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2,176,558 | In the 1970s, there was an intense urban growth and harm of natural habitat in the United States. In response to this phenomenon, formal wildlife rehabilitation organizations began forming across the country. These new programs demonstrated a lack of clear, professional standards of care and support networks primarily using a method based on trial and error. Although the facilities were growing rapidly in the United States, they were functioning in an isolated manner. The founders of IWRC wanted to create a professional association. Through this organization, wildlife rehabilitators could access reliable, science-based, and up-to-date information. They also sought to share the necessary resources “to help improve the quality of care provided to injured wild animals” . Their main mission is to provide science-based education and resources to those who are certified as wildlife rehabilitators, as well as, the public who wishes to become certified. Mainly they seek to promote wildlife conservation and welfare . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13302631 | 2,175,314 |
669,466 | In the most ancient swords, all hamons were of the straight-edge variety. Irregular patterns started to emerge around the 1300s, with famous smiths such as Kunimitsu, Muramasa, and Masamune, among many others. By the 1600--1700s, hamons with various shapes in them became common, such as trees, flowers, rat's feet, clovers, pillboxes, and many others. Common themes included "juka choji" (multiple, overlapping clovers), "kikusui" (chrysanthemums floating on a stream), "Yoshino" (cherry blossoms on the Yoshino River), or "Tatsuta" (maple leaves on the Tatsuta River). By the 1800s, with the addition of decorative forging techniques, hamons were being created that depicted entire landscapes. These often depicted specific scenery or skylines familiar in everyday life, such as specific islands or mountains, towns and cities, grassy country-sides, or violent crashing-waves in the ocean complete with sandy beaches and spraying surf. A common such design was "Fujimi Saigyo" (Priest Saigyo viewing Mount Fuji). Sometimes low spots were cut into the clay to produce "niye" disconnected from the hamon in the center of the blade, creating the appearance of stars, clouds, wind-blown snowy peaks, or even birds in the sky. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7108723 | 669,116 |
7,580 | Traditionally, manga stories flow from top to bottom and from right to left. Some publishers of translated manga keep to this original format. Other publishers mirror the pages horizontally before printing the translation, changing the reading direction to a more "Western" left to right, so as not to confuse foreign readers or traditional comics-consumers. This practice is known as "flipping". For the most part, criticism suggests that flipping goes against the original intentions of the creator (for example, if a person wears a shirt that reads "MAY" on it, and gets flipped, then the word is altered to "YAM"), who may be ignorant of how awkward it is to read comics when the eyes must flow through the pages and text in opposite directions, resulting in an experience that's quite distinct from reading something that flows homogeneously. If the translation is not adapted to the flipped artwork carefully enough it is also possible for the text to go against the picture, such as a person referring to something on their left in the text while pointing to their right in the graphic. Characters shown writing with their right hands, the majority of them, would become left-handed when a series is flipped. Flipping may also cause oddities with familiar asymmetrical objects or layouts, such as a car being depicted with the gas pedal on the left and the brake on the right, or a shirt with the buttons on the wrong side, however these issues are minor when compared to the unnatural reading flow, and some of them could be solved with an adaptation work that goes beyond just translation and blind flipping. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18985 | 7,577 |
2,176,910 | Born Annie Roslyn Roycroft in Bangor, County Down, in May 1926 Roycroft was the fifth of six children born to Kerry woman Annie Stephens and her husband, Cork man Tom Roycroft. He had worked in the Royal Irish Constabulary which had taken him to County Down. Roycroft got her education with Bangor Central Public Elementary School and Technical College before going on to get a job with the local newspaper, the County Down Spectator in 1941. Roycroft began as a junior office assistant but showed a journalists instincts and learned journalistic skills by typing up the reports dictated by the newspapers journalists. She began submitting local news stories and in 1952 she was taken on as a journalist despite misgivings among the teams locally about a woman working in the field. She then took a break working as a clerk for North Down Rural Council before being asked to return as the editor for the Spectator. A member of the National Union of Journalists, so that she knew how to pay her journalists properly, Roycroft had a reputation of standing her ground during reporting of the Troubles. She left County Down and her role as editor in 1983 when she married Joe Stephens and eventually moved to Cork. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62596736 | 2,175,666 |
255,781 | When comparing the Na, Fe, and Si contents of the Deccan to other major igneous provinces, the Deccan appears to have undergone the greatest degree of melting suggesting a deep plume origin. Olivine appears to have fractionated at near-Moho depths with additional fractionation of gabbro ~6 km below the surface. Features such as widespread faulting, frequent diking events, high heat flux, and positive gravity anomalies suggest that the extrusive phase of the Deccan Traps is associated with the existence of a triple junction which may have existed during the Late Cretaceous, having been caused by a deep mantle plume. Not all of these diking events are attributed to large-scale contributions to the overall flow volume. It can be difficult, however, to locate the largest dikes as they are often located towards the west coast and are therefore believed to currently reside under water. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8688 | 255,647 |
313,090 | Leahy attended his first meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) on July 28. The other members were Marshall; King, who was now both CNO and Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet (now abbreviated as COMINCH); and Lieutenant General Henry H. Arnold, the Chief of U.S. Army Air Forces. Henceforth, the JCS held regular meetings at noon on Wednesdays, which usually commenced with a light lunch. Leahy served as the de facto chairman. He drew up the agenda for the JCS meetings, presided over them, and signed off on all the major papers and decisions. He considered that this was due to his seniority and not by virtue of his position. He had a small personal staff of two military aides-de-camp and two or three secretaries. JCS meetings were held in the Public Health Service Building, where Leahy had an office. After some renovations were made, he was also given an office in the East Wing of the White House on September 7, 1942; the other two main offices there were occupied by Hopkins and Byrnes. Roosevelt had the Map Room constructed in the White House where large maps showed the progress of the war. Only Leahy and Hopkins had unrestricted access to the Map Room; everyone else had to be accompanied by Leahy or Hopkins or given special permission to enter. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=448716 | 312,922 |
1,328,973 | Using a high voltage terminal kept at a static potential on the order of millions of volts, charged particles can be accelerated. In simple language, an electrostatic generator is basically a giant capacitor (although lacking plates). The high voltage is achieved either using the methods of Cockcroft & Walton or Van de Graaff, with the accelerators often being named after these inventors. Van de Graaff's original design places electrons on an insulating sheet, or belt, with a metal comb, and then the sheet physically transports the immobilized electrons to the terminal. Although at high voltage, the terminal is a conductor, and there is a corresponding comb inside the conductor which can pick up the electrons off the sheet; owing to Gauss's law, there is no electric field inside a conductor, so the electrons are not repulsed by the platform once they are inside. The belt is similar in style to a conventional conveyor belt, with one major exception: it is seamless. Thus, if the belt is broken, the accelerator must be disassembled to some degree in order to replace the belt, which, owing to its constant rotation and being made typically of a rubber, is not a particularly uncommon occurrence. The practical difficulty with belts led to a different medium for physically transporting the charges: a chain of pellets. Unlike a normal chain, this one is non-conducting from one end to the other, as both insulators and conductors are used in its construction. These types of accelerators are usually called Pelletrons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26877140 | 1,328,245 |
288,214 | On January 27, 1967, Grissom's crew was conducting a launch-pad test for their planned February 21 mission, when a fire broke out in the cabin, killing all three men. A complete safety review of the Apollo program followed. Soon after the fire, Slayton asked Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham to fly the first mission after the pause. Apollo 7 would use the BlockII spacecraft designed for the lunar missions, as opposed to the Block I CSM used for Apollo 1, which was intended only to be used for the early Earth-orbit missions, as it lacked the capability of docking with a lunar module. The CM and astronauts' spacesuits had been extensively redesigned, to reduce any chance of a repeat of the accident which killed the first crew. Schirra's crew would test the life support, propulsion, guidance and control systems during this "open-ended" mission (meaning it would be extended as it passed each test). The duration was limited to 11 days, reduced from the original 14-day limit for Apollo1. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1773 | 288,058 |
729,481 | Rising oxygen concentrations have been cited as one of several drivers for evolutionary diversification, although the physiological arguments behind such arguments are questionable, and a consistent pattern between oxygen concentrations and the rate of evolution is not clearly evident. The most celebrated link between oxygen and evolution occurs at the end of the last of the Snowball Earth glaciations, where complex multicellular life is first found in the fossil record. Under low oxygen concentrations and before the evolution of nitrogen fixation, biologically-available nitrogen compounds were in limited supply and periodic "nitrogen crises" could render the ocean inhospitable to life. Significant concentrations of oxygen were just one of the prerequisites for the evolution of complex life. Models based on uniformitarian principles (i.e. extrapolating present-day ocean dynamics into deep time) suggest that such a concentration was only reached immediately before metazoa first appeared in the fossil record. Further, anoxic or otherwise chemically "inhospitable" oceanic conditions that resemble those supposed to inhibit macroscopic life re-occur at intervals through the early Cambrian, and also in the late Cretaceous – with no apparent effect on lifeforms at these times. This might suggest that the geochemical signatures found in ocean sediments reflect the atmosphere in a different way before the Cambrian - perhaps as a result of the fundamentally different mode of nutrient cycling in the absence of planktivory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24377796 | 729,097 |
702,329 | According to a 2021 study, in 2019, 54% of Americans agreed with the statement: "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals". A 2019 Gallup creationism survey found that 40% of adults in the United States inclined to the belief that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" when asked for their beliefs regarding the origin and development of human beings. 22% believed that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process", despite 49% of respondents indicating they believed in evolution. Belief in creationism is inversely correlated to education; only 22% of those with post-graduate degrees believe in strict creationism. The level of support for strict creationism could be even lower when poll results are adjusted after comparison with other polls with questions that more specifically account for uncertainty and ambivalence. A 2000 poll for People for the American Way found that 70% of the American public thought that evolution is compatible with a belief in God. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8746727 | 701,961 |
2,166,118 | Moore has published many papers in statistical physics covering a wide range of topics. His early research was on the application of scaling theories to magnetic spin systems and superfluidity, and contained a series of useful results on critical indices. He then applied renormalisation group ideas to polymer solutions and clarified the relationship of this approach to previous theories; a particularly interesting result concerned the retrieval of the Flory index under approximation schemes. After some work on critical behaviour on surfaces, he joined the (then) new spin glass field, and in collaboration with Alan Bray wrote a series of important papers both on replica symmetry breaking in these systems and on their properties as revealed by computer simulation. In particular, he is associated with the droplet scaling theory of the spin glass state. In recent years, Michael has extended this work to structural glasses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54975954 | 2,164,881 |
1,093,164 | SMART provides Indian Navy the capability to target enemy submarines at extremely long standoff ranges. The missile is powered by dual stage solid-propellant rocket and electro-mechanical actuators for higher degree of automation. The in-flight guidance uses inertial navigation system (INS) with real-time course correction and target update mechanism while the missile fly at low altitude to decrease detection rate. SMART is similar in concept to the now cancelled UUM-125 Sea Lance from Boeing. The system is under-development due to increasing deployment of submarines by People's Liberation Army Navy Submarine Force (PLANSF) in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), rapid modernization of naval assets by People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and building of Chinese overseas military bases in Africa. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=69517435 | 1,092,604 |
1,680,155 | "CS = problem solving” is a famous and meaningful quote by Donald Knuth. Tutors and lecturers spend a hefty amount of time teaching students how to solve problems using technology and its software. However, because fundamental problem solving is a requirement for CS1 (Introductory Computer Science), it is out of the range of the course to demonstrate it. Teachers disregarding to teach these essential skills will almost certainly have an outcome of a larger number of students dropping out of the class, worsening the extraordinary drop rates issue. Another common issue in large universities is having a graduate student as a teacher. Even though every computer science graduate student has the technical expertise to instruct the class, that graduate student may be entirely unqualified to speak in front of a class, especially if a language barrier is involved. With the number of surveys and researches taken, the investigation paper concluded by Theresa Beaubouef and John Mason, the Department of Computer Science in Southeastern Louisiana University suggests that having a graduate student as a teacher can address the impression to pupils that they are inconsiderable and less significant and in addition with the stress of a strenuous major, it can be greatly for students to bear. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8487132 | 1,679,212 |
861,677 | The LISA mission's primary objective is to detect and measure gravitational waves produced by compact binary systems and mergers of supermassive black holes. LISA will observe gravitational waves by measuring differential changes in the length of its arms, as sensed by laser interferometry. Each of the three LISA spacecraft contains two telescopes, two lasers and two test masses (each a 46 mm, roughly 2 kg, gold-coated cube of gold/platinum), arranged in two optical assemblies pointed at the other two spacecraft. This forms Michelson-like interferometers, each centred on one of the spacecraft, with the test masses defining the ends of the arms. The entire arrangement, which is ten times larger than the orbit of the Moon, will be placed in solar orbit at the same distance from the Sun as the Earth, but trailing the Earth by 20 degrees, and with the orbital planes of the three spacecraft inclined relative to the ecliptic by about 0.33 degree, which results in the plane of the triangular spacecraft formation being tilted 60 degrees from the plane of the ecliptic. The mean linear distance between the formation and the Earth will be 50 million kilometres. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=364369 | 861,218 |
738,504 | The second mechanism depends on a second messenger cascade regulating gene transcription and changes in the levels of key proteins at pommel synapses such as CaMKII and PKAII. Activation of the second messenger pathway leads to increased levels of CaMKII and PKAII within the dendritic spine. These protein kinases have been linked to growth in dendritic spine volume and LTP processes such as the addition of AMPA receptors to the plasma membrane and phosphorylation of ion channels for enhanced permeability. Localization or compartmentalization of activated proteins occurs in the presence of their given stimulus which creates local effects in the dendritic spine. Calcium influx from NMDA receptors is necessary for the activation of CaMKII. This activation is localized to spines with focal stimulation and is inactivated before spreading to adjacent spines or the shaft, indicating an important mechanism of LTP in that particular changes in protein activation can be localized or compartmentalized to enhance the responsivity of single dendritic spines. Individual dendritic spines are capable of forming unique responses to presynaptic cells. This second mechanism can be triggered by protein phosphorylation but takes longer and lasts longer, providing the mechanism for long-lasting memory storage. The duration of the LTP can be regulated by breakdown of these second messengers. Phosphodiesterase, for example, breaks down the secondary messenger cAMP, which has been implicated in increased AMPA receptor synthesis in the post-synaptic neuron . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=423771 | 738,113 |
724,656 | Biofuel cells utilize the metabolic processes of anodophiles (electronegative bacteria) to convert chemical energy from organic matter into electricity. A biofuel cell mechanism consists of an anode and a cathode that are separated by an internal proton exchange membrane (PEM) and connected in an external circuit with an external load. Anodophiles grow on the anode and consume biodegradable organic molecules to produce electrons, protons, and carbon dioxide gas, and as the electrons travel through the circuit they feed the external load. The HRT for this application is the rate at which the feed molecules are passed through the anodic chamber. This can be quantified by dividing the volume of the anodic chamber by the rate at which the feed solution is passed into the chamber. The hydraulic residence time (HRT) affects the substrate loading rate of the microorganisms that the anodophiles consume, which affects the electrical output. Longer HRTs reduce substrate loading in the anodic chamber which can lead to reduced anodophile population and performance when there is a deficiency of nutrients. Shorter HRTs support the development of non-exoelectrogenous bacteria which can reduce the Coulombic efficiency electrochemical performance of the fuel cell if the anodophiles must compete for resources or if they do not have ample time to effectively degrade nutrients. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50390340 | 724,275 |
1,410,836 | The first quantitative reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere (NH) annual mean temperatures was published in 1979 by Brian Groveman and Helmut Landsberg. They used "a short-cut method" based on their earlier paper which showed that 9 instrumental stations could adequately represent an extensive gridded instrumental series, and reconstructed temperatures from 1579 to 1880 on the basis of their compilation of 20 time-series. These records were largely instrumental but also included some proxy records including two tree-ring series. Their method used nested multiple regression to allow for records covering different periods, and produced measures of uncertainty. The reconstruction showed a cool period extending beyond the Maunder Minimum, and warmer temperatures in the 20th century. After this around a decade elapsed before Gordon Jacoby and Rosanne D'Arrigo produced the next quantitative NH reconstruction, published in 1989. This was the first based entirely on non-instrumental records, and used tree rings. They reconstructed northern hemisphere annual temperatures since 1671 on the basis of boreal North American tree ring data from 11 distinct regions. From this, they concluded that recent warming was anomalous over the 300-year period, and went as far as speculating that these results supported the hypothesis that recent warming had human causes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5354105 | 1,410,044 |
1,125,160 | Beginning with the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila (Władysław II Jagiełło), the Jagiellon dynasty (1385–1569) formed the Polish–Lithuanian union. The partnership brought vast Lithuania-controlled Rus' areas into Poland's sphere of influence and proved beneficial for the Poles and Lithuanians, who coexisted and cooperated in one of the largest political entities in Europe for the next four centuries. In the Baltic Sea region Poland's struggle with the Teutonic Knights continued and included the milestone Peace of Thorn under King Casimir IV Jagiellon; the treaty created the future Duchy of Prussia. In the south Poland confronted the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tatars, and in the east helped Lithuania fight the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Poland was developing as a feudal state, with predominantly agricultural economy and an increasingly dominant landed nobility component. The "Nihil novi" act adopted by the Polish Sejm (parliament) in 1505, transferred most of the legislative power from the monarch to the Sejm. This event marked the beginning of the period known as "Golden Liberty", when the state was ruled by the "free and equal" Polish nobility. Protestant Reformation movements made deep inroads into the Polish Christianity, which resulted in unique at that time in Europe policies of religious tolerance. The European Renaissance currents evoked in late Jagiellon Poland (kings Sigismund I the Old and Sigismund II Augustus) an immense cultural flowering. Poland's and Lithuania's territorial expansion included the far north region of Livonia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2164617 | 1,124,585 |
1,008,541 | The hull and turret were castings with a maximum thickness of 47 mm and 40 mm respectively — the former of four sections, bolted together: two longitudinal plates formed the bottom; the superstructure was divided in a front and back section. The turret was a variant of the APX 1 as used on the Char B1: the APX 1 CE ("chemin élargi") with a larger as against ) turret ring, allowing the radio operator to assist the commander in loading the gun from an ammunition stock of 118 shells (90 AP, 28 HE) and 2,250 machine gun rounds. As with the B1, the commander was expected to direct the tank while also loading, aiming, and firing the 47 mm SA 35 main gun — although at least the radio duty could be left to another crew member. Radios were planned to be part of the standard equipment of S35s. In practice the platoon commander had an ER ("émetteur-récepteur") 29 set for communications with a higher command level, but a shortage of the short range ER28 sets for communication within the platoon meant that the other four tanks of the platoon were never fitted with any form of radio, although in some units all tanks had antennas: the programme to fit the sets themselves was postponed until the summer of 1940 and thus overtaken by events. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2838334 | 1,008,020 |
775,075 | Later in 2010, Kirkland and Kenneth Bader redescribed and discussed the numerous feeding traces from this "Protoceratops" specimen, which they nicknamed Fox Site "Protoceratops". They found at least three types of feeding traces on this individual; nearly circular borings—which they found instead to correlate best with feeding traces made by dermestid beetles—of in diameter; semicircular shaped notches at the edge of bones; and destruction of articular surfaces, mostly at the joints of the limbs. The co-workers also noted that the Fox Site "Protoceratops" preserves associated traces in the encasing sediment, indicative of necrophagous activity after the animal was buried. Kirkland and Bader concluded that adults of a large beetle taxon would detect decaying carcasses buried below the sand and dig down in order to feed and lay their eggs. After emerging from the eggs, larvae would have fed on the carcass prior to pupating. The last larvae to emerge would have feed on the dried tendons and cartilage in the joint areas—thereby explaining the notorious poor preservation of these areas in the specimen—and subsequently chewing on the bone itself, prior to pupating. After reaching full maturity, adult beetles would have then dig back to the surface, most likely leaving borings through bones, and finally beginning to search for new carcasses and thus continuing the recycling of "Protoceratops" carcasses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1064031 | 774,659 |
2,147,772 | When the British Army again advanced in 1811 the troop equally distinguished itself. It was mentioned by Wellington in his despatches of 14 and 16 March and 9 April for its conduct in the affairs of Cazal Nova, Foz d'Aronce, and Sabugal. At Fuentes d'Onoro (5 May) the British cavalry on the right wing was driven back by the French, which was in much greater strength, and I Troop, or part of it, was cut off. It was supposed that the guns were lost, but soon a commotion was observed among the French cavalry:an English shout pealed high and clear, the mass was rent asunder, and Norman Ramsay burst forth, sword in hand, at the head of his battery, his horses breathing fire, stretched like greyhounds along the plain, the guns bounded behind them like things of no weight, and the mounted gunners followed close, with heads bent low and pointed weapons in desperate career. A drawing of this incident, by Richard Beavis, later entered the collection of the Royal United Service Institution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70676642 | 2,146,541 |
502,571 | AFDX adopted concepts such as the token bucket from the telecom standards, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), to fix the shortcomings of IEEE 802.3 Ethernet. By adding key elements from ATM to those already found in Ethernet, and constraining the specification of various options, a highly reliable full-duplex deterministic network is created providing guaranteed bandwidth and quality of service (QoS). Through the use of full-duplex Ethernet, the possibility of transmission collisions is eliminated. The network is designed in such a way that all critical traffic is prioritized using QoS policies so delivery, latency, and jitter are all guaranteed to be within set parameters. A highly intelligent switch, common to the AFDX network, is able to buffer transmission and reception packets. Through the use of twisted pair or fiber optic cables, full-duplex Ethernet uses two separate pairs or strands for transmitting and receiving the data. AFDX extends standard Ethernet to provide high data integrity and deterministic timing. Further a redundant pair of networks is used to improve the system integrity (although a virtual link may be configured to use one or the other network only). It specifies interoperable functional elements at the following OSI reference model layers: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3112664 | 502,313 |
339,887 | "Allosaurus" was a typical large theropod, having a massive skull on a short neck, a long, slightly sloping tail, and reduced forelimbs. "Allosaurus fragilis", the best-known species, had an average length of and mass of , with the largest definitive "Allosaurus" specimen (AMNH 680) estimated at long, with an estimated weight of . In his 1976 monograph on "Allosaurus", James H. Madsen mentioned a range of bone sizes which he interpreted to show a maximum length of . As with dinosaurs in general, weight estimates are debatable, and since 1980 have ranged between , , and approximately for modal adult weight (not maximum). John Foster, a specialist on the Morrison Formation, suggests that is reasonable for large adults of "A. fragilis", but that is a closer estimate for individuals represented by the average-sized thigh bones he has measured. Using the subadult specimen nicknamed "Big Al", since assigned to the species "Allosaurus jimmadseni", researchers using computer modelling arrived at a best estimate of for the individual, but by varying parameters they found a range from approximately to approximately . "A. europaeus" has been measured up to in length and in body mass. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1347 | 339,707 |
1,636,264 | From the early 1970s, cyclodextrins have been extensively studied for its encapsulation properties and used as binding sites in supramolecular catalyst. Cyclodextrins have rigid ring structure, hydrophilic surface, and hydrophobic cavity on the inside; therefore, they are capable of binding organic molecules in aqueous solution. In 1978, with the background knowledge that the hydrolysis of m-tert-butylphenyl acetate is accelerated in the presence of 2-benzimidazoleacetic acid and alpha-cyclodextrin, Brewslow et al. developed a catalyst based on a beta-cyclodextrin carrying two imidazole groups. This cyclodextrin catalytic system mimics ribonuclease A by its use of a neutral imidazole and an imidazolium cation to selective cleave cyclic phosphate substrates. The rate of the reaction is catalyzed 120 times faster, and unlike a hydrolysis by simple base NaOH that gives a 1:1 mixture of the products, this catalysts yield a 99:1 selectivity for one compound. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41267493 | 1,635,339 |
313,263 | In 1960, Stockhausen returned to the composition of vocal music (for the first time since "Gesang der Jünglinge") with "Carré" for four orchestras and four choirs. Two years later, he began an expansive cantata titled "Momente" (1962–64/69), for solo soprano, four choir groups and thirteen instrumentalists. In 1963, Stockhausen created "Plus-Minus", "2 × 7 pages for realisation" containing basic note materials and a complex system of transformations to which those materials are to be subjected in order to produce an unlimited number of different compositions. Through the rest of the 1960s, he continued to explore such possibilities of "process composition" in works for live performance, such as "Prozession" (1967), "Kurzwellen", and "Spiral" (both 1968), culminating in the verbally described "intuitive music" compositions of "Aus den sieben Tagen" (1968) and "Für kommende Zeiten" (1968–70). Some of his later works, such as "Ylem" (1972) and the first three parts of "Herbstmusik" (1974), also fall under this rubric. Several of these process compositions were featured in the all-day programmes presented at Expo 70, for which Stockhausen composed two more similar pieces, "Pole" for two players, and "Expo" for three. In other compositions, such as "Stop" for orchestra (1965), "Adieu" for wind quintet (1966), and the "Dr. K Sextett", which was written in 1968–69 in honour of Alfred Kalmus of Universal Edition, he presented his performers with more restricted improvisational possibilities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17268 | 313,095 |
27,428 | One of the keys to Le Mans is top speed due to the long straights that dominate the circuit. This has meant cars have attempted to achieve the maximum speeds possible instead of relying on downforce for the turns. While early competitors' cars were street cars with their bodywork removed to reduce weight, innovators like Bugatti developed cars that saw the beginnings of aerodynamics. Nicknamed "tanks" due to their similarity to military tanks in World War I, these cars used simple curves to cover all the car's mechanical elements and increase top speed. Once Le Mans returned after World War II, most manufacturers would adopt closed bodies streamlined for better aerodynamics. A notable example of the changes brought about by aerodynamics are the 1950 entries by Briggs Cunningham. Cunningham entered two 1950 Cadillac Coupe de Villes, one nearly stock and the other completely rebodied in a streamlined aluminum shape developed by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation that looked so unusual that it was nicknamed "Le Monstre" by the French press. The smoothing of body shapes and fairing-in of various parts of the machine brought about by the continual search for reduction of aerodynamic drag led to a separation from Grand Prix cars, which rarely had large bodywork. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1401596 | 27,418 |
928,914 | NPC may present as a lump or a mass on both sides towards the back of the neck. These lumps usually are not tender or painful but appear as a result of the metastatic spread of the cancer to the lymph nodes, thus causing the lymph nodes to swell. Lymph nodes are defined as glands that function as part of the immune system and can be found throughout the body. Swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck is the initial presentation in many people, and the diagnosis of NPC is often made by lymph node biopsy. Signs of nasopharyngeal cancer may appear as headaches, a sore throat, and trouble hearing, breathing, or speaking. Additional symptoms of NPC include facial pain or numbness, blurred or double vision, trouble opening the mouth, or recurring ear infections. If the ear infection does not present with an upper respiratory tract infection, then an examination should be done on the nasopharynx. This is due to the fact that, in adults, ear infections are less common than in children. Signs and symptoms related to the primary tumor include trismus, pain, otitis media, nasal regurgitation due to paresis (loss of or impaired movement) of the soft palate, hearing loss and cranial nerve palsy (paralysis). Larger growths may produce nasal obstruction or bleeding and a "nasal twang". Metastatic spread may result in bone pain or organ dysfunction. Rarely, a paraneoplastic syndrome of osteoarthropathy (diseases of joints and bones) may occur with widespread disease. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8263081 | 928,423 |
1,775,526 | In the "Critters" rule, the transition function reverses the state of every cell in a block, except for a block with exactly two live cells which remains unchanged. Additionally, blocks with three live cells undergo a 180-degree rotation as well as the state reversal. This is a reversible rule, and it obeys conservation laws on the number of particles (counting a particle as a live cell in even phases and as a dead cell in odd phases) and on the parity of the number of particles along diagonal lines. Because it is reversible, initial states in which all cells take randomly chosen states remain unstructured throughout their evolution. However, when started with a smaller field of random cells centered within a larger region of dead cells, this rule leads to complex dynamics similar to those in Conway's Game of Life in which many small patterns similar to life's glider escape from the central random area and interact with each other. Unlike the gliders in Life, reversibility and the conservation of particles together imply that when gliders crash together in Critters, at least one must escape, and often these crashes allow both incoming gliders to reconstitute themselves on different outgoing tracks. By means of such collisions, this rule can also simulate the billiard ball model of computing, although in a more complex way than the BBM rule. The Critters rule can also support more complex spaceships of varying speeds as well as oscillators with infinitely many different periods. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2399633 | 1,774,529 |
1,102,629 | The exact functional form of the potential function, or force field, depends on the particular simulation program being used. Generally the bond and angle terms are modeled as harmonic potentials centered around equilibrium bond-length values derived from experiment or theoretical calculations of electronic structure performed with software which does "ab-initio" type calculations such as Gaussian. For accurate reproduction of vibrational spectra, the Morse potential can be used instead, at computational cost. The dihedral or torsional terms typically have multiple minima and thus cannot be modeled as harmonic oscillators, though their specific functional form varies with the implementation. This class of terms may include "improper" dihedral terms, which function as correction factors for out-of-plane deviations (for example, they can be used to keep benzene rings planar, or correct geometry and chirality of tetrahedral atoms in a united-atom representation). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=547400 | 1,102,068 |
1,007,076 | For the Airborne Intercept radar, the Rad Lab 10 cm breadboard set was fitted with a parabolic antenna having azimuth and elevation scanning capabilities. Cathode-ray tube indicators and appropriate controls were also added. Edwin McMillan was primarily responsible for building and testing the engineering set. This was first flight-tested near the end of March 1941, giving target returns at up to five miles distance and without ground clutter, a primary advantage of microwave radar. Designated "SCR-520", this was America's first microwave radar. It saw limited service on some larger patrol aircraft, but was too heavy for fighter aircraft. Improved as the much lighter "SCR-720", thousands of these sets were manufactured and used extensively by both the U.S. and Great Britain (as the AI Mk X) throughout the war. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27693223 | 1,006,557 |
612,721 | Water is essential for all the major chemical weathering reactions. To be effective in soil formation, water must penetrate the regolith. The seasonal rainfall distribution, evaporative losses, site topography, and soil permeability interact to determine how effectively precipitation can influence soil formation. The greater the depth of water penetration, the greater the depth of weathering of the soil and its development. Surplus water percolating through the soil profile transports soluble and suspended materials from the upper layers (eluviation) to the lower layers (illuviation), including clay particles and dissolved organic matter. It may also carry away soluble materials in the surface drainage waters. Thus, percolating water stimulates weathering reactions and helps differentiate soil horizons. Likewise, a deficiency of water is a major factor in determining the characteristics of soils of dry regions. Soluble salts are not leached from these soils, and in some cases they build up to levels that curtail plant and microbial growth. Soil profiles in arid and semi-arid regions are also apt to accumulate carbonates and certain types of expansive clays (calcrete or caliche horizons). In tropical soils, when the soil has been deprived of vegetation (e.g. by deforestation) and thereby is submitted to intense evaporation, the upward capillary movement of water, which has dissolved iron and aluminum salts, is responsible for the formation of a superficial hard pan of laterite or bauxite, respectively, which is improper for cultivation, a known case of irreversible soil degradation (lateritization, bauxitization). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=164544 | 612,410 |
87,061 | Prost was fired two days after the 1983 season following his public comments about the team's lack of development of the Renault RE40 which resulted in his loss to Piquet and the team's loss to Ferrari in the 1983 championship. He subsequently joined McLaren, while Cheever left to join Alfa Romeo. The team turned to Frenchman Patrick Tambay (who had left Ferrari) and Englishman Derek Warwick (formerly of Toleman) to bring them back to prominence. Despite a few good results, including Tambay giving the team its last pole position at the 1984 French Grand Prix at Dijon, the team was not as competitive in and as in the past, with other teams doing a better job with turbo engines, or more specifically Lotus and to a lesser extent Ligier. provided another F1 first, as the team ran a third car in Germany at the new Nürburgring that featured the first in-car camera which could be viewed live by a television audience. Driven by Frenchman François Hesnault, the car only lasted 8 laps before a clutch problem forced it to retire. In 1985, major financial problems emerged at Renault and the company could no longer justify the large expenses needed to maintain the racing team's competitiveness. CEO Georges Besse pared down the company's involvement in F1 from full-fledged racing team to engine supplier for the season before taking it entirely out of F1 at the end of that year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=240378 | 87,026 |
1,915,638 | Four endomicroscope products have been developed: The fluorescence in vivo endomicroscope - FIVE2 (OptiScan Imaging Ltd, Melbourne, Australia) developed for pre-clinical research, the neurosurgical device Convivo (Carl Zeiss Meditech AG, Jena, Germany), the Pentax ISC-1000/EC3870CIK endoscope (Pentax/Hoya, Tokyo, Japan), now withdrawn from some markets, and Cellvizio (Mauna Kea Technologies, Paris, France). The Pentax Medical device was packaged into an endoscope, that used OptiScan's electromagnetic-controlled scanning of a single fibre to perform the confocal scanning at the distal tip of the device. This provides sub-micrometre resolution across a large field of view and up to a million pixels per frame. The original Pentax instrument had variable frame rate up to 1.6 fps and dynamic adjustment of working distance by the user over a depth range from surface to 250 μm.The second generation of OptiScan's scanner has an adjustable frame rate between 0.8fps to 3.5fps, field of view of 475μm and a depth range of surface to 400μm. Mauna Kea’s Cellvizio device has an external laser scanning unit and offers a selection of fibre-bundle based probes with resolution, field of view and working distance optimised for different applications. These probes are compatible with standard endoscope instrument channels, and have a frame rate of 12 Hz. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37293330 | 1,914,539 |
12,342 | "Unreal" was noted for its graphical innovations, but Sweeney recognized in a 1999 interview with "Eurogamer" that many aspects of the game were unpolished, citing complaints from gamers about its high system requirements and online gameplay issues. Epic addressed these points during the development of "Unreal Tournament" by incorporating several enhancements in the engine intended to optimize performance on low-end machines and improve the networking code, while also refining the artificial intelligence for bots to display coordination in team-based gamemodes such as Capture the Flag. Originally planned as an expansion pack for "Unreal", the game also came with increased image quality with the support for the S3TC compression algorithm, allowing for 24-bit high resolution textures without compromising performance. In addition to being available on Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix, the engine was ported through "Unreal Tournament" to the PlayStation 2 and, with the help of Secret Level, to the Dreamcast. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=417152 | 12,337 |
414,913 | Traditional epistemology and Bayesian epistemology are both forms of epistemology, but they differ in various respects, for example, concerning their methodology, their interpretation of belief, the role justification or confirmation plays in them and some of their research interests. Traditional epistemology focuses on topics such as the analysis of the "nature of knowledge", usually in terms of justified true beliefs, the "sources of knowledge", like perception or testimony, the "structure of a body of knowledge", for example in the form of foundationalism or coherentism, and the problem of "philosophical skepticism" or the question of whether knowledge is possible at all. These inquiries are usually based on epistemic intuitions and regard beliefs as either present or absent. Bayesian epistemology, on the other hand, works by formalizing concepts and problems, which are often vague in the traditional approach. It thereby focuses more on mathematical intuitions and promises a higher degree of precision. It sees belief as a continuous phenomenon that comes in various degrees, so-called "credences". Some Bayesians have even suggested that the regular notion of belief should be abandoned. But there are also proposals to connect the two, for example, the "Lockean thesis", which defines belief as credence above a certain threshold. Justification plays a central role in traditional epistemology while Bayesians have focused on the related notions of confirmation and disconfirmation through evidence. The notion of evidence is important for both approaches but only the traditional approach has been interested in studying the sources of evidence, like perception and memory. Bayesianism, on the other hand, has focused on the role of evidence for rationality: how someone's credence should be adjusted upon receiving new evidence. There is an analogy between the Bayesian norms of rationality in terms of probabilistic laws and the traditional norms of rationality in terms of deductive consistency. Certain traditional problems, like the topic of skepticism about our knowledge of the external world, are difficult to express in Bayesian terms. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55503854 | 414,710 |
1,477,307 | Although there are relatively few studies of rehabilitation in MS, its general effectiveness, when conducted by a team of specialists, has been clearly demonstrated in other diseases such as stroke or head trauma. As for any patient with neurologic deficits, a multidisciplinary approach is key to limiting and overcoming disability; however there are particular difficulties in specifying a 'core team' because people with MS may need help from almost any health profession or service at some point. Neurologists are mainly involved in the diagnosis and ongoing management of multiple sclerosis, and any exacerbations. The comprehensive rehabilitation process for patients with multiple sclerosis is generally managed by physiatrists. Allied treatments such as physiotherapy, speech and language therapy or occupational therapy can also help to manage some symptoms and maintain quality of life. Treatment of neuropsychiatric symptoms such as emotional distress and clinical depression should involve mental health professionals such as therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, while neuropsychologists can help to evaluate and manage cognitive deficits. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7663818 | 1,476,475 |
626,805 | The sympathetic nervous system is one of two divisions under the autonomic nervous system, it functions involuntarily and one aspect of the system deals with emotional arousal in response to situations accordingly. Therefore, if an individual decides to deceive someone, they will experience a stress response within because of the possible consequences if caught. A person using deception will typically cope by using nonverbal cues which take the form of bodily movements. These bodily movements occur because of the need to release the chemical buildup of cortisol, which is produced at a higher rate in a situation where there is something at stake. The purpose for these involuntary nonverbal cues are to ease oneself in a stressful situation. In the midst of deceiving an individual, leakage can occur which is when nonverbal cues are exhibited and are contradictory to what the individual is conveying. Despite this useful tactic of detecting deception, microexpressions do not show what intentions or thoughts the deceiver is trying to conceal. They only provide the fact that there was emotional arousal in the context of the situation. If an individual displays fear or surprise in the form of a microexpression, it does not mean that the individual is concealing information that is relevant to investigation. This is similar to how polygraphs fail to some degree: because there is a sympathetic response due to the fear of being disbelieved as innocent. The same goes for microexpressions, when there is a concealed emotion there is no information revealed on why that emotion was felt. They do not determine a lie, but are a form of detecting concealed information. David Matsumoto is a well-known American psychologist and explains that one must not conclude that someone is lying if a microexpression is detected but that there is more to the story than is being told. Matsumoto was also the first to publish scientific evidence that microexpressions may be a key to detecting deception. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=566231 | 626,472 |
133,728 | In 2008, an ochre processing workshop likely for the production of paints was uncovered dating to ca. 100,000 years ago at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Analysis shows that a liquefied pigment-rich mixture was produced and stored in the two abalone shells, and that ochre, bone, charcoal, grindstones and hammer-stones also formed a composite part of the toolkits. Evidence for the complexity of the task includes procuring and combining raw materials from various sources (implying they had a mental template of the process they would follow), possibly using pyrotechnology to facilitate fat extraction from bone, using a probable recipe to produce the compound, and the use of shell containers for mixing and storage for later use.<ref name="Washington Post-2011/10/12/gIQApyHrhL"></ref> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14099 | 133,675 |
1,235,104 | In 2008, an ochre processing workshop likely for the production of paints was uncovered dating to ca. 100,000 years ago at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Analysis shows that a liquefied pigment-rich mixture was produced and stored in the two abalone shells, and that ochre, bone, charcoal, grindstones and hammer-stones also formed a composite part of the toolkits. Evidence for the complexity of the task includes procuring and combining raw materials from various sources (implying they had a mental template of the process they would follow), possibly using pyrotechnology to facilitate fat extraction from bone, using a probable recipe to produce the compound, and the use of shell containers for mixing and storage for later use.<ref name="Washington Post-2011/10/12/gIQApyHrhL"></ref> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=710102 | 1,234,441 |
1,024,639 | Scholars taking a "realist" perspective on wars and diplomacy have emphasized the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as a dividing line. It ended the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), where religion and ideology had been powerful motivating forces for warfare. Westphalia, in the realist view, ushered in a new international system of sovereign states of roughly equal strength, dedicated not to ideology or religion but to enhance status, and territorial gains. The Catholic Church, for example, no longer devoted its energies to the very difficult task of reclaiming dioceses lost to Protestantism, but to build large-scale missions in overseas colonial possessions that could convert the natives by the thousands Using devoted members of society such as the Jesuits. According to Hamish Scott, the realist model assumes that "foreign policies were guided entirely by "Realpolitik," by the resulting struggle for resources and, eventually, by the search for what became known as a 'balance of power.' | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=118582 | 1,024,106 |
1,448,544 | Haeckel's embryo drawings are primarily intended to express his theory of embryonic development, the Biogenetic Law, which in turn assumes (but is not crucial to) the evolutionary concept of common descent. His postulation of embryonic development coincides with his understanding of evolution as a developmental process. In and around 1800, embryology fused with comparative anatomy as the primary foundation of morphology. Ernst Haeckel, along with Karl von Baer and Wilhelm His, are primarily influential in forming the preliminary foundations of 'phylogenetic embryology' based on principles of evolution. Haeckel's 'Biogenetic Law' portrays the parallel relationship between an embryo's development and phylogenetic history. The term, 'recapitulation,’ has come to embody Haeckel's Biogenetic Law, for embryonic development is a recapitulation of evolution. Haeckel proposes that all classes of vertebrates pass through an evolutionarily conserved “phylotypic” stage of development, a period of reduced phenotypic diversity among higher embryos. Only in later development do particular differences appear. Haeckel portrays a concrete demonstration of his Biogenetic Law through his "Gastrea" theory, in which he argues that the early cup-shaped gastrula stage of development is a universal feature of multi-celled animals. An ancestral form existed, known as the gastrea, which was a common ancestor to the corresponding gastrula. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10273 | 1,447,728 |
261,351 | The discovery of fission raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created. The term was already familiar to the British public through the writings of H. G. Wells, with a continuously exploding bomb in his 1913 novel "The World Set Free". George Paget Thomson, at Imperial College London, and Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist at the University of Birmingham, were tasked with carrying out a series of experiments on uranium. Oliphant delegated the task to two German refugee scientists, Rudolf Peierls and Frisch, who ironically could not work on the university's secret projects like radar because they were enemy aliens and therefore lacked the necessary security clearance. In March 1940 they calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium-235, and found that instead of tons, as everyone had assumed, as little as would suffice, which would explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2095669 | 261,212 |
670,996 | En route to the harbour at Islana, north of Ragusa, to rendezvous with "Viribus Unitis" and "Prinz Eugen" for the coordinated attack on the Otranto Barrage, "Szent István" and "Tegetthoff" attempted to make maximum speed in order to catch up to the rest of the fleet. In doing so, "Szent István"s turbines started to overheat and speed had to be reduced to . When an attempt was made to raise more steam in order to increase to "Szent István" produced an excess of smoke. At about 3:15 am on 10 June, two Italian MAS boats, "MAS-15" and "MAS-21", spotted the smoke from the Austrian ships while returning from an uneventful patrol off the Dalmatian coast. The MAS platoon was commanded by "Capitano di corvetta" Luigi Rizzo, who had sunk the Austro-Hungarian coastal defense ship in Trieste six months before. The individual boats were commanded by "Capo timoniere" Armando Gori and "Guardiamarina di complemento" Giuseppe Aonzo respectively. Both boats successfully penetrated the escort screen and split to engage each of the dreadnoughts. "MAS-21" attacked "Tegetthoff", but her torpedoes failed to hit the ship. "MAS-15" fired her two torpedoes successfully at 3:25 am at "Szent István". Both boats evaded any pursuit although "MAS-15" had to discourage the Austro-Hungarian torpedo boat "Tb 76 T" by dropping depth charges in her wake. "Tegetthoff", thinking that the torpedoes were fired by submarines, pulled out of the formation and started to zigzag to throw off any further attacks. She repeatedly fired on suspected submarine periscopes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1089216 | 670,644 |
1,977,457 | The transfer of "F. novicida" to a "Francisella tularensis" subsp. "novicida" has been recommended, and many microbiologists already use this name. Results of DNA-DNA hybridization and genome sequencing experiments indicate "F. novicida" is genetically close to "F. tularensis". Also, the phenotypic differences observed are in agreement with the subspecies concept. From some scientists’ points of view, it is not consistent to have a species "F. tularensis" with three subspecies supported by the DNA-DNA hybridization data, but distinct by phenotypic traits and thus considered a separate species. The DNA-DNA relatedness was greater than 85%. Human or animal infections with "F. t. novicida" are very rare and few publications describe it, in part because it is infrequently isolated. This indicates most laboratories are not able to distinguish the two subspecies based on phenotype or metabolic requirements. For medically important organisms such as "Francisella", clear guidelines exist for differentiation of subspecies. According to EU guideline 2000/54/EC, which has been adopted in 27 European countries, "F. t. tularensis" ["F. tularensis" (type A)] is classified as a BSL 3 pathogen, while "F. t. holarctica" ["F. tularensis" (type B)] is classified as a BSL 2 pathogen. Eleven metabolic reactions have been found to differ in "F. novicida" and "F. tularensis". Many scientists argue this is not enough among the 98 traits to contradict "F. novicida" as a subspecies. It is common for bacterial species to be composed of individuals that are not identical in phenotypic traits. For example, the size of the "Escherichia coli" genome ranges from 4.6 to 5.7 Mb. This means the strains of a single species may differ in 20-25% of their genome without affecting their taxonomic status. Therefore, many believe more metabolic diversity is needed to distinguish the two as separate species. While all of this supports "F. novicida" to be classified as a subspecies, many still believe enough evidence exists to create a separate species. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40853981 | 1,976,319 |
1,386,324 | The Environmental Archaeology Program (EAP) of the Florida Museum was established by Dr. Elizabeth Wing in the early 1960s (as the Zooarchaeology collection) and was curated by her until her retirement in 2001. The EAP collections include archaeological animal, plant, and soil materials that represent 14,000 years of human-environmental relationships in the early circum-Caribbean Americas (including the SE USA, Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America). The collections are strongest in zoological specimens (modern comparative and zooarchaeological), but since the 1990s have grown to include significant holdings of both archaeobotanical/botanical and archaeopedological materials. Environmental archaeology, a subdiscipline of anthropology, reconstructs the long relationship between people and environments using biotic (animal and plant) and abiotic (geological) remains from archaeological sites. The EAP researchers focus on integrated analyses that explore every aspect of that relationship, from the environmental conditions during human occupation, to human use of and impact on natural resources, to human perceptions and symbolic interpretations of aspects of the plants, animals, and landscapes of their environments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1143787 | 1,385,557 |
241,956 | To this day, the exact shape of the universe remains a matter of debate in physical cosmology. In this regard, experimental data from various independent sources (WMAP, BOOMERanG, and Planck for example) confirm that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error. Yet, the issue of simple versus multiple connectivity has not yet been decided based on astronomical observation. On the other hand, any non-zero curvature is possible for a sufficiently large curved universe (analogously to how a small portion of a sphere can look flat). Theorists have been trying to construct a formal mathematical model of the shape of the universe relating connectivity, curvature and boundedness. In formal terms, this is a 3-manifold model corresponding to the spatial section (in comoving coordinates) of the four-dimensional spacetime of the universe. The model most theorists currently use is the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) model. Arguments have been put forward that the observational data best fit with the conclusion that the shape of the global universe is infinite and flat, but the data is also consistent with other possible shapes, such as the so-called Poincaré dodecahedral space, the multiply connected three-torus, and the Sokolov–Starobinskii space (quotient of the upper half-space model of hyperbolic space by a 2-dimensional lattice). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=99293 | 241,830 |
199,575 | When describing the species in 2002, Brunet "et al." noted the combination of features which would be considered archaic or derived for a species on the human line (the subtribe Hominina), the latter namely bipedal locomotion and reduced canine teeth, which they interpreted as evidence of its position near the chimpanzee–human last common ancestor (CHLCA). This classification made "Sahelanthropus" the oldest Hominina, shifting the centre of origin for the clade away from East Africa. They also suggested that "Sahelanthropus" could be a sister group to the 5.5 to 4.5 million year old "Ardipithecus" and later Hominina. The classification of "Sahelanthropus" in Hominina, as well as "Ardipithecus" and the 6 million year old "Orrorin", was at odds with molecular analyses of the time which had placed the CHLCA between 6 and 4 million years ago based on a high mutation rate of about 70 mutations per generation. All these genera were anatomically too derived to represent a basal hominin (the group containing chimps and humans), so molecular data would only permit their classification into more ancient and now-extinct lineages. This was overturned in 2012 by geneticists Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin who studied the genomes of children and their parents and found the mutation was actually half that, placing the CHLCA anywhere from 14 to 7 million years ago, though most geneticists and palaeoanthropologists use 8 to 7 million years ago. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61700 | 199,472 |
1,450,178 | In 1817, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer became the superintendent. He is known as the "Father of the Military Academy." He upgraded academic standards, instilled military discipline, and emphasized honorable conduct. He also created a teaching method known today as the Thayer Method, which emphasizes self study and daily homework, as well as small class size. This method of instruction is still used today. Thayer made civil engineering the foundation of the curriculum. For the first half century, USMA graduates were largely responsible for the construction of the bulk of the nation's initial railway lines, bridges, harbors and roads. This tradition continues in the hands of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Thayer was responsible for forging many of the traditions and culture that are the essence of the academy even in modern times. During his tenure, the Corps of Cadets thrived and due to the small size of the Regular Army during this period of American history, USMA became the predominant source of commissioned officers. This led to an increase in the esprit-de-corps and honoring of tradition that is so ingrained in West Point culture. The tradition of the class ring began during Thayer's tenure, in 1835 – the first such university in the US to do so. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20793344 | 1,449,362 |
938,321 | "During the 17th and 18th centuries, various forms of immunotherapy in cancer became widespread... In the 18th and 19th centuries, septic dressings enclosing ulcerative tumours were used for the treatment of cancer. Surgical wounds were left open to facilitate the development of infection, and purulent sores were created deliberately... One of the most well-known effects of microorganisms on ... cancer was reported in 1891, when an American surgeon, William Coley, inoculated patients having inoperable tumours with [ "Streptococcus pyogenes" ]." "Coley [had] thoroughly reviewed the literature available at that time and found 38 reports of cancer patients with accidental or iatrogenic feverish erysipelas. In 12 patients, the sarcoma or carcinoma had completely disappeared; the others had substantially improved. Coley decided to attempt the therapeutic use of iatrogenic erysipelas..." "Coley developed a toxin that contained heat-killed bacteria [ "Streptococcus pyogenes" and "Serratia marcescens" ]. Until 1963, this treatment was used for the treatment of sarcoma." "Coley injected more than 1000 cancer patients with bacteria or bacterial products." 51.9% of [Coley's] patients with inoperable soft-tissue sarcomas showed complete tumour regression and survived for more than 5 years, and 21.2% of the patients had no clinical evidence of tumour at least 20 years after this treatment..." Research continued in the 20th Century under Dr. Maria O'Connor Hornung at Tulane Medical School | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1661124 | 937,820 |
161,975 | More importantly for biomaterials research, however, is the fact that, when dried, the mucin provides a suitable substrate for the attachment of living cells. This has important implications for tissue engineering, especially because of the elastic qualities of the adhesive. Essentially, a coating of "Drosera" mucilage on a surgical implant, such as a replacement hip or an organ transplant, could drastically improve the rate of recovery and decrease the potential for rejection, because living tissue can effectively attach and grow on it. The authors also suggest a wide variety of applications for "Drosera" mucin, including wound treatment, regenerative medicine, or enhancing synthetic adhesives. Because this mucilage can stretch to nearly a million times its original size and is readily available for use, it can be an extremely cost-efficient source of biomaterial. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=148069 | 161,890 |
993,395 | Beginning in 2003, Craig Venter, leader of the privately funded parallel of the Human Genome Project, has led the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS), circumnavigating the globe and collecting metagenomic samples throughout the journey. All of these samples were sequenced using shotgun sequencing, in hopes that new genomes (and therefore new organisms) would be identified. The pilot project, conducted in the Sargasso Sea, found DNA from nearly 2000 different species, including 148 types of bacteria never before seen. Venter thoroughly explored the West Coast of the United States, and completed a two-year expedition to explore the Baltic, Mediterranean and Black Seas. Analysis of the metagenomic data collected during this journey revealed two groups of organisms, one composed of taxa adapted to environmental conditions of 'feast or famine', and a second composed of relatively fewer but more abundantly and widely distributed taxa primarily composed of plankton. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1408929 | 992,878 |
1,379,234 | He edited "The Cyclopedia of American Agriculture" (1907–09), the "Cyclopedia of American Horticulture" (1900–02) (continued as the "Standard Cyclopedia Of Horticulture" (1916–1919)) and the "Rural Science, Rural Textbook, Gardencraft," and "Young Folks Library" series of manuals. He was the founding editor of the journals "Country Life in America" and the "Cornell Countryman." He dominated the field of horticultural literature, writing some sixty-five books, which together sold more than a million copies, including scientific works, efforts to explain botany to laypeople, a collection of poetry; edited more than a hundred books by other authors and published at least 1,300 articles and over 100 papers in pure taxonomy. He also coined the words "cultivar", "cultigen", and "indigen". His most significant and lasting contributions were in the botanical study of cultivated plants. Bailey's publisher was George Platt Brett, Sr. of Macmillan Publishers (United States). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=160679 | 1,378,472 |
1,716,246 | A critical element of Keasling's work was the development of genetic tools to aid in the manipulation of microbial metabolism, particularly for low-value products that require high yields from sugar.His laboratory developed single-copy plasmids for the expression of complex metabolic pathways, promoter systems that allow regulated control of transcription consistently in all cells of a culture, mRNA stabilization technologies to regulate the stability of mRNA segments, and a protein engineering approach to attach several enzymes of a metabolic pathway onto a synthetic protein scaffold to increase pathway flux. These and other gene expression tools now enable precise control of the expression of the genes that encode novel metabolic pathways to maximize chemical production, to minimize losses to side products, and minimize the accumulation of toxic intermediates that may poison the microbial host, all of which are important for economical production of this important drug. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5619097 | 1,715,277 |
1,436,426 | The nuances of the SP log are still being researched. In theory, almost all porous rocks contain water. Some pores are completely filled with water. Others have a thin layer of water molecules wetting the surface of the rock, with gas or oil filling the rest of the pore. In sandstones and porous limestones there is a continuous layer of water throughout the formation. If there is even a little permeability to water, ions can move through the rock and decrease the voltage difference with the mud nearby. Shales do not allow water or ion movement. Although they may have a large water content, it is bound to the surface of the flat clay crystals comprising the shale. Thus mud opposite shale sections maintains its voltage difference with the surrounding rock. As the SP logging tool is drawn up the hole it measures the voltage difference between the reference stake and the mud opposite shale and sandstone or limestone sections. The resulting log curve reflects the permeability of the rocks and, indirectly, their lithology. SP curves degrade over time, as the ions diffuse up and down the mud column. It also can suffer from stray voltages caused by other logging tools that are run with it. Older, simpler logs often have better SP curves than more modern logs for this reason. With experience in an area, a good SP curve can even allow a skilled interpreter to infer sedimentary environments such as deltas, point bars or offshore tidal deposits. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=222313 | 1,435,617 |
1,946,160 | McComas was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, Harold McComas, was a World War II Veteran, who went to college and law school through the GI Bill. His mother, Hazelyn McComas, nee Melconian, was the descendant of Armenian/Lebanese refugees who fled the genocide from Beirut to Ellis Island. McComas is severely dyslexic, and didn’t start to learn how to read until the 4th grade. He discussed his dyslexia in childhood and how it led him to space science in a 2014 talk entitled “A Personal Journey from “Slow” to the interstellar Frontier.” McComas received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Geophysics and Space Physics from University of California, Los Angeles in 1985 and 1986. He began his space physics career in 1980 with early development work on the SWOOPS instrument for Ulysses, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He moved to SwRI, in San Antonio, Texas, in 2000 and Princeton University in 2016. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43835413 | 1,945,048 |
2,032,592 | The traditional colony count method could be modified to measure antimicrobial activity in the 96-well plate without the need for sampling the wells and spreading surviving cells on agar plates by simply adding an equal volume of twice-concentrated broth after the two hour incubation in the low salt buffer. There would need to be a way to determine how many cells survived at the end of the incubation period using batch cultures. Fortunately, the mathematics of exponential growth offers a way to do just that. If the turbidity, or optical density, of the batch cultures within the 96-well plate is monitored in real time, and the amount of time required for a well to reach a threshold is recorded, and the doubling time of the exponentially growing cells is known, then the number of cells originally present in the inoculum can be calculated. This starting number of cells is equal to the number of surviving cells at the end of the two hour incubation with the antimicrobial agent. Because this procedure requires no actual colony formation or colony counting, it is termed "virtual colony count". Thus far the VCC technique has been limited to antimicrobial peptides. It could potentially work with other antimicrobial agents, as long as the twice-concentrated Mueller Hinton Broth inactivates the antimicrobial activity of the agent. The VCC method can detect either bactericidal or bacteriostatic activity, but it cannot distinguish between them. However, bacteriostatic activity can be quantified by measuring the difference in threshold times between the "input" and "output" controls (see below). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38532142 | 2,031,422 |
147,965 | Nanoparticles can also be formed using radiation chemistry. Radiolysis from gamma rays can create strongly active free radicals in solution. This relatively simple technique uses a minimum number of chemicals. These including water, a soluble metallic salt, a radical scavenger (often a secondary alcohol), and a surfactant (organic capping agent). High gamma doses on the order of 10 Gray are required. In this process, reducing radicals will drop metallic ions down to the zero-valence state. A scavenger chemical will preferentially interact with oxidizing radicals to prevent the re-oxidation of the metal. Once in the zero-valence state, metal atoms begin to coalesce into particles. A chemical surfactant surrounds the particle during formation and regulates its growth. In sufficient concentrations, the surfactant molecules stay attached to the particle. This prevents it from dissociating or forming clusters with other particles. Formation of nanoparticles using the radiolysis method allows for tailoring of particle size and shape by adjusting precursor concentrations and gamma dose. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1234517 | 147,906 |
1,952,409 | The use of seed tubers from virus-infected plants in successive cropping seasons was common in the past and is still common in developing countries. This management leads to cultivar degeneration that can result in yield decreases of more than 80%. On the other hand, the solution to this problem implies an increase in crop production costs because the farmer cannot use the tubers he has produced himself as seed and must look for a clean (virus-free) seed source, which usually represents a significant amount of the total cost. European farmers observed from the beginning of the 20th century that seed tubers from certain regions produced more than those from their own region. Thus began the commercial production of clean seed tubers in specific regions, an activity highly perfected and technified in many countries of the world. By the 18th century, long before what we now call viruses were known, potato degeneration was attributed to its repeated asexual propagation. Because of this belief, it was thought that sexual reproduction was necessary to rejuvenate and restore the yield potential of cultivars. The cause of aging was not correct, but the method of controlling viruses by breeding new cultivars through crosses worked well because many potato viruses, such as PVX, PVY, and PLRV, are not transmitted by seed of sexual origin (called "botanical seed"). Subsequently, however, these new cultivars also eventually degenerated, requiring the generation of new cultivars on an ongoing basis. In some regions of the world, in fact, tuber pieces are not used in commercial potato production, but seed of sexual origin is used instead. This strategy was first used in China in 1959. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=71590913 | 1,951,288 |
966,218 | Gradualism had its basis in the works of the geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Hutton's view suggests that profound geological change was the cumulative product of a relatively slow continuing operation of processes which can still be seen in operation today, as opposed to catastrophism which promoted the idea that sudden changes had causes which can no longer be seen at work. A uniformitarian perspective was adopted for biological changes. Such a view can seem to contradict the fossil record, which often shows evidence of new species appearing suddenly, then persisting in that form for long periods. In the 1970s palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould developed a theoretical model that suggests that evolution, although a slow process in human terms, undergoes periods of relatively rapid change (ranging between 50,000 and 100,000 years) alternating with long periods of relative stability. Their theory is called "punctuated equilibrium" and explains the fossil record without contradicting Darwin's ideas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19852895 | 965,708 |
934,135 | Although some earlier unpublished studies had been prepared, not until the early 1970s was true textual criticism applied to the Book of Mormon. At that time BYU Professor Ellis Rasmussen and his associates were asked by the LDS Church to begin preparation for a new edition of the Holy Scriptures. One aspect of that effort entailed digitizing the text and preparing appropriate footnotes; another aspect required establishing the most dependable text. To that latter end, Stanley R. Larson (a Rasmussen graduate student) set about applying modern text critical standards to the manuscripts and early editions of the Book of Mormon as his thesis project—which he completed in 1974. To that end, Larson carefully examined the Original Manuscript (the one dictated by Joseph Smith to his scribes) and the Printer's Manuscript (the copy Oliver Cowdery prepared for the Printer in 1829–1830), and compared them with the first, second, and third editions of the Book of Mormon to determine what sort of changes had occurred over time and to make judgments as to which readings were the most original. Larson proceeded to publish a useful set of well-argued articles on the phenomena which he had discovered. Many of his observations were included as improvements in the 1981 LDS edition of the Book of Mormon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=155023 | 933,643 |
579,524 | While cultural psychology is reliant on this model, societies often fail to recognize this. Despite the overwhelming acceptance that people affect culture and culture affects people, societal systems tend to minimize the effect that people form on their communities. For example, mission statements of businesses, schools, and foundations attempt to make promises regarding the environment and values that their establishment holds. However, these promises cannot be made in accordance with the mutually consisting theory without being upheld by all participants. The mission statement for the employees of Southwest Airlines, for example, makes the claim that, "...We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth". While the company can ensure the "equal opportunity for learning and personal growth", the aforementioned message cannot be promised. The work environment that Southwest provides includes paying consumers. While rules can be enforced to ensure "safety" on their aircraft, customers will not be removed due to attitude or a lack of courtesy. This therefore contradicts the promise of a "stable work environment". On the contrary, some establishments do ensure that their mission statements agree with the mutually consisting model. For example, Yale University promises within its mission statement that: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2700105 | 579,227 |
439,964 | The instruments necessary for electrospinning include a high voltage supplier, a capillary tube with a pipette or needle with a small diameter, and a metal collecting screen. One electrode is placed into the polymer solution and the other electrode is attached to the collector. An electric field is applied to the end of the capillary tube that contains the polymer solution held by its surface tension and forms a charge on the surface of the liquid. As the intensity of the electric field increases, the hemispherical surface of the fluid at the tip of the capillary tube elongates to form a conical shape known as the Taylor cone. A critical value is attained upon further increase in the electric field in which the repulsive electrostatic force overcomes the surface tension and the charged jet of fluid is ejected from the tip of the Taylor cone. The discharged polymer solution jet is unstable and elongates as a result, allowing the jet to become very long and thin. Charged polymer fibers solidifies with solvent evaporation. Randomly-oriented nanofibers are collected on the collector. Nanofibers can also be collected in a highly aligned fashion by using specialized collectors such as the rotating drum, metal frame, or a two-parallel plates system. Parameters such as jet stream movement and polymer concentration have to be controlled to produce nanofibers with uniform diameters and morphologies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4406110 | 439,750 |
51,130 | Frogs are much more vocal, especially during the breeding season when they use their voices to attract mates. The presence of a particular species in an area may be more easily discerned by its characteristic call than by a fleeting glimpse of the animal itself. In most species, the sound is produced by expelling air from the lungs over the vocal cords into an air sac or sacs in the throat or at the corner of the mouth. This may distend like a balloon and acts as a resonator, helping to transfer the sound to the atmosphere, or the water at times when the animal is submerged. The main vocalisation is the male's loud advertisement call which seeks to both encourage a female to approach and discourage other males from intruding on its territory. This call is modified to a quieter courtship call on the approach of a female or to a more aggressive version if a male intruder draws near. Calling carries the risk of attracting predators and involves the expenditure of much energy. Other calls include those given by a female in response to the advertisement call and a release call given by a male or female during unwanted attempts at amplexus. When a frog is attacked, a distress or fright call is emitted, often resembling a scream. The usually nocturnal Cuban tree frog ("Osteopilus septentrionalis") produces a rain call when there is rainfall during daylight hours. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=621 | 51,110 |
1,270,622 | Later in the season, when nitrogen and nutrients becomes limited and radiation stress increases, the green cells will develop into flagellated sexual gametes that mate and produce new zygotes that have lost their flagella and are capable of surviving the winter period. Transformation into the zygote, or hypnoblast, is characterized by the production and accumulation of reserve materials that include sugars and lipids as well as the formation of esterified secondary carotenoids. The secondary carotenoids will turn the green zygotes orange as they accumulate in the area around the plastids of the cell to protect the zygotes from UV radiation. Orange and red spores can be seen throughout the summer. During this stage, the cell wall will also begin to thicken to help the cell tolerate freezing temperatures and UV light. In addition, the color of these pigments reduces albedo such that individual cells may melt nearby ice and snow crystals to access limiting nutrients and water in an otherwise unavailable frozen state. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4338212 | 1,269,931 |
330,284 | On 15 November 1942, the Auxiliary "Staffel" was created. By mid-1943, "Luftflotte" 1 was given four "Staffeln" while "Luftflotte" 4 and "Luftwaffe Kommando Ost" (Luftwaffe Command East) were given six and two respectively. In the first half of 1943, 12 "Nachtschlachtgruppen" ("night battle groups"—NSGr) had been formed, flying a multitude of different types of aircraft, including the Ju 87, which proved itself ideally suited to the low-level slow flying needed. NSGr 1 and 2 fought with some success on the Western Front during the Battle of Normandy and Battle of the Bulge. NSGr 7 operated in "anti-partisan" role from bases in Albania from July 1944, replacing their use of German trainers. The 3rd and 4th group served on the Eastern Front, the 8th in the Arctic and the 9th in Italy. NSGr 20 fought against the Western Allied invasion of Germany in 1945. Photographic evidence exists of 16 NSGr 20 Ju 87s lining up to take-off in the woods circling the Lippe airfield, Germany while under attack from Republic P-47 Thunderbolts of the USAAF IX Tactical Air Command. The unit operated against the Ludendorff Bridge during the Battle of Remagen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16590 | 330,109 |
2,032,769 | VCC users are cautioned to transfer cells in a small volume such as 10 microliters beneath a larger volume such as 90 microliters, similar to the QGK calibration curves shown above and the calibration curves reported in the initial VCC publication, but unlike the experimental procedure used to test defensin activity in that same paper. The improved pipetting technique was described in 2011 in the study of the biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) pathogen "Bacillus anthracis". The original method published in 2005 involved the transfer of 50 microliters of cell suspensions to 50 microliters of liquid, which generates froth, bubbles and turbidity that is incompatible with a turbidimetric method when cells are transferred directly to the bottoms of the wells beneath the phosphate buffer solutions. Avoiding this problem by adding cell suspensions as droplets from above can cause aerosols that result in cross-contamination. Bioaerosols of hazardous bacteria can also pose safety risks that can be reduced by conducting experiments within a biosafety cabinet. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38532142 | 2,031,597 |
2,181,474 | STEP has benefited from and exploited the microeconomic field of technology and productivity analysis that is the fairly recent legacy of Griliches, Jorgenson, Solow, Mansfield, and others as well as the work of international trade economists. But the fact is that in many of the specific policy areas of STEP work – intellectual property, standards, program evaluation, etc. – there is a serious deficit of empirical research. Rather than rely on anecdote and judgment, the Board has when possible taken the step – unusual for the Academy – of supporting small-scale original research projects, often surveys. This was done in studies of the patent system, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Advanced Technology Program (ATP), and biomedical researchers’ experience with intellectual property. In all of these cases, the research results strongly influenced study committees’ findings and recommendations. That, in turn, has encouraged more research. In the case of the patent study, the Board in 2002 issued an RFP, received 80-odd proposals, and selected 9 projects for full or co-funding. This undoubtedly contributed to the subsequent flowering of empirical research on intellectual property systems and policies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12911652 | 2,180,227 |
1,657,651 | In the 16S rRNA gene trees, the "Aquificota" species branch in the proximity of the phylum Thermotogota (another phylum comprising hyperthermophilic organisms) close to the archaeal-bacterial branch point. However, a close relationship of the "Aquificota" to the Thermotogota and the deep branching of the "Aquificota" is not supported by some phylogenetic studies based upon other gene/protein sequences and also by CSIs in several highly conserved universal proteins 16S-23S-5S operons. In contrast to the very high G+C content of their rRNAs (i.e. more than 62%), which is required for stability of their secondary structures at high growth temperatures, the inference that the "Aquificota" do not constitute a deep-branch lineage is also independently strongly supported by CSIs in a number of important proteins (viz. Hsp70, Hsp60, RpoB, RpoB and AlaRS), which support its placement in the proximity of the phylum Proteobacteria, particularly the Campylobacterota. A specific relationship of the "Aquificota" to the Proteobacteria is supported by a two-amino-acid CSI in the protein inorganic pyrophosphatase, which is uniquely found in species from these two phyla. Cavalier-Smith has also suggested that the "Aquificota" are closely related to the Proteobacteria. In contrast to the above cited analyses that are based on a few indels or on single genes, analyses on informational genes, which appeared to be less often transferred to the "Aquifex" lineage than noninformational genes, most often placed the Aquificales close to the Thermotogales. These authors explain the frequently observed grouping of "Aquificota" with Campylobacterota as result of frequent horizontal gene transfer due to shared ecological niches. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=464400 | 1,656,718 |
2,086,521 | Butterworth then moved to Harwell, as a scientific officer at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE), where he conducted research on materials for the production of a cold neutron source. Then, in 1958, Butterworth was awarded a lectureship at Imperial College. He joined the High Energy Nuclear Physics group and worked on bubble chambers. In 1962 Ian led the Imperial group into an Anglo–German collaboration involving groups from six centres using the Saclay 81 cm chamber to take data of interactions produced by beams of pions generated by the CERN Proton Synchrotron. Two years later he took a year’s leave of absence from Imperial College to take up a physicist position at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “then considered the prime location for the investigation of the resonant states”. He returned to Imperial in 1965 as a senior lecturer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63363756 | 2,085,319 |
122,248 | Alhazen studied the process of sight, the structure of the eye, image formation in the eye, and the visual system. Ian P. Howard argued in a 1996 "Perception" article that Alhazen should be credited with many discoveries and theories previously attributed to Western Europeans writing centuries later. For example, he described what became in the 19th century Hering's law of equal innervation. He wrote a description of vertical horopters 600 years before Aguilonius that is actually closer to the modern definition than Aguilonius's—and his work on binocular disparity was repeated by Panum in 1858. Craig Aaen-Stockdale, while agreeing that Alhazen should be credited with many advances, has expressed some caution, especially when considering Alhazen in isolation from Ptolemy, with whom Alhazen was extremely familiar. Alhazen corrected a significant error of Ptolemy regarding binocular vision, but otherwise his account is very similar; Ptolemy also attempted to explain what is now called Hering's law. In general, Alhazen built on and expanded the optics of Ptolemy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1645 | 122,199 |
1,117,938 | The "barbat" probably originated in Central Asia. The earliest image of the "barbat" dates back to the 1st century BC from ancient northern Bactria. While in his book ("Les instruments de musique de l’Inde ancienne") musicologist Claudie Marcel-Dubois pointed out a more "clear cut" depiction of the "barbat" from Gandhara sculpture dated to the 2nd-4th centuries AD, which may well have been introduced by the Kushan aristocracy whose influence is attested in Gandharan art. The name itself meant "short-necked lute" in Pahlavi, the language of the Sasanian Empire, through which the instrument came west from Central Asia to the Middle East, adopted by the Persians. The barbat (possibly known as mizhar, kirān, or muwatter, all skin topped versions, like the rud) was used by some Arabs in the sixth century. At the end of the 6th century, a wood topped version of the Persian-styled instrument was constructed by al Nadr, called "ūd", and introduced from Iraq to Mecca. This Persian-style instrument was being played there in the seventh century. Sometime in the seventh century it was modified or "perfected" by Mansour Zalzal, and the two instruments (barbat and "ūd shabbūt") were used side by side into the 10th century, and possibly longer. The two instruments have been confused by modern scholars looking for examples, and some of the ouds identified may possibly be barbats. Examples of this cited in the "Encyclopedia of Islam" include a lute in the Cantigas de Santa Maria and the frontispiece from "The Life and Times of Ali Ibn ISA" by Harold Bowen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3591961 | 1,117,365 |
615,407 | Tuna can maintain the temperature of certain parts of their body above the temperature of ambient seawater. For example, bluefin tuna maintain a core body temperature of , in water as cold as . However, unlike typical endothermic creatures such as mammals and birds, tuna do not maintain temperature within a relatively narrow range. Tuna achieve endothermy by conserving the heat generated through normal metabolism. The rete mirabile ("wonderful net"), the intertwining of veins and arteries in the body's periphery, transfers heat from venous blood to arterial blood via a counter-current exchange system, thus mitigating the effects of surface cooling. This allows the tuna to elevate the temperatures of the highly aerobic tissues of the skeletal muscles, eyes and brain, which supports faster swimming speeds and reduced energy expenditure, and which enables them to survive in cooler waters over a wider range of ocean environments than those of other fish. In all tunas, however, the heart operates at ambient temperature, as it receives cooled blood, and coronary circulation is directly from the gills. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37930465 | 615,093 |
85,844 | In 1961, Igor and Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft traveled to London, Zürich and Cairo on their way to Australia where Stravinsky and Craft conducted all-Stravinsky concerts in Sydney and Melbourne. They returned to California via New Zealand, Tahiti, and Mexico. In January 1962, during his tour's stop in Washington, D.C., Stravinsky attended a dinner at the White House with President John F. Kennedy in honour of his eightieth birthday, where he received a special medal for "the recognition his music has achieved throughout the world". In September 1962, Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time since 1914, accepting an invitation from the Union of Soviet Composers to conduct six performances in Moscow and Leningrad. During the three-week visit he met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian. Stravinsky did not return to his Hollywood home until December 1962 in what was almost eight months of continual travelling. Following the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, Stravinsky completed his "Elegy for J.F.K." in the following year. The two-minute work took the composer two days to write. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38172 | 85,810 |
255,816 | Fluctuations in the orbits of the moons indicate that their mean density decreases with distance from Jupiter. Callisto, the outermost and least dense of the four, has a density intermediate between ice and rock whereas Io, the innermost and densest moon, has a density intermediate between rock and iron. Callisto has an ancient, heavily cratered and unaltered ice surface and the way it rotates indicates that its density is equally distributed, suggesting that it has no rocky or metallic core but consists of a homogeneous mix of rock and ice. This may well have been the original structure of all the moons. The rotation of the three inner moons, in contrast, indicates differentiation of their interiors with denser matter at the core and lighter matter above. They also reveal significant alteration of the surface. Ganymede reveals past tectonic movement of the ice surface which required partial melting of subsurface layers. Europa reveals more dynamic and recent movement of this nature, suggesting a thinner ice crust. Finally, Io, the innermost moon, has a sulfur surface, active volcanism and no sign of ice. All this evidence suggests that the nearer a moon is to Jupiter the hotter its interior. The current model is that the moons experience tidal heating as a result of the gravitational field of Jupiter in inverse proportion to the square of their distance from the giant planet. In all but Callisto this will have melted the interior ice, allowing rock and iron to sink to the interior and water to cover the surface. In Ganymede a thick and solid ice crust then formed. In warmer Europa a thinner more easily broken crust formed. In Io the heating is so extreme that all the rock has melted and water has long ago boiled out into space. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12505 | 255,682 |
1,409,548 | Tizard was born in Gillingham, Kent in 1885, the only son of Thomas Henry Tizard (1839–1924), naval officer and hydrographer, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Churchward. His ambition to join the navy was thwarted by poor eyesight, and he instead studied at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he concentrated on mathematics and chemistry, doing work on indicators and the motions of ions in gases. Tizard graduated in 1908 and at his tutor's suggestion he spent time in Berlin, where he met and formed a close friendship with Frederick Alexander Lindemann, later an influential scientific advisor of Winston Churchill. In 1909, he became a researcher in the Davy–Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution, working on colour change indicators. In 1911, Tizard returned to Oxford as a tutorial fellow at Oriel College and to work as a demonstrator in the electrical laboratory. On 25 July 1942, Tizard was elected President of Magdalen College, Oxford. He resigned this position in 1946. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=614252 | 1,408,756 |
174,723 | The United Kingdom and allied countries signed the Declaration of St James's Palace in June 1941 committing to no separate peace with Germany and setting out principles to serve as the basis of a future peace. Churchill agreed an alliance with the Soviet Union in July and began sending supplies to the USSR. By August, Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt had drafted the Atlantic Charter to define goals for the post-war world. In December, the Empire of Japan attacked British and American holdings with near-simultaneous offensives against Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific including an attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. Britain and America declared war on Japan, opening the Pacific War. The Grand Alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was formed and Britain and America agreed a Europe first grand strategy for the war. The Declaration by United Nations drafted by Roosevelt and Churchill in Washington in December 1941 formalised the Allies of World War II. The UK and her Allies suffered many disastrous defeats in the Asia-Pacific war during the first six months of 1942. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=202102 | 174,632 |
980,934 | Discovery is the identification of novel active chemical compounds, often called "hits", which are typically found by assay of compounds for a desired biological activity. Initial hits can come from repurposing existing agents toward a new pathologic processes, and from observations of biologic effects of new or existing natural products from bacteria, fungi, plants, etc. In addition, hits also routinely originate from structural observations of small molecule "fragments" bound to therapeutic targets (enzymes, receptors, etc.), where the fragments serve as starting points to develop more chemically complex forms by synthesis. Finally, hits also regularly originate from "en-masse" testing of chemical compounds against biological targets using biochemical or chemoproteomics assays, where the compounds may be from novel synthetic chemical libraries known to have particular properties (kinase inhibitory activity, diversity or drug-likeness, etc.), or from historic chemical compound collections or libraries created through combinatorial chemistry. While a number of approaches toward the identification and development of hits exist, the most successful techniques are based on chemical and biological intuition developed in team environments through years of rigorous practice aimed solely at discovering new therapeutic agents. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=938177 | 980,422 |
1,609,096 | ChemCam has been used, in conjunction with other instruments of the Curiosity rover, to make advancements in understanding the chemical composition of rocks and soils on Mars. LIBS makes it possible to detect and quantify the major oxides: SiO, AlO, FeO, MgO, TiO, CaO, NaO, and KO of bedrock targets. There are distinguishable geologic units determined from orbital analyses that have been confirmed by averaged bedrock compositions determined from ChemCam and other instruments aboard Curiosity. The identification is based on multivariate PLS and PCA models classified using SIMCA with calibration models made using ""The Unscramble"r" software. ChemCam has also quantified soil chemistry. ChemCam has seen two distinct soil types at Gale crater: a fine-grained mafic material that is more representative of global Martian soils or dust and a coarse-grained felsic material that originates from local Gale crater bedrock. ChemCam has the capability to measure minor or trace elements such as lithium, manganese, strontium, and rubidium. ChemCam has measured MnO up to 25 wt% in fracture fills that suggests Mars was once a more oxygenating environment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41305681 | 1,608,191 |
50,720 | A steam turbine consists of one or more "rotors" (rotating discs) mounted on a drive shaft, alternating with a series of "stators" (static discs) fixed to the turbine casing. The rotors have a propeller-like arrangement of blades at the outer edge. Steam acts upon these blades, producing rotary motion. The stator consists of a similar, but fixed, series of blades that serve to redirect the steam flow onto the next rotor stage. A steam turbine often exhausts into a surface condenser that provides a vacuum. The stages of a steam turbine are typically arranged to extract the maximum potential work from a specific velocity and pressure of steam, giving rise to a series of variably sized high- and low-pressure stages. Turbines are only efficient if they rotate at relatively high speed, therefore they are usually connected to reduction gearing to drive lower speed applications, such as a ship's propeller. In the vast majority of large electric generating stations, turbines are directly connected to generators with no reduction gearing. Typical speeds are 3600 revolutions per minute (RPM) in the United States with 60 Hertz power, and 3000 RPM in Europe and other countries with 50 Hertz electric power systems. In nuclear power applications, the turbines typically run at half these speeds, 1800 RPM and 1500 RPM. A turbine rotor is also only capable of providing power when rotating in one direction. Therefore, a reversing stage or gearbox is usually required where power is required in the opposite direction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27692 | 50,700 |
1,995,259 | In 1964, the F-100As were retired and the 188th received newer F-100C and twin-seat F-100F Super Sabre trainers, and became the 188th Tactical Fighter Squadron, gained by Tactical Air Command. In January 1968, the group was activated as a result of the Pueblo Crisis, and in June of that year the 188th Tactical Fighter Squadron and approximately 250 maintenance and support personnel were deployed to Tuy Hoa Air Base, Republic of Vietnam. Remaining group members were assigned to various bases in South Korea. The unit flew over 6000 combat sorties in the F-100C Super Sabre and amassed over 630 medals and decorations before release from federal active duty in June 1969. Captain Michael Adams was killed in action and Major Bobby Neeld and First Lieutenant Mitchell Lane remain listed as missing in action. The unit received the Air Force Outstanding Unit Award with Combat "V' Device. After its Vietnam War deployment, the 188th was relieved from active duty and returned to New Mexico State Control on 4 June 1969. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16928579 | 1,994,116 |
577,162 | There are also mechanical changes which occur in the moving components during use. In this case, however, most of the changes seem to occur early in the life of the driver, and are almost certainly due to relaxation in flexing mechanical parts of the driver (e.g., surround, spider, etc.). Several studies have been published documenting substantial changes in the T/S parameters over the first few hours of use, some parameters changing by as much as 15% or more over these initial periods. The proprietor of the firm GR Research has publicly reported several such investigations of several manufacturers' drivers. Other studies suggest little change, or reversible changes after only the first few minutes. This variability is largely related to the particular characteristics of specific materials, and reputable manufacturers attempt to take them into account. While there are a great many anecdotal reports of the audible effects of such changes in published speaker reviews, the relationship of such early changes to subjective sound quality reports is not completely clear. Some changes early in driver life are complementary (such as a reduction in formula_9 accompanied by a rise in formula_24) and result in minimal net changes (small fractions of a dB) in frequency response. If the performance of speaker system is critical, as with high order (complex) or heavily equalized systems, it is sensible to measure T/S parameters after a period of run-in (some hours, typically, using program material), and to model the effects of normal parameter changes on driver performance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1311933 | 576,866 |
1,595,277 | Crabtree corresponded with Jeremiah Horrocks (who sometimes spelt his name in the Latised form as Horrox), another enthusiastic amateur astronomer, from 1636. A group of astronomers from the north of England, which included William Gascoigne, formed around them and were Britain's first followers of the astronomy of Johannes Kepler. "Nos Keplari" as the group called themselves, were distinguished as being the first people to gain a realistic notion of the solar system's size. Crabtree and Horrocks were the only astronomers to observe, plot, and record the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun, as predicted by Horrocks, on 24 November 1639 (Julian calendar, or 4 December in the Gregorian calendar). They also predicted the next occurrence on 8 June 2004. The two correspondents both recorded the event in their own homes and it is not known whether they ever met in person, but Crabtree's calculations were crucial in allowing Horrocks to estimate the size of Venus and the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Unfortunately Horrocks died early in 1641 the day before he was due to meet Crabtree. Crabtree made his will on 19 July 1644, and was buried within the precincts of the Manchester Collegiate Church on 1 August 1644, close to where he had received his education. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33684900 | 1,594,379 |
358,480 | The sequence of the DNA is stored in databases available to anyone on the Internet. The U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (and sister organizations in Europe and Japan) house the gene sequence in a database known as GenBank, along with sequences of known and hypothetical genes and proteins. Other organizations, such as the UCSC Genome Browser at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Ensembl present additional data and annotation and powerful tools for visualizing and searching it. Computer programs have been developed to analyze the data because the data itself is difficult to interpret without such programs. Generally speaking, advances in genome sequencing technology have followed Moore's Law, a concept from computer science which states that integrated circuits can increase in complexity at an exponential rate. This means that the speeds at which whole genomes can be sequenced can increase at a similar rate, as was seen during the development of the Human Genome Project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5219699 | 358,294 |
1,604,002 | Situated on a main campus, in 2012 the university had a workforce of more than 9,800, an annual budget of about $1.49 billion (only 29% provided by the state of Georgia), and a physical plant valued at some $600 million, making it one of the largest employers in Georgia and a major contributor to the state's economic and cultural vitality. Transit at the University of Georgia is maintained by UGA Campus Transit. Athens has been named one of the top ten places in America to live and is home to many popular music artists including the American rock bands R.E.M. and Widespread Panic. UGA has been ranked number one among "campus scenes that rock!" by "Rolling Stone" magazine. Every summer since 1996 the city has hosted AthFest, a non-profit music and arts festival in the downtown area. While university students can enjoy the college town of Athens, they are less than an hour away by automobile from Atlanta, Georgia, a designated global city and the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, being in the top ten of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. In the recent years, neighboring metro areas such as Gainesville, Georgia and metro Atlanta have experienced considerable growth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59604425 | 1,603,101 |
2,246,977 | While surface area and pore volume is important to the adsorption properties of MOF materials, another consideration is the availability of coordinatively unsaturated metals sites. The divalent metal carboxylate CPO-27(M) (where M = Co,Ni) was reported by Dietzel and co-workers, while at a similar time work by Rosi et. al. produced the isostructural zinc analogue, referred to as MOF-74. The divalent metal and 2,5-dihydroxyterephthalic acid linker form a honeycomb like array of hexagonalchannels. The inorganic component is a helical chain of edge sharing NiO6octahedra where each metal is bound to two oxygens from hydroxyl groups on the ligand, three oxygens from carboxylate groups and one water molecule. MOF-74 was prepared using DMF as the solvent and as such, has terminal DMF molecules bound to the free metal sites on the chain. The helical chains of CPO-27(Ni) are separated by the planar dihydroxyterephthalic acid linker. This organic molecule acts as a rigid pillar between chains with each linker bound to three different metal sites from each chain. Removal of the solvent molecules from the terminal metal sites creates five-coordinate metal cations with little freedom to rotate or distort the chain to change the coordination environment.This unfavourable coordination environment means that the activated metal site has a high enthalpy of adsorption and is readily filled by adsorbed guest species. The chain istopologically identical to that of the nickel bisphosphonate STA-12(Ni) but differs upon dehydration where the additional flexibility of the bisphosphonate linker allows the chain to twist and distort reducing the accessibility of the coordinatively unsaturated metal site. The availability of this metal site in the CPO-27 framework has been explored for a number of different adsorption applications involving gases such as CO, H and NO. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=71321817 | 2,245,705 |
401,581 | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has an extensive history of Greek community involvement on campus, including past presidents, honorary academic building dedications, and philanthropic achievements. The overall Greek system at Rensselaer stresses Leadership, Fortitude, Innovation, and Evolution. RPI currently has 29 active fraternities as well as 6 sororities, with 32 percent involvement of all males and 18 percent involvement of all females, organized under the Interfraternal Council and Panhellenic Council. Of those Greek organizations, three were founded at Rensselaer including the Theta Xi national engineering fraternity, the Sigma Delta Hispanic-interest local sorority, and the Rensselaer Society of Engineers local engineering fraternity. Theta Xi fraternity was established by RPI students on 29 April 1864, the only national fraternity founded during the Civil War. The Theta Xi Fraternity Chapter House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Additionally, Rensselaer is home to the Epsilon Zeta chapter of the Alpha Phi Omega, or "APO," national service fraternity, which operates a test-bank and office at the top floor of the Student Union. The organization also hosts a campus lost & found, universal can tab collection, and a public 3D printing service. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=194026 | 401,382 |
1,466,569 | Black soldiers had been a part of the Continental Army since the first shots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The black soldiers in those integrated militias served throughout the war. However, new recruits of black soldiers were technically barred from military service in the Continental Army from November 12, 1775, until February 23, 1778. Even so, many enslavers shirked their duty to serve and sent their enslaved men to serve in their place. As Frederick Mackenzie reported on June 30, 1777, the rebels "find it so difficult to raise men for the Continental Army, that they enlist Negroes, for whom their owners receive a bounty of 180 dollars, and half their pay; and the Negro gets the other half, and a promise of freedom after three years." Rhode Island continued to have difficulties recruiting enough white men to meet the troop quotas set by the Continental Congress in 1778, so the Rhode Island Assembly decided to pursue a suggestion made by General Varnum to enlist enslaved men into the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. Varnum had raised the idea in a letter to George Washington, who forwarded it to the governor of Rhode Island without explicitly approving or disapproving of the plan. On 14 February 1778, the Rhode Island General Assembly voted to allow the enlistment of "every able-bodied negro, mulatto, or Indian man slave" who chose to do so, and voted that "every slave so enlisting shall, upon his passing muster before Colonel Christopher Greene, be immediately discharged from the service of his master or mistress, and be absolutely free." The owners of enslaved men who enlisted were to be compensated by the Assembly in an amount equal to their market value. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3597603 | 1,465,746 |
663,866 | A 2020 meta-analysis by van Klink and others, published in the journal "Science", found that globally terrestrial insects appear to be declining in abundance at a rate of about 9% per decade, while the abundance of freshwater insects appears to be increasing by 11% per decade. The study analysed 166 long-term studies, involving 1676 different sites across the world. It found considerable variations in insect decline depending on locality – the authors considered this a hopeful sign, as it suggests local factors, including conservation efforts, can make a big difference. The article stated that the increase in freshwater insects may in part be due to efforts to clean up lakes and rivers, and may also relate to global warming and enhanced primary productivity driven by increased nutrient inputs. However, the data selection and methodology of the article were criticised in four e-letters in "Science", one technical comment published in "Science" and one opinion published in "". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59924918 | 663,520 |
354,662 | In 1997, he elected to skip Formula Renault and Formula Vauxhall on sponsors advice, and signed a contract to progress to the higher-tier British Formula Three Championship with Alan Docking Racing (ADR). Webber was ADR's lead driver complemented by two funded non-competitive teammates, and was told to bring funding to ADR. Driving a Dallara F397 car powered by an old Mugen Honda engine purchased by the Webber family, he won the Brands Hatch Grand Prix event and came fourth overall with 131 points. Webber was voted Rookie of the Year as 1997's highest-placed rookie. His funding almost dried up mid-season until motor racing journalist Peter Windsor suggested Webber solicit funding from rugby union player and family friend David Campese to complete the year and stop Webber ending his international career early. Webber's season was put on a race-by-race basis and he received offers from Renault and Jackie Stewart. He also finished third in the Masters of Formula 3 and fourth in the Macau Grand Prix for ADR. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=564161 | 354,479 |
1,208,126 | The advent of the CNC lathe (or more properly, CNC turning center) has blurred these distinct levels of production to some extent. The CNC turning center most appropriately fits in the mid-range of production, replacing the turret lathe. However, it is often possible to produce a single component with a CNC turning center more quickly than can be done with an engine lathe. To some extent too, the CNC turning center has stepped into the region traditionally occupied by the (mechanical) screw machine. CNC screw machines do this to an even greater degree, but they are expensive. In some cases they are vital, yet in others a mechanical machine can match or beat overall performance and profitability. It is not unusual for cam-op automatic lathes to beat CNCs on cycle time. CNC offers many benefits, not least CAD/CAM integration, but the CNC itself usually does not give any inherent speed advantage within the context of an automatic lathe cycle in terms of speeds and feeds or tool-changing speed. There are many variables involved in answering the question of which is best for a particular part at a particular company. (Overhead is part of the calculation—not least because most cam-op machines are long since paid for, whereas a late-model CNC machine has hefty monthly payments). Businesses relying on cam-op machines are still competing even in today's CNC-filled environment; they just need to be vigilant and smart about keeping it that way. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29477317 | 1,207,480 |
1,732,717 | HB-EGF-like growth factor is synthesized as a membrane-anchored mitogenic and chemotactic glycoprotein. An epidermal growth factor produced by monocytes and macrophages, due to an affinity for heparin is termed HB-EGF. It has been shown to play a role in wound healing, cardiac hypertrophy, and heart development and function. First identified in the conditioned media of human macrophage-like cells, HB-EGF is an 87-amino acid glycoprotein that displays highly regulated gene expression. Ectodomain shedding results in the soluble mature form of HB-EGF, which influences the mitogenicity and chemotactic factors for smooth muscle cells and fibroblasts. The transmembrane form of HB-EGF is the unique receptor for diphtheria toxin and functions in juxtacrine signaling in cells. Both forms of HB-EGF participate in normal physiological processes and in pathological processes including tumor progression and metastasis, organ hyperplasia, and atherosclerotic disease. HB-EGF can bind two locations on cell surfaces: heparan sulfate proteoglycans and EGF-receptor effecting cell to cell interactions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11883272 | 1,731,741 |
505,291 | Prior to the 19th century most patella fractures were treated non-surgically with extension splinting, frequently resulting in poorly joined fragments of bone and long-term pain and disability. Incomplete understanding of the importance of the patella led to the trend of removing the whole patella, also resulting in pain, disability and dissatisfaction. The first open reduction and internal fixation for a patella fracture was performed in 1877 by Scottish surgeon Sir Hector Cameron. Several techniques followed and materials used included metal loops, pins, kangaroo tendons and screws. Significant advances in surgery occurred in the 1950s with the development of banding after Herbert A. Haxton and others demonstrated that the patella was not just to protect the knee but important for straightening the leg. Subsequently, the three surgical treatments for displaced patella fractures became tension banding, partial patellectomy and total patellectomy, the decision of which to use tailored to the individual. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6246155 | 505,029 |
778,262 | Stereolithographic models have been used in medicine since the 1990s, for creating accurate 3D models of various anatomical regions of a patient, based on data from computer scans. Medical modelling involves first acquiring a CT, MRI, or other scan. This data consists of a series of cross sectional images of the human anatomy. In these images different tissues show up as different levels of grey. Selecting a range of grey values enables specific tissues to be isolated. A region of interest is then selected and all the pixels connected to the target point within that grey value range are selected. This enables a specific organ to be selected. This process is referred to as segmentation. The segmented data may then be translated into a format suitable for stereolithography. While stereolithography is normally accurate, the accuracy of a medical model depends on many factors, especially the operator performing the segmentation correctly. There are potential errors possible when making medical models using stereolithography but these can be avoided with practice and well trained operators. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1086236 | 777,845 |
358,886 | From 1986 to 2009, Borlaug was the President of the SAA. That year, a joint venture between The Carter Center and SAA was launched called Sasakawa-Global 2000 (SG 2000). The program focuses on food, population and agricultural policy. Since then, more than 8 million small-scale farmers in 15 African countries have been trained in SAA farming techniques, which have helped them to double or triple grain production. Those elements that allowed Borlaug's projects to succeed in India and Pakistan, such as well-organized market economies, transportation, and irrigation systems, are severely lacking throughout much of Africa, posing additional obstacles to increasing yields and reducing the ongoing threat of food shortages. Because of these challenges, Borlaug's initial projects were restricted to relatively developed regions of the continent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=275564 | 358,700 |
1,745,876 | The Royal Navy transported the division to Tobruk from 19 September to 25 October, in a politically controversial move to relieve the mainly Australian garrison which had been defending the port for almost seven months, since the beginning of the siege of Tobruk. Under daily aerial and artillery attacks, the division defended the port and conducted nightly offensive patrols against German and Italian positions. On 18 November, the British Eighth Army launched Operation Crusader. The division was tasked with breaking out of Tobruk, following the destruction of the Axis armoured forces. Following unexpected early success, the division began its attacks on 21 November, before the armoured formations of Germans and Italians had been defeated. Heavy fighting soon followed as the division captured several well-defended and dug-in German and Italian strong points. The looming threat of the Axis tanks ended the break-out offensive the following day. Renewed fighting on 26 November saw the division link up with the approaching New Zealand Division, cutting the Axis lines of communication. In response, the Germans launched several counter-attacks to throw back the 70th Division from the territory they had gained. The failure of these attacks had a lasting strategic impact on Operation Crusader; the Axis forces began their retreat and lifted the siege of Tobruk. Two men—from units attached to the division—were awarded the Victoria Cross for their actions during Operation Crusader. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4468060 | 1,744,891 |
1,742,875 | Charles Darwin grew up with an interest in natural history, and as a student at the University of Cambridge he became a pupil and close friend of botany professor John Stevens Henslow. The year he graduated, Darwin was given a supernumerary position as a gentleman naturalist and geologist on the second voyage of HMS "Beagle", a trip that lasted five years. By the time he returned in October 1836, he had doubts about the doctrine that species were fixed and unchanging. Within months, experts informed him that specimens he had collected were separate species, not just varieties, and the patterns he saw inspired the inception of his theory of natural selection in 1838. Darwin began editing and publishing the expert reports, collected in the "Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle", at the same time as writing a series of books on geology, the first of which was "The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs". His "species work" was his "prime hobby", a background to this writing, but it evolved into an extensive research programme during the twenty years before he published his theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21436165 | 1,741,891 |
1,110,648 | Members of the genus "Poeciliopsis", for example, show variable reproductive life history adaptations. "Poeciliopsis monacha", "P. lucida", and "P. prolifica" form part of the same clade within that genus. However, their modes of maternal provisioning vary greatly. "P. monacha" can be considered to be lecithotrophic because it does not really provide any resources for its offspring after fertilization - the pregnant female is basically a swimming egg sac. "P. lucida" shows an intermediate level of matrotrophy, meaning that to a certain extent the offspring's metabolism can actually affect the mother's metabolism, allowing for increased nutrient exchange. "P. prolifica" is considered to be highly matrotrophic, and almost all of the nutrients and materials needed for fetal development are supplied to the oocyte after it has been fertilized. This level of matrotrophy allows "Poeciliopsis" to carry several broods at different stages of development, a phenomenon known as superfetation. Because the space for developing embryos is limited, viviparity reduces brood size. Superfetation can compensate for this loss by keeping embryos at various stages and sizes during development. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25119 | 1,110,082 |
846,207 | In 1932, Jan Hendrik Oort became the first to report that measurements of the stars in the solar neighborhood indicated that they moved faster than expected when a mass distribution based upon visible matter was assumed, but these measurements were later determined to be essentially erroneous. In 1939, Horace Babcock reported in his PhD thesis measurements of the rotation curve for Andromeda which suggested that the mass-to-luminosity ratio increases radially. He attributed that to either the absorption of light within the galaxy or to modified dynamics in the outer portions of the spiral and not to any form of missing matter. Babcock's measurements turned out to disagree substantially with those found later, and the first measurement of an extended rotation curve in good agreement with modern data was published in 1957 by Henk van de Hulst and collaborators, who studied M31 with the newly commissioned Dwingeloo 25 meter telescope. A companion paper by Maarten Schmidt showed that this rotation curve could be fit by a flattened mass distribution more extensive than the light. In 1959, Louise Volders used the same telescope to demonstrate that the spiral galaxy M33 also does not spin as expected according to Keplerian dynamics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=183083 | 845,757 |
260,183 | With the exception of the molluscs, whose shells often comprise both forms, most lineages use just one form of the mineral. The form used appears to reflect the seawater chemistry – thus which form was more easily precipitated – at the time that the lineage first evolved a calcified skeleton, and does not change thereafter. However, the relative abundance of calcite- and aragonite-using lineages does not reflect subsequent seawater chemistry – the magnesium/calcium ratio of the oceans appears to have a negligible impact on organisms' success, which is instead controlled mainly by how well they recover from mass extinctions. A recently discovered modern gastropod "Chrysomallon squamiferum" that lives near deep-sea hydrothermal vents illustrates the influence of both ancient and modern local chemical environments: its shell is made of aragonite, which is found in some of the earliest fossil mollusks; but it also has armor plates on the sides of its foot, and these are mineralized with the iron sulfides pyrite and greigite, which had never previously been found in any metazoan but whose ingredients are emitted in large quantities by the vents. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=145424 | 260,049 |
125,054 | The British prepared for an overwhelming mortar bombardment of Kronstadt by the close of the Crimean War, but never considered running the smoke-ridden, shallow-water gauntlet straight to St. Petersburg with ironclads. Likewise, monitors proved acutely unable to 'overwhelm' enemy fortifications single-handed during the American conflict, though their low-profile and heavy armor protection made them ideal for running artillery gauntlets. Mines and obstructions negated these advantages—a problem the British Admiralty frequently acknowledged but never countered throughout the period. The British never laid down enough "Devastation"-class 'battleships' to instantly overwhelm Cherbourg, Kronstadt or even New York City with gunfire. Although throughout the 1860s and 1870s the Royal Navy was still in many respects superior to its potential rivals, by the early 1880s widespread concern about the threat from France and Germany culminated in the Naval Defence Act, which promulgated the idea of a 'two-power standard', that Britain should possess as many ships as the next two navies combined. This standard provoked aggressive shipbuilding in the 1880s and 1890s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=251489 | 125,002 |
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