of how basic neuronal networks code stimuli and thus basic concepts are possible (David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel). The molecular revolution swept across US universities in the 1980s. It was in the 1990s that molecular mechanisms of behavioral phenomena became widely known (Eric Richard Kandel)." A microscopic examination shows that nerves consist primarily of axons, along with different membranes that wrap around them and segregate them into fascicles. The neurons that give rise to nerves do not lie entirely within the nerves themselves—their cell bodies reside within the brain, spinal cord, or peripheral ganglia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21944 | 55,054 |
1,106,236 | After having worked as a technician specializing in fusions at the Taiwanese railways in Taipei, at the end of the World War II, in 1945, he started to work at the Japan Management Association (JMA) () in Tokyo, becoming a consultant focused on the improvement of factory management. Gathering tips from the improvement experiences in the field he had in 1950 at Toyo Ind. (now Mazda) and in 1957 at the sites in Hiroshima of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, since 1969 Shingō got involved in some actions in Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) for the reduction of set-up time (change of dies) of pressing machines which took him to the formulation of a specific technique based on operational analysis, which shortened set-up times from 1 to 2 hours (or even half a day) per each exchange of dies to a rapid setting of a few minutes. The method spread out under the English denomination "Single Minute Exchange of Die", abbreviated as SMED. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2381197 | 1,105,673 |
429,062 | In 2016, cryo-electron microscopy was employed to obtain a three-dimensional structure of TRPA1. This work revealed that the channel assembles as a homotetramer, and possesses several structural features that hint at its complex regulation by irritants, cytoplasmic second messengers (e.g., calcium), cellular co-factors (e.g., inorganic anions like polyphosphates), and lipids (e.g., PIP2). Most notably, the site of covalent modification and activation for electrophilic irritants was localized to a tertiary structural feature on the membrane-proximal intracellular face of the channel, which has been termed the 'allosteric nexus', and which is composed of a cysteine-rich linker domain and the eponymous TRP domain. Breakthrough research combining cryo-electron microscopy and electrophysiology later elucidated the molecular mechanism of how the channel functions as a broad-spectrum irritant detector. With respect to electrophiles, which activate the channel by covalent modification of two cysteines in the allosteric nexus, it was shown that these reactive oxidative species act step-wise to modify two critical cysteine residues in the allosteric nexus. Upon covalent attachment, the allosteric nexus adopts a conformational change that is propagated to the channel's pore, dilating it to permit cation influx and subsequent cellular depolarization. With respect to activation by the second messenger calcium, the structure of the channel in complex with calcium localized the binding site for this ion and functional studies demonstrated that this site controls the various different effects of calcium on the channel – namely potentiation, desensitization, and receptor-operation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13530826 | 428,852 |
493,808 | Beginning in 2010 the concept of geodiversity (a term used previously in efforts to preserve scientifically important geological features) entered into the literature of conservation biologists as a potential way to identify climate change refugia and as a surrogate (in other words, a proxy used when planning for protected areas) for biodiversity. While the language to describe this mode of conservation planning hadn't fully developed until recently, the use of geophysical diversity in conservation planning goes back at least as far as the work by Hunter and others in 1988, and Richard Cowling and his colleagues in South Africa also used "spatial features" as surrogates for ecological processes in establishing conservation areas in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The most recent efforts have used the idea of "land facets" (also referred to as "geophysical settings", "enduring features", or "geophysical stages"), which are unique combinations of topographical features (such as slope steepness, slope direction, and elevation) and soil composition, to quantify physical features. The density of these facets, in turn, is used as a measure of geodiversity. Because geodiversity has been shown to be correlated with biodiversity, even as species move in response to climate change, protected areas with high geodiversity may continue to protect biodiversity as niches get filled by the influx of species from neighboring areas. Highly geodiverse protected areas may also allow for the movement of species within the area from one land facet or elevation to another. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2175118 | 493,553 |
534,193 | That part of the Western Front extending from the English Channel south through Ypres, and thence across the Lys River to the vicinity of Arras, was manned by an army group under King Albert of Belgium composed of Belgian, British, and French armies. In late August and early September the British Second and Fifth Armies, assisted by the American II Corps (27th and 30th Divisions), wiped out the Lys salient. When the Germans began retiring in the sector south of the Lys in October to shorten their lines, King Albert's army group attacked along its entire front. By 20 October Ostend and Bruges had been captured and the Allied left was at the Dutch frontier. In mid-October Pershing dispatched two American divisions – the 37th and 91st – to the French Army of Belgium, at Foch's request, to give impetus to the drive to cross the Scheldt (Escaut) southwest of Ghent. A general attack began in this area on 31 October and continued intermittently until hostilities ended on 11 November. The 37th Division forced a crossing of the river southeast of Heurne on 2 November and another farther north at the site of the destroyed Hermelgem-Syngem bridge on 10 November. Casualties of the two divisions in these operations totaled about 2,600. From 19 August to 11 November about 108,000 Americans participated in the Ypres-Lys Campaign. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6191450 | 533,914 |
1,725,799 | The plasticity of ENV processing has been demonstrated in several ways. For instance, the ability of auditory-cortex neurons to discriminate voice-onset time cues for phonemes is degraded following moderate hearing loss (20-40 dB HL) induced by acoustic trauma. Interestingly, developmental hearing loss reduces cortical responses to slow, but not fast (100 Hz) AM stimuli, in parallel with behavioral performance. As a matter of fact, a transient hearing loss (15 days) occurring during the "critical period" is sufficient to elevate AM thresholds in adult gerbils. Even non-traumatic noise exposure reduces the phase-locking ability of cortical neurons as well as the animals' behavioral capacity to discriminate between different AM sounds. Behavioral training or pairing protocols involving neuromodulators also alter the ability of cortical neurons to phase lock to AM sounds. In humans, hearing loss may result in an unbalanced representation of speech cues: ENV cues are enhanced at the cost of TFS cues (see: Effects of age and hearing loss on temporal envelope processing). Auditory training may reduce the representation of speech ENV cues for elderly listeners with hearing loss, who may then reach levels comparable to those observed for normal-hearing elderly listeners. Last, intensive musical training induces both behavioral effects such as higher sensitivity to pitch variations (for Mandarin linguistic pitch) and a better synchronization of brainstem responses to the f0-contour of lexical tones for musicians compared with non-musicians. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56439577 | 1,724,828 |
1,843,135 | John Allen studied physics initially at the University of Manitoba, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1928. Afterwards, he went to the University of Toronto to pursue postgraduate studies. He obtained his master's degree in 1930 and undertook his PhD working with John McLennan about superconductivity. He there developed and built his first cryostat which was taken by John McLennan for a demonstration of superconductivity in a public lecture to the Royal Institution in London. He obtained his PhD degree in 1933. With a two-year US National Research Council Fellowship which he obtained in 1933, he went to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech between 1933 and 1935. In 1935, he joined the Mond Laboratory of the Royal Society in Cambridge to work with Pyotr Kapitsa on low temperature experiments. However, Kapitsa could not return from a visit of his mother in the Soviet Union in 1934 and never returned to Cambridge. So John Allen worked independently of Kapitsa on properties of helium at very low temperatures and published reports on the discovery of superfluidity in helium which were published side by side in Nature in January 1938. Despite the independent discovery at about the same time, the Nobel prize for Superfluidity was awarded only to Kapitsa in 1978. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1573057 | 1,842,082 |
94,362 | Pierre Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer had discovered a new element on 18 August 1868 while looking at the chromosphere of the Sun, and named it helium after the Greek word for the Sun, (). No chemical analysis was possible at the time, but helium was later found to be a noble gas. Before them, in 1784, the English chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish had discovered that air contains a small proportion of a substance less reactive than nitrogen. A century later, in 1895, Lord Rayleigh discovered that samples of nitrogen from the air were of a different density than nitrogen resulting from chemical reactions. Along with Scottish scientist William Ramsay at University College, London, Lord Rayleigh theorized that the nitrogen extracted from air was mixed with another gas, leading to an experiment that successfully isolated a new element, argon, from the Greek word (, "idle" or "lazy"). With this discovery, they realized an entire class of gases was missing from the periodic table. During his search for argon, Ramsay also managed to isolate helium for the first time while heating cleveite, a mineral. In 1902, having accepted the evidence for the elements helium and argon, Dmitri Mendeleev included these noble gases as group 0 in his arrangement of the elements, which would later become the periodic table. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21140 | 94,321 |
698,103 | Although the concept of Allee effect had no title at the time, it was first described in the 1930s by its namesake, Warder Clyde Allee. Through experimental studies, Allee was able to demonstrate that goldfish have a greater survival rate when there are more individuals within the tank. This led him to conclude that aggregation can improve the survival rate of individuals, and that cooperation may be crucial in the overall evolution of social structure. The term "Allee principle" was introduced in the 1950s, a time when the field of ecology was heavily focused on the role of competition among and within species. The classical view of population dynamics stated that due to competition for resources, a population will experience a reduced overall growth rate at higher density and increased growth rate at lower density. In other words, individuals in a population would be better off when there are fewer individuals around due to a limited amount of resources (see ). However, the concept of the Allee effect introduced the idea that the reverse holds true when the population density is low. Individuals within a species often require the assistance of another individual for more than simple reproductive reasons in order to persist. The most obvious example of this is observed in animals that hunt for prey or defend against predators as a group. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1466225 | 697,739 |
1,507,495 | Traditional morphometrics is the study of morphological variations between or within groups using multivariate statistical tools. Shape is defined by collecting and analyzing length measurements, counts, ratios, and angles. The statistical tools are able to quantify the covariation within and between samples. Some of the typical statistical tools used for traditional morphometrics are: principal components, factor analysis, canonical variate, and discriminant function analysis. It is also possible to study allometry, which is the observed change in shape when there is change in size. However, there are problems pertaining to size correction since linear distance is highly correlated with size. There have been multiple methods put forth to correct for this correlation, but these methods disagree and can end up with different results using the same dataset. Another problem is linear distances are not always defined by the same landmarks making it difficult to use for comparative purposes. For shape analysis itself, which is the goal of morphometrics, the biggest downside to traditional morphometrics is that it does not capture the complete variation of shape in space, which is what the measurements are supposed to be based on. For example, if one tried to compare the length and width for an oval and tear drop shape with the same dimensions they would be deemed as the same using traditional morphometrics. Geometric morphometrics tries to correct these problems by capturing more variability in shape. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45580833 | 1,506,649 |
1,229,278 | In applied mathematics, the central differencing scheme is a finite difference method that optimizes the approximation for the differential operator in the central node of the considered patch and provides numerical solutions to differential equations. It is one of the schemes used to solve the integrated convection–diffusion equation and to calculate the transported property Φ at the e and w faces, where "e" and "w" are short for "east" and "west" (compass directions being customarily used to indicate directions on computational grids). The method's advantages are that it is easy to understand and implement, at least for simple material relations; and that its convergence rate is faster than some other finite differencing methods, such as forward and backward differencing. The right side of the convection-diffusion equation, which basically highlights the diffusion terms, can be represented using central difference approximation. To simplify the solution and analysis, linear interpolation can be used logically to compute the cell face values for the left side of this equation, which is nothing but the convective terms. Therefore, cell face values of property for a uniform grid can be written as: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40996300 | 1,228,616 |
259,987 | In October 2013, the Republic of Korea Navy expressed its interest in acquiring up to 18 ex-USN S-3s to augment their fleet of 16 Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft. In August 2015, a military program review group approved a proposal to incorporate 12 mothballed S-3s to perform ASW duties; the Viking plan was sent onto the Defense Acquisition Program Administration for further assessment before final approval decision by the national defense system committee. Although the planes are relatively old, being in storage has supposedly kept them serviceable, and using them is an affordable means of fulfilling short-range airborne ASW capabilities that were vacated by the retirement of the S-2 Tracker. Refurbished S-3s could be returned to use by 2019. In 2017, the Republic of Korea Navy canceled plans to purchase refurbished and upgraded Lockheed S-3 Viking aircraft for maritime patrol and anti-submarine duties, leaving offers by Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Saab on the table. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29475 | 259,853 |
861,007 | RNA interference (RNAi) is a natural process used by cells to regulate gene expression. It was discovered in 1998 by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who won the Nobel Prize for their discovery in 2006. The process to silence genes first begins with the entrance of a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecule into the cell, which triggers the RNAi pathway. The double-stranded molecule is then cut into small double-stranded fragments by an enzyme called Dicer. These small fragments, which include small interfering RNAs (siRNA) and microRNA (miRNA), are approximately 21–23 nucleotides in length. The fragments integrate into a multi-subunit protein called the RNA-induced silencing complex, which contains Argonaute proteins that are essential components of the RNAi pathway. One strand of the molecule, called the "guide" strand, binds to RISC, while the other strand, known as the "passenger" strand is degraded. The guide or antisense strand of the fragment that remains bound to RISC directs the sequence-specific silencing of the target mRNA molecule. The genes can be silenced by siRNA molecules that cause the endonucleatic cleavage of the target mRNA molecules or by miRNA molecules that suppress translation of the mRNA molecule. With the cleavage or translational repression of the mRNA molecules, the genes that form them are rendered essentially inactive. RNAi is thought to have evolved as a cellular defense mechanism against invaders, such as RNA viruses, or to combat the proliferation of transposons within a cell's DNA. Both RNA viruses and transposons can exist as double-stranded RNA and lead to the activation of RNAi. Currently, siRNAs are being widely used to suppress specific gene expression and to assess the function of genes. Companies utilizing this approach include Alnylam, Sanofi, Arrowhead, Discerna, and Persomics, among others. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=240850 | 860,548 |
1,477,204 | In 1945, Leloir ended his exile and returned to Argentina to work under Houssay at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de la Fundación Campomar, which Leloir would direct from its creation in 1947 by businessman and patron Jaime Campomar. Initially, the institute was composed of five rooms, a bathroom, central hall, patio, kitchen, and changing room. During the final years of the 1940s, although lacking financial resources and operating with very low-cost teams, Leloir's successful experiments would reveal the chemical origins of sugar synthesis in yeast as well as the oxidation of fatty acids in the liver; together with J. M. Muñoz, he produced an active cell-free system, a first in scientific research. It had initially been assumed that in order to study a cell, scientists could not separate it from its host organism, as oxidation could only occur in intact cells. Along the way, Muñoz and Leloir, unable to procure the costly refrigerated centrifuge needed to separate cell contents, improvised by spinning a tire stuffed with salt and ice. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=392727 | 1,476,372 |
1,781,257 | Distinguishing between borderline personality disorder (BPD) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often challenging, especially when the client has experienced a trauma such as childhood sexual abuse (CSA), which is strongly linked to both disorders. Although the individual diagnostic criteria for these two disorders do not overlap substantially, patients with either of these disorders can display similar clinical pictures. Both patients with BPD and PTSD may present as aggressive toward self or others, irritable, unable to tolerate emotional extremes, dysphoric, feeling empty or dead, and highly reactive to mild stressors. Despite having similar clinical pictures, PTSD and BPD are regarded differently by many clinicians. Results from a 2009 study concluded that patient gender does not affect diagnosis. This finding is consistent with research suggesting that women are not more likely to be given the BPD diagnosis, all else being equal, though it contradicts other findings from studies that have used similar case vignettes. Nor did the data support an effect of clinician gender or age on diagnosis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32780718 | 1,780,253 |
1,167,147 | The roles of specific cosmic objects in producing these elemental abundances are clear for some elements, and heavily debated for others. For example, iron is believed to originate mostly from thermonuclear supernova explosions (also called supernovae of type Ia), and carbon and oxygen is believed to originate mostly from massive stars and their explosions. Li, Be, and B are believed to originate from spallation reactions of cosmic-ray nuclei such as carbon and heavier nuclei, breaking these apart. Unclear is, in which sources nuclei much heavier than iron are produced; for the slow and rapid neutron capture reactions, different sites are discussed, such as envelopes of stars of either lower or higher masses, or supernova explosions versus collisions of compact stars. The transport of nuclear reaction products from their sources through the interstellar and intergalactic medium also is unclear, and there is, e.g., a missing metals problem of more production of heavy elements predicted than is observed in stars. Also, many nuclei that are involved in cosmic nuclear reactions are unstable and only predicted to exist temporarily in cosmic sites; we cannot easily measure the properties of such nuclei, and uncertainties on their binding energies are substantial. Similarly, stellar structure and its dynamics is not satisfactorily described in models and hard to observe except through asteroseismology; also, supernova explosion models lack a consistent description based on physical processes, and include heuristic elements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5470137 | 1,166,529 |
306,924 | Common examples include the phosphor coatings used in fluorescent lamps, where phosphorescence on the order of milliseconds or longer is useful for filling in the "off-time" between AC current cycles, helping to reduce "flicker". Phosphors with faster decay times are used in applications like the pixels excited by free electrons (cathodoluminescence) in cathode-ray tube television-sets, which are slow enough to allow the formation of a picture as the electron beam scans the screen, but fast enough to prevent the frames from blurring together. Even substances commonly associated with fluorescence may in fact be prone to phosphorescence, such as the liquid dyes found in highlighter pens, which is a common problem in liquid dye lasers. The onset of phosphorescence in this case can sometimes be reduced or delayed significantly by the use of triplet-quenching agents. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=309252 | 306,760 |
811,265 | In 1986, EuroJet Turbo GmbH was founded to manage the development, production, support, maintenance, support and sales of the EJ200 turbofan engine for the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter. At the time of its establishment, the original partners in Eurojet GmbH were Rolls-Royce, MTU, Fiat and Sener. The EJ200 engine combined the leading technologies from each of the four European companies, using advanced digital control and health monitoring; wide chord aerofoils and single crystal turbine blades; and a convergent / divergent exhaust nozzle to give excellent thrust-to-weight ratio, multimission capability, supercruise performance, low fuel consumption, low cost of ownership, modular construction and significant growth potential. By late 2006, Eurojet had been contracted to produce a total of 1,400 engines for the Eurofighter. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=574451 | 810,833 |
875,078 | In July 2002 the NASA/AeroVironment UAV Pathfinder Plus carried commercial communications relay equipment developed by Skytower to test using the aircraft as an "atmospheric satellite". Skytower, in partnership with NASA and the Japan Ministry of Telecommunications used the aircraft to transmit both an HDTV signal as well as an IMT-2000 wireless communications signal from . It was the equivalent of a tall transmitter tower. Because of the aircraft's high angle, the transmission utilized only one watt of power, or 1/10,000 that required by a terrestrial tower to provide the same signal. According to SkyTower's Stuart Hindle, "SkyTower platforms are basically geostationary satellites without the time delay." Hindle said that such platforms flying in the stratosphere, as opposed to actual satellites, can achieve much higher levels of frequency use. "A single SkyTower platform can provide over 1,000 times the fixed broadband local access capacity of a geostationary satellite using the same frequency band, on a bytes per second per square mile basis." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1803967 | 874,616 |
146,949 | As software and electronic systems have become generally more complex, the various common debugging techniques have expanded with more methods to detect anomalies, assess impact, and schedule software patches or full updates to a system. The words "anomaly" and "discrepancy" can be used, as being more neutral terms, to avoid the words "error" and "defect" or "bug" where there might be an implication that all so-called "errors", "defects" or "bugs" must be fixed (at all costs). Instead, an impact assessment can be made to determine if changes to remove an "anomaly" (or "discrepancy") would be cost-effective for the system, or perhaps a scheduled new release might render the unnecessary. Not all issues are safety-critical or mission-critical in a system. Also, it is important to avoid the situation where a change might be more upsetting to users, long-term, than living with the known (where the "cure would be worse than the disease"). Basing decisions of the acceptability of some anomalies can avoid a culture of a "zero-defects" mandate, where people might be tempted to deny the existence of problems so that the result would appear as zero "defects". Considering the collateral issues, such as the cost-versus-benefit impact assessment, then broader debugging techniques will expand to determine the frequency of anomalies (how often the same "bugs" occur) to help assess their impact to the overall system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24998792 | 146,891 |
2,199,051 | With Wisconsin cruising to the top seed and Brian Elliott seemingly a shoe-in for the Hobey Baker Award, the team was dealt a serious blow in mid-January. After sweeping #5 Colorado College, Elliott was injured at practice when a teammate slid into him. The goalie was ruled out for 3-4 weeks and it fell to freshman backup Shane Connelly to hold the fort until then. Much to their misfortune, Wisconsin's next four games were against ranked teams and the Badgers fell in each match. After being thrown into the fire, Connelly recovered to earn three wins over his next four games before Elliott was finally able to return. Unfortunately, it took Elliott more than a week to get back into game shape and he ended up allowing 17 goals over a 3-game stretch, a little more than half of the 31 he had allowed in the first 22 games. With the Badgers unable to win a conference title at the time, the final weekend of the season would only serve as a tune-up for the postseason. Luckily, Elliott appeared to have regained his early-season form by allowing just 1 goal against a ranked St. Cloud State squad. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=72035440 | 2,197,799 |
1,169,958 | Almost all of the neurons in the brain are generated before birth, during the first three months of pregnancy, and the newborn child's brain has a similar number of neurons to that of an adult. Many more neurons form than are needed, and only those that form active connections with other neurons survive. In the first year after birth the infant brain undergoes an intense phase of development, during which excessive numbers of connections between neurons are formed, and many of these excess connections must be cut back through the process of synaptic pruning that follows. This pruning process is just as important a stage of development as the early rapid growth of connections between brain cells. The process during which large numbers of connections between neurons are formed is called synaptogenesis. For vision and hearing (visual and auditory cortex), there is extensive early synaptogenesis. The density of connections peaks at around 150% of adult levels between four and 12 months, and the connections are then extensively pruned. Synaptic density returns to adult levels between two and four years in the visual cortex. For other areas such as prefrontal cortex (thought to underpin planning and reasoning), density increases more slowly and peaks after the first year. Reduction to adult levels of density takes at least another 10–20 years; hence there is significant brain development in the frontal areas even in adolescence. Brain metabolism (glucose uptake, which is an approximate index of synaptic functioning) is also above adult levels in the early years. Glucose uptake peaks at about 150% of adult levels somewhere around four to five years. By the age of around ten years, brain metabolism has reduced to adult levels for most cortical regions. Brain development consists of bursts of synaptogenesis, peaks of density, and then synapse rearrangement and stabilisation. This occurs at different times and different rates for different brain regions, which implies that there may be different sensitive periods for the development of different types of knowledge. Neuroscience research into early brain development has informed government education policy for children under three years old in many countries including the US and the United Kingdom. These policies have focused on enriching the environment of children during nursery and preschool years, exposing them to stimuli and experiences thought to maximise the learning potential of the young brain. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25935238 | 1,169,339 |
847,310 | The ERC contains a 72-seat lecture theatre, three 50-seat classrooms, two 30-seat tutorial rooms with flexible seating, 11 student-study (breakout) rooms, 12 labs, dedicated working stations for graduate students, and administrative space and offices for staff and faculty. One of the more notable labs is an extensive nuclear power plant computer simulation, the most extensive of its kind. The second, third, and fourth floors of the ERC have indoor connections to the adjacent Business and Information Technology building. The ERC features a glass-covered atrium with a large hanging metal-wire sculpture of Northern Dancer, the famous, award-winning Canadian horse from Windfields Farm. Ontario Tech and Durham College purchased the core area of Windfield Farms in 2013, including the site where Northern Dancer was buried; the sculpture is a tribute. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=300275 | 846,860 |
1,170,660 | The scientific community has praised China for its transparency and rapid response to the outbreak of H7N9. In an editorial on April 24, 2013, the journal "Nature" said "China deserves credit for its rapid response to the outbreaks of H7N9 avian influenza, and its early openness in the reporting and sharing of data." This, in spite of initial worries by Chinese scientists and officials that they might lose credit for their work in isolating and sequencing the novel H7N9 virus, after learning that pharmaceutical company Novartis and the J. Craig Venter Institute had used their sequences to develop US-funded H7N9 vaccine without offering to collaborate with the Chinese team, according to Nature. They believed, the usage of their data was initially not handled in the spirit of the GISAID sharing mechanism, which requires scientists who use the sequences to credit and propose collaboration with those who deposited the data in GISAID. Nature cited a Chinese official who concluded that this situation was quickly mitigated once communication channels were opened and the parties agreed to collaborate, thanks to GISAID president Peter Bogner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38969724 | 1,170,041 |
126,778 | Hadfield attended White Oaks Secondary School in Oakville, Ontario until his senior year and then graduated as an Ontario Scholar from Milton District High School in 1977. As a member of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, he earned a glider pilot scholarship at age 15 and a powered pilot scholarship at age 16. After graduating from high school in 1978, he joined the Canadian Armed Forces and spent two years at Royal Roads Military College followed by two years at the Royal Military College of Canada, where he received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1982. He also conducted his post-graduate research at the University of Waterloo in 1982. Before graduating, he also underwent basic flight training at CFB Portage la Prairie. In 1983, he took honours as the top graduate from Basic Jet Training at CFB Moose Jaw, and then went on to train as a tactical fighter pilot with 410 Tactical Fighter Operational Training Squadron at CFB Cold Lake, flying the Canadair CF-116 Freedom Fighter and the McDonnell Douglas CF-18 Hornet. After completing his fighter training, Hadfield flew CF-18 Hornets with 425 Tactical Fighter Squadron, flying intercept missions for NORAD. He was the first CF-18 pilot to intercept a Soviet Tupolev Tu 95 long-range bomber in the Canadian Arctic. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=78114 | 126,726 |
1,407,286 | A derived G-allele point mutation (SNP) with pleiotropic effects in "EDAR", 370A or rs3827760, found in ancient and modern East Asians, Southeast Asians, Nepalese and Native Americans but not common in African or European populations, is thought to be one of the key genes responsible for a number of differences between these populations, including the thicker hair, more numerous sweat glands, smaller breasts, and the Sinodont dentition (so-called shovel incisors) characteristic of East Asians. It has been hypothesized that natural selection favored this allele during the last ice age in a population of people living in isolation in Beringia, as it may play a role in the synthesis of breast milk under Vitamin D-poor conditions. The 370A mutation arose in humans approximately 35,000 years ago, and now is found in 60-90% of Han Chinese and in the majority of people in nearby Asian populations of very specific demographic haplogroups. This mutation is also implicated in ear morphology differences and reduced chin protrusion. The derived G-allele is a variation of the A-allele in earlier hominids, the version found in most modern non-East Asian and non-Native American populations and is found in 100% of Native American skeletal remains within all Native American haplogroups which studies have been done on prior to all contract for foreign population from Africa, Europe, or Asia. This derived allele was present in both the Tibeto-Burman (Magar and Newar) and Indo-European (Brahmin) populations of Nepal. The highest 1540C allele frequency was observed in Magar (71%), followed by Newar (30%) and Brahmin (20%). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14800628 | 1,406,496 |
523,546 | The U.S. Army Specialized Training Program only lasted a few years, but it gained a lot of attention from the popular press and the academic community. Charles C. Fries set up the first English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, to train English as a second or foreign language teachers. Similar programs were created later at Georgetown University, University of Texas among others based on the methods and techniques used by the military. The developing method had much in common with the British oral approach although the two developed independently. The main difference was the developing audio-lingual methods allegiance to structural linguistics, focusing on grammar and contrastive analysis to find differences between the student's native language and the target language in order to prepare specific materials to address potential problems. These materials strongly emphasized drill as a way to avoid or eliminate these problems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29572509 | 523,274 |
88,528 | In 1982 journalist Jonathan Schell in his popular and influential book "The Fate of the Earth", introduced the public to the belief that fireball generated NOx would destroy the ozone layer to such an extent that crops would fail from solar UV radiation and then similarly painted the fate of the Earth, as plant and aquatic life going extinct. In the same year, 1982, Australian physicist Brian Martin, who frequently corresponded with John Hampson who had been greatly responsible for much of the examination of NOx generation, penned a short historical synopsis on the history of interest in the effects of the direct NOx generated by nuclear fireballs, and in doing so, also outlined Hampson's other non-mainstream viewpoints, particularly those relating to greater ozone destruction from upper-atmospheric detonations as a result of any widely used anti-ballistic missile (ABM-1 Galosh) system. However, Martin ultimately concludes that it is "unlikely that in the context of a major nuclear war" ozone degradation would be of serious concern. Martin describes views about potential ozone loss and therefore increases in ultraviolet light leading to the widespread destruction of crops, as advocated by Jonathan Schell in "The Fate of the Earth", as highly unlikely. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22171 | 88,493 |
1,019,598 | Washington D.C. started implementing incentives for green roofs within their city at the beginning of the 21st Century. In 2003, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation introduced a “green roof demonstration project” in combination with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority. This program issued grants to several pilot green roofs, which would assist with the cost of construction for the building owner. From this project the city began to understand how beneficial these roofs could be and more programs were implemented over the years. In 2007, the Riversmart Rewards Program introduced a RiverSmart Rooftops Green Roof Rebate Program that would lend a $3 per square foot subsidy to potential green roof projects within the District. This culminated to assist 12 projects that year. A year later, the subsidy was raised to $5, incentivizing even more developers to use this program within their design. There is also possibility through the RiverSmart Rewards program for “residents and property owners to receive a significant discount on their water utility fees” if they install approved stormwater management features. In 2016, a rebate of $10-$15 per square feet was introduced, “promoting the voluntary installation of green roofs for the purpose of reducing stormwater runoff and pollutants”. $10 per square foot rebates were set for installation within a combined sewer system. $15 per square foot rebates were set for installation within a municipal storm sewer system. The greatest aspect of this incentivized project is the lack of restriction of building type that qualifies. There is no size cap on properties that qualify whether it’s residential, commercial or institutional. In 2016 there was a total of 2.3 million square feet of green roofing within the district. As of 2020, there is 5.1 million square feet of green roofing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=192025 | 1,019,071 |
609,347 | The TL Type-S was introduced once again for the 2007 through 2008 model years. The new TL Type-S received the Acura RL's 3.5-liter V6 tuned to with either a 5-speed automatic with F1 style paddle shifters or a 6-speed manual transmission. The manual transmission includes a limited slip differential. Exterior differences include quad exhaust pipes, restyled rear lamps and front fascia, lip spoiler, wider side sills, Brembo brakes, dark silver 10-spoke wheels, a "black chrome" grille rather than the standard glossy grille, and exclusive Type-S badging, plus an exclusive new color option, Kinetic Blue Pearl. The interior has Type-S badging on the steering wheel and headrests, more highly bolstered front seats, two-tone seats (only with the ebony/silver interior), metal racing pedals, carbon fiber trim, and red interior lighting (as opposed to blue in the base TL). Touch screen navigation is standard and the suspension has been firmed up. The only options are the aforementioned transmission and high performance summer tires (Bridgestone Potenzas) rather than the standard all-season tires (Michelin Pilot MXM4s). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57764329 | 609,036 |
1,090,826 | On 9 February 2001, Space Shuttle "Atlantis" docked to the ISS, bringing the five American crew members of STS-98 temporarily to the station. The mission was originally planned for mid-January, but was delayed due to NASA's concerns about some cables on the shuttles. This mission brought the U.S. built Destiny laboratory, which has a mass of 16 short tons. It was installed with the use of the shuttle's robotic Canadarm, controlled by Marsha Ivins. Astronauts Thomas D. Jones and Robert L. Curbeam helped with the installation during a spacewalk. The "Destiny" module had a cost of US$1.4 billion, and would be used primarily for scientific research. During the spacewalk an ammonia coolant leak created a contamination scare, which happened when Curbeam was hooking up coolant lines to "Destiny". The other two spacewalks went ahead without any problems. While the Shuttle was docked, the control of the station's orientation was switched from propellants to electrically powered gyroscopes, which had been installed in September 2000. The gyroscopes had not been used earlier due to the lack of key navigational electronics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=881135 | 1,090,266 |
415,832 | Three years after the mutiny, "Minas Geraes" was used to transport Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lauro Müller to the United States. The ship returned on 16 July and arrived in Rio de Janeiro on 16 August. In September both "Minas Geraes" and "São Paulo" participated in a major exercise with most of the Brazilian Navy. The need for more modern fire control system was identified as early as late 1913, but no action was taken. When Brazil entered the First World War in 1917, they were offered to the United Kingdom for service in the Grand Fleet, but the British declined due to the condition the ships were in. They had not been modernized since entering service, and maintenance had been neglected; to illustrate the problem, when Brazil sent "São Paulo" to the United States for a modernization in June 1918, fourteen of the eighteen boilers that powered the ship failed. The ship only finished the voyage to New York with the assistance of the American battleship and cruiser . "Minas Geraes" followed after its sister's return, and the modernization was done between 1 September 1920 and 1 October 1921. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29900534 | 415,629 |
1,954,977 | As was typical in the early days of television broadcasting, each show was broadcast live from a studio at Johns Hopkins University. Each week's show involved one or more guests, often from the Johns Hopkins faculty and staff. Poole acted as the host and interviewer. The guest might show how a scientific apparatus such an electron microscope or an oscilloscope worked, or would briefly explain scientific ideas to the viewers. In the December 5, 1950, episode, the live broadcast of a fluoroscope screen was used by doctors in New York and Chicago to diagnose the injuries to a machinist in the hospital in Baltimore. In the April 21, 1952, episode, a scientist drank a solution containing the radioactive isotope of iodine, and then followed its progress in his own body with a Geiger counter. The guests were sometimes national figures like Wernher von Braun (October 20, 1952), George Gamov, and Harold Urey. The show famously showed a live birth and gave instructions to women viewers about breast self-examination. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19689038 | 1,953,855 |
1,185,483 | Physical mapping is a technique to complete the sequencing of a genome. Ongoing projects that determine DNA base pair sequences, namely the Human Genome Project, give knowledge on the order of nucleotide and allow further investigation to answer genetic questions, particularly the association between the target sequence and the development of traits. From the individual DNA sequence isolated and mapped in physical mapping, it could provide information on the transcription and translation process during development of organisms, hence identifying the specific function of the gene and associated traits produced. As a result of understanding the expression and regulation of the genes, potential new treatments can be developed to alter protein expression patterns in specific tissues. Moreover, if the location and sequence of disease genes are identified, medical advice can be given to potential patients who are the carrier the disease gene, with reference to the knowledge of the gene function and products. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60323851 | 1,184,854 |
773,706 | To test the strength of Soviet chess masters, Krylenko organized the Moscow 1925 chess tournament. On a rest day during the event, world champion José Raúl Capablanca gave a simultaneous exhibition in Leningrad. Botvinnik was selected as one of his opponents, and won his game. In 1926, he reached the final stage of the Leningrad championship. Later that year, he was selected for Leningrad's team in a match against Stockholm, held in Sweden, and scored +1=1 against the future grandmaster Gösta Stoltz. On his return, he entertained his schoolmates with a vivid account of the rough sea journey back to Russia. Botvinnik was commissioned to annotate two games from the match, and the fact that his analyses were to be published made him aware of the need for objectivity. In December 1926, he became a candidate member of his school's Komsomol branch. Around this time his mother became concerned about his poor physique, and as a result he started a programme of daily exercise, which he maintained for most of his life. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=242416 | 773,290 |
2,041,331 | Murphy’s career has centered on combining fluorescence-based cell measurement methods with quantitative and computational methods. He and his collaborators did extensive work on the application of flow cytometry to analyze endocytic membrane traffic beginning in the early 1980s and pioneered the application of machine learning methods to high-resolution fluorescence microscope images depicting subcellular location patterns in the mid-1990s. This work led to the development of the first systems for automatically recognizing all major organelle patterns in 2D and 3D images. He founded the CellOrganizer project for learning generative models of cell organization directly from microscope images. He also leads the image analysis and modeling efforts for the National Center for Multiscale Modeling of Biological Systems. He has also done extensive work on using active machine learning to drive biomedical discovery, and founded the world’s first M.S. program in Automated Science. His research publications have been cited over 13,000 times and his h-index is 57 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34226786 | 2,040,151 |
1,801,776 | The first operational launch of a Ryan Q-2A Firebee drone at Eglin AFB was made on 14 January 1956, following operational suitability testing by the APGC's Air Force Operational Test Center. Launched in flight from the wing of a Douglas DB-26C Invader, the drone flew a controlled flight pattern over the Eglin water ranges over Gulf of Mexico before deploying a parachute for recovery by a boat of the 3201st Boat Squadron. It was rinsed with fresh water and returned to Eglin for overhaul and preparation for future flights, the first time a Firebee had been recovered from a water area. "Overall command of the mission was in AFOTC's 3241st Test Group (Interceptor), commanded by Colonel Thomas D. DeJarnette. Captain Alexander J. Bobrowski of the 3241st Test Group served as project officer. The drone was controlled under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Woolwine, Commander of the 3205th Drone Group." Local boaters were warned that Firebee tests would continue over water ranges 32 through 45, Warning Area 151, off Santa Rosa Island, 15 to 60 miles offshore, with drone launches occurring from a point approximately 20 miles offshore. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33714574 | 1,800,767 |
61,149 | The most extreme forms of Cubism were not those practiced by Picasso and Braque, who resisted total abstraction. Other Cubists, by contrast, especially František Kupka, and those considered Orphists by Apollinaire (Delaunay, Léger, Picabia and Duchamp), accepted abstraction by removing visible subject matter entirely. Kupka's two entries at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, "Amorpha-Fugue à deux couleurs" and "Amorpha chromatique chaude", were highly abstract (or nonrepresentational) and metaphysical in orientation. Both Duchamp in 1912 and Picabia from 1912 to 1914 developed an expressive and allusive abstraction dedicated to complex emotional and sexual themes. Beginning in 1912 Delaunay painted a series of paintings entitled "Simultaneous Windows", followed by a series entitled "Formes Circulaires", in which he combined planar structures with bright prismatic hues; based on the optical characteristics of juxtaposed colors his departure from reality in the depiction of imagery was quasi-complete. In 1913–14 Léger produced a series entitled "Contrasts of Forms", giving a similar stress to color, line and form. His Cubism, despite its abstract qualities, was associated with themes of mechanization and modern life. Apollinaire supported these early developments of abstract Cubism in "Les Peintres cubistes" (1913), writing of a new "pure" painting in which the subject was vacated. But in spite of his use of the term Orphism these works were so different that they defy attempts to place them in a single category. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37803 | 61,124 |
1,816,622 | The National Health Security Office, which institutes and manages the largest health plan in Thailand (Universal Coverage Scheme [UC]), initiated a collaborative research and development project with two independent research institutes – the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program and the International Health Policy Program – in 2009. The aim of the project was to develop an optimal strategy for the development of the UC benefit package, that is, to determine which interventions should be candidate for public reimbursement. The project is named "research for development of health benefit package under the universal health care coverage scheme", or known as UCBP (see www.ucbp.net). The project incorporates multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and a deliberative process and multi stakeholders’ involvement to guide national-level priority setting in health care coverage decision. The review documented the experience of seven health technology assessment organizations in Canada, England and Wales, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Spain, which all use an explicit process of priority setting. Its findings concluded that all these organizations consider multiple criteria, involved multiple stakeholders, and distinguish, in one way or another, four basic steps in their priority setting Process. These steps were then also applied in the Thai setting and included. The results of the review were adapted to the Thai setting, resulting in 4 steps of explicit priority setting including: 1) nomination of interventions for assessments, 2) selection of interventions for assessment, 3) technology assessment of interventions, and 4) appraisal of interventions. Since the beginning of the research project up to 119 topics have been proposed for inclusion into the benefit package, with 53 topics selected for further research or HTA analysis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50741092 | 1,815,588 |
1,924,414 | In January 2015, Michael Moss of "The New York Times" published an exposé on the mistreatment of research animals at USMARC after being approached by a scientist and veterinarian who worked at the center for 24 years. The article stated that because the 1966 Animal Welfare Act contains an exemption for farm animals, the research center "has become a destination for the kind of high-risk, potentially controversial research that other institutions will not do or are no longer allowed to do." Among other things, the article commented that the center had no veterinarians on its staff, with surgical procedures done by workers without veterinary degrees or licenses; the research involves selectively breeding animals to give birth to too many children; that sheep are made to give birth unaided in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation. It also stated that in 1985, a scientist wrote the director with a warning, “Membership [to other organizations] may bring more visibility [to USMARC activities], which we may not want.” In response, USDA officials said the center abides by federal rules on animal welfare. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45153360 | 1,923,311 |
1,434,842 | Partly in response to renewed public interest in astronomy following the 1835 return of Halley's Comet, the Harvard College Observatory was founded in 1839, when the Harvard Corporation appointed William Cranch Bond as an "Astronomical Observer to the University". For its first four years of operation, the observatory was situated at the Dana-Palmer House (where Bond also resided) near Harvard Yard, and consisted of little more than three small telescopes and an astronomical clock. In his 1840 book recounting the history of the college, then Harvard President Josiah Quincy III noted that "there is wanted a reflecting telescope equatorially mounted". This telescope, the 15-inch "Great Refractor", opened seven years later (in 1847) at the top of Observatory Hill in Cambridge (where it still exists today, housed in the oldest of the CfA's complex of buildings). The telescope was the largest in the United States from 1847 until 1867. William Bond and pioneer photographer John Adams Whipple used the Great Refractor to produce the first clear Daguerrotypes of the Moon (winning them an award at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London). Bond and his son, George Phillips Bond (the second director of HCO), used it to discover Saturn's 8th moon, Hyperion (which was also independently discovered by William Lassell). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1505128 | 1,434,036 |
129,508 | Fossil and genetic evidence indicate that mycorrhizae are ancient, potentially as old as the terrestrialization of plants. Genetic evidence indicates that all land plants share a single common ancestor, which appears to have quickly adopted mycorrhizal symbiosis, and research suggests that proto-mycorrhizal fungi were a key factor enabling plant terrestrialization. The 400 million year old Rhynie chert contains an assemblage of fossil plants preserved in sufficient detail that arbuscular mycorrhizae have been observed in the stems of "Aglaophyton major", giving a lower bound for how late mycorrhizal symbiosis may have developed. Ectomycorrhizae developed substantially later, during the Jurassic period, while most other modern mycorrhizal families, including orchid and erchoid mycorrhizae, date to the period of angiosperm radiation in the Cretaceous period. There is genetic evidence that the symbiosis between legumes and nitrogen-fixing bacteria is an extension of mycorrhizal symbiosis. The modern distribution of mycorrhizal fungi appears to reflect an increasing complexity and competition in root morphology associated with the dominance of angiosperms in the Cenozoic Era, characterized by complex ecological dynamics between species. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59358 | 129,456 |
403,693 | Players start the game with the ability to equip two weapons but later gain up to four weapon slots, as well as slots for an energy shield, a grenade modification, and a class modification. Items collected can be sold back at vendors for money that then can be used to buy better items. One of the key features of "Borderlands" is the randomly generated weapons and items created either as dropped by enemies, found in storage chests about the game, on the ground, sold at vendors in the game, or as quest reward items. The game uses a "Procedural Content Creation System" to create these weapons and items, which can alter their firepower, rate of fire, and accuracy, add in elemental effects such as a chance to set foes on fire or cover them in burning acid, and at rare times other special bonuses such as regenerating the player's ammo. A color-coded scale is used to indicate the rarity of the weapon or item. According to Gearbox developers, the random system could generate around 16-17 million variations of weapons. The Procedural system is also used to create the characteristic of random enemies that the player may face. This allows for enemies of the same species to have widely varying attacks: for example, variations of "spiderants" in the game could leap around and would jump onto players' faces, while another variant can roll up into a ball and attack people, depending on the content generator. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12785426 | 403,493 |
963,987 | I will insist particularly upon the following fact, which seems to me quite important and beyond the phenomena which one could expect to observe: The same crystalline crusts [of potassium uranyl sulfate], arranged the same way with respect to the photographic plates, in the same conditions and through the same screens, but sheltered from the excitation of incident rays and kept in darkness, still produce the same photographic images. Here is how I was led to make this observation: among the preceding experiments, some had been prepared on Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th of February, and since the sun was out only intermittently on these days, I kept the apparatuses prepared and returned the cases to the darkness of a bureau drawer, leaving in place the crusts of the uranium salt. Since the sun did not come out in the following days, I developed the photographic plates on the 1st of March, expecting to find the images very weak. Instead the silhouettes appeared with great intensity ... One hypothesis which presents itself to the mind naturally enough would be to suppose that these rays, whose effects have a great similarity to the effects produced by the rays studied by M. Lenard and M. Röntgen, are invisible rays emitted by phosphorescence and persisting infinitely longer than the duration of the luminous rays emitted by these bodies. However, the present experiments, without being contrary to this hypothesis, do not warrant this conclusion. I hope that the experiments which I am pursuing at the moment will be able to bring some clarification to this new class of phenomena. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53711 | 963,478 |
1,085,114 | The IOP accredits undergraduate degrees (BSc/BA and MSci/MPhys) in physics in British and Irish universities. At post-16 level, the IOP developed the 'Advancing Physics' A-level course, in conjunction with the OCR examining board, which is accredited by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Advancing Physics was sold to Oxford University Press in January 2011. The IOP also developed the Integrated Sciences degree, which is run at four universities in England. The IOP provides an important educational service for secondary schools in the UK. This is the Lab in a Lorry, a mobile laboratory in a large articulated truck. This has three small laboratories where schoolchildren can try out various hands-on experiments, using physics equipment not usually available in the average school laboratory. Sponsorship is provided by EDF Energy and support from the British Science Association. IOP runs the Stimulating Physics Network, aimed at increasing the uptake of physics at A-level, and administers teacher-training scholarships funded by the Department for Education. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=358381 | 1,084,556 |
964,219 | Theories of embodiment propose that the processing of emotional states and the concepts used to refer to them are partly based on one's own perceptual, motor, and somatosensory systems. Research has shown, through manipulations of facial expressions and posture under controlled laboratory settings, how the embodiment of a person's emotion casually affects the way emotional information is processed. Similar studies have evidenced that nodding the head while listening to persuasive messages led to more positive attitudes toward the message than when shaking the head. When people are led to adopt certain bodily positions indirectly associated with different feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness, these corporeal postures are said to modulate the experienced affect. In a series of experiments on the neurobiological basis of language, researchers investigated the role of embodiment in emotional language through electromyographic (EMG) measurements of specific muscle regions. They found that action verbs that refer to positive emotional expressions (e.g., to smile) elicit smile muscle activation as compared to mere positive adjectives unrelated to actions (e.g., funny). Further research found that action verb stimuli also yield muscle activation and shape judgment only when muscle activation is not inhibited. Thus, these results suggest that language is embodied rather than symbolic. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33034640 | 963,710 |
1,559,265 | In July 2010, the Presidential Initiative on Science and Technology offered a further boost by creating a fund to foster innovation at Makerere University over the next five years. When President Museveni visited Makerere University in December 2009, he noticed that many undergraduate students had produced interesting prototypes of machines and implements, and that PhD students and senior researchers were working on inventions with potential for transforming rural Ugandan society but that innovation was being held back by the lack of modern research and teaching laboratories. After the visit, he decided to create a Presidential Innovations Fund endowed with UGX 25 billion ("circa" US$8.5 million) over five years to support innovation-related projects at the university's College of Engineering, Art, Design and Technology. The fund became operational in July 2010. It covered the cost of modernizing laboratories and the implementation of ten projects at the university. It also financed undergraduate science and engineering programmes, academia–private sector partnerships, student internships, science policy formulation and science popularization in schools and communities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54235129 | 1,558,379 |
1,178,134 | Franklin recommends that resistance take the form of refusing to speak the language of the occupiers. This language includes such terms as "stakeholders", "users", "health-care providers" and "consumers of education" to refer to teachers and students, doctors, nurses, patients and communities. Franklin also calls for resistance through court challenges and "the creative use of electronic media to bypass the occupation forces' control of information." Finally, Franklin is a strong supporter of "citizen politics", a civic movement which focuses on practical solutions to common problems—everything from the absence of peace to homelessness and local traffic congestion. Borrowing a Quaker term, Franklin calls on citizens to engage in "scrupling", the process of sitting down together to discuss and clarify common moral and political concerns. She writes that citizen politics does not seek to overthrow existing governments but to improve them "whether those in power like it or not." The movement also tries to defend communities against those intent, in Franklin's words, on "turning the globe into one giant commercial resource base, while denying a decent and appropriate habitat to many of the world's citizens." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1094203 | 1,177,510 |
143,296 | One of the earliest recorded uses of V12 engines in automobiles was in October 1913, when a custom-built racing car competed at the Brooklands circuit in the United Kingdom. The car was entered by Louis Coatalen, who was chief engineer of the Sunbeam Motor Car Company. It was named 'Toodles V' (after Coatalen's pet name for his wife) and achieved several speed records in 1913 and 1914. The V12 engine had a displacement of , an aluminum crankcase, iron cylinders with L-shaped combustion chambers, a cam-in-block valvetrain and a V-angle of 60 degrees. Each bank of the engine consisted of two-cylinder blocks with three cylinders each. Valve clearance was set by grinding the relevant parts, the engine lacking any easy means of adjustment. This reflected the intention for the engine to be later used in aircraft since any adjustment method that could go wrong in flight was to be avoided. As initially built, the V12 was rated at at 2,400 rpm and weighed approximately . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32660 | 143,238 |
2,106,852 | Born in Nantucket on September 16, 1830, into a scientifically inclined family, his mother was a cousin of Benjamin Franklin, and John Greenleaf Whittier was a friend of his father, William, who taught astronomy at Harvard. At age 19 he joined the US Coastal Survey, where his first assignment was a map of the waters around his home of Nantucket. From 1856 until 1860 he worked on a map of New York Harbor, which was considered the most accurate of its day. During the American Civil War he helped map the coasts of North Carolina, and in 1896 he went to a tour through the Old World to study their watery engineering. There he met Ferdinand de Lesseps. In 1888 he helped co-found the National Geographic Society, but shortly thereafter had a health crisis that prevented him from doing any work for the rest of his life. He died in his daughter's house in New York City on December 1, 1902. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39736771 | 2,105,639 |
1,526,101 | As illustrated above, the basic constructive induction algorithm in MDR is very simple. However, its implementation for mining patterns from real data can be computationally complex. As with any machine learning algorithm there is always concern about overfitting. That is, machine learning algorithms are good at finding patterns in completely random data. It is often difficult to determine whether a reported pattern is an important signal or just chance. One approach is to estimate the generalizability of a model to independent datasets using methods such as cross-validation. Models that describe random data typically don't generalize. Another approach is to generate many random permutations of the data to see what the data mining algorithm finds when given the chance to overfit. Permutation testing makes it possible to generate an empirical p-value for the result. Replication in independent data may also provide evidence for an MDR model but can be sensitive to difference in the data sets. These approaches have all been shown to be useful for choosing and evaluating MDR models. An important step in a machine learning exercise is interpretation. Several approaches have been used with MDR including entropy analysis and pathway analysis. Tips and approaches for using MDR to model gene-gene interactions have been reviewed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3259720 | 1,525,238 |
677,232 | KPF's introduction to the Asian market began with the Japan Railways Central Towers project in Nagoya (1999). Within 10 years, KPF had projects in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. Completed KPF projects in Asia include Plaza 66 on Shanghai’s Nanjing Xi Lu (2001), Roppongi Hills in Tokyo (2003), Continental Engineering Corporation Tower in Taipei (2003), the Rodin Pavilion in Seoul (2003), the Merrill Lynch Japan Head Office in Tokyo (2004), Shr-Hwa International Tower in Taichung (2004), and the Shanghai World Financial Center (2008), which was named the “Best Tall Building Overall” by the Council on Tall Buildings and the Urban Habitat in 2008. KPF worked with renowned structural engineers, Leslie E. Robertson Associates, to maximize the tower’s floor plate and material efficiency by perfecting its tapered form. In addition to this work in Asia, KPF has completed projects in: the Middle East, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Headquarters (2007) and the Marina Towers (2008); South America including Ventura Corporate Towers in Rio de Janeiro (2008) and Infinity Tower in São Paulo (2012); Australia, including Chifley Tower in Sydney (1992); and has also worked on several projects in Africa. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1253625 | 676,879 |
1,168,380 | Canan Dagdeviren studied physics engineering at the Hacettepe University in Ankara, graduating in 2007. She obtained a Master of Science degree from Sabancı University in Istanbul, and won a Fulbright scholarship for study in the United States. With this scholarship, she chose to conduct research in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where she focused on exploring patterning techniques and creating piezoelectric biomedical systems. Here, one of the projects that she developed was a conformable, piezoelectric, energy harvester that converts mechanical energy from internal organ movements into electric energy to power medical devices. It is soft and flexible and conforms to the heart as well as other soft tissues. This technology could extend the battery life of implanted electronics or eliminate the need for battery replacement, sparing patients from repeated operations and the risk of surgical complications. In August 2014 she received her PhD degree. Her advisor was John A. Rogers, and the title of her PhD thesis was Ferroelectric/Piezoelectric Materials Flexible/Stretchable/Wearable/Implantable Sensors, Actuators, Mechanical Energy Harvesters, Transducers, Microfabrication. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61422095 | 1,167,762 |
1,301,368 | Antibody allotypes came back to spotlight due to development and use of therapies based on monoclonal antibodies. These recombinant human glycoproteins and proteins are now well established in clinical practise, but sometimes leads to adverse effects such as generation of antitherapeutic antibodies that negates therapy or even cause severe reactions to the therapy. This reaction may be attributed to differences between therapeutics itself or may arise between same therapeutics produced by different companies or even between different lots produced by the same company. To prevent production of such antitherapeutic antibodies, ideally, all clinical used proteins and glycoproteins should poses same allotype as natural patient’s product, this way the presence of ‘altered self‘ which poses a potential target for immune system, is limited. Whilst many parameters connected to developing and manufacturing process that might predispose monoclonal antibodies to cause immune response are well known and appropriate steps are taken to monitor and control these unwanted effects, complications linked with administration of monoclonal antibodies to genetically diverse human population are less well described. Humans exhibit abundance of genotypes and phenotypes, however all currently licensed IgG therapeutic immunoglobulins are developed as single allotypic/ polymorphic form. Patients that are homozygous for alternative phenotype are therefore at higher risk of developing potential immune response to the therapy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10807783 | 1,300,654 |
612,841 | Poincaré's attempt of a four-dimensional reformulation of the new mechanics was not continued by himself, so it was Hermann Minkowski (1907), who worked out the consequences of that notion (other contributions were made by Roberto Marcolongo (1906) and Richard Hargreaves (1908)). This was based on the work of many mathematicians of the 19th century like Arthur Cayley, Felix Klein, or William Kingdon Clifford, who contributed to group theory, invariant theory and projective geometry, formulating concepts such as the Cayley–Klein metric or the hyperboloid model in which the interval formula_27 and its invariance was defined in terms of hyperbolic geometry. Using similar methods, Minkowski succeeded in formulating a geometrical interpretation of the Lorentz transformation. He completed, for example, the concept of four vectors; he created the Minkowski diagram for the depiction of spacetime; he was the first to use expressions like world line, proper time, Lorentz invariance/covariance, etc.; and most notably he presented a four-dimensional formulation of electrodynamics. Similar to Poincaré he tried to formulate a Lorentz-invariant law of gravity, but that work was subsequently superseded by Einstein's elaborations on gravitation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1790788 | 612,530 |
1,864,616 | The crystal structure complex with platensimycin employed a C163Q mutant, which gave a 50-fold increase in apparent binding. The Gln163 residue lies adjacent to the carboxylate of platensimycin but makes no specific hydrogen bond. The close proximity of the carboxylate of platensimycin (presumed to be an anion) to the anionic thiol of Cys163 in the wild type enzyme may suggest the reason behind the increase in binding of the C163Q mutant. The second set of residues worth considering comprises His303 and His340, which play a role in the decarboxylation mechanism of the malonyl moiety. In particular, His303 activates a structured water to attack the carboxylate of the incoming malonyl-ACP. The crystal structure of FabF also demonstrates that His340 forms a hydrogen bond between the amide nitrogen of Leu342 and the N-delta- atom of the imidazole ring meaning that the lone pair must reside on this atom. In the platensimycin crystal structure the structured water adjacent to His303 is no longer present which may suggest an alternative electronic state for this residue. A strong possibility exists that His303 would present itself as a cation capable of forming an ionic interaction with the benzoic acid group of platensimycin. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5192329 | 1,863,544 |
1,029,014 | Over the winter months Ferrari technical director Mauro Forghieri and his engineers at Ferrari developed the car into 312B/2 form. Jacky Ickx and Clay Regazzoni were retained but the team's third driver, Italian Ignazio Giunti was killed in January during the Buenos Aires 1000 kilometer long-distance sportscar race. Jean-Pierre Beltoise was pushing his Matra sportscar back to the pits when he was hit by Giunti's Ferrari 312P; the Italian was killed in the ensuing crash. As a result, Mario Andretti was hired on a part-time basis to be the team's third driver; Andretti had been driving Ferraris in long distance sportscar races during the two previous years. Tyrrell retained Jackie Stewart and Francois Cevert, while Team Lotus also developed its 1970 car for Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi and Swede Reine Wisell (although design work was progressing on the Lotus 56, a gas turbine car powered by Pratt & Whitney engines). March lost both of its 1970 drivers: Chris Amon, moving to Matra to join Beltoise and Jo Siffert replacing Jack Oliver at BRM as teammate to Pedro Rodriguez and new driver Howden Ganley. McLaren continued with Denny Hulme and Peter Gethin but the Alfa Romeo engines used by Andrea de Adamich moved to March where the Italian became Ronnie Peterson's teammate in the curious March 711 factory cars. Rob Walker decided that he could no longer afford to continue his private team and transferred his Brooke Bond Oxo sponsorship to Surtees, which recruited second driver Rolf Stommelen (with backing from Auto Motor und Sport and Eifelland caravans) from Brabham. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1140090 | 1,028,480 |
99,907 | The x86 architecture is a variable instruction length, primarily "CISC" design with emphasis on backward compatibility. The instruction set is not typical CISC, however, but basically an extended version of the simple eight-bit 8008 and 8080 architectures. Byte-addressing is enabled and words are stored in memory with little-endian byte order. Memory access to unaligned addresses is allowed for almost all instructions. The largest native size for integer "arithmetic" and memory addresses (or offsets) is 16, 32 or 64 bits depending on architecture generation (newer processors include direct support for smaller integers as well). Multiple scalar values can be handled simultaneously via the SIMD unit present in later generations, as described below. Immediate addressing offsets and immediate data may be expressed as 8-bit quantities for the frequently occurring cases or contexts where a -128..127 range is enough. Typical instructions are therefore 2 or 3 bytes in length (although some are much longer, and some are single-byte). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34198 | 99,862 |
1,087,514 | Before the "Records of the Grand Historian" ("Shiji") by Sima Qian (145–86 BCE), there existed terse chronicles of events such as the "Spring and Autumn Annals" and the chronicle found at Shuihudi covering events in the State of Qin and Qin dynasty from 306 to 217 BCE. There was also the "Classic of History"—part of the Confucian canon—which recorded the deeds of past rulers and political events (sometimes mythological instead of historical). However, Sima's work is considered the first of China's Standard Histories, laid the groundwork for Chinese historiography by creating the first universal history of China. He divided his work of one hundred and thirty chapters into basic annals, chronological tables in grid format (with year-by-year accounts since 841 BCE, the start of the Gonghe Regency), treatises on general subjects (such as the economy and the calendar), histories of hereditary houses and states, biographies on individuals arranged in roughly chronological order, and his own autobiography as the last chapter. Being a court archivist allowed Sima to utilize eighty textual sources in addition to memorials, edicts, and stone inscriptions. These sources enhanced the enormous scope of his work, which mentions roughly four thousand people by name. He also traveled extensively to interview witnesses for more recent accounts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21786810 | 1,086,955 |
1,778,742 | USCT systems share with the common tomography the fundamental architectural similarity that the aperture, the active imaging elements, surround the object. For the distribution of ultrasound transducers around the measurement object, forming the aperture, multiple design approaches exist. There exist mono-, bi- and multistatic setups of transducer configurations. Common are 1D- or 2D- linear arrays of ultrasound transducers acting as emitters on one side of the object, on the opposing side of the object a similar array acting as receiver is placed, forming a parallel setup. Sometimes accompanied with the additional ability to be moved to gather more information from additional angles. While cost efficient to build the main disadvantage of such a setup is the limited ability (or inability) of gathering reflectivity information, as such an aperture is limited to only transmission information. Another aperture approach is a ring of transducers, sometimes with the degree of freedom of motorized lifting for gathering additional information over the height for 3D imaging ("stacking"). Full 3D setups, with no inherent need for aperture movements, exist in form of apertures formed by semi-spherical distributed transducers. While the most expensive setup they offer the advantage of nearly-uniform data, gathered from many directions. Also, they are fast in data taking as they don't require time-costly mechanical movements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48503281 | 1,777,740 |
1,955,150 | Solution-phase reaction has historically been the method that has been most studied, and a general consensus that has evolved with regards to the conditions required for the formation of smooth aminosilane films includes the following: (1) an anhydrous solvent such as toluene is required, with a rigidly controlled trace amount of water to regulate the degree of polymerization of aminosilanes at the surface and in solution; (2) formation of oligomers and polymers is favored at higher silane concentrations (>10%); (3) moderate temperatures (60–90 °C) can disrupt non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen bonds, leading to fewer silane molecules that are weakly tethered to the surface. Additionally, condition (3) favors desorption of water from the substrate into the toluene phase20; (4) Rinsing with solvents such as toluene, ethanol and water following the silanization reaction favors the removal of weakly bonded silane molecules and the hydrolysis of residual alkoxy linkages in the layer; (5) drying and curing at high temperature (110 °C) favors the formation of siloxane linkages and also converts ammonium ions to the neutral amine, which is more reactive. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33987226 | 1,954,028 |
1,667,519 | Finally, in any type of thunderstorm, the surface cold pool of air associated with the downdraft will stabilize the air and form a cloud-free area that will end along the gust front. This mesoscale front, when moving into a warm and unstable air mass, will lift it and cumulus clouds appear on satellite pictures. This line is likely the point of further convection and storms, especially if it coincides with fronts from other thunderstorms in the vicinity. One can notice it at the leading edge of a squall line, in the southeastern quadrant of a typical supercell (in the northern hemisphere), or different regions around other thunderstorms. They may also be visible as an outflow boundary hours or days after convection and can pinpoint areas of favored thunderstorm development, the possible direction of movement, and even likelihood for tornadoes. The speed of forward movement of the outflow boundary or gust front to some degree modulates the likelihood of tornadoes and helps determine whether a storm will be enhanced by its presence or the inflow be choked off thus weakening and possibly killing the storm. Thunderstorms may move along slow-moving or stationary outflow boundaries and tornadoes are more likely; whereas fast-moving gust fronts in many cases weaken thunderstorms after impact and are less likely to produce tornadoes—although brief tornadoes may occur at the time of impact. Fast-moving gust fronts may eventually decelerate and become slow-moving or stationary outflow boundaries with the characteristic "agitated area" of cumulus fields previously mentioned. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12253521 | 1,666,580 |
185,419 | Thus, over time the cameras and recording media for fluoroscopic imaging have progressed: The original kind of fluoroscopy, and the common kind for its first half century of existence, simply used none, because for most diagnosis and treatment, they were not essential. For those investigations that needed to be transmitted or recorded (such as for training or research), movie cameras using film (such as 16 mm film) were the medium. In the 1950s, analog electronic video cameras (at first only producing live output, but later using video tape recorders) appeared. Since the 1990s, digital video cameras, flat panel detectors, and storage of data to local servers or (more recently) secure cloud servers have been used. Late-model fluoroscopes all use digital image processing and image analysis software, which not only helps to produce optimal image clarity and contrast, but also allows that result with a minimal radiation dose (because signal processing can take tiny inputs from low radiation doses and amplify them while to some extent also differentiating signal from noise). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=418974 | 185,322 |
239,253 | Of the six alkaline earth metals, beryllium, calcium, barium, and radium have at least one naturally occurring radioisotope; magnesium and strontium do not. Beryllium-7, beryllium-10, and calcium-41 are trace radioisotopes; calcium-48 and barium-130 only decay by double beta decay and have very long half-lives (longer than the age of the universe) - thus they are primordial radionuclides; and all isotopes of radium are radioactive. Calcium-48 is the lightest nuclide to undergo double beta decay. Calcium and barium are weakly radioactive: calcium contains about 0.1874% calcium-48, and barium contains about 0.1062% barium-130. The longest lived isotope of radium is radium-226 with a half-life of 1600 years; it and radium-223, -224, and -228 occur naturally in the decay chains of primordial thorium and uranium. Beryllium-8 is notable by its absence as it nigh instantaneously decays into two alpha particles whenever it is formed. The triple alpha process in stars can only occur at energies high enough for beryllium-8 to encounter a third alpha particle before it decays. This is why most main sequence stars spend billions of years hydrogen burning but never or only briefly during their red giant phase initiate helium burning. Strontium-90 is a common fission product of the fission of uranium and has been produced in appreciable quantities by humanmade nuclear reactions as well as a tiny secular equilibrium concentration in uranium due to spontaneous fission. Radioisotopes of alkaline earth metals are usually "bone seekers" as they behave chemically similar to calcium and may do significant harm to bone marrow (a rapidly dividing tissue) when they accumulate there. This property is also made use of in radiotherapy of certain bone cancers as the chemical properties allow the radionuclide to target the cancerous growth in the bone while leaving the rest of the body unharmed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37411 | 239,133 |
1,614,779 | "Stylidium graminifolium" is one of the few "Stylidium" species commercially available for sale as seed. This species, along with six other triggerplants, was tested for horticultural value and cold hardiness by Douglas Darnowski in the United States from 2000 to 2002. Dr. Darnowski's study concluded that "S. graminifolium" was able to survive cold temperatures down to -10°C, making it suitable for growing outside in as low as USDA hardiness zone 8. Darnowski also postulated that "S. graminifolium"'s attractive floral spikes could be of use in floriculture and could be used to replace purple loosestrife in winter and spring arrangements. It has a relatively long flowering period and has somewhat specific conditions for germination, including smoke treatments and higher temperatures to simulate a bushfire, though germination can occur without these conditions. These germination requirements reduce the risk that it will become an invasive species. It is also able to grow on nutrient-poor soils and withstand significant drought. These attributes increase its potential for floricultural use. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10434036 | 1,613,873 |
675,956 | Once a metric is given on a surface and a base point is fixed, there is a unique geodesic connecting the base point to each sufficiently nearby point. The direction of the geodesic at the base point and the distance uniquely determine the other endpoint. These two bits of data, a direction and a magnitude, thus determine a tangent vector at the base point. The map from tangent vectors to endpoints smoothly sweeps out a neighbourhood of the base point and defines what is called the "exponential map", defining a local coordinate chart at that base point. The neighbourhood swept out has similar properties to balls in Euclidean space, namely any two points in it are joined by a unique geodesic. This property is called "geodesic convexity" and the coordinates are called "normal coordinates". The explicit calculation of normal coordinates can be accomplished by considering the differential equation satisfied by geodesics. The convexity properties are consequences of [[Gauss's lemma (Riemannian geometry)|Gauss's lemma]] and its generalisations. Roughly speaking this lemma states that geodesics starting at the base point must cut the spheres of fixed radius centred on the base point at right angles. Geodesic polar coordinates are obtained by combining the exponential map with polar coordinates on tangent vectors at the base point. The Gaussian curvature of the surface is then given by the second order deviation of the metric at the point from the Euclidean metric. In particular the Gaussian curvature is an invariant of the metric, Gauss's celebrated "[[Theorema Egregium]]". A convenient way to understand the curvature comes from an ordinary differential equation, first considered by Gauss and later generalized by Jacobi, arising from the change of normal coordinates about two different points. The Gauss–Jacobi equation provides another way of computing the Gaussian curvature. Geometrically it explains what happens to geodesics from a fixed base point as the endpoint varies along a small curve segment through data recorded in the [[Jacobi field]], a [[vector field]] along the geodesic. One and a quarter centuries after Gauss and Jacobi, [[Marston Morse]] gave a more conceptual interpretation of the Jacobi field in terms of second derivatives of the energy function on the infinite-dimensional [[Hilbert manifold]] of paths. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15513875 | 675,603 |
2,047,596 | In the preliminary rounds, Australia were defeated by eventual gold medalists United States 85 to 29; silver medalists, Israel, 101 to 36 and France 74 to 53. As a result, the team did not advance in the competition and finished in 8th position. Kevin Coombs was the team captain and coach however, found it difficult to manage. In his book, "A Fortunate Accident," Coombs acknowledges, "I tried to coach but I was overawed. When you're coaching against the best in the world and trying to play and be the best as well...it was just bit much for me. One of the senior players, Frankie Ponta, and Mike Wilson, who was our team manager, took over." Player John Martain cut his hand on the push rim of his wheelchair, in one of the early wheelchair basketball games, which ended his campaign. The geographical distance of Australia from other competitive countries was a disadvantage to the team due to the lack of opportunity for international competition that is readily available to other countries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31908691 | 2,046,415 |
41,489 | Modafinil has been studied and reported to be effective in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with significantly less abuse potential than conventional psychostimulants like methylphenidate and amphetamines. In the United States, an application to market modafinil for pediatric ADHD was submitted to the FDA. However, approval was denied due to concerns about rare but serious dermatological toxicity (specifically, the occurrence of Stevens–Johnson syndrome). In any case, modafinil may be used off-label to treat ADHD in both children and adults. However, evidence of modafinil for treatment of adult ADHD is mixed, and a 2016 systematic review of alternative drug therapies for adult ADHD could not recommend its use in this context. In a large phase 3 clinical trial of modafinil for adult ADHD, modafinil was not effective in improving symptoms and there was a high rate of side effects (86%) and discontinuation (47%). The poor tolerability of modafinil in this study was possibly due to the use of excessively high doses (210–510 mg/day). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20690 | 41,474 |
944,952 | The Formula One effort initially looked promising, with March supplying its 701 chassis to Tyrrell for Jackie Stewart. These cars were merely a stopgap for Tyrrell, who no longer had the use of Matra chassis and were in the process of constructing their own car; March was the only option available given clashing fuel contracts. In addition, the factory ran two team cars for Jo Siffert (Porsche were paying for his drive) and Chris Amon sponsored by STP. A third STP car, entered by Andy Granatelli for Mario Andretti, appeared on several occasions. Ronnie Peterson appeared in a semi-works car for Colin Crabbe when his works Formula Two commitments allowed; various other 701s went to privateers. The team constructed ten Formula One chassis that year, in addition to Formula Two, Formula Three, Formula Ford and Can-Am chassis. Stewart gave the March its first Formula One victory, at the 1970 Spanish Grand Prix, and both Amon and Stewart took a non-championship race victory, but the works team did not win a Grand Prix. The 701 had distinctive aerofoil-profile fuel tanks at the sides of the car designed by Peter Wright of Specialised Mouldings; Wright had been involved with BRM's abortive ground-effect programme in the late sixties and later worked on the groundbreaking Lotus 78. The 701's tanks lacked endplates and skirts to help generate any meaningful ground effect. Herd (in Mike Lawrence's history of the team "Four Guys and a Telephone") described the 701 as essentially a good 1969 car and not what he would have done had he been able to run a small team for a star like Rindt - the 701 was designed and built very quickly and he claims he would have built something more like the 711. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1347020 | 944,450 |
1,675,370 | Nanothreads can be thought of essentially as "flexible diamond". The extremely high specific strength predicted for them by modeling has attracted attention for applications such as space elevators and would be useful in other applications related to transportation, aerospace, and sports equipment. They may uniquely combine extreme strength, flexibility, and resilience. Chemically substituted nanothreads may facilitate load transfer between neighbors through covalent bonding to transfer their mechanical strength to a surrounding matrix. Modeling also suggests that the kinks associated with Stone-Wales transformations in nanothreads may facilitate interfacial load transfer to a surrounding matrix, making them useful for high strength composites. In contrast to carbon nanotubes, bonds to the exterior of nanothreads need not disrupt their carbon core because only three of the four tetrahedral bonds are needed form it. The “extra” bond usually formed to hydrogen could be instead be linked to another nanothread or another molecule or atom. Nanothreads may thus be thought of as "hybrids" that are both hydrocarbon molecules and carbon nanomaterials. Bonds to carbon nanotubes require their carbon to change from near planar sp-bonding to tetrahedral sp-bonding, thus disrupting their tubular geometry and possibly weakening them. Nanothreads may be less susceptible to loss of strength through defects than carbon nanotubes. Thus far the extreme strength predicted for carbon nanotubes has largely not been realized in practical applications because of issues with load transfer to the surroundings and defects at various length scales from that of atoms on up. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44111579 | 1,674,428 |
546,145 | The first attempts to study whole transcriptomes began in the early 1990s. Subsequent technological advances since the late 1990s have repeatedly transformed the field and made transcriptomics a widespread discipline in biological sciences. There are two key contemporary techniques in the field: microarrays, which quantify a set of predetermined sequences, and RNA-Seq, which uses high-throughput sequencing to record all transcripts. As the technology improved, the volume of data produced by each transcriptome experiment increased. As a result, data analysis methods have steadily been adapted to more accurately and efficiently analyse increasingly large volumes of data. Transcriptome databases getting bigger and more useful as transcriptomes continue to be collected and shared by researchers. It would be almost impossible to interpret the information contained in a transcriptome without the knowledge of previous experiments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54112223 | 545,859 |
161,091 | The sudden arrival and spread of the Corrupted Blood pandemic created widespread panic among "World of Warcraft"s user base. One player told "The Washington Post" that the "world chat would explode any time a city fell. We kept a close eye not only on our guild chat but on world chat as well to see where not to go. We didn't want to catch it." Casual "World of Warcraft" players who had read about the incident on the news would log into their accounts to better understand the pandemic, promptly infecting their characters. The in-game environment soon filled with the skeletons and corpses of player characters who had succumbed to the infection, and internet forums described seeing "hundreds" of these bodies throughout Azeroth's population centers. One player described Azeroth as "filled to the brim with corpses", the "streets literally white with the bones of the dead". Another posted that "[s]ome servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague. And anyone less than like Level 50 nearly immediately dies." Some players incorrectly speculated that the Corrupted Blood incident had been intentional, with developers intending for the Hakkar boss battle to lead directly into a pandemic-based game event. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2723081 | 161,006 |
112,944 | It is highly unlikely that this reaction will be able to create any atoms of ununennium in the near future, given the extremely difficult task of making sufficient amounts of einsteinium-254, which is favoured for production of ultraheavy elements because of its large mass, relatively long half-life of 270 days, and availability in significant amounts of several micrograms, to make a large enough target to increase the sensitivity of the experiment to the required level; einsteinium has not been found in nature and has only been produced in laboratories, and in quantities smaller than those needed for effective synthesis of superheavy elements. However, given that ununennium is only the first period 8 element on the extended periodic table, it may well be discovered in the near future through other reactions, and indeed an attempt to synthesise it is currently ongoing in Japan. Currently, none of the period 8 elements has been discovered yet, and it is also possible, due to drip instabilities, that only the lower period 8 elements, up to around element 128, are physically possible. No attempts at synthesis have been made for any heavier alkali metals: due to their extremely high atomic number, they would require new, more powerful methods and technology to make. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=666 | 112,899 |
2,100,196 | Minnesota Duluth was ranked 9th by the selection committee and given a #3 seed. They were placed opposite Michigan but COVID-19 prevented their meeting. Due to Michigan's withdrawal, UMD's first tournament game would be against top-seeded North Dakota and the two ended up producing a game for the ages. UMD started Stejskal in goal and the plan looked to be the perfect choice early; Stejskal turned aside every UND shot in the first two periods and allowed the Bulldogs to take a 2-goal lead early in the third. North Dakota pulled their goalie with more than 2 minutes to play, trying to jump-start their offense and, miraculously, the tactic worked. The Fighting Hawks scored twice in the final 100 seconds and tied the game. The two teams continued to battle into overtime and UMD scored in the extra frame, only to see the goal waved-off due to offsides. More than 40 minutes later, UND almost ended the game when the puck hit Stejskal in the shoulder, deflected up and landed on top of the goal. In the 4th overtime, it looked like North Dakota had caught a break when Stejskal had to leave the game due to cramping but, fortunately for UMD, Ryan Fanti was more than capable of holding the fort. It took another period before the game finally saw the winning goal and freshman Luke Mylymok ended the match with just his second career goal. This was the longest game in the history of the NCAA tournament but was still more than 27 minutes shorter than the longest contest in NCAA history. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67417834 | 2,098,988 |
1,315,462 | The brown bear ("Ursus arctos)" is one of the most omnivorous animals in the world and has been recorded consuming the greatest variety of foods of any bear. Throughout life, this species is regularly curious about the potential of eating virtually any organism or object that they encounter. Certainly no other animal in their given ecosystems, short perhaps of other bear species and humans, can claim to feed on as broad a range of dietary opportunities. Food that is both abundant and easily obtained is preferred. Their jaw structure has evolved to fit their dietary habits. Their diet varies enormously throughout their differing areas based on opportunity. In spring, winter-provided carrion, grasses, shoots, sedges and forbs are the dietary mainstays for brown bears from almost every part of their distribution. Fruits, including berries, become increasingly important during summer and early autumn. Roots and bulbs become critical in autumn for some inland bear populations if fruit crops are poor. The dietary variability is illustrated in the western United States, as meat made up 51% of the average year-around diet for grizzly bears from Yellowstone National Park, while it made up only 11% of the year-around diet for grizzlies from Glacier National Park a few hundred miles to the north. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63866123 | 1,314,741 |
1,204,430 | Over the next decade, the local school district failed to delivery on its pledge to adequately fund the revitalized Baltimore City College curriculum and enforce higher admissions standards. In 1975, City students, faculty, and influential alumni like then-Mayor of Baltimore William Donald Schaefer '39 and then-City Comptroller Hyman A. Pressman '33 again engaged in a series of coordinated campaigns, urging political leaders and members of the School Board to provide the resources and enforce the high standards the school needs to succeed. As a result, the City of Baltimore announced its plan to advance funds to complete a $9 million renovation of the school's main building and earmarked funding for a comprehensive, two-year study (1977–79). Subject matter experts in education and pedagogy, school faculty, parents, alumni, and other members of the school community formed the "New City College Task Force". The task force, which combed through two decades of previous improvement plans, academic proposals, and experimental curricula, recommended to the School Board a plan that included stricter admissions and retention standards, a revitalized humanities- and liberal arts-based curriculum, and the autonomy to selectively recruit new, highly qualified faculty and administrators. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=713949 | 1,203,785 |
1,145,170 | Genetic correlations are scientifically useful because genetic correlations can be analyzed over time within an individual longitudinally (e.g. intelligence is stable over a lifetime, due to the same genetic influences – childhood genetically correlates formula_5 with old age), or across studies or populations or ethnic groups/races , or across diagnoses, allowing discovery of whether different genes influence a trait over a lifetime (typically, they do not), whether different genes influence a trait in different populations due to differing local environments, whether there is disease heterogeneity across times or places or sex (particularly in psychiatric diagnoses there is uncertainty whether 1 country's 'autism' or 'schizophrenia' is the same as another's or whether diagnostic categories have shifted over time/place leading to different levels of ascertainment bias), and to what degree traits like autoimmune or psychiatric disorders or cognitive functioning meaningfully cluster due sharing a biological basis and genetic architecture (for example, reading & mathematics disability genetically correlate, consistent with the Generalist Genes Hypothesis, and these genetic correlations explain the observed phenotypic correlations or 'co-morbidity'; IQ and specific measures of cognitive performance such as verbal, spatial, and memory tasks, reaction time, long-term memory, executive function etc. all show high genetic correlations as do neuroanatomical measurements , and the correlations may increase with age, with implications for the etiology & nature of intelligence). This can be an important constraint on conceptualizations of the two traits: traits which seem different phenotypically but which share a common genetic basis require an explanation for how these genes can influence both traits. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18690851 | 1,144,569 |
244,483 | Guglielmo Marconi studied at the Leghorn Technical School, and acquainted himself with the published writings of Professor Augusto Righi of the University of Bologna. In 1894, Sir William Preece delivered a paper to the Royal Institution in London on electric signalling without wires. In 1894 at the Royal Institution lectures, Lodge delivered "The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors". Marconi is said to have read, while on vacation in 1894, about the experiments that Hertz did in the 1880s. Marconi also read about Tesla's work. It was at this time that Marconi began to understand that radio waves could be used for wireless communications. Marconi's early apparatus was a development of Hertz's laboratory apparatus into a system designed for communications purposes. At first Marconi used a transmitter to ring a bell in a receiver in his attic laboratory. He then moved his experiments out-of-doors on the family estate near Bologna, Italy, to communicate further. He replaced Hertz's vertical dipole with a vertical wire topped by a metal sheet, with an opposing terminal connected to the ground. On the receiver side, Marconi replaced the spark gap with a metal powder coherer, a detector developed by Edouard Branly and other experimenters. Marconi transmitted radio signals for about at the end of 1895. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3800477 | 244,356 |
1,801,487 | The Space Interferometry Mission, or SIM, also known as SIM Lite (formerly known as SIM PlanetQuest), was a planned space telescope proposed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in conjunction with contractor Northrop Grumman. One of the main goals of the mission was the hunt for Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of nearby stars other than the Sun. SIM was postponed several times and finally cancelled in 2010. In addition to detecting extrasolar planets, SIM would have helped astronomers construct a map of the Milky Way galaxy. Other important tasks would have included collecting data to help pinpoint stellar masses for specific types of stars, assisting in the determination of the spatial distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way and in the local group of galaxies and using the gravitational microlensing effect to measure the mass of stars. The spacecraft would have used optical interferometry to accomplish these and other scientific goals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=570274 | 1,800,478 |
139,803 | The astronauts went through a training program covering some of the same exercises that were used in their selection. They simulated the g-force profiles of launch and reentry in a centrifuge at the Naval Air Development Center, and were taught special breathing techniques necessary when subjected to more than 6 g. Weightlessness training took place in aircraft, first on the rear seat of a two-seater fighter and later inside converted and padded cargo aircraft. They practiced gaining control of a spinning spacecraft in a machine at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory called the Multi-Axis Spin-Test Inertia Facility (MASTIF), by using an attitude controller handle simulating the one in the spacecraft. A further measure for finding the right attitude in orbit was star and Earth recognition training in planetaria and simulators. Communication and flight procedures were practiced in flight simulators, first together with a single person assisting them and later with the Mission Control Center. Recovery was practiced in pools at Langley, and later at sea with frogmen and helicopter crews. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19812 | 139,746 |
1,975,495 | The process of mining Carboniferous-aged coal to help power the industrial revolution has been responsible for uncovering tracks left at that time by early tetrapods in Alabama. Such discoveries frequently occur when the excavation of coal mines removes the rock underlying the trackway, leaving it exposed on the tunnel's ceiling. In 1842, one of the state's biggest early fossil discoveries occurred, the remains of the primitive whale "Basilosaurus". The fossils were discovered on a plantation owned by Judge John Creagh of Clarke County, Alabama. His slaves thought the bones had belonged to one of the fallen angels. Local doctors identified the fossils as belonging to an ancient marine reptile. However, some of the fossils were shipped to Sir Richard Owen in England. Owen realized the bones actually belonged to a whale and tried to rename the creature "Zeuglodon". Despite the attempted rename, ""Zeuglodon"" is still formally known by the name first given to it, "Basilosaurus". Herman Melville later discussed this discovery in his famous 1851 novel, "Moby Dick". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37799052 | 1,974,358 |
271,102 | The circulating leptin levels are positively correlated with the Body Mass Index (BMI), more specifically with fatty mass, and obese individuals have higher leptin levels in their blood circulation, compared with non-obese individuals. In obese individuals, the increased circulating leptin levels induce unwanted responses, that is, reduced food intake or losing body weight does not occur as there is a resistance to leptin (ref 9). In addition to the function of regulating energy homeostasis, leptin carries out a role in other physiological functions such as neuroendocrine communication, reproduction, angiogenesis and bone formation. More recently, leptin has been recognised as a cytokine factor as well as with pleiotropic actions also in the immune response and inflammation. For example, leptin can be found in the synovial fluid in correlation with the body mass index, and the leptin receptors are expressed in the cartilage, where leptin mediates and modulates many inflammatory responses that can damage cartilage and other joint tissues. Leptin has thus emerged as a candidate to link obesity and osteoarthritis and serves as an apparent objective as a nutritional treatment for osteoarthritis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=214938 | 270,954 |
27,758 | During his three-year stay at Bologna, which occurred between fall 1496 and spring 1501, Copernicus seems to have devoted himself less keenly to studying canon law (he received his doctorate in canon law only after seven years, following a second return to Italy in 1503) than to studying the humanities—probably attending lectures by Filippo Beroaldo, Antonio Urceo, called Codro, Giovanni Garzoni, and Alessandro Achillini—and to studying astronomy. He met the famous astronomer Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara and became his disciple and assistant. Copernicus was developing new ideas inspired by reading the "Epitome of the Almagest" ("Epitome in Almagestum Ptolemei") by George von Peuerbach and Johannes Regiomontanus (Venice, 1496). He verified its observations about certain peculiarities in Ptolemy's theory of the Moon's motion, by conducting on 9 March 1497 at Bologna a memorable observation of the occultation of Aldebaran, the brightest star in the Taurus constellation, by the moon. Copernicus the humanist sought confirmation for his growing doubts through close reading of Greek and Latin authors (Pythagoras, Aristarchos of Samos, Cleomedes, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Philolaus, Heraclides, Ecphantos, Plato), gathering, especially while at Padua, fragmentary historic information about ancient astronomical, cosmological and calendar systems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=323592 | 27,748 |
1,646,098 | The UK economy was contracting by the early 1970s, and engineering businesses were rationalising their operations on a scale which raised many comments in Parliament and elsewhere. The ratio of unemployment to vacancies in engineering and the allied trades at June 1970 was more or less 1:1, but by September 1971 it was 5:1, i.e.: five people unemployed in the sector for every job available. In 1972 the Churchill factory in Altrincham was closed, despite industrial action there and at Alfred Herbert's Coventry factory to stop this happening. There were representations against the closure from Altrincham council to the government, including a meeting in February 1972 when the council and its delegation of industry experts met the Minister for Trade and Industry and said It was said in Parliament that 1,000 people were made redundant and that in Manchester 500 machine tool fitters were now chasing 10 jobs. Production moved to Coventry as the parent group, Herbert, faced losses of £4M, although Churchill had an order book of £2.25M that could provide sufficient work to keep its 1,100 workforce in jobs through to 1974. Order book value aside, it was also said in Parliament that Churchill had lost over £1M in the previous two years. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30046818 | 1,645,169 |
102,900 | The author points out the shift from the last five, six, seven decades, when the elite "leisure class" worked only rarely and spent days enjoying their fortune, while hard working people stayed poor for their whole lives. But lately, an important change occurred: according to a Harvard Business survey, members of the elite social circles are working more and harder than ever before. More than 60% of individuals with high income work circa 50 hours per week, around 30% of them work more than 60 hours per week and the last 10% spend over 80 hours per week occupied with their work responsibilities. Also, by having access to the best possible education available since starting school, members from the top 1% of households prevail in the world leading universities around the world. The interaction of these elements creates unusual and never-seen-before living situation for members of the elite circles: by hard work, higher amount of hours spent at work and performing with higher skills obtained from the best universities, they gain respect and position of the "superordinate" working class while losing their unflattering label of "leisure class". As the author implies in his calculations, the income of a typical elite household is now from three quarters made up of earnings from labor instead of ancestors' heritage. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20971 | 102,855 |
1,528,169 | On 11 September 2001, 19 terrorists – in association with Al-Qaeda – hijacked four commercial planes and flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a field near Stonycreek Township, Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The number of deaths is estimated at 2996 casualties. In the following days, President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror to prevent any more terrorist attacks on the Western world. Bush immediately framed these terrorists as being motivated by Islamic extremism; an evil, destructive and repressive people who America refused to negotiate with and must defeat (45). The estimates of how many thousands of civilians, insurgents, soldiers (both American and otherwise) and Islamists that have been killed in the war on terror vary widely from 220,000 to 650,000. However these statistics are unreliable due to their varied date, source and amount – it is not possible to know how many people have been victims of the war on terror. Not only has this war killed, tortured and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, there is no proof that it has been effective in reducing terrorism, and has led to a further proliferation of terrorist attacks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19455353 | 1,527,305 |
744,680 | Well-documented anatomic factors include the morphologic characteristics of the acromion, a bony projection from the scapula that curves over the shoulder joint. Hooked, curved, and laterally sloping acromia are strongly associated with cuff tears and may cause damage through direct traction on the tendon. Conversely, flat acromia may have an insignificant involvement in cuff disease and consequently may be best treated conservatively. The development of these different acromial shapes is likely both genetic and acquired. In the latter case, there can be a progression from flat to curved or hooked with increasing age. Repetitive mechanical activities such as sports and exercise may contribute to flattening and hooking of the acromion. Cricket bowling, swimming, tennis, baseball, and kayaking are often implicated. Progression to a hooked acromion could be an adaptation to an already damaged, poorly balanced rotator cuff with resultant stress on the coracoacromial arch. Other anatomical factors include an os acromiale and acromial spurs. Environmental factors include age, shoulder overuse, smoking, and medical conditions that affect circulation or impair the inflammatory and healing response, such as diabetes mellitus. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1263226 | 744,286 |
655,003 | Halteres are able to sense small deviations in body position using the gyroscopic properties of moving mass. What this means is that halteres beat up and down in time with the flapping of the wings along a linear pathway, but when the fly's body begins to rotate, the path of the beating halteres also changes. Now, instead of the halteres following a linear path, they begin to follow a curved path. The larger the perturbation they experience, the farther the halteres move from their original linear path. During these periods, the haltere is no longer moving in only two directions (up and down), but four (up, down, left, and right). The force exerted on the halteres in response to this left right movement is known as Coriolis force and can be produced when any moving object is rotated in the three directions of rotation, yaw, pitch or roll (see figure). When this occurs, tiny bell-shaped structures at the base of the haltere experience strain as the haltere stalk bends in their direction. The nervous system can then transform the bending of these hairs into electrical signals, which the fly interprets as body rotation information. The fly uses this information to make corrections to its position and thereby restabilizes itself during flight. Further details explaining the dynamics and physiology of halteres are described below. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46080 | 654,659 |
2,092,456 | Rowan Hooper, reviewing the book in "New Scientist", called it a "wide-ranging, beautifully written account." Reviewing the book for the National Center for Science Eductation, paleontologist Donald R. Prothero said Coyne "does a beautiful job of covering nearly all the bases in a succinct but enjoyable and gently persuasive fashion." Reviewing the book for The BioLogos Foundation, Robert C. Bishop wrote "The breadth and clarity of Coyne’s explanation and discussion of the evidence supporting evolution is impressive. Christians who have even a passing interest in science should give what he has to say careful, prayerful reflection." That said, Bishop criticized Coyne's approach to science and faith as "problematic". In "The Wall Street Journal", Philip Kitcher wrote "the book is designed to present the evidence in an accessible way and thus to convince those who might otherwise be seduced by the blandishments of creationists...Coyne has offered Darwin a splendid birthday present." In the "New York Review of Books", Richard C. Lewontin wrote that Coyne's "primary object in writing this book is to present the incontrovertible evidence that evolution is a physical fact of the history of life on Earth...In this he is entirely successful." E. O. Wilson said "For anyone who wishes a clear, well-written explanation of evolution by one of the foremost scientists working on the subject, "Why Evolution is True" should be your choice." Richard Dawkins reviewed the book favorably in "The Times Literary Supplement", saying "I once wrote that anybody who didn't believe in evolution must be stupid, insane or ignorant, and I was then careful to add that ignorance is no crime. I should now update my statement: anybody who doesn't believe in evolution is stupid, insane, or hasn't read Jerry Coyne." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34245540 | 2,091,251 |
288,417 | Other studies suggest that hormones play also an important role in vocal fold maturation. Hormones are molecules secreted into the blood stream to be delivered at different targeted sites. They usually promote growth, differentiation and functionality in different organs or tissues. Their effect is due to their ability to bind to intracellular receptors, modulating the gene expression, and subsequently regulating protein synthesis. The interaction between the endocrine system and tissues such as breast, brain, testicles, heart, bones, etc., is being extensively studied. It has clearly been seen that the larynx is somewhat affected by hormonal changes, but surprisingly, very few studies are working on elucidating this relationship. The effect of hormonal changes in voice is clearly seen when hearing male and female voices, or when listening to a teenage voice changing during puberty. Actually, it is believed that the number of hormonal receptors in the pre-pubertal phase is higher than in any other age. Menstruation has also been seen to influence the voice. In fact, singers are encouraged by their instructors not to perform during their pre-menstrual period, because of a drop in their voice quality. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32807 | 288,261 |
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