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356,381 | Metroidvania is generally associated with game levels/maps that are laid out as two-dimensional side scrollers, with the player character moving left, right, up and down through the level. These games typically are rendered using two-dimensional graphics, but can include 2.5D-rendered games using 3D graphics engines but limiting player movement to two dimensions, such as the aforementioned "Shadow Complex", or with "Metroid Dread". The exploration and character development concepts of Metroidvanias can be used in other genres, though these games typically are not categorized as Metroidvanias. For example, the "Metroid Prime" trilogy is a first-person action adventure game that builds on the same style of exploration play as "Metroid". "Dark Souls" is a third-person action role-playing game loosely considered a Metroidvania featuring "soft locks" – obstacles in the form of boss characters that are difficult but not impossible to defeat when the player-character is starting out, and become much easier to defeat with increased experience and abilities. The third-person action/brawler "" series also uses similar concepts as a Metroidvania, with Batman collecting new gadgets to access new areas. The 2017 "Prey" was developed as a first-person-perspective immersive sim but using Metroidvania level design concepts to require the player to traverse the setting multiple times as they gain additional tools and abilities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45665895 | 356,196 |
565,473 | David McMullen argues that social ownership of the means of production and the absence of markets for them is fully compatible with a decentralized price system. In a post-capitalist society, transactions between enterprises would entail transfers of social property between custodians rather than an exchange of ownership. Individuals would be motivated by the satisfaction from work and the desire to contribute to good economic outcomes rather than material reward. Bids and offer prices would aim to minimize costs and ensure that output is guided by expected final demand for private and collective consumption. Enterprises and startups would receive their investment funding from project assessment agencies. The required change in human behavior would take a number generations and would have to overcome considerable resistance. However, McMullen believes that economic and cultural development increasingly favors the transition. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44379754 | 565,183 |
386,332 | Hideo Kojima's "Metal Gear", released in 1987 for the MSX2 and the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988, utilized stealth elements within an action-adventure framework, and was the first mainstream stealth game to be released on consoles. Since the MSX2 was not available in North America, only the NES version was released there. "Metal Gear" placed a greater emphasis on stealth than other games of its time, with the player character Solid Snake beginning without any weapons (requiring him to avoid confrontation until weapons are found) and having limited ammunition for each weapon. Enemies are able to see Snake from a distance (using a line-of-sight mechanic) and hear gunshots from non-silenced weapons; security cameras and sensors are placed at various locations, and a security alarm sounds whenever Snake is spotted and causes all enemies on screen to chase him. Snake could also disguise himself in enemy uniform or a cardboard box, and use his fists to fight enemies. In 1988, Infogrames published "Hostages," sometimes known as "Rescue: The Embassy Mission". One of the game's three main segments required players to evade searchlights by rolling and ducking into doorways. "Gamestop" has observed that the game "set important grounds and ideas for future stealth/tactical shooters," noting the game's use of time limits, cover mechanics, and tests of reflexes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=245390 | 386,137 |
1,104,372 | The relationship broke down acrimoniously when Fried began to make his own, poorer quality speakers, also marketed as "IMF", and refused to cease until a court agreed that the UK business had the right to the trademark IMF for loudspeakers. Following the split, Fried in the USA (under the brandname "Fried") and the three founders of IMF Electronics in the UK (via a joint venture with driver manufacturer Elac under the name TDL), both became well known in audiophile circles for many years as major advocates of transmission line speaker design. TDL closed after John Wright's gradual failing of health and death in 1999 from cancer. He was described in his 1999 obituary as "one of the most important figures on the British hi-fi scene since the mid-1960s... best remembered for his transmission-line loudspeaker designs". The brand was acquired by Audio Partnerships (part of retailer group Richer Sounds). Fried died six years later, in 2005. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44224558 | 1,103,809 |
1,949,874 | Traditional methods for detecting contamination in water, though highly accurate and sensitive, pose a number of obstacles. They are often costly, require the operation of a trained technician, and are labor intensive. They can also be time consuming, for example, microbiological assays necessitate growing and isolating the pathogen from the sample, which can take several days or even weeks, in addition to preparing media. Paper-based biosensors address many of these problems. Specifically, paper as a material has several benefits. No external power is required, as the sample travels through the device via capillary action. Its fiber network structure allows for the storage of the necessary reagents in an active form. It is also cost-effective, has a high surface area to volume ratio, absorbs the sample efficiently, and is easily disposable by incineration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62073693 | 1,948,753 |
1,447,640 | The only research report available to the public was done by its creator, Yair-Ein-Eli. Eli began research in Technion – Israel Institute of Technology with David Starosvetsky, graduate student Gil Cohen of Technion, Digby Macdonald of Pennsylvania State University, and Rika Hagiwara of Kyoto University. Eli's reasoning for using silicon as a fuel cell is because of its high specific energy, its large availability as a resource (silicon being the eighth most plentiful in the universe, the second most plentiful in Earth's crust), tolerance of places with high humidity, and non-toxic properties. In their experiments, they tested for different potential energies and voltages, using different liquid oxygen solutions. The experimental results and theories on the battery were published online in 2009 in the journal "Electrochemistry Communications". This got the attention of organizations such as DARPA and the Pentagon, where they are currently working on military usage of this battery. The battery is still under research by these organizations and not available for commercial use. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31964508 | 1,446,824 |
1,209,786 | Plasmodium falciparum, the major etiologic agent of human malaria, has a very complex life cycle that occurs in both humans and mosquitoes. While in the human host, the parasite spends most of its life cycle within hepatic cells and erythrocytes (in contrast to "T. brucei" which remains extracellular). As a result of its mainly intracellular niche, parasitized host cells which display parasite proteins must be modified to prevent destruction by the host immune defenses. In the case of "Plasmodium", this is accomplished via the dual purpose "Plasmodium falciparum" erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1). PfEMP1 is encoded by the diverse family of genes known as the "var" family of genes (approximately 60 genes in all). The diversity of the gene family is further increased via a number of different mechanisms including exchange of genetic information at telomeric loci, as well as meiotic recombination. The PfEMP1 protein serves to sequester infected erythrocytes from splenic destruction via adhesion to the endothelium. Moreover, the parasite is able to evade host defense mechanisms by changing which "var" allele is used to code the PfEMP1 protein. Like "T. brucei", each parasite expresses multiple copies of one identical protein. However, unlike "T. brucei", the mechanism by which "var" switching occurs in "P. falciparum" is thought to be purely transcriptional. "Var" switching has been shown to take place soon after invasion of an erythrocyte by a "P. falciparum" parasite. Fluorescent in situ hybridization analysis has shown that activation of "var" alleles is linked to altered positioning of the genetic material to distinct "transcriptionally permissive" areas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5951626 | 1,209,139 |
1,004,778 | A second fire incident took place in August 2012 when a Karma caught fire while stopped at a parking lot in Woodside, California. According to Fisker engineers, the area of origin for the fire was determined to be outside the engine compartment, as the fire was located at the driver's side front corner of the car. The evidence suggested that the ignition source was not the lithium-ion battery pack, new technology components or unique exhaust routing. The investigation conducted by Fisker engineers and an independent fire expert concluded that the cause of the fire was a low temperature cooling fan located at the left front of the Karma, forward of the wheel. An internal fault caused the fan to fail, overheat and started a slow-burning fire. Fisker announced a voluntary recall on all Karmas sold to replace the faulty fan and install an additional fuse. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38267353 | 1,004,260 |
1,180,817 | The machine had difficulty in the marketplace and was seen as a poor value for money, since other laptops in the market had more built-in features, although it enjoyed some success with business users, who saw its battery life and portability as selling points. Even after the release of the Model 3 in October 1987, which fixed some of the machine's issues, lack of built-in features remained a pain point. The parallel, serial and video ports all required adapters, while competing machines included these as integrated features. The Convertible was heavy, not much faster than the Portable it replaced, had no traditional PC expansion ports (such as serial ports and a parallel port) without an add-on, and had a hard-to-read, oddly-shaped LCD screen. It also competed against faster portables based on the Intel 80286 that offered optional hard drives, from companies such as Compaq, and laptops from companies such as Toshiba and Zenith that were lighter and offered similar specifications, sometimes at half the price. The keyboard was also criticized for lacking several important keys. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=274034 | 1,180,193 |
364,001 | In March 2016, Lockheed Martin began analysis on an enhanced wing design to further increase range. In September 2018, the corporation was awarded a contract to develop an "Extreme Range" variant of the AGM-158. The weapon would weigh about and deliver a warhead out to a range of . Originally called the JASSM-XR and later designated the AGM-158D, it features a new missile control unit, changes to the wings, a different paint coating, an Electronic Safe and Arm Fuze, secure GPS receiver, and program protection requirements at a unit cost of $1.5 million. Low-rate initial production began in 2021 as part of Lot 19 with deliveries beginning in January 2024 at a rate of five per month for the first 40 missiles. The designation was later changed again to the AGM-158B-2. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3377314 | 363,811 |
1,011,125 | The Westland design team, under the new leadership of W. E. W. "Teddy" Petter designed an aircraft that employed state-of-the-art technology. The monocoque fuselage was tubular, with a T-tail at the end, although as originally conceived, the design featured a twin tail, which was discarded when large Fowler flaps were added that caused large areas of turbulence over the tail unit. By the employment of the T-tail, the elevator was moved up out of the way of the disturbed airflow caused when the flaps were down. Handley Page slats were fitted to the outer wings and to the leading edge of the radiator openings; these were interconnected by duraluminium torque tubes. In June 1941, the slats were wired shut on the recommendation of the Chief Investigator of the Accident Investigation Branch, after two Whirlwinds crashed when the outer slats failed during vigorous manoeuvres; tests by the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) confirmed that the Whirlwind's take-off and landing was largely unaffected with the slats locked shut, while the flight characteristics improved under the conditions in which the slats normally deployed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=91979 | 1,010,604 |
1,989,995 | IMPRINT was originally named: Integrated MANPRINT Tools and was first released in 1995. It was a Windows application that merged the functionality of the 9 HARDMAN III tools into one application. In 1997 IMPRINT was renamed to the Improved Performance Research Integration Tool – the name changed but the IMPRINT acronym remained the same. Between 1995 and 2006 several enhancements were made to IMPRINT and new releases (Versions 2 through 6) were made available. IMPRINT Pro was introduced in 2007. It featured a new interface design and complete integration with the Micro Saint Sharp simulation engine. It had enhanced analytical capabilities and moved from being an Army tool to a tri-service tool. From the beginning IMPRINT has continued to evolve, new enhancements have been continually added, and new releases made freely available to the user community. IMPRINT has over 800 users supporting Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, NASA, DHS, DoT, Joint and other organizations across the country. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51636312 | 1,988,853 |
167,563 | In September 1951, after a series of differences with Bradbury and other scientists, Teller resigned from Los Alamos, and returned to the University of Chicago. At about the same time, Ulam went on leave as a visiting professor at Harvard for a semester. Although Teller and Ulam submitted a joint report on their design and jointly applied for a patent on it, they soon became involved in a dispute over who deserved credit. After the war, Bethe returned to Cornell University, but he was deeply involved in the development of thermonuclear weapons as a consultant. In 1954, he wrote an article on the history of the H-bomb, which presents his opinion that both men contributed very significantly to the breakthrough. This balanced view is shared by others who were involved, including Mark and Fermi, but Teller persistently attempted to downplay Ulam's role. "After the H-bomb was made," Bethe recalled, "reporters started to call Teller the father of the H-bomb. For the sake of history, I think it is more precise to say that Ulam is the father, because he provided the seed, and Teller is the mother, because he remained with the child. As for me, I guess I am the midwife." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41531 | 167,476 |
1,920,262 | The environmental history of Latin America has become the focus of a number of scholars, starting in the later years of the twentieth century. But historians earlier than that recognized that the environment played a major role in the region's history. Environmental history more generally has developed as a specialized, yet broad and diverse field. According to one assessment of the field, scholars have mainly been concerned with "three categories of research: colonialism, capitalism, and conservation" and the analysis focuses on narratives of environmental decline. There are several currents within the field. One examines humans within particular ecosystems; another concerns humans’ cultural relationship with nature; and environmental politics and policy. General topics that scholars examine are forestry and deforestation; rural landscapes, especially agro-export industries and ranching; conservation of the environment through protected zones, such as parks and preserves; water issues including irrigation, drought, flooding and its control through dams, urban water supply, use, and waste water. The field often classifies research by geographically, temporally, and thematically. Much of the environmental history of Latin America focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there is a growing body of research on the first three centuries (1500-1800) of European impact. As the field established itself as a more defined academic pursuit, the journal Environmental History was founded in 1996, as a joint venture of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA) formed in 2004. Standard reference works for Latin American now include a section on environmental history. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65056762 | 1,919,160 |
1,340,797 | Geosynthetic clay liners (GCLs) are factory manufactured hydraulic barriers consisting of a layer of bentonite or other very low-permeability material supported by geotextiles and/or geomembranes, mechanically held together by needling, stitching, or chemical adhesives. Due to environmental laws, any seepage from landfills must be collected and properly disposed of, otherwise contamination of the surrounding ground water could cause major environmental and/or ecological problems. The lower the hydraulic conductivity the more effective the GCL will be at retaining seepage inside of the landfill. Bentonite composed predominantly (>70%) of montmorillonite or other expansive clays, are preferred and most commonly used in GCLs. A general GCL construction would consist of two layers of geosynthetics stitched together enclosing a layer of natural or processed sodium bentonite. Typically, woven and/or non-woven textile geosynthetics are used, however polyethylene or geomembrane layers or geogrid geotextiles materials have also been incorporated into the design or in place of a textile layer to increase strength. GCLs are produced by several large companies in North America, Europe, and Asia. The United States Environmental Protection Agency currently regulates landfill construction and design in the US through several legislations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7079700 | 1,340,064 |
1,449,935 | Several lines of evidence have been presented in favor of the notion that primary protein sequence contains all the information required for overall three-dimensional protein structure, making the idea of a de novo protein prediction possible. First, proteins with different functions usually have different amino acid sequences. Second, several different human diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, can be linked to loss of protein function resulting from a change in just a single amino acid in the primary sequence. Third, proteins with similar functions across many different species often have similar amino acid sequences. Ubiquitin, for example, is a protein involved in regulating the degradation of other proteins; its amino acid sequence is nearly identical in species as far separated as "Drosophila melanogaster" and "Homo sapiens". Fourth, by thought experiment, one can deduce that protein folding must not be a completely random process and that information necessary for folding must be encoded within the primary structure. For example, if we assume that each of 100 amino acid residues within a small polypeptide could take up 10 different conformations on average, giving 10^100 different conformations for the polypeptide. If one possible confirmation was tested every 10^-13 second, then it would take about 10^77 years to sample all possible conformations. However, proteins are properly folded within the body on short timescales all the time, meaning that the process cannot be random and, thus, can potentially be modeled. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9378673 | 1,449,119 |
1,776,305 | A magnetohydrodynamic accelerator is an MHD converter that imparts motion to an electrically conductive fluid initially at rest, using cross electric current and magnetic field both applied within the fluid. MHD propulsion has been mostly tested with models of ships and submarines in seawater. Studies are also ongoing since the early 1960s about aerospace applications of MHD to aircraft propulsion and flow control to enable hypersonic flight: action on the boundary layer to prevent laminar flow from becoming turbulent, shock wave mitigation or cancellation for thermal control and reduction of the wave drag and form drag, inlet flow control and airflow velocity reduction with an MHD generator section ahead of a scramjet or turbojet to extend their regimes at higher Mach numbers, combined to an MHD accelerator in the exhaust nozzle fed by the MHD generator through a bypass system. Research on various designs are also conducted on electromagnetic plasma propulsion for space exploration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57060297 | 1,775,306 |
1,471,880 | A major inconvenience for the future clinical development of betulinic acid and analogues resides in their poor solubility in aqueous media such as blood serum and polar solvents used for bioassays. To circumvent this problem of hydrosolubility and to enhance pharmacological properties, many derivatives were synthesized and evaluated for cytotoxic activity. One study showed C-20 modifications involve the loss of cytotoxicity. Another study demonstrated the importance of the presence of the -COOH group, since compounds substituted at this position, such as lupeol and methyl betulinate, were less active on human melanoma than betulinic acid. Moreover, some C-28 amino acids and C-3 phthalates derivatives exhibited higher cytotoxic activity against cancer cell lines with improved selective toxicity and water solubility. Chatterjee "et al." obtained the 28-O-β-D-glucopyranoside of betulinic acid by microbial transformation with "Cunninghamella" species, while "Baglin et al." obtained it by organic synthesis. This glucoside did not exhibit any significant "in vitro" activity on human melanoma (MEL-2) and human colorectal adenocarcinoma (HT-29) cell lines, which confirms the importance of the carboxylic acid function to preserve the cytotoxicity. Recently, Gauthier "et al." synthesized a series of 3-"O"-glycosides of betulinic acid which exhibited a strongly potent "in vitro" anticancer activity against human cancer cell lines. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5800721 | 1,471,051 |
474,748 | NASA management were certain that there were highly qualified women and minorities out there, but they needed to persuade them to apply. A special team consisting of Mary Wilmarth and Baley Davis from the JSC Personnel Office, and Joseph D. Atkinson and Jose R. Perez from the JSC Equal Opportunity Programs Office was created to publicize the recruitment effort. NASA centers and NASA contractors were canvassed for prospective applicants, minority and women's professional organizations were contacted, and graduated schools and government agencies were asked to notify their students and employees. Political organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP were contacted. Advertisements were placed in minority magazines with minority readership like "Ebony", "Black Enterprise", "Essence" and "Jet". Nichelle Nichols, an African-American actor best known for the television series "Star Trek" was hired to do spot advertising. Her publicity firm, Women in Motion, was paid $49,000 ($). She met with members of community organizations, colleges and institutions to familiarize them with the requirements for Space Shuttle astronaut candidates. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17881165 | 474,512 |
1,344,903 | Taube was accepted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1959. In 1961, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. President Jimmy Carter presented Taube with the 1976 President's National Medal of Science "in recognition of contributions to the understanding of reactivity and reaction mechanisms in inorganic chemistry." He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1981. In 1985, Taube received the American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, which is awarded to recognize "distinguished services to chemistry". He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1955. In 1965, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Taube was made an honorary member of the College of Chemists of Catalonia and Beleares (1984), the Canadian Society of Chemists (1986), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1988). He was also awarded an honorary fellowship in the Royal Society of Chemistry (1989) and the Indian Chemical Society (1989) and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1988. Taube received honorary degrees from many institutions, including the University of Saskatchewan (1973), the University of Chicago (1983), the Polytechnic Institute of New York (1984), the State University of New York Stony Brook (1985), the University of Guelph (1987), Seton Hall University (1988), the Lajos Kossuth University of Debrecen in Hungary (1988) and Northwestern University (1990). A Nobel Laureate Plaza on the University of Saskatchewan's campus in honor of Taube and Gerhard Herzberg was dedicated in 1997. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=917657 | 1,344,165 |
1,070,984 | A new structural system using framed tubes was developed in the early 1960s. Fazlur Khan and J. Rankine defined the framed tube structure as "a three dimensional space structure composed of three, four, or possibly more frames, braced frames, or shear walls, joined at or near their edges to form a vertical tube-like structural system capable of resisting lateral forces in any direction by cantilevering from the foundation." Closely spaced interconnected exterior columns form the tube. Horizontal loads (primarily wind) are supported by the structure as a whole. About half the exterior surface is available for windows. Framed tubes allow fewer interior columns, and so create more usable floor space. Where larger openings like garage doors are required, the tube frame must be interrupted, with transfer girders used to maintain structural integrity. Tube structures cut down costs, at the same time allow buildings to reach greater heights. Tube-frame construction was first used in the DeWitt-Chestnut Apartment Building, designed by Khan and completed in Chicago in 1963. It was used soon after for the John Hancock Center and in the construction of the World Trade Center. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3475655 | 1,070,430 |
1,303,579 | Although the increase in plant size is more or less proportional to plant mass already present, plants do not grow strictly exponentially. In a period of several days, plant growth rate will vary because of diurnal changes in light intensity, and day-to-day differences in the daily light integral. At night, plants will respire and even lose biomass. Over a longer period (weeks to months), RGR will generally decrease because of several reasons. First, the newly formed leaves at the top of the plant will begin to shade lower leaves, and therefore, average photosynthesis per unit area will go down, and so will ULR. Second, non-photosynthetic biomass, especially stems, will increase with plant size. The RGR of trees in particular decreases with increasing size due in part to the large allocation to structural material in the trunk required to hold the leaves up in the canopy. Overall, respiration scales with total biomass, but photosynthesis only scales with photosynthetically active leaf area and as a result growth rate slows down as total biomass increases and LAR decreases. And thirdly, depending on the growth conditions applied, shoot and/or root space may become confined with plant age, or water and/or nutrient supply do not keep pace with plant size and become more and more limiting. One way to 'correct' for these differences is by plotting RGR and their growth components directly against plant size. If RGR specifically is of interest, another approach is to separate size effects from intrinsic growth differences mathematically. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61125010 | 1,302,863 |
270,968 | In 1921 Koffka published a Gestalt-oriented text on developmental psychology, "Growth of the Mind". With the help of American psychologist Robert Ogden, Koffka introduced the Gestalt point of view to an American audience in 1922 by way of a paper in "Psychological Bulletin". It contains criticisms of then-current explanations of a number of problems of perception, and the alternatives offered by the Gestalt school. Koffka moved to the United States in 1924, eventually settling at Smith College in 1927. In 1935 Koffka published his "Principles of Gestalt Psychology". This textbook laid out the "Gestalt" vision of the scientific enterprise as a whole. Science, he said, is not the simple accumulation of facts. What makes research scientific is the incorporation of facts into a theoretical structure. The goal of the "Gestalt"ists was to integrate the facts of inanimate nature, life, and mind into a single scientific structure. This meant that science would have to swallow not only what Koffka called the quantitative facts of physical science but the facts of two other "scientific categories": questions of order and questions of "Sinn", a German word which has been variously translated as significance, value, and meaning. Without incorporating the meaning of experience and behavior, Koffka believed that science would doom itself to trivialities in its investigation of human beings. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1573230 | 270,820 |
1,869,798 | Erlandson was born in Santa Barbara, California and enjoyed many different water-based activities, including swimming, surfing and sailing. He moved to Alaska in 1982, and has been a resident in various parts of the Pacific Northwest since that time. Erlandson worked to protect archaeological sites from damage after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. His collaborative efforts with marine biologists and ecologists have inspired him to become involved in policy issues about the conservation biology of endangered coastal fisheries and ecosystems. He has won several awards for outstanding teaching and research, as well as for his mentoring of minority students. Discover Magazine named a paper Erlandson was involved in, “Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems” by Jeremy Jackson et al., the top science story of 2001. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37784948 | 1,868,721 |
721,189 | In May 1994 the first Rebreather Forum was held in Key West, Florida, organised by Michael Menduno and Tracy Robinette, with guests including Dr Edward D. Thalmann, the US Navy diving physiology researcher, and developer of the US Navy's mixed-gas decompression tables, and inventor Alan Krasberg, who had done significant development work on closed-circuit mixed-gas rebreathers. The 90 attendees included five rebreather manufacturers, several training agencies, and representatives from recreational, military, and commercial-diving communities. The forum recognised that there was a market for recreational rebreathers but no supply. The only community successfully using rebreathers at the time was the military, and their success depended on disciplined use and very good technical support. Commercial diving had rejected them as too complex and unreliable. It was also clear that training requirements for rebreather diving would be more complex than for open circuit, that semi-closed rebreathers would probably be easier to bring into the recreational diving market because of relative simplicity and lower cost, and that unlike the initial reaction to nitrox, there did not appear to be great concern that the technology was inappropriate for recreational diving – PADI technical development director Karl Shreeves indicated that when the technology was ready PADI would provide training. Despite continued rebreather workshops and try-dives at further annual conferences, actual rebreather availability was slow to materialise. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39194607 | 720,809 |
1,679,001 | Helen Rhoda Arnold Quinn (born 19 May 1943) is an Australian-born particle physicist and educator who has made major contributions to both fields. Her contributions to theoretical physics include the Peccei–Quinn theory which implies a corresponding symmetry of nature (related to matter-antimatter symmetry and the possible source of the dark matter that pervades the universe) and contributions to the search for a unified theory for the three types of particle interactions (strong, electromagnetic, and weak). As Chair of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences, Quinn led the effort that produced "A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas"—the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by many states. Her honours include the Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, the Oskar Klein Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, appointment as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia, the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics from the American Physical Society, the Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics from the American Institute of Physics, and the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6528064 | 1,678,058 |
2,181,369 | In composing the first slate of members, the Academies added a fourth category of expertise and experience – finance and investment – and took care to ensure that among the members were people with high-level public policy experience. Over the past 16 years the membership has included leading industrialists (Rube Mettler, Don Peterson, Bill Spencer), three Nobel Laureates (Mike Spence, Joe Stiglitz, and Jim Heckman) among many leading microeconomists, prominent venture capitalists (Burton McMurtry, Kathy Behrens, and David Morgenthaler), scientists and engineers from the Academies (George Whitesides and Vint Cerf), former policymakers (James Lynn, Mary Good, and Alan Wolff), and people whose careers have bridged the corporate and nonprofit sectors (Edward Penhoet) or industry and elective politics (Amo Houghton, Jr.). In STEP’s first decade the majority of industrialists represented heavy manufacturing and information technology. In recent years there has been an effort to recruit more senior managers from life science-based industries and services. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12911652 | 2,180,123 |
396,560 | Caesium-137 is not widely used for industrial radiography because it is hard to obtain a very high specific activity material with a well defined (and small) shape as caesium from used nuclear fuel contains stable caesium-133 and also long-lived caesium-135. Isotope separation is too costly compared to cheaper alternatives. Also the higher specific activity caesium sources tend to be made from very soluble caesium chloride (CsCl), as a result if a radiography source was damaged it would increase the spread of the contamination. It is possible to make water insoluble caesium sources (with various ferrocyanide compounds such as , and ammonium ferric hexacyano ferrate (AFCF), Giese salt, ferric ammonium ferrocyanide) but their specific activity will be much lower. Other chemically inert Caesium compounds include Caesium-Aluminosilicate-glasses akin to the natural mineral pollucite. The latter has been used in demonstration of chemically stable water-insoluble forms of nuclear waste for disposal in deep geological repositories. A large emitting volume will harm the image quality in radiography. and , are preferred for radiography, since these are chemically non-reactive metals and can be obtained with much higher specific activities by the activation of stable cobalt or iridium in high flux reactors. However, while is a waste product produced in great quantities in nuclear fission reactors, and are specifically produced in commercial and research reactors and their life cycle entails the destruction of the involved high-value elements. Cobalt-60 decays to stable nickel, whereas iridium-192 can decay to either stable osmium or platinum. Due to the residual radioactivity and legal hurdles, the resulting material is not commonly recovered even from "spent" radioactive sources, meaning in essence that the entire mass is "lost" for non-radioactive uses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3093327 | 396,364 |
329,268 | Known as fringe field switching (FFS) until 2003, advanced fringe field switching is similar to IPS or S-IPS offering superior performance and color gamut with high luminosity. AFFS was developed by Hydis Technologies Co., Ltd, Korea (formally Hyundai Electronics, LCD Task Force). AFFS-applied notebook applications minimize color distortion while maintaining a wider viewing angle for a professional display. Color shift and deviation caused by light leakage is corrected by optimizing the white gamut which also enhances white/gray reproduction. In 2004, Hydis Technologies Co., Ltd licensed AFFS to Japan's Hitachi Displays. Hitachi is using AFFS to manufacture high-end panels. In 2006, HYDIS licensed AFFS to Sanyo Epson Imaging Devices Corporation. Shortly thereafter, Hydis introduced a high-transmittance evolution of the AFFS display, called HFFS (FFS+). Hydis introduced AFFS+ with improved outdoor readability in 2007. AFFS panels are mostly utilized in the cockpits of latest commercial aircraft displays. However, it is no longer produced as of February 2015. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17932 | 329,093 |
262,792 | In May 1822 he first presented the herbivorous teeth to the Royal Society of London but the members, among them William Buckland, dismissed them as fish teeth or the incisors of a rhinoceros from a Tertiary stratum. On 23 June 1823 Charles Lyell showed some to Georges Cuvier, during a soiree in Paris, but the famous French naturalist at once dismissed them as those of a rhinoceros. Though the very next day Cuvier retracted, Lyell reported only the dismissal to Mantell, who became rather diffident about the issue. In 1824 Buckland described "Megalosaurus" and was on that occasion invited to visit Mantell's collection. Seeing the bones on 6 March he agreed that these were of some giant saurian—though still denying it was a herbivore. Emboldened nevertheless, Mantell again sent some teeth to Cuvier, who answered on 22 June 1824 that he had determined that they were reptilian and quite possibly belonged to a giant herbivore. In a new edition that year of his "Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles" Cuvier admitted his earlier mistake, leading to an immediate acceptance of Mantell, and his new saurian, in scientific circles. Mantell tried to corroborate his theory further by finding a modern-day parallel among extant reptiles. In September 1824 he visited the Royal College of Surgeons but at first failed to find comparable teeth. However, assistant-curator Samuel Stutchbury recognised that they resembled those of an iguana he had recently prepared, albeit twenty times longer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=228798 | 262,653 |
268,315 | A similar paper was also submitted by J. P. Russel et al. to IEEE Electron Device Letter in 1982. The applications for the device were initially regarded by the power electronics community to be severely restricted by its slow switching speed and latch-up of the parasitic thyristor structure inherent within the device. However, it was demonstrated by Baliga and also by A. M. Goodman et al. in 1983 that the switching speed could be adjusted over a broad range by using electron irradiation. This was followed by demonstration of operation of the device at elevated temperatures by Baliga in 1985. Successful efforts to suppress the latch-up of the parasitic thyristor and the scaling of the voltage rating of the devices at GE allowed the introduction of commercial devices in 1983, which could be utilized for a wide variety of applications. The electrical characteristics of GE's device, IGT D94FQ/FR4, were reported in detail by Marvin W. Smith in the proceedings of PCI April 1984. Marvin W. Smith showed in Fig.12 of the proceedings that turn-off above 10 amperes for gate resistance of 5kOhm and above 5 amperes for gate resistance of 1kOhm was limited by switching safe operating area although IGT D94FQ/FR4 was able to conduct 40 amperes of collector current. Marvin W. Smith also stated that the switching safe operating area was limited by the latch-up of the parasitic thyristor. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=109053 | 268,171 |
13,248 | The F-4N (updated F-4Bs) with smokeless engines and F-4J aerodynamic improvements started in 1972 under a U.S. Navy-initiated refurbishment program called "Project Bee Line" with 228 converted by 1978. The F-4S model resulted from the refurbishment of 265 F-4Js with J79-GE-17 smokeless engines of 17,900 lbf (79.379 kN), AWG-10B radar with digitized circuitry for improved performance and reliability, Honeywell AN/AVG-8 Visual Target Acquisition Set or VTAS (world's first operational Helmet Sighting System), classified avionics improvements, airframe reinforcement and leading edge slats for enhanced maneuvering. The USMC also operated the RF-4B with reconnaissance cameras with 46 built; the RF-4B flew alone and unarmed, with a requirement to fly straight and level at 5,000 feet while taking photographs. They relied on the shortcomings of the anti-aircraft defenses to survive as they were unable to make evasive maneuveres. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11759 | 13,243 |
897,537 | The idea of DNA digital data storage dates back to 1959, when the physicist Richard P. Feynman, in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" outlined the general prospects for the creation of artificial objects similar to objects of the microcosm (including biological) and having similar or even more extensive capabilities. In 1964–65, Mikhail Samoilovich Neiman, the Soviet physicist, published 3 articles about microminiaturization in electronics at the molecular-atomic level, which independently presented general considerations and some calculations regarding the possibility of recording, storage, and retrieval of information on synthesized DNA and RNA molecules. After the publication of the first M.S. Neiman's paper and after receiving by Editor the manuscript of his second paper (January, the 8th, 1964, as indicated in that paper) the interview with cybernetician Norbert Wiener as published. N. Wiener expressed ideas about miniaturization of computer memory, close to the ideas, proposed by M. S. Neiman independently. These Wiener's ideas M. S. Neiman mentioned in the third of his papers. This story is described in details. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38324409 | 897,064 |
1,127,729 | Canada's military was revitalized as a result of the Korean War. A planned changeover to US-designed weapons equipment had been planned for the 1950s, but the emergency in Korea forced the use of war stocks of Second World War–vintage British-designed weapons. On 5 February 1951, at a time when the Chinese were advancing in Korea, the Defence Minister, Brooke Claxton, announced in the House of Commons an emergency military budget of $5 billion which committed the government to raise an infantry division within the next three years and committed a brigade to Europe at once. At the time, it was believed that Stalin had ordered the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 as a part of a diversion to tie down Western forces in Korea as a prelude to a Soviet invasion of West Germany. Consequently, Canada followed the United States in increasing forces for the defence of West Germany instead of South Korea during the Korean War. On 16 January 1951, General Dwight Eisenhower, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander, visited Ottawa to tell the Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet that he believed there was a possibility the Red Army would invade West Germany in the near-future and help from Canada was needed at once. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3110164 | 1,127,151 |
620,647 | Some species in America, such as namely the barred owl, are at times thought to be so closely related as well to the extreme that the Ural and barred and spotted owls ("Strix occidentalis"), have been considered to potentially be part of a species complex or even within the same species. However, there is no evidence nor likelihood that the "Strix" owls between America and Eurasia ever formed a continuous population given their adaptation to well-forested areas as well as the fact that the barred owl is more ecologically similar to the more generalized tawny owl, despite being of intermediate size between tawny and Ural owls (closer in size to the latter), and that the tawny does not range anywhere close to the boundary between North America and Russia as does the Ural. Certainly the most ambiguous aspect of the relations of Ural owl is the Père David's owl which has both historically and currently been considered either an isolated subspecies of the Ural owl or a distinct species. It is thought that the Père David's is likely a glacial relict of the mountainous forest of western China where plant and animal life often remain reminiscent of pre-glacial life. Recent study has indicated that the Père David's owl is valid species based on appearance, voice, and life history differences, though genetic studies have shown a somewhat muddled diversity between races of the Ural owls species complex. It has been recognized by The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World but BirdLife International and IUCN still classify it as a subspecies of the Ural owl. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=815909 | 620,332 |
1,564,020 | Recently, a new approach to exploiting viruses and their capsids for biotechnology began to change toward using them for nanotechnology application. Researchers Douglas and Young (Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA) were the first to consider the utility of a virus capsid as a nanomaterial. They have taken plant virus Cowpea Chlorotic Mottle Virus (CCMV) for their study. CCMV showed a highly dynamic platform with pH and metal ion dependent structural transitions. Douglas and Young made use of these capsid dynamics and exchanged the natural cargo (nucleic acid) with synthetic materials. Since then many materials have been encapsulated into CCMV and other VNPs. At about the same time, the research team led by Mann (University of Bristol, UK) pioneered a new area using the rod-shaped particles of TMV (Tobacco Mosaic Virus). The particles were used as templates for the fabrication of a range of metallized nanotube structures using mineralization techniques. TMV particles have also been utilized to generate various structures (nanotubes and nanowires) for use in batteries and data storage devices. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56007469 | 1,563,133 |
933,243 | Funding came from financiers throughout the Northeast, and from Europe, especially Britain. The federal government provided no cash to any other railroads. However it did provide unoccupied free land to some of the Western railroads, so they could sell it to farmers and have customers along the route. Some cash came from states, or from local governments that use money as a leverage to prevent being bypassed by the main line. The larger sound came from the southern states during the Reconstruction era, as they try to rebuild their destroyed rail system. Some states such as Maine and Texas also made land grants to local railroads; the state total was 49 million acres. The emerging American financial system was based on railroad bonds. Boston was the first center, but New York by 1860 was the dominant financial market. The British invested heavily in railroads around the world, but nowhere more so than the United States; The total came to about $3 billion by 1914. In 1914–1917, they liquidated their American assets to pay for war supplies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=587997 | 932,751 |
1,788,791 | Fernández-Morán founded the Venezuelan Institute for Neurological and Brain Studies, the predecessor of the current Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC). He studied medicine at the University of Munich, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1944. He contributed to the development of the electron microscope and was the first person to use the concept of cryo-ultramicrotomy. After flying over Angel Falls in his home country of Venezuela he was inspired by the concept of the smoothly reoccurring flow system inherent in a waterfall to take his diamond knife invention and combine it with an ultramicrotome to dramatically improve the ultra-thin sectioning of electron microscopy samples. The ultramictrotome advances the rotating, drum-mounted specimen sample in such small increments (utilizing the very low thermal expansion coefficient of Invar) past the stationary diamond knife that sectioning thicknesses of several Angstrom units are possible. He also helped to advance the field of electron cryomicroscopy - the use of superconductive electromagnetic lenses cooled with liquid helium in electron microscopes to achieve the highest resolution possible - among many other research topics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1061822 | 1,787,785 |
15,329 | In October 2018, potential suppliers responded to a renewed tender, consisting of new F-16V Vipers from Lockheed Martin, new F/A-18E/F Super Hornets from Boeing, used Eurofighter Typhoons from Italy and used Gripen C/Ds from Sweden. France, Germany, Israel and Portugal did not respond to requests for used Eurofighter Typhoons and F-16 variants. In December 2018, Saab submitted an improved offer to supply 10 new Gripen C/Ds instead of the previously proposed 8. However, in December 2018, the Bulgarian Ministry of Defence selected the F-16V offer as the preferred option, and recommended talks with the US. On 3 June 2019, the US State Department approved the possible sale of 8 F-16Vs to Bulgaria at an estimate cost of $1.67 billion. On 10 July 2019, Bulgaria approved the acquisition of eight F-16V Block 70/72s for US$1.25bn. The deal was vetoed by the Bulgarian President, Rumen Radev on 23 July 2019, citing the need for a broader consensus, returning it to parliament. On 26 July 2019, parliament again approved the deal, overruling the veto, and was approved by Radev. In April 2020, Lockheed Martin was contracted by the US government to produce Bulgaria's F-16Vs, completion is expected in 2027. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=87577 | 15,324 |
426,442 | A quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) (also known as "quartz microbalance" (QMB), sometimes also as "quartz crystal nanobalance" (QCN)) measures a mass variation per unit area by measuring the change in frequency of a quartz crystal resonator. The resonance is disturbed by the addition or removal of a small mass due to oxide growth/decay or film deposition at the surface of the acoustic resonator. The QCM can be used under vacuum, in gas phase ("gas sensor", first use described by King) and more recently in liquid environments. It is useful for monitoring the rate of deposition in thin film deposition systems under vacuum. In liquid, it is highly effective at determining the affinity of molecules (proteins, in particular) to surfaces functionalized with recognition sites. Larger entities such as viruses or polymers are investigated as well. QCM has also been used to investigate interactions between biomolecules. Frequency measurements are easily made to high precision (discussed below); hence, it is easy to measure mass densities down to a level of below 1 μg/cm. In addition to measuring the frequency, the dissipation factor (equivalent to the resonance bandwidth) is often measured to help analysis. The dissipation factor is the inverse quality factor of the resonance, Q = w/f (see below); it quantifies the damping in the system and is related to the sample's viscoelastic properties. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1236075 | 426,233 |
2,140,403 | Third, on a national scale, the public health and urban planning communities were increasingly calling attention to the connections between the built environment (that is, land use, transportation systems, and community design) and health, particularly focusing on the contribution of the land use patterns (for example, sprawl) to physical inactivity, pedestrian safety, and air quality. Findings illustrated that urban design and land use regulations could accomplish the complementary goals of preventing illness and ensuring environmental quality. For example, creating higher density, mixed-use developments closer to transit and job centers would enhance public safety, prevent motor-vehicle injuries, increase access to goods and services, encourage walking or bicycling, reduce air pollution, and limit global warming. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13915509 | 2,139,173 |
1,016,124 | Controllers in MOCR/FCR are supported by the "backrooms", teams of flight controllers located in other parts of the building or even at remote facilities. The backroom was formerly called the staff support room (SSR), and is now called the multi-purpose support room (MPSR, pronounced "mipser"). Backroom flight controllers are responsible for the details of their assigned system and for making recommendations for actions needed for that system. "Frontroom" flight controllers are responsible for integrating the needs of their system into the larger needs of the vehicle and working with the rest of the flight control team to develop a cohesive plan of action, even if that plan is not necessarily in the best interests of the system they are responsible for. Within the chain of command of the MCC, information and recommendations flow from the backroom to the frontroom to Flight, and then, potentially, to the on board crew. Generally, a MOCR/FCR flight control team is made up of the more seasoned flight controllers than the SSR/MPSR, though senior flight controllers cycle back to support in the backroom periodically. One example of the usefulness of this system occurred during the descent of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module "Eagle", when "1202" and "1201" program alarms came from the LM. GUIDO Steve Bales, not sure whether to call for an abort, trusted the experts in the guidance backroom, especially Jack Garman, who told him that the problem was a computer overload, but could be ignored if it was intermittent. Bales called "Go!", Flight Director Gene Kranz accepted the call and the mission continued to success. Without the support of the backroom, a controller might make a bad call based on faulty memory or information not readily available to the person on the console. The nature of quiescent operations aboard the International Space Station (ISS) today is such that the full team is not required for 24/7/365 support. FCR flight controllers accept responsibility for operations without MPSR support most of the time, and the MPSR is only staffed for high-intensity periods of activity, such as joint Shuttle/ISS missions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4052227 | 1,015,601 |
1,837,673 | For decades, the researchers have believed that the maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) would most likely remain below 0.1%. Only in 1979 Tang reported a two-layer, thin-film PV device, which ultimately yielded a power conversion efficiency of 1%. Tang's research was published in 1986, which allowed others to decipher many of the problems which limited the basic understanding of the process involved in the OPVs. In later years, the majority of the research focused on the composite blend of poly(3-hexylthiopehene) (P3HT) and phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM). This, along with the research performed on fullerenes, dictated the majority of studies pertaining to OPV for many years. In more recent research, polymer-based bulk heterojunction solar cells, along with low band-gap donor-acceptor copolymers have been created for PCBM-based OPV devices. These low band-gap donor-acceptor copolymers are able to absorb a higher percentage of the solar spectrum as compared to other high efficiency polymers. These copolymers have been widely researched due to their ability to be tuned for specific optical and electrical properties. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31698140 | 1,836,624 |
1,277,972 | In an interview with the "Yomiuri Shimbun", Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata named "Twin Spica", because of its nostalgic story, as one of five manga series which highlight the dream of reaching space. While assessing the series for licensing in English, Vertical marketing director Ed Chavez, a fan of science fiction, found its story "technically sound" and noted it as "possibly one of the most heartfelt series I've read in ages". He hoped that the series would rank in top 10 of "The New York Times" Graphic Books Best Seller List for manga and believed that it would make Vertical a "known name, not only amongst better comic shops and independent book stores, but also with anime fans and casual graphic novel readers". While the series was originally published in a "seinen" magazine, Chavez expected that it would also appeal to fans of "shōjo" manga. He believed that the word "seinen" "means adult and does not make reference to gender". He hoped "Twin Spica" will prove to be a financial success and enable Vertical to fund future licenses of classic works by Osamu Tezuka and the Forty-Niners. The first volume in English was listed by "Publishers Weekly" as one of the most anticipated graphic novels of 2010. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4551091 | 1,277,279 |
1,965,219 | The second half of the 20th century is predominantly characterized by constructional changes and progressive decentralisation. In 1950 both stacks situated edgeways behind the reading room got an annex in the south-east. 1970 a new building (of no architectural value whatsoever) was added-on to the old house with a new entrance and hall. From 1994 to 1996 the ReSoWi-Library which accommodates the Law and Social and Economic Sciences Libraries was built. At the same time another building was erected directly attached to the library's original front leaving it unaltered. This addition is exclusively used by the library. Additionally, there were several branch libraries opened in some distance to the main library, e. g. in the Universitätszentrum Wall situated in Merangasse 70. In 1996, a media library for visual media was installed. As a consequence of the university-splitting in 2004, the medical branches became an autonomous university library. Together with the University Libraries of Vienna and Innsbruck Graz has been assuming control of the establishment of national and international consortia installed in order to use electronic journals and books in cooperation and thus more cost-effectively in 1998. On 1 July 2005 the "Cooperation of e-media in Austria" was constituted. The University of Graz Library authoritatively participates in the Austrian Literature Online project, the digitisation of Austrian literature. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3299927 | 1,964,090 |
1,348,923 | The modern history of SEPs began with George Dawson's 1947 recordings of somatosensory cortical responses in patients with myoclonus, a neurological condition characterized by abrupt, involuntary, jerk-like contractions of a muscle or muscle group. Because of their relatively large amplitude and low frequency compatible with a low sampling rate of A/D conversion, the cortical SEPs were the first studied in normal subjects and patients. In the 1970s and early 1980s spinal and subcortical (far-field) potentials were identified. Although the origins and mechanisms of far-field SEPs are still debated in the literature, correlations among abnormal waveforms, lesion site, and clinical observations are fairly well established. However, the most recent advances were brought about by multichannel recordings of evoked potentials coupled with source modeling and source localization in 3D images of brain volume provided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27326458 | 1,348,181 |
1,769,342 | Several features of BMCs make them appealing for biotechnological applications. Because carboxysomes increase the efficiency of carbon fixation, much research effort has gone into introducing carboxysomes and required bicarbonate transporters into plant chloroplasts in order to engineer a chloroplastic concentrating mechanism with some success. Carboxysomes also provide an example of how knowledge of a BMC assembly pathway enables simplification and reduction in the number of necessary gene products for organelle construction. This is an especially important consideration for introducing compartmentalization into difficult to engineer organisms like plants in plant synthetic biology. More generally, because BMC shell proteins self-assemble, empty shells can be formed, prompting efforts to engineer them to contain customized cargo. Discovery of the encapsulation peptide on the termini of some BMC-associated proteins provides a means to begin to engineer custom BMCs by fusing foreign proteins to this peptide and co-expressing this with shell proteins. For example, by adding this peptide to pyruvate decarboxylase and alcohol dehydrogenase, researchers have engineered an ethanol bioreactor. Strategies for encapsulating proteins into synthetic shells using various adaptor domains and fusions to termini of shell proteins have also been successful. Finally, the pores present in the shell proteins control the permeability of the shell: these can be a target for bioengineering, as they can be modified to allow the crossing of selected substrates and products. The engineering of permeability has even been extended beyond metabolites; shell protein pores have been modified to conduct electrons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16999078 | 1,768,348 |
759,058 | Before the introduction of vaccines, people could only become immune to an infectious disease by contracting the disease and surviving it. Smallpox (variola) was prevented in this way by inoculation, which produced a milder effect than the natural disease. The first clear reference to smallpox inoculation was made by the Chinese author Wan Quan (1499–1582) in his "Douzhen xinfa" (痘疹心法) published in 1549. In China, powdered smallpox scabs were blown up the noses of the healthy. The patients would then develop a mild case of the disease and from then on were immune to it. The technique did have a 0.5–2.0% mortality rate, but that was considerably less than the 20–30% mortality rate of the disease itself. Two reports on the Chinese practice of inoculation were received by the Royal Society in London in 1700; one by Dr. Martin Lister who received a report by an employee of the East India Company stationed in China and another by Clopton Havers. According to Voltaire (1742), the Turks derived their use of inoculation from neighbouring Circassia. Voltaire does not speculate on where the Circassians derived their technique from, though he reports that the Chinese have practiced it "these hundred years". It was introduced into England from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1721 and used by Zabdiel Boylston in Boston the same year. In 1798 Edward Jenner introduced inoculation with cowpox (smallpox vaccine), a much safer procedure. This procedure, referred to as vaccination, gradually replaced smallpox inoculation, now called variolation to distinguish it from vaccination. Until the 1880s vaccine/vaccination referred only to smallpox, but Louis Pasteur developed immunization methods for chicken cholera and anthrax in animals and for human rabies, and suggested that the terms vaccine/vaccination should be extended to cover the new procedures. This can cause confusion if care is not taken to specify which vaccine is used e.g. measles vaccine or influenza vaccine. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=284029 | 758,652 |
111,684 | Males perform a sequence of five behavioral patterns to court females. First, males orient themselves while playing a courtship song by horizontally extending and vibrating their wings. Soon after, the male positions himself at the rear of the female's abdomen in a low posture to tap and lick the female genitalia. Finally, the male curls his abdomen and attempts copulation. Females can reject males by moving away, kicking, and extruding their ovipositor. Copulation lasts around 15–20 minutes, during which males transfer a few hundred, very long (1.76 mm) sperm cells in seminal fluid to the female. Females store the sperm in a tubular receptacle and in two mushroom-shaped spermathecae; sperm from multiple matings compete for fertilization. A last male precedence is believed to exist; the last male to mate with a female sires about 80% of her offspring. This precedence was found to occur through both displacement and incapacitation. The displacement is attributed to sperm handling by the female fly as multiple matings are conducted and is most significant during the first 1–2 days after copulation. Displacement from the seminal receptacle is more significant than displacement from the spermathecae. Incapacitation of first male sperm by second male sperm becomes significant 2–7 days after copulation. The seminal fluid of the second male is believed to be responsible for this incapacitation mechanism (without removal of first male sperm) which takes effect before fertilization occurs. The delay in effectiveness of the incapacitation mechanism is believed to be a protective mechanism that prevents a male fly from incapacitating his own sperm should he mate with the same female fly repetitively. Sensory neurons in the uterus of female "D. melanogaster" respond to a male protein, sex peptide, which is found in semen. This protein makes the female reluctant to copulate for about 10 days after insemination. The signal pathway leading to this change in behavior has been determined. The signal is sent to a brain region that is a homolog of the hypothalamus and the hypothalamus then controls sexual behavior and desire. Gonadotropic hormones in Drosophila maintain homeostasis and govern reproductive output via a cyclic interrelationship, not unlike the mammalian estrous cycle. Sex peptide perturbs this homeostasis and dramatically shifts the endocrine state of the female by inciting juvenile hormone synthesis in the corpus allatum. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=173204 | 111,639 |
364,308 | Jemison served on the board of directors of the World Sickle Cell Foundation from 1990 to 1992. In 1993, she founded The Jemison Group Inc., a consulting firm which considers the sociocultural impact of technological advancements and design. Jemison also founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence and named the foundation in honor of her mother. One of the projects of the foundation is "The Earth We Share", a science camp for students aged 12 to 16. Founded in 1994, camps have been held at Dartmouth College, Colorado School of Mines, Choate Rosemary Hall and other sites in the United States, as well as internationally in South Africa, Tunisia, and Switzerland. The Dorothy Jemison Foundation also sponsors other events and programs, including the Shaping the World essay competition, Listening to the Future (a survey program that targets obtaining opinions from students), Earth Online (an online chatroom that allows students to safely communicate and discuss ideas on space and science), and the Reality Leads Fantasy Gala. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=201525 | 364,118 |
1,303,189 | The basic technical reason for this difficulty is that the frequency response of a simple filter approaches a fall of 6 dB/octave far from the point of resonance. This means that if telephone channels are squeezed in side by side into the frequency spectrum, there will be crosstalk from adjacent channels in any given channel. What is required is a much more sophisticated filter that has a flat frequency response in the required passband like a low-Q resonant circuit, but that rapidly falls in response (much faster than 6 dB/octave) at the transition from passband to stopband like a high-Q resonant circuit. Obviously, these are contradictory requirements to be met with a single resonant circuit. The solution to these needs was founded in the theory of transmission lines and consequently the necessary filters did not become available until this theory was fully developed. At this early stage the idea of signal bandwidth, and hence the need for filters to match to it, was not fully understood; indeed, it was as late as 1920 before the concept of bandwidth was fully established. For early radio, the concepts of Q-factor, selectivity and tuning sufficed. This was all to change with the developing theory of transmission lines on which image filters are based, as explained in the next section. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23431648 | 1,302,473 |
327,617 | Due to natural gas shortage concerns in the northeastern U.S. and surplus natural gas in the rest of the country, many new LNG import and export terminals are being contemplated in the United States. Concerns about the safety of such facilities create controversy in some regions where they are proposed. One such location is in the Long Island Sound between Connecticut and Long Island. Broadwater Energy, an effort of TransCanada Corp. and Shell, wishes to build an LNG import terminal in the sound on the New York side. Local politicians including the Suffolk County Executive raised questions about the terminal. In 2005, New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton also announced their opposition to the project. Several import terminal proposals along the coast of Maine were also met with high levels of resistance and questions. On Sep. 13, 2013 the U.S. Department of Energy approved Dominion Cove Point's application to export up to 770 million cubic feet per day of LNG to countries that do not have a free trade agreement with the U.S. In May 2014, the FERC concluded its environmental assessment of the Cove Point LNG project, which found that the proposed natural gas export project could be built and operated safely. Another LNG terminal is currently proposed for Elba Island, Ga. Plans for three LNG export terminals in the U.S. Gulf Coast region have also received conditional Federal approval. In Canada, an LNG export terminal is under construction near Guysborough, Nova Scotia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=832128 | 327,443 |
14,387 | Openness to experience is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. They tend to be, when compared to closed people, more creative and more aware of their feelings. They are also more likely to hold unconventional beliefs. High openness can be perceived as unpredictability or lack of focus, and more likely to engage in risky behavior or drug-taking. Moreover, individuals with high openness are said to pursue self-actualization specifically by seeking out intense, euphoric experiences. Conversely, those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-drivensometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret and contextualize the openness factor as there is a lack of biological support for this particular trait. Openness has not shown a significant association with any brain regions as opposed to the other four traits which did when using brain imaging to detect changes in volume associated with each trait. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1284664 | 14,382 |
1,393,709 | Scientists at the ICR were instrumental in the development of one of the world's most widely used anti-cancer drugs, carboplatin (Paraplatin). Carboplatin's development began in 1970 after scientists in the United States discovered that the platinum-based compound cisplatin was effective against many tumours – but had serious side-effects. A team of ICR and RMH scientists and clinicians including Professors Kenneth Harrap and Tom Connors, Hilary Calvert and Hospital Consultant Eve Wiltshaw recognised its potential but also the need for a less toxic alternative. In collaboration with the chemical and precious metal company Johnson Matthey plc the ICR scientists evaluated some 300 different platinum-containing molecules and developed a series of second-generation compounds, of which carboplatin was selected as the lead. The first clinical trial of carboplatin was carried out in 1981 and it was launched commercially as Parplatin (manufactured by Bristol-Myers) in 1986. As of 2012 carboplatin is in use for a range of cancers including ovarian and lung. For the development of these platinum-based anticancer drugs the ICR, together with The Royal Marsden Hospital and Johnson Matthey plc, received the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in 1991. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=704015 | 1,392,938 |
33,656 | The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of SFr 2.6bn, with another SFr 210M toward the experiments. However, cost overruns, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around SFr 480M for the accelerator, and SFr 50M for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007. The superconducting magnets were responsible for SFr 180M of the cost increase. There were also further costs and delays owing to engineering difficulties encountered while building the cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid, and also due to magnet supports which were insufficiently strongly designed and failed their initial testing (2007) and damage from a magnet quench and liquid helium escape (inaugural testing, 2008) "(see: Construction accidents and delays)". Because electricity costs are lower during the summer, the LHC normally does not operate over the winter months, although exceptions over the 2009/10 and 2012/2013 winters were made to make up for the 2008 start-up delays and to improve precision of measurements of the new particle discovered in 2012, respectively. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=357353 | 33,644 |
1,420,809 | The first comprehensive presentation of the 1980 concept was part of a two-day conference at Stroud Water Research Center, whose head director was Robin Vannote. It was the result of a multi-year study conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation. The publication of the hypothesis was released later that same year under the title "The River Continuum Concept" in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. The concept built on the work of other American limnologists such as Ruth Patrick, from which the modern riverine ecosystem model has emerged, and Luna Leopold, which deals with the physical changes of water. The essential goal of the concept was to further assess and explain the various communities in the system. Vannote himself described the current situation as follows, "in those days, most people studied a square meter of water to death ”. Meaning that previous research was always only on small pieces of water and only rarely was the entire river system considered, allowing for the creation of a general model. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20622433 | 1,420,009 |
2,051,793 | Williams was born in Aberdare, an industrial town in Rhondda Cynon Taf, South Wales, and attended Aberdare Boys' Grammar School. He was a keen sportsman in his youth, taking part in athletics and rugby, and had ambitions to join the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, although these were thwarted by a bout of tuberculosis in 1939, which confined him for a time to a sanitorium. He instead won a scholarship to study at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he achieved a First in geology in 1939, and a PhD, studying Welsh Ordovician rocks and describing new species of brachiopods. Whilst at Aberystwyth he served both as President of the institution's Students' Representative Council, and as National Vice-President of the National Union of Students. In 1948, he was appointed Lecturer in Geology at the University of Glasgow, but postponed this position to complete a two-year Harkness Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., working under leading brachiopod expert G. Arthur Cooper. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25484011 | 2,050,612 |
504,291 | While traditionally classified as such, it is not clear that IgM MGUS is a clonal plasma cell dyscrasia. IgM MGUS involves an increase in a B cell derivative with morphological features of both plasma cells and lymphocytes viz., lymphoplasmacytic cells. Studies indicate that both plasma cells and lymphoblastic cells infiltrate involved tissues and that one or perhaps both cell types harbor mutations in a) the "MYD88" gene (~20% in IgM MGUS and >90% in IgM-related malignancies), almost all of which are L265P mutations (i.e. changing leucine to proline at the 265th amino acid position of the MYK88 protein thereby causing the protein to be continuously active in stimulating the same cell-activating pathways that Toll-like receptors activate intermittently and on a physiologically basis); b) the "CXCR4" gene (8% in IgM MGUS, 25% in IgM-related malignancies); and c) increased gene copy number due to chromosomal rearrangements (36% in IgM MGUS, 82% in IgM-related malignancies). It is clear that each cell type contributes to different features of IgM malignancies but not clear that clonal plasma cells are critical to the development or progression of IgM MGUS. In all events, IgM MGUS is diagnosed in individuals who have serum IgM levels less than 30 gram/liter; have less than 10% of nucleated bone marrow cells with the lymphoplasmacytic morphology, and have no symptoms or findings of end organ dysfunction attributed to Waldenström macroglobulinemia such as anemia, decreases in any white blood cell count, cold agglutinin disease, hyperviscosity of blood, lymphadenopathy, hepatomegaly, splenomegaly, peripheral neuropathy, cryoglobulinemia, or constitutional symptoms. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17475959 | 504,031 |
330,327 | The dive bomber wing supported "Generalfeldmarschall" Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in its two-year campaign in North Africa; its other main task was attacking Allied shipping. In 1941, Ju 87 operations in North Africa were dominated by the Siege of Tobruk, which lasted for over seven months. It served during the Battle of Gazala and the First Battle of El Alamein, as well as the decisive Second Battle of El Alamein, which drove Rommel back to Tunisia. As the tide turned and Allied air power grew in the autumn of 1942, the Ju 87 became very vulnerable and losses were heavy. The entry of the Americans into North Africa with the Operation Torch invasion of French North Africa made the situation far worse; the Stuka was obsolete in what was now a fighter-bomber's war. The Bf 109 and Fw 190 could at least fight enemy fighters on equal terms after dropping their ordnance but the Stuka could not. The Ju 87's vulnerability was demonstrated on 11 November 1942, when 15 Ju 87Ds were shot down by United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) Curtiss P-40Fs in minutes. According to Ring and Shores there were 15 Ju 87s on the mission, 2 Squadron SAAF shot down eight with four probable and three were shot down by 57th Fighter Group. Two South-African and one American lost shot down by German fighter escort. Three Stuka crews were captured, one was wounded. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16590 | 330,152 |
329,731 | The use of the equality test (codice_12) requires care when dealing with floating-point numbers. Even simple expressions like codice_13 will, on most computers, fail to be true (in IEEE 754 double precision, for example, codice_14 is approximately equal to -4.44089209850063e-16). Consequently, such tests are sometimes replaced with "fuzzy" comparisons (codice_15, where epsilon is sufficiently small and tailored to the application, such as 1.0E−13). The wisdom of doing this varies greatly, and can require numerical analysis to bound epsilon. Values derived from the primary data representation and their comparisons should be performed in a wider, extended, precision to minimize the risk of such inconsistencies due to round-off errors. It is often better to organize the code in such a way that such tests are unnecessary. For example, in computational geometry, exact tests of whether a point lies off or on a line or plane defined by other points can be performed using adaptive precision or exact arithmetic methods. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11376 | 329,556 |
1,282,100 | During the 1950s, the new command began to make its mark. ARDC developed many ambitious aircraft and missile prototypes. Among the successes of this period were the North American F-86 Sabre swept wing fighter, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress intercontinental bomber, the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker jet-powered refueling tanker aircraft, the Lockheed C-130 Hercules turboprop transport and the Lockheed U-2 very high-altitude strategic reconnaissance aircraft. In addition, ARDC played a major contribution in the development of Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which became a priority after the world learned that the Soviet Union had detonated a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb on 23 August 1953. A crash program was employed which developed America's first ICBM (the SM-65D Atlas), that became operational in 1959. In terms of importance, resources, and success, the ICBM program was rivaled only by the famed Manhattan Project of World War II. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1827412 | 1,281,404 |
274,514 | Formally, an ADT may be defined as a "class of objects whose logical behavior is defined by a set of values and a set of operations"; this is analogous to an algebraic structure in mathematics. What is meant by "behaviour" varies by author, with the two main types of formal specifications for behavior being "axiomatic (algebraic) specification" and an "abstract model;" these correspond to axiomatic semantics and operational semantics of an abstract machine, respectively. Some authors also include the computational complexity ("cost"), both in terms of time (for computing operations) and space (for representing values). In practice, many common data types are not ADTs, as the abstraction is not perfect, and users must be aware of issues like arithmetic overflow that are due to the representation. For example, integers are often stored as fixed-width values (32-bit or 64-bit binary numbers), and thus experience integer overflow if the maximum value is exceeded. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2349 | 274,366 |
326,875 | According to Malthus, population doubled every 25 years (Sandmo). Population sat at less than 17 million people in the U.S in the 1850s and a century later, according to the United States Census Bureau, population had risen to 150 million. Malthus overpopulation would lead to war, famine, and diseases and in the future, society won't be able to feed every person and eventually die. Malthus theory was incorrect, however, because by the early 1900s and mid 1900s, the rise of conventional foods brought a decline to food production and efficiency increased exponentially. More supply was being produced with less work, less resources, and less time. Processed foods had much to do with it, many wives wanting to spend less time in the kitchen and instead work. This was the beginning of technological advancements adhering to food demand even in the middle of a war. Economists disregarded Malthus population theory because Malthus didn't factor in important roles society would have on economic growth. These factors concerned the society's need to improve their quality of life and there want for economic prosperity(Sandmo). Cultural shifts also had much to do with food production increase, and this put end to the population theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1454728 | 326,701 |
1,260,377 | The unit is composed of a probe; a wire link; and a shipboard canister. Inside of the probe is a thermistor which is connected electronically to a chart recorder. The probe falls freely at 20 feet per second and that determines its depth and provides a temperature-depth trace on the recorder. A pair of fine copper wires which pay out from both a spool retained on the ship and one dropped with the instrument, provide a data transfer line to the ship for shipboard recording. Eventually, the wire runs out and breaks, and the XBT sinks to the ocean floor. Since the deployment of an XBT does not require the ship to slow down or otherwise interfere with normal operations, XBT's are often deployed from "vessels of opportunity", such as cargo ships or ferries, and also by dedicated research ships conducting underway operations when a CTD cast would require stopping the ship for several hours. Airborne versions (AXBT) are also used; these use radio frequencies to transmit the data to the aircraft during deployment. Today Lockheed Martin Sippican has manufactured over 5 million XBTs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5660340 | 1,259,690 |
2,033,288 | During his eighteen years' work on the Liverpool and Manchester line Woods took a prominent part in various early experimental investigations into the working of railways. In 1836 he made observations on the waste of fuel due to condensation in the long pipes conveying steam a quarter of a mile to the winding engines used for hauling trains through the Edge Hill tunnel, the gradient of which was then considered too steep for locomotives. He was a member of a committee appointed by the British Association in 1837 to report on the resistance of railway trains. In 1838 he presented to the Institution of Civil Engineers a paper 'On Certain Forms of Locomotive Engines,' which contains some of the earliest accurate details of the working of locomotives, and for which he was awarded a Telford Medal in silver. The consumption of fuel in locomotives was the subject of a paper presented by him to the Liverpool Polytechnic Society in 1843 (published in 1844), and of a contribution to a new edition of Thomas Tredgold's "Steam Engine" in 1850. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14051322 | 2,032,116 |
398,870 | In February, Caruana—having won Corus C 2008—received and accepted invitation to Corus B 2009 which was of category 16 with average Elo of 2641. Throughout the tournament his standings ranged from first to third place. Going into the last round he was tied for second and his opponent was Nigel Short who was in clear first. The game lasted 67 moves. Caruana won the game and the tournament with a score of +4 (8½/13) and performance of 2751. Caruana is the first player ever to win both Corus C and Corus B in consecutive years placing clear first in both. In April he played in the Russian Team Championship at Sochi with the "Club 64" of Moscow, scoring 5 points out of 6; his team placed second after Tomsk. In May he played with the Italian team in the "Mitropa Cup" at Rogaska Slatina in Slovenia, scoring 6 points out of 8 and winning the individual gold medal on first board. By November Caruana was entered in and played in the Chess World Cup 2009 at Khanty-Mansiysk in Russia. In the first two rounds he beat the Cuban grandmasters Lázaro Bruzón and Leinier Domínguez (Elo 2719), in the third the Russian Evgeny Alekseev (Elo 2715); in round four he lost, only in the rapid games, to Vugar Gashimov (Elo 2759 and seventh in the world). This performance allowed him to reach 2675 points Elo. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10837948 | 398,673 |
1,730,400 | An integral part of the SETI project in general is research in the field of the construction of messages for extraterrestrial intelligence, possibly to be transmitted into space from Earth. As far as such messages are based on linguistic principles, the research can be considered to belong to astrolinguistics. The first proposal in this field was put forward by the mathematician Hans Freudenthal at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, in 1960 – around the time of the first SETI effort at Greenbank in the US. Freudenthal conceived a complete Lingua Cosmica. His book "LINCOS: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse" seems at first sight non-linguistic, because mathematical concepts are the core of the language. The concepts are, however, introduced in conversations between persons ("Homo sapiens"), de facto by linguistic means. This is witnessed by the innovative examples presented. The book set a landmark in astrolinguistics. This was witnessed by Bruno Bassi's review years later. Bassi noted: “LINCOS is there. In spite of its somewhat ephemeral 'cosmic intercourse' purpose it remains a fascinating linguistic and educational construction, deserving existence as another Toy of Man's Designing”. Freudenthal eventually had lost interest in creating further work altogether because of rising issues in applying LINCOS "for [anything] other than mathematical contents due to the potential different sociological aspects of alien receivers". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11175098 | 1,729,425 |
199,967 | A breakthrough in astronomy was made by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) when, in 1543, he gave strong arguments for the heliocentric model of the Solar System, ostensibly as a means to render tables charting planetary motion more accurate and to simplify their production. In heliocentric models of the Solar system, the Earth orbits the Sun along with other bodies in Earth's galaxy, a contradiction according to the Greek-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (2nd century CE; see above), whose system placed the Earth at the center of the Universe and had been accepted for over 1,400 years. The Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos (c.310 – c.230 BCE) had suggested that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but Copernicus' reasoning led to lasting general acceptance of this "revolutionary" idea. Copernicus' book presenting the theory ("De revolutionibus orbium coelestium", "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres") was published just before his death in 1543 and, as it is now generally considered to mark the beginning of modern astronomy, is also considered to mark the beginning of the Scientific revolution. Copernicus' new perspective, along with the accurate observations made by Tycho Brahe, enabled German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) to formulate his laws regarding planetary motion that remain in use today. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13758 | 199,864 |
1,166,511 | At the start, nobody wanted the lead, so the role defaulted to Americans Matthew Centrowitz and Ben Blankenship sandwiching David Bustos. Kickers Asbel Kiprop, Taoufik Makhloufi and Ayanleh Souleiman went to the back. The first lap was 66.83, a virtual crawl for these athletes. During the second lap, Nick Willis drifted to the front to replace Blankenship next to Bustos and Centrowitz. On the homestretch, Kiprop moved out to lane 2 and loped up toward the front. Reacting, Ronald Kwemoi crashed to the track as Souleiman was drifting out to find some running room at the back of the pack and Kwemoi caught Souleiman's back kick. The pace was so slow, Kwemoi caught back up to the runners in less than 100 metres. The second lap was even slower at 69.76. Down the next backstretch, Kiprop moved aggressively to challenge Centrowitz at the front, but Centrowitz wouldn't let him by, holding his position on the curb. Behind him, Willis and Blankenship were getting tangled up in a similar situation. Coming around the turn, Souleiman tried to pass again and was successful, taking the lead position on the home stretch. Instead of charging away, Souleiman slowed down. Centrowitz took the small gap next to the rail and squeezed through, deftly slipping his elbow and shoulder in front of Souleiman. Just at the bell, Makhloufi hit the front outside of Centrowitz. But on the penultimate turn, Centrowitz would not let Makhloufi by holding the inside and the lead. Makhloufi fell in behind Centrowitz. Along the backstretch, Kiprop loped to the front again. Centrowitz held him off, making him run to the outside of the turn. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45151199 | 1,165,894 |
695,548 | Isaac Newton (1643–1727) investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light. He also showed that the coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects. Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, it stayed the same colour. Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour. From this work he concluded that any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours, and invented a reflecting telescope (today known as a Newtonian telescope) to bypass that problem. By grinding his own mirrors, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes, he was able to produce a superior instrument to the refracting telescope, due primarily to the wider diameter of the mirror. In 1671 the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes "On Colour", which he later expanded into his "Opticks". Newton argued that light is composed of particles or "corpuscles" and were refracted by accelerating toward the denser medium, but he had to associate them with waves to explain the diffraction of light ("Opticks" Bk. II, Props. XII-L). Later physicists instead favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for diffraction. Today's quantum mechanics, photons and the idea of wave-particle duality bear only a minor resemblance to Newton's understanding of light. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2627738 | 695,184 |
1,526,925 | Joseph, aided by the G. I. Bill, went on to earn his B.S. (1947), M.S. (1948), and Ph.D. (1953) at New York University (NYU). In the middle of his sophomore year at NYU, he entered the Air Force and joined an elite group of cadet recruits, chosen for their talents in mathematics and physics. Those talents led Smagorinsky to be selected for the air force meteorology program. He and other recruits were then sent to Brown University to study mathematics and physics for six months. He was then sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to learn dynamical meteorology. His instructor was Ed Lorenz, who later pioneered the mathematical theory of deterministic chaos. During the war Smagorinsky flew in the nose of bombers as a weather observer, making weather forecasts based on visible factors such as the estimated size of waves, and the observed air temperature and wind velocity at the plane's altitude. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5194620 | 1,526,061 |
1,723,014 | The standard method of isolating neural stem cells in vitro is with the neurosphere culture system, the method originally used to identify NSCs. After some proliferation, the cells are either induced to differentiate by withdrawing the mitogens or by exposing the cells to another factor that induces some of the cells to develop into different lineages. Cellular fates are analysed by staining with antibodies directed against antigens specific for astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and neurons. In some cases, cells are plated at low density and monitored to determine if a single cell can give rise to the three phenotypes. Immunomagnetic cell separation strategies using antibodies directed against cell surface markers present on stem cells, progenitors and mature CNS cells have been applied to the study of NSCs. Other non-immunological methods have been used to identify populations of cells from normal and tumorigenic CNS tissues, which demonstrate some of the in vitro properties of stem cells, including high aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) enzyme activity. ALDH cells from embryonic rat and mouse CNS have been isolated and shown to have the ability to generate neurospheres, neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in vitro, as well as neurons in vivo when transplanted into the adult mouse cerebral cortex. Once a stem cell divides asymmetrically, the more mature progenitor is born and migrates to regions of differentiation. As the progenitor migrates, it matures further until it reaches a site where it stops and either becomes quiescent or fully differentiates into a functioning cell. The major obstacle to identifying and discovering markers that define a stem cell is that the most primitive cells are probably in a quiescent state and do not express many unique antigens. Thus, as with other fields like haematopoiesis, a combination of positive and negative markers will be required to better define the central nervous system stem cell. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42069970 | 1,722,044 |
803,920 | The stages are repeated over and over until the learner builds or remodels the neural network to guide an activity appropriately and accurately without conscious thought. The context for this view is similar to how physical therapy works to help brain-injured patients recover lost functions. The patient maintains the desired result (e.g., control over hand movement) while making repeated attempts, without conscious awareness of the neural activity required to make the hand move. The patient continues to make attempts until movement is achieved. In the case of brain injury, how much progress is made depends upon the extent of the injury and the "mental force" or "will power" applied by the individual. Most individuals with reading problems have brains unaffected by brain injury, but negatively affected by an undefined problem with early learning in the area of reading. Because the brain is otherwise healthy, Tadlock has used highly structured methods associated with the Predictive Cycle to successfully remediate individuals with mild to severe reading problems (including dyslexia). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21312313 | 803,491 |
1,862,614 | An "$80,000 study on why the same teams always dominate March Madness", a "$315,000 study suggesting playing FarmVille on Facebook helps adults develop and maintain relationships", a study costing "$1 million for an analysis of how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names", a study costing "$50,000 to produce and publicize amateur songs about science, including a rap called "Money 4 Drugz," and a misleading song titled "Biogas is a Gas, Gas, Gas";" a study costing "$2 million to figure out that people who often post pictures on the internet from the same location at the same time are usually friends"; and "$581,000 on whether online dating site users are racist". Ineffective management examples, cited in the report, included "ineffective contracting", "$1.7 billion in unspent funds sitting in expired, undisbursed grant accounts", "at least $3 million in excessive travel funds", "a lack of accountability or program metrics to evaluate expenditures" and "inappropriate staff behavior including porn surfing and Jello wrestling and skinny-dipping at NSF-operated facilities in Antarctica". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33036576 | 1,861,545 |
1,287,187 | In addition to photoreceptors, the eye requires a properly functioning lens, retina, and an undamaged optic nerve to recognize form. Light travels through the lens, hits the retina, activates the appropriate photoreceptors, depending on available light, which convert the light into an electrical signal that travels along the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus and then to the primary visual cortex. In the cortex, the adult brain processes information such as lines, orientation, and color. These inputs are integrated in the occipito-temporal cortex where a representation of the object as a whole is created. Visual information continues to be processed in the posterior parietal cortex, also known as the dorsal stream, where the representation of an object’s shape is formed using motion-based cues. It is believed that simultaneously information is processed in the anterior temporal cortex, also known as the ventral stream, where object recognition, identification and naming occur. In the process of recognizing an object, both the dorsal and ventral streams are active, but the ventral stream is more important in discriminating between and recognizing objects. The dorsal stream contributes to object recognition only when two objects have similar shapes and the images are degraded. Observed latency in activation of different parts of the brain supports the idea of hierarchal processing of visual stimuli, with object representations progressing from simple to complex. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32197396 | 1,286,486 |
1,576,711 | On December 29 of 1824, the president and the board met and established the methods of instruction, which were rather different from methods employed at other colleges at the time. Students spent six hours a day performing experiments and explaining their rationale and gave their own lectures rather than listening to lectures and watching demonstrations. This unconventional mode of instruction was inspired by the original intention to make the Rensselaer School a place to train students in teaching what they had learned; as van Rensselaer wrote to Blatchford, he wanted the school's graduates "to qualify [as] teachers for instructing the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics, by lectures or other-wise, in the application of experimental chemistry, philosophy, and natural history, to agriculture, domestic economy,the arts, and manufactures." Although van Rensselaer, at Eaton's suggestion, even waived tuition for students who committed to teaching locally for at least one year after graduation as an incentive for graduates of the Rensselaer School to enter the teaching profession, this intended objective was ultimately unsuccessful. Tuition was around $80 a semester. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32133136 | 1,575,822 |
579,342 | At this stage Carathéodory began training as a military engineer. He attended the École Militaire de Belgique from October 1891 to May 1895 and he also studied at the École d'Application from 1893 to 1896. In 1897 a war broke out between the Ottoman Empire and Greece. This put Carathéodory in a difficult position since he sided with the Greeks, yet his father served the government of the Ottoman Empire. Since he was a trained engineer he was offered a job in the British colonial service. This job took him to Egypt where he worked on the construction of the Assiut dam until April 1900. During periods when construction work had to stop due to floods, he studied mathematics from some textbooks he had with him, such as Jordan's "Cours d'Analyse" and Salmon's text on the analytic geometry of conic sections. He also visited the Cheops pyramid and made measurements which he wrote up and published in 1901. He also published a book on Egypt in the same year which contained a wealth of information on the history and geography of the country. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=470625 | 579,045 |
1,957,176 | In 1909, Tikhomirov returned to Moscow to develop "numerous research and inventions accumulated over many years ... scientific and practical work." He made a schematic development and the necessary calculations of "self-propelled mines". Tikhomirov suggested using the reaction of gases during the combustion of flammable liquids or explosives in combination with an ejected air medium to propel a rocket. In 1912, he submitted his project to the Minister of the Navy, Admiral Aleksei Birilev for consideration. The project was reported to the emperor. Nicholas II personally came to the test, ordered the work to be continued and allocated the necessary funding. In November 1915, Tikhomirov applied for a patent to the Technical Affairs Committee of the Department of Industry of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, which issued him a protective certificate No. 309 (without disclosure) for a type of "self-propelled mines for water and air." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70947774 | 1,956,052 |
1,537,428 | Structural analysis of mVDAC1's structure showed a barrel-like channel composed of 19 amphipathic β-strands, with the N-terminus and C-terminus both facing towards the inter membrane space of the mitochondrion. β-strands are connected via loops and are arranged in an anti-parallel pattern with the exception of β-strands 1 and 19 which are parallel. The pore has a height of 40 Ẳ, spans a distance of 27 Ẳ by 20 Ẳ at the openings and tapers down to 20 Ẳ by 14 Ẳ at the N-terminal α-helix segment in the open state. The closed state conformation has yet to be isolated and determined. Additionally, the N-terminus has an alpha helical segment that is held to the inside wall of the pore by hydrophobic interactions with residues on β-sheets 8-18. This N-terminus can serve as a scaffold for the movement of ions or attachment of proteins. One such example is seen as it is the docking site for HK1 binding. A significant residue to point out is the glutamate located at the 73rd residue on the amino acid chain (E73). This residue is found in VDAC1 and VDAC2 but not VDAC3. The side chain of this charged residue points into the phospholipid bilayer which would normally cause repulsive forces to occur. E73 however, has been implicated in VDAC1 function and interaction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14988574 | 1,536,557 |
1,166,495 | After Houbolt presented the LOR concept to a series of dismissive high-level panels, he ignored the chain of command and complained in a long letter dated November 15, 1961, to Associate Administrator of NASA Robert Seamans that his proposal had been derided as "a scheme that has a 50 percent chance of getting a man to the moon and a 1 percent of getting him back." Indeed, at one of the earliest NASA panels on December 14, 1960, Houbolt was attacked in the presence of both Seamans and Wernher von Braun by fellow engineer Max Faget, who announced, "His figures lie. He doesn't know what he's talking about." However, the detailed letter to Seamans, together with studies of the difficulties posed by the need for a massive rocket in a direct ascent and the problems associated with landing a large craft on the lunar surface following an Earth orbit rendezvous, led Seamans and von Braun to support LOR in 1962. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5604505 | 1,165,878 |
1,094,797 | In effect, the Ariane 4 was an improved and developed derivative of the earlier Ariane 3, primarily differing through the application of various solid-fuelled and liquid-fuelled boosters, the latter being the only all-new design feature of the Ariane 4; at this point, the practice of using liquid boosters was uncommon, having only previously been used in the Chinese space program. Another innovation of the Ariane 4 was the dual-launch SPELDA (Structure Porteuse Externe de Lancement Double Ariane) fairing. This had the function of allowing a pair of satellites, one placed on top of the other; several different SPELDA nose fairings could be installed, including normal and extended models. The SPELDA was considerably lighter than its predecessor; the guidance system also used much more accurate ring laser gyroscopes. According to aviation author Brian Harvey, the advances present in the design of the Ariane 4 represented a conservative and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, philosophy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=80781 | 1,094,237 |
200,200 | After John Glenn's 1962 orbital flight, an exchange of letters between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev led to a series of discussions led by NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden and Soviet scientist Anatoly Blagonravov. Their 1962 talks led to the Dryden-Blagonravov agreement, which was formalized in October of that year, the same time the two countries were in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The agreement was formally announced at the United Nations on 5 December 1962. It called for cooperation on the exchange of data from weather satellites, a study of the Earth's magnetic field, and joint tracking of the NASA Echo II balloon satellite. Kennedy could even interest Khrushchev in a joint crewed Moon landing. The assassination of Kennedy on 22 November 1963, and the removal from office of Khrushchev on 14 October 1964, made any personal preferences of the respective leaders moot. Unfortunately, as the competition between the two nation's crewed space programs heated up, efforts to further cooperation at that point came to an end. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=331959 | 200,097 |
480,141 | Brown began a collaboration with other scientists, including Harold Varmus (then director of the National Institutes of Health), David J. Lipman (then director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information), and Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to overhaul the scientific and medical publishing systems to make papers available on the rapidly developing Internet platforms such as Usenet and the World Wide Web. "Why should publishers be able to control what I can do with information that was published by my scientific colleagues whose motivation was exactly to have their discoveries contribute to future discoveries? ... We had already existing tools that we could use to so to speak hyperlink things so that you could reorganize information in systematic ways, but they weren't really being exploited by the conventional scientific literature," Brown said in an interview with BioMedCentral Biology. The magazine Nature reported that the scientists' open-access movement could "spell the end for many print titles"; Brown called subscription-based scientific journals "anachronisms." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4508007 | 479,897 |
186,641 | Cambridge Plating Company, now known as Purecoat North, was an electroplating business in Belmont, Massachusetts. A report was conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), to evaluate the association between environmental exposures from the Cambridge Plating Company and health effects on the surrounding community. The report indicated that residents of Belmont were exposed to chromium via air emissions, as well as groundwater and soil. However, six types of cancer were evaluated, and the incidence was actually found to be average, in most cases, across all types, if not a little bit lower than average. For example, in kidney cancer the number of observed cases was 7 versus an expected 16. While that was the case for most diseases, it was not for all. The incidence of leukemia among females was elevated in Belmont, MA during 1982–1999 (32 diagnoses observed vs. 23.2 expected). Elevations in females were due to four excess cases in each time period (11 diagnoses observed vs. 6.9 expected during 1988–1993; 13 diagnoses observed vs. 8.7 expected during 1994–1999) while elevations among males were based on one to three excess cases. ATSDR deemed Cambridge Plating as an Indeterminate Public Health Hazard in the past, but No Apparent Public Health Hazard in the present or future. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2468967 | 186,544 |
443,418 | In the UK the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans has elevated significantly, to the point where many large DB plans are no longer open to new employees. This momentum has been employer-driven and is considered a response to a combination of factors such as pension underfunding, declined long-term interest rates and the move to more market-based accounting. The focus is now on managing pension fund assets in relation to liabilities instead of market benchmarks. The Pensions Policy Institute estimates that in 2013 there were approximately 8 million private sector workers building up DC benefits, compared to approximately 1 million building up DB benefits. However, one point of concern with these schemes is that employers often contribute less than what they would under final salary plans. According to the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), employers contribute on average 11% of salary into final salary schemes, compared to only 6% to money purchase. This indicates that individuals will have to save more of their own income into a retirement fund in order to accomplish a satisfactory retirement income. Companies such as Aon Hewitt, Mercer and Aviva recognise these challenges and have identified the need to help new generations of workers with their retirement funding plans. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3570644 | 443,203 |
1,546,732 | Zearalenone: Zearalenone (6-[10-hydroxy-6-oxo-trans-1-undecenyl]-B-resorcyclic acid lactone), a secondary metabolite from Fusarium graminearum (teleomorph Gibberella zeae) was given the trivial name zearalenone as a combination of G. zeae, resorcylic acid lactone, -ene (for the presence of the C-1′ to C-2 double bond), and -one, for the C-6′ ketone. Almost simultaneously, a second group isolated, crystallized, and studied the metabolic properties of the same compound and named it F-2. Much of the early literature uses zearalenone and F-2 as synonyms; the family of analogues are known as zearalenones and F-2 toxins, respectively. Perhaps because the original work on these fungal macrolides coincided with the discovery of aflatoxins, chapters on zearalenone have become a regular fixture in monographs on mycotoxins (see, for example, Mirocha and Christensen and Betina ). Nevertheless, the word toxin is almost certainly a misnomer because zearalenone, while biologically potent, is hardly toxic; rather, it sufficiently resembles 17β-estradiol, the principal hormone produced by the human ovary, to allow it to bind to estrogen receptors in mammalian target cells Zearalenone is better classified as a nonsteroidal estrogen or mycoestrogen. Sometimes it is called a phytoestrogen. For the structure-activity relationships of zearalenone and its analogues, see Hurd and Shier. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9465500 | 1,545,856 |
1,630,534 | TKTL1 protein was first detected in healthy cells and in tumor cells by immunohistochemistry in 2005. Shortly thereafter, TKTL1 protein was shown to be increased in tumors compared to healthy tissue, and it identified patients with colorectal cancer and bladder cancer who showed faster mortality. This study also discussed the role of TKTL1 in the fermentation of glucose to lactic acid despite the presence of oxygen, which was first described by Nobel Prize winner Otto Heinrich Warburg and which he termed "aerobic glycolysis". The coined term aerobic glycolysis used by Warburg, which he created to describe fermentation that was anaerobic but carried out under aerobic conditions, i.e., despite the presence of oxygen, led to great misunderstanding. In Warburg's honor, the fermentation of glucose to lactic acid was called the Warburg effect. In a 2006 study by Langbein et al., the Warburg effect was reinterpreted and the importance of this metabolic fermentation process for invasive destructive growth and metastasis of cancer cells was discussed. A subsequent study by Langbein demonstrated the role of TKTL1 and the switch of energy release to fermentation mediated by it in the metastasis of renal carcinomas, identifying the clinical significance of TKTL1 expression in early tumor stages. The study was able to show that apparently quite benign tumors (stage T1) which led to the death of renal cancer patients after a short time were detected by TKTL1. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15065801 | 1,629,613 |
1,561,192 | The team first considered spinning the radar dish around a vertical axis and then angling the dish up and down a few degrees with each complete circuit. The vertical motion could be smoothed out by moving continually rather than in steps, producing a helix pattern. However, this helical-scan solution had two disadvantages; one was that the dish spent half of its time pointed backwards, limiting the amount of energy broadcast forward, and the other was that it required the microwave energy to somehow be sent to the antenna through a rotating feed. At a 25 October all-hands meeting attended by Dee, Hodgkin and members of the GEC group at GEC's labs, the decision was made to proceed with the helical-scan solution in spite of these issues. GEC solved the problem of having the signal turned off half the time by using two dishes mounted back-to-back and switching the output of the magnetron to the one facing forward at that instant. They initially suggested that the system would be available by December 1940, but as work progressed it became clear that it would take much longer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43764346 | 1,560,306 |
1,726,300 | These existing approval frameworks almost universally use the best available science to assess safety and do not approve substances or products with an unacceptable risk benefit profile. One proposal is to simply treat particle size as one of the several parameters defining a substance to be approved, rather than creating special rules for all particles of a given size regardless of type. A major argument against special regulation of nanotechnology is that the projected applications with the greatest impact are far in the future, and it is unclear how to regulate technologies whose feasibility is speculative at this point. In the meantime, it has been argued that the immediate applications of nanomaterials raise challenges not much different from those of introducing any other new material, and can be dealt with by minor tweaks to existing regulatory schemes rather than sweeping regulation of entire scientific fields. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18069384 | 1,725,329 |
116,912 | Projected changes in flood frequency and severity can bring new challenges in flood risk management, allowing for increased mosquito populations in urban areas. Weather conditions affected by climate change including temperature, precipitation and wind may affect the survival and reproduction rates of mosquitoes, suitable habitats, distribution, and abundance. Ambient temperatures drive mosquito replication rates and transmission of WNV by affecting the peak season of mosquitoes and geographic variations. For example, increased temperatures can affect the rate of virus replication, speed up the virus evolution rate, and viral transmission efficiency. Furthermore, higher winter temperatures and warmer spring may lead to larger summer mosquito populations, increasing the risk for WNV. Similarly, rainfall may also drive mosquito replication rates and affect the seasonality and geographic variations of the virus. Studies show an association between heavy precipitation and higher incidence of reported WNV. Likewise, wind is another environmental factor that serves as a dispersal mechanism for mosquitoes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50642063 | 116,867 |
2,149,977 | Up to now, a typical one-component PDV instrument utilizes a pulsed injection-seeded laser, one or two scientific grade CCD cameras and a molecular iodine filter. The laser is used to illuminate a plane of the flow with narrow spectral linewidth light. The Doppler shifted scattered light is then split into two paths using a beamsplitter and imaged onto the camera(s). In this manner the absolute absorption of scattered light, as it passes through an iodine cell placed in one of the beam paths, is measured at every spatial location within the object plane. For scattering by relatively large (i.e. Mie scattering) particles, this absorption is a function of particle velocity alone. Accurate calibration and image mapping algorithms have been developed with the result that velocity accuracies of ~1–2 m/s are possible. More details concerning the history of PDV, the art of its application and recent advances can be found in comprehensive review articles by Elliott and Beutner (1999) and Samimy and Wernet (2000). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6231089 | 2,148,746 |
1,719,301 | In 2000 Wells wrote "Icons of Evolution", in which he claims, "What the textbooks don't explain, however, is that biologists have known since the 1980s that the classical story has some serious flaws. The most serious is that peppered moths in the wild don't even rest on tree trunks. The textbook photographs, it turns out, have been staged." The arguments were dismissed by Majerus, Cook and Bruce Grant who describes Wells as distorting the picture by selectively omitting or scrambling references in a way that is dishonest. Professional photography to illustrate textbooks uses dead insects because of the considerable difficulty in getting good images of both forms of moth in the same shot. The scientific studies actually consisted of observational data rather than using such photographs. The photographs in Majerus's "Melanism: Evolution in Action" are unstaged pictures of live moths in the wild, and the photographs of moths on tree-trunks, apart from some slight blurring, look little different from the "staged" photographs. While an experiment did involve the gluing of dead moths to trees, this practice was just one of many different ways used to study different individual elements of the overall hypothesis. This particular experiment was not meant to exactly reproduce natural conditions but instead was used to assess how the numbers of moths available (their density) affected the foraging practices of birds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3890535 | 1,718,331 |
231,371 | The East Asia and Pacific region has reached its goals on nutrition, in part due to the improvements contributed by China, the region's most populous country. China has reduced its underweight prevalence from 19 percent to 8 percent between 1990 and 2002. China played the largest role in the world in decreasing the rate of children under five underweight between 1990 and 2004, halving the prevalence. This reduction of underweight prevalence has aided in the lowering of the under 5 mortality rate from 49 to 31 of 1000. They also have a low birthweight rate at 4%, a rate comparable to industrialized countries, and over 90% of households receive adequate iodized salts. However, large disparities exist between children in rural and urban areas, where 5 provinces in China leave 1.5 million children iodine deficient and susceptible to diseases. Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia are all projected to reach nutrition MDGs. Singapore has the lowest under five mortality rate of any nation, besides Iceland, in the world, at 3%. Cambodia has the highest rate of child mortality in the region (141 per 1,000 live births), while still its proportion of underweight children increased by 5 percent to 45% in 2000. Further nutrient indicators show that only 12 per cent of Cambodian babies are exclusively breastfed and only 14 per cent of households consume iodized salt. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=93827 | 231,252 |
3,749 | Srinivasa Ramanujan (; born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, ; 22 December 188726 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: according to Hans Eysenck: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognising Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before", and some recently proven but highly advanced results. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47717 | 3,749 |
2,041,330 | The earliest radiations of the first land plants, also known as embryophytes, were bryophytes, which began to transform terrestrial environments and the global climate in the Ordovician. During the Wenlock epoch of the Silurian, the first fossils of vascular plants appear in the fossil record in the form of sporophytes of polysporangiophytes. Clubmosses first appeared during the later Ludlow epoch. Palynological evidence points to Silurian terrestrial floras exhibiting little provincialism relative to present day floras that vary significantly by region, instead being broadly similar across the globe. Plant diversification in the Silurian was aided by the presence of numerous small, rapidly changing volcanic islands in the Rheic Ocean that acted as natural laboratories accelerating evolutionary changes and enabling distinct, endemic floral lineages to arise. Silurian plants rarely reached large sizes, with heights of 13 cm, achieved by "Tichavekia grandis", being exceptionally large for the time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63520779 | 2,040,150 |
1,613,993 | Since the last glacial maximum there have been three major climatic periods the coldest period from 28–18,000 years ago, an intermediate period from 18–11,000 years ago and our current climatic condition the warmer Holocene Inter Glacial over the last 11,000 years. In the first period global sea levels were about lower than today. This made most of New Zealand a single island and exposed great sections of the currently submerged continental shelf. Temperatures were about 4–5 °C lower than today. Much of the Southern Alps and Fiordland were glaciated and much of the rest of New Zealand was covered in grass or shrubs, due to the cold and dry climate. These vast tracks of exposed land with little vegetation cover increased wind erosion and the deposition of loess (windblown dust). This deforestation led to a reduction in the forest cover and many canopy species were restricted to the northern areas of the country. The kauri was at the time only present in Northland but has progressively moved south from there over the last 7000 years, reaching its current limit about 2000 years ago. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15089769 | 1,613,088 |
744,989 | Such a new model is described in the figure on the right and involves the utilization of a master equation that includes all steps of amyloid fibril formation, i.e. primary nucleation, fibril elongation, secondary nucleation and fibril fragmentation. The rate constants of the various steps can be determined from a global fit of a number of time courses of aggregation (for example ThT fluorescence emission versus time) recorded at different protein concentrations. The general master equation approach to amyloid fibril formation with secondary pathways has been developed by Knowles, Vendruscolo, Cohen, Michaels and coworkers and considers the time evolution of the concentration formula_1 of fibrils of length formula_2 (here formula_2 represents the number of monomers in an aggregate). formula_4where formula_5 denotes the Kronecker delta. The physical interpretation of the various terms in the above master equation is straight forward: the terms on the first line describe the growth of fibrils via monomer addition with rate constant formula_6 (elongation). The terms on the second line describe monomer dissociation, i.e. the inverse process of elongation. formula_7 is the rate constant of monomer dissociation. The terms on the third line describe the effect of fragmentation, which is assumed to occur homogeneously along fibrils with rate constant formula_8. Finally, the terms on the last line describe primary and secondary nucleation respectively. Note that the rate of secondary nucleation is proportional to the mass of aggregates, defined as formula_9. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=396724 | 744,595 |
770,407 | As a result of the efficiency gains realized using HDL, a majority of modern digital circuit design revolves around it. Most designs begin as a set of requirements or a high-level architectural diagram. Control and decision structures are often prototyped in flowchart applications, or entered in a state diagram editor. The process of writing the HDL description is highly dependent on the nature of the circuit and the designer's preference for coding style. The HDL is merely the 'capture language', often beginning with a high-level algorithmic description such as a C++ mathematical model. Designers often use scripting languages such as Perl to automatically generate repetitive circuit structures in the HDL language. Special text editors offer features for automatic indentation, syntax-dependent coloration, and macro-based expansion of the entity/architecture/signal declaration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=74554 | 769,993 |
1,979,838 | Several studies have implemented asynchronous models and found that their behaviour differs from the synchronous ones. Bersini and Detours (1994) have shown how sensitive Conway's Game of Life is to the updating scheme. Any interesting behaviour disappears in the asynchronous case. Harvey and Bossomaier (1997) pointed out that stochastic updating in random boolean networks results in the expression of point attractors only: there is no repeatable cyclic behaviour, although they introduced the concept of loose cyclic attractors. Kanada (1994) has shown that some one-dimensional CA models that generate non-chaotic patterns when updated synchronously generate edge of chaos patterns when randomised. Orponen (1997) has demonstrated that any synchronously updated network of threshold logic units (see Artificial neuron) can be simulated by a network that has no constraints on the order of updates. Sipper et al. (1997) investigated the evolution of non-uniform CAs that perform specific computing tasks. These models relax the normal requirement of all nodes having the same update rule. In their models, nodes were organised into blocks. Nodes within a block were updated synchronously, but blocks were updated asynchronously. They experimented with three schemes: (1) at each time step, a block is chosen at random with replacement; (2) at each time step, a block is chosen at random without replacement; (3) at each time step, a block is chosen according to a fixed update order. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9064595 | 1,978,700 |
740,844 | Computational biomechanics is the application of engineering computational tools, such as the Finite element method to study the mechanics of biological systems. Computational models and simulations are used to predict the relationship between parameters that are otherwise challenging to test experimentally, or used to design more relevant experiments reducing the time and costs of experiments. Mechanical modeling using finite element analysis has been used to interpret the experimental observation of plant cell growth to understand how they differentiate, for instance. In medicine, over the past decade, the Finite element method has become an established alternative to in vivo surgical assessment. One of the main advantages of computational biomechanics lies in its ability to determine the endo-anatomical response of an anatomy, without being subject to ethical restrictions. This has led FE modeling (or other discretization techniques) to the point of becoming ubiquitous in several fields of Biomechanics while several projects have even adopted an open source philosophy (e.g. BioSpine) and SOniCS, as well as the SOFA, FEniCS frameworks and FEBio. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=105355 | 740,452 |
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