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Sullivan graduated from William Howard Taft High School in the Woodland Hills district of Los Angeles, California, in 1969. She took both French and German in high school, and resolved to have a career in the foreign service. She chose to enter the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), on account of its excellent Russian language program. The university required that humanities students take three science classes and vice versa. She chose to take courses in marine biology, topology and oceanography. She enjoyed these, and altered her course to take in more science subjects. She was an exchange student at the University of Bergen in Norway for the 1971–1972 school year and the two summers around it, and decided to change her major to oceanography. She was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Earth Sciences from UCSC in 1973, and a Doctor of Philosophy in geology from Dalhousie University and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1978, writing her doctoral thesis on "The structure and evolution of the Newfoundland Basin" under the supervision of Michael John Keen. While at Dalhousie, she participated in several oceanographic expeditions that studied the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=498730
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Multiple limitations as well as possible sources of error must be taken under consideration, and possible solutions or alternatives put into place. The statistical construction of ancient proteins is unverifiable and will not have identical amino acid sequences to ancestral proteins. Reconstruction can also be affected by multiple factors including: mutations; turnover rates - as prokaryotic species are more prone to genetic change than their eukaryotic counterparts, making it harder to determine their proteomic past; amino acid distribution; and limited resources of fully sequenced genomes and amino acid sequences of extant species. Ancestral protein reconstruction also assumes that certain homologous phenotypes actually existed within ancient proteinaceous populations when in fact the data recovered is but an estimate consensus of the total pre-existing diversity. Inadequate taxonomic sampling can lead to inaccurate phylogenetic trees due to long branch attraction. Proteins can also get degraded over time into small fragments and have modern proteins incorporated into them - making identification difficult or inaccurate. Last but not least, fossilized remnants contain minuscule amounts of proteins that can be used for further study and identification and actually provide less information regarding evolutionary patterns compared to genome sequences.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56920215
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The two-stage missile is equipped with solid propellant booster and sustainer rocket motors. The missile uses an initial burn to carry out a vertical hot launch from the container and a secondary burn to sustain the missile's trajectory towards the target at a speed of Mach 9, or . Thrust vector control is used in the boost and sustainer phases of flight. At the ignition of the second stage sustainer motor, the first stage assembly separates. The Arrow missile is launched before the threat missile's trajectory and intercept point are accurately known. As more trajectory data becomes available, the optimum intercept point is more precisely defined, towards which the missiles is then guided. The kill vehicle section of the missile, containing the warhead, fusing and the terminal seeker, is equipped with four moving delta aerodynamic control fins to give low altitude interception capability. The dual mode missile seeker has a passive infrared seeker for the acquisition and tracking of tactical ballistic missiles and an active radar seeker used to home on air-breathing targets at low altitudes. The infrared seeker is an indium antimonide focal plane array. The kill vehicle is designed to achieve a hit-to-kill interception, but if this is not achieved, the proximity fuze will direct the warhead fragments at the target shortly before reaching the closest point to the target. The high explosive directed blast fragmentation warhead is capable of destroying a target within a radius. In this manner, Arrow also differs from Patriot PAC-3, THAAD, and Standard Missile 3, which rely purely on hit-to-kill technology in which the kinetic force of a precise impact causes the destruction of the threat.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=198447
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North American Rockwell Block 1 Apollo Command Module, serial "007", a Block 1 spacecraft, built for training and Earth-orbit missions, delivered to NASA in 1966 (and originally identical to CM "012" in which astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died in the 1967 launchpad fire), after serving as a ground test vehicle was modified in 1967 for use in water-survival training. As part of their training, astronauts inside the capsule were dropped into the Gulf of Mexico by a crane from an aircraft carrier to simulate the force of splashdown. Apollo crews also trained for extended recovery by remaining at sea for several days at a time in the Command Module. This prepared astronauts for the possibility of a splashdown far from the planned recovery site. In 1971, CM "007" was transported to Eglin Air Force Base, where it was exposed to cold water and cold air during testing through 1973 for the forthcoming Skylab program. It was displayed at several open houses during this period at the base. The Command Module survived the tests only to end up in an equipment lot of the Houston Department of Public Works, where it remained for 12 years. In 1988, CM "007" was restored for the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, where it is now preserved, by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33714574
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Like other Hydromantes, "S. strinatii" produces a deterring secretion from dorsal skin glands as a form of protection. The bright-colored patterns on their backs can be considered aposematic. This secretion may be protective against different microbial infections. "Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans" and "Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis" are two similar single-celled fungal pathogens that have had detrimental effects on amphibian populations worldwide, including "S. strinatii". "Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis" has been known to cause disease in frogs, salamanders, and caecilians, while "Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans" has only been reported to infect Urodelans (newts and salamanders)."Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans" and "Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis" both cause the infectious disease of chytridiomycosis. Symptoms of this fatal condition include disruptions of the amphibian's salt-water balance, destruction of the amphibian's skin, and eventual heart failure. The fungal pathogens are believed to have originated in Asia and are thought to likely have been introduced to Europe through the pet trade of salamanders. "Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans" has been detected in the wild in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Spain and have been shown to be highly pathogenic to most urodelan taxa. While there are currently no records of "Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans" in France or Italy, it is probable that it will spread through these areas in the near future, as the closest recorded outbreak is only 509 kilometers away. There are some current hypotheses that "S. strinatii"'s skin secretions may act as protection against this fungus. The secretions have been shown to kill the fungus within 24 hours. Because of this microbial protection, researchers do not believe that Bd will have the same detrimental effect on S. strinatii populations as it had for other salamanders and amphibians.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53058340
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Originally, the planned timeline called for concept work to start in 2009, preliminary designs to be established between 2011 and 2013, then detailed design work completed in time for construction to start in 2016. This was to ensure that the new class would be in service before the "Collins" class began decommissioning in 2025. However, meetings between Moffitt and the National Security Committee to clarify concept details and intended capabilities scheduled for November 2009 did not go ahead until March 2012. On 3 May 2012, the Australian government announced funding for the initial design phase. The initial phase would encompass studies to select the new submarines' design, Defence Science and Technology Organisation projects to establish parameters for propulsion, combat system, and stealth capabilities, along with initiating programs to develop the required industry skills for the actual construction. Under the 2012 revised timeline, the preliminary phase would conclude in 2013, with 'first pass approval' to be done by early 2014, and 'second pass approval' in 2017. The best case prediction for seeing the first new submarine enter service, made in 2012, was "after 2030". Some of the slow pace and lack of decision making has been attributed to politicians fearing being held responsible for a repeat of the problems experienced by the "Collins" class during their construction and early career.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15174021
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In 1992 Ross started her academic career as a staff scientist inn the University of California, Berkeley National Center for Electron Microscopy. She moved to the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1997 where she worked as a research staff member. Here she developed various microscopic techniques, including "in situ" environmental transmission electron microscopy (TEM). By monitoring the growth of materials "in situ" it is possible to understand the nucleation and growth of materials, including observing individual nucleation events and transient intermediate states. She can change the growth conditions (for example temperature, pressure or choice of solvent) and establish how these variables impact the growth of materials. At IBM Ross monitored self-assembly mechanisms, including the processes by which nanowires form using chemical vapor deposition and the growth of quantum dots. By controlling the growth of nanowires it is possible to form complicated structures, which can be used in transistors, batteries and sensors. To grow the nanowires in an electron microscope Ross uses small catalytic particles, a flat substrate and a gas that contains silicon. She heats the substrate to 500 degrees celsius, at which temperature the gas begins to react with the metal catalysts and depositing silicon beneath the particles. She has demonstrated this nanowire growth for silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide and gallium phosphide. These nanowires can be used to bridge electrical contacts, allowing Ross to understand the relationship between physical structure and electronic performance.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61804794
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JTIDS began with an advanced planning study sponsored by the Air Force Electronic Systems Division (ESD) Advanced Plans (XR) at L.G. Hanscom Field. The study was conducted by the MITRE Corporation in 1967 and the principal investigators were Vic Desmarines who later became MITRE President and Gordon Welchman who had been instrumental in breaking the German Enigma machine code as the head of "Hut 6" at Bletchley Park, England. Gordon wrote a book titled "The Hut 6 Story" which described his activities and contains some additional information about his work at MITRE. The study concluded that on the battlefield valuable information was available that was not getting to the combat forces that needed it because of fundamental deficiencies in communications architecture. Gordon suggested a radical architecture where elements that had critical information could broadcast it and units that needed the information could selectively process what was of immediate value. This was a significant departure from the circuit-oriented communications architectures then in use and a way to eliminate overcrowding and confusion in the radio nets used to interconnect aircraft and some ground forces. A second recommendation was the need for a consistent and reliable basis for position which was available to all combat elements dubbed a "Common Position Grid". The overall study was called "Control and Surveillance of Friendly Forces" CASOFF.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=106295
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Fundamental Library Language for Reverse Monte Carlo or fullrmc is a multicore RMC modeling package. fullrmc is a fully object-oriented python interfaced package where every definition can be overloaded allowing easy development, implementation and maintenance of the code. fullrmc's computation blocks and modules are optimized written in cython/C. fullrmc is not a standard RMC package but it is rather unique in its approach to solving an atomic or molecular structure. fullrmc supports atomic and molecular systems, all types (not limited to cubic) of periodic boundary conditions systems as well as the so-called infinite boundary conditions to model nanoparticles or isolated systems. fullrmc's Engine is defined and used to launch a RMC calculation. By definition, Engine reads only Protein Data Bank (file format) atomic configuration files and handles other definitions and attributes. In fullrmc atoms can be grouped into rigid bodies or semi-rigid bodies called groups so the system can evolve atomically, clusterly, molecularly or any combination of those. Every group can be assigned a different and customizable move generator (translation, rotation, a combination of moves generators, etc.). Groups selection by the fitting engine can also be customizable. Also fullrmc uses Artificial intelligence and Reinforcement learning algorithms to improve the ratio of accepted moves.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7747652
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295,140
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In 1886, Adolf Mayer first described the tobacco mosaic disease that could be transferred between plants, similar to bacterial infections. In 1892, Dmitri Ivanovsky gave the first concrete evidence for the existence of a non-bacterial infectious agent, showing that infected sap remained infectious even after filtering through the finest Chamberland filters. Later, in 1903, Ivanovsky published a paper describing abnormal crystal intracellular inclusions in the host cells of the affected tobacco plants and argued the connection between these inclusions and the infectious agent. However, Ivanovsky remained rather convinced, despite repeated failures to produce evidence, that the causal agent was an unculturable bacterium, too small to be retained on the employed Chamberland filters and to be detected in the light microscope. In 1898, Martinus Beijerinck independently replicated Ivanovsky's filtration experiments and then showed that the infectious agent was able to reproduce and multiply in the host cells of the tobacco plant. Beijerinck coined the term of "virus" to indicate that the causal agent of tobacco mosaic disease was of non-bacterial nature. "Tobacco mosaic virus" was the first virus to be crystallized. It was achieved by Wendell Meredith Stanley in 1935 who also showed that TMV remains active even after crystallization. For his work, he was awarded 1/4 of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946, even though it was later shown some of his conclusions (in particular, that the crystals were pure protein, and assembled by autocatalysis) were incorrect. The first electron microscopical images of TMV were made in 1939 by Gustav Kausche, Edgar Pfankuch and Helmut Ruska – the brother of Nobel Prize winner Ernst Ruska. In 1955, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley Williams showed that purified TMV RNA and its capsid (coat) protein assemble by themselves to functional viruses, indicating that this is the most stable structure (the one with the lowest free energy).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=164217
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When considering land farming as a waste management option, several items should be considered. These include site topography, site hydrology, neighboring land use, and the physical (texture and bulk density) and chemical composition of the waste and the resulting waste-soil mixture. Wastes that contain large amounts of oil and various additives may have diverse effects on parts of the food chain. Constituents of particular concern include pH, nitrogen (total mass), major soluble ions (Ca, Mg, Na, Cl), electrical conductivity, total metals, extractable organic halogens, oil content, and hydrocarbons. Oil-based muds typically utilize an emulsified phase of 20 to 35 percent by weight CaCl brine. This salt can be a problem in some areas, such as some parts of Canada, the mid-continent, and the Rocky Mountains. For this reason, alternative mud systems have emerged that use an environmentally preferred beneficial salt, such as calcium nitrate or potassium sulfate, as the emulsified internal water phase.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5124364
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To provide an optimum entry date into service, Lockheed decided to use a beefed-up turbofan derivative of the Pratt & Whitney J58. The J58 had already successfully proven itself as a high-thrust, high-performance jet engine on the top-secret Lockheed A-12 (and subsequently on the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.) Since it was a turbofan, it was deemed to be quieter than a typical turbojet at low altitude and low speed, required no afterburner for takeoff, and allowed reduced power settings. The engines were placed in cylindrical pods with a wedge-shaped splitter, and a squarish intake providing the inlet system for the aircraft. The inlet was designed with the goal of requiring no moving parts, and was naturally stable. To reduce the noise from sonic booms, rather than penetrate the sound barrier at a more ideal 30,000 ft (9,144 m), they intended to penetrate it at 42,000 ft (12,802 m) instead. It would not be possible on hot days, but on normal days this would be achievable. Acceleration would continue through the sound barrier to Mach 1.15, at which point sonic booms would be audible on the ground. The plane would climb precisely to minimize sonic boom levels. After an initial level-off at around 71,500 ft (21,793 m), the plane would cruise climb upwards, ultimately reaching 76,500 ft (23,317 m). Descents would also be performed in a precise way to reduce sonic boom levels until subsonic speeds were reached.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=265811
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Many other elements and molecules have been detected in ice cores. In 1969, it was discovered that lead levels in Greenland ice had increased by a factor of over 200 since pre-industrial times, and increases in other elements produced by industrial processes, such as copper, cadmium, and zinc, have also been recorded. The presence of nitric and sulfuric acid ( and ) in precipitation can be shown to correlate with increasing fuel combustion over time. Methanesulfonate (MSA) () is produced in the atmosphere by marine organisms, so ice core records of MSA provide information on the history of the oceanic environment. Both hydrogen peroxide () and formaldehyde () have been studied, along with organic molecules such as carbon black that are linked to vegetation emissions and forest fires. Some species, such as calcium and ammonium, show strong seasonal variation. In some cases there are contributions from more than one source to a given species: for example, Ca comes from dust as well as from marine sources; the marine input is much greater than the dust input and so although the two sources peak at different times of the year, the overall signal shows a peak in the winter, when the marine input is at a maximum. Seasonal signals can be erased at sites where the accumulation is low, by surface winds; in these cases it is not possible to date individual layers of ice between two reference layers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=426456
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The 50 kilotons of pure water is continually reprocessed at rate about 30 tons/hour in a closed system since early 2002. Now, raw mine water is recycled through the first step (particle filters and RO) for some time before other processes, which involve expensive expendables, are imposed. Initially, water from the Super-Kamiokande tank is passed through nominal 1 μm mesh filters to remove dust and particles, which reduce the transparency of the water for Cherenkov photons and provide a possible radon source inside the Super-Kamiokande detector. A heat exchanger is used to cool down the water in order to reduce the PMT dark noise level as well as suppress the growth of bacteria. Surviving bacteria are killed by a UV sterilizer stage. A cartridge polisher (CP) eliminates heavy ions, which also reduce water transparency and include radioactive species. The CP module increases the typical resistivity of recirculating water from 11 MΩ cm to 18.24 MΩ cm, approaching chemical limit. Originally, an ion-exchanger (IE) was included in system, but it was removed when IE resin was found to be a significant radon source. The RO step that removes additional particulates, and the introduction of Rn-reduced air into the water that increases radon removal efficiency in the vacuum degasifier (VD) stage which follows were installed in 1999. After that, a VD removes dissolved gases in the water. These gases are dissolved in water with a serious background of events source for solar neutrinos in the MeV energy range and the dissolved oxygen encourages the growth of bacteria. The removal efficiency is about 96%. Then, the ultra filter (UF) is introduced to remove particles whose minimum size corresponds to molecular weight approximately 10,000 (or about 10 nm diameter) thanks to hollow fiber membrane filters. Finally, a membrane degasifier (MD) removes radon dissolved in water, and the measured removal efficiency for radon is about 83%. The concentration of radon gases is miniaturized by realtime detectors. In June 2001, typical radon concentrations in water coming into the purification system from the Super-Kamiokande tank were less than 2 mBq m, and in water output by the system, 0.4±0.2 mBq m.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28464
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Bruce was born in New York City in February 1777 and graduated from Columbia College in 1795 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. His father, William Bruce, head of the medical department of the British army at New York, on being ordered to the West Indies, specially directed that his son should not be brought up to the medical profession. From the medical lectures of Nicholas Romayne, the teachings of Dr. Hosack, and attendance on the courses of medical instruction of Columbia, he attained a knowledge of the science. He went to Europe in 1798, received an M.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1800, and, in a tour of two years in France, Switzerland, and Italy, collected a mineralogical cabinet of great value. He married in London, and in the summer of 1803, returned to New York city and began practice. In 1807, he was appointed professor of materia medica and mineralogy in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, being the first to fill such a chair in the United States. On the reorganization of the college in 1811, he was superseded on account of some disagreement with the management, and after 1812, filled the same chair in Queen's, now Rutgers, College, New Jersey. He projected the "American Mineralogical Journal" in 1810, and edited it until 1814. His chemical analysis "of native magnesia from New Jersey" made known to science the mineral now called after him, Brucite. He also detected and correctly analyzed the zincite of Sussex County, New Jersey, and published a valuable paper "On the Ores of Titanium occurring within the United States." Dr. Bruce was one of the original members of the New York Historical Society, and at the time of his death, was a member of many learned societies both in this country and in Europe. He died in New York from apoplexy on February 22, 1818.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55031906
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Virtual reality headsets have been linked to rising cases of rashes, swelling, burning, itching, hives, and bumps. On 27 July 2021, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Health Canada have coordinated a recall of Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 after 5,716 reports of facial skin irritation were reported with 45 cases requiring medical attention. Despite complaints issued by consumers such as swollen painful itchy eyes being reported as early as October 2020, the recall only occurred in July 2021. Facebook did not halt Oculus sales immediately citing data that only "0.01% of people using Quest 2" had serious allergic reactions and dermatological and toxicological reports came out negative for contaminants that could be causing the swollen painful rashes upon skin contact. Facebook doesn't know the origin of this reaction and instead they sent a free silicone cover to cover the allergic user's faces. Over four million Oculus head sets have been recalled. Facebook's VR headsets also was banned from Germany in September 2020 after it faced criticism from the German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) for requiring its users to have valid Facebook accounts before covering their head with the Oculus. Germany has one of the world's leading antitrust agencies and Facebook's ruling raised concerns of regulation and antitrust monopolies.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49608407
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Although there are many and varied spatial interactions evident in the early neural networks of the human visual system, only a few are of great importance in high fidelity information sensing. The rest are predominantly associated with processes such as local adaptation. It has therefore been found that the most important interactions are of very local extent, but it is the subtleties of usage of these interactions which seem most important. For hexagonal matrices a single ring of six receptors surrounding an addressed pixel is the simplest symmetrical layout. The general finding from primate receptive field studies is that any such local group yields no output for a uniform input illumination. So this is essentially similar to one of the classical Laplacian receptive fields for square arrays - that with weightings of -1 on each side and -0.5 on each corner. The only difference is an aspect ratio of 8:7.07 (or approximately 8:7 to within 1%). Very useful further evidence of the processes going on in his area comes from the electron-microscopy studies of Kolb These clearly show the neural structures which lead to difference signals being transmitted further. If one combines a point spread function having a Gaussian form and having an S.D. of 1.3 'pixels' with a single ring Laplacian - type operator, the resultant is a function with very similar properties to a DOG function as discussed by Marr.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31923406
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Many institutions began to research the algae, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the NIH, UC Berkeley, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Stanford University. Following World War II, many Europeans were starving, and many Malthusians attributed this not only to the war, but also to the inability of the world to produce enough food to support the increasing population. According to a 1946 FAO report, the world would need to produce 25 to 35% more food in 1960 than in 1939 to keep up with the increasing population, while health improvements would require a 90 to 100% increase. Because meat was costly and energy-intensive to produce, protein shortages were also an issue. Increasing cultivated area alone would go only so far in providing adequate nutrition to the population. The USDA calculated that, to feed the U.S. population by 1975, it would have to add 200 million acres (800,000 km) of land, but only 45 million were available. One way to combat national food shortages was to increase the land available for farmers, yet the American frontier and farm land had long since been extinguished in trade for expansion and urban life. Hopes rested solely on new agricultural techniques and technologies. Because of these circumstances, an alternative solution was needed.
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The track's "of continuously welded, heavy-duty crane-rails aligned to within plus or minus one-tenth inch tolerance [was] the longest" in the US (cf. the shorter 1954 Holloman Rocket Sled). Coleman Engineering Company was contracted for $2 million in June 1954 and constructed the Supersonic Military Air Research Track (SMART), mechanical arresting gear (water brakes with 34 tons of force), retro rockets, and photographic/telemetering facilities. Coleman was also contracted for operations on November 30, 1955, and achieved a "world land speed record [using] a 9,400-pound sled rocketing down the track at 1,800 miles per hour." The numerous test facilities included a powered comparator for high-speed motion pictures, a 1956 IBM 706 computer, and 1960 Bendix G-15 computer. Control of the site transferred from Indian Springs Air Force Base on November 6, 1957, and from Wright-Patterson AFB to Edwards AFB on March 9, 1962—the base was placed on standby in December 1961, and was closed on June 20, 1963.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43278552
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One common area of study within sport psychology is the relationship between personality and performance. This research focuses on specific personality characteristics and how they are related to performance or other psychological variables. There are various personality characteristics that have been found to be consistent among elite athletes. These include but are not limited to mental toughness, self-efficacy, arousal, motivation, commitment, competitiveness, and control. "Mental toughness" is a psychological edge that helps one perform at a high level consistently. Mentally tough athletes exhibit four characteristics: a strong self-belief (confidence) in their ability to perform well, an internal motivation to be successful, the ability to focus one's thoughts and feelings without distraction, and composure under pressure. "Self-efficacy" is a belief that one can successfully perform a specific task. In sport, self-efficacy has been conceptualized as sport-confidence. However, efficacy beliefs are specific to a certain task (e.g., I believe I can successfully make both free throws), whereas confidence is a more general feeling (e.g., I believe I will have a good game today). "Arousal" refers to one's physiological and cognitive activation. While many researchers have explored the relationship between arousal and performance, one unifying theory has not yet been developed. However, research does suggest perception of arousal (i.e., as either good or bad) is related to performance. "Motivation" can be defined broadly as the will to perform a given task. People who play or perform for internal reasons, such as enjoyment and satisfaction, are said to be intrinsically motivated, while people who play for external reasons, such as money or attention from others, are extrinsically motivated. "Commitment" refers to the dedication to continuing a sport from early development into a high level of sport expertise. "Competitiveness" is the ability to challenge opponents with an aim of success. "Control" is the ability to separate and focus on different events occurring in one's life, both within and outside of athletics. Additionally, there are specific psychological skills that are ingrained in personality that are possessed at higher levels in elite athletes than the typical person. These include arousal regulation, goal setting, imagery, pre-performance routines, and self-talk.
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The ideology of Japan's colonial empire, as it expanded dramatically during the war, contained two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, it preached the unity of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, a coalition of Asian races, directed by Japan, against Western imperialism. This approach celebrated the spiritual values of the East in opposition to the "crass" materialism of the West. In practice, it was a euphemistic title for grabbing land and acquiring essential natural resources. The Japanese installed organizationally-minded bureaucrats and engineers to run their new empire, and they believed in ideals of efficiency, modernization, and engineering solutions to social problems. Economist Akamatsu Kaname (1896–1974) devised the "Flying geese paradigm" in the late 1930s that provided a model of imperialistic economic behavior. Japan (the lead goose) would specialize in high technology, high-value manufacturing. It would purchase food, cotton, and iron ore at artificially low prices from the trailing Co-Prosperity Sphere geese, and sell them high-priced final products such as chemicals, fertilizers, and machinery. These dealings were carried out by the powerful zaibatsu corporations and supervised by the Japanese government. The Flying geese paradigm was revived after 1950 and was given credit for the rapid economic growth of Japan's East Asia trading partners.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54108025
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The second data release (DR2), which occurred on 25 April 2018, is based on 22 months of observations made between 25 July 2014 and 23 May 2016. It includes positions, parallaxes and proper motions for about 1.3 billion stars and positions of an additional 300 million stars in the magnitude range g = 3–20, red and blue photometric data for about 1.1 billion stars and single colour photometry for an additional 400 million stars, and median radial velocities for about 7 million stars between magnitude 4 and 13. It also contains data for over 14,000 selected Solar System objects. The coordinates in DR2 use the second "Gaia" celestial reference frame ("Gaia"–CRF2), which is based on observations of 492,006 sources believed to be quasars and has been described as "the first full-fledged optical realisation of the ICRS ... built only on extragalactic sources." Comparison of the positions of 2,843 sources common to "Gaia"–CRF2 and a preliminary version of the ICRF3 shows a global agreement of 20 to 30 μas, although individual sources may differ by several mas. Since the data processing procedure links individual Gaia observations with particular sources on the sky, in some cases the association of observations with sources will be different in the second data release. Consequently, DR2 uses different source identification numbers than DR1. A number of issues have been identified with the DR2 data, including small systematic errors in astrometry and significant contamination of radial velocity values in crowded star fields, which may affect some one percent of the radial velocity values. Ongoing work should resolve these issues in future releases. A guide for researchers using Gaia DR2, which collected "all information, tips and tricks, pitfalls, caveats and recommendations relevant to" DR2, was prepared by the Gaia Helpdesk in December 2019.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=801330
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Although widely employed, the scientific community is still unsure of the physical phenomena underpinning biofilter operation, and information about the microorganisms involved continues to be developed. A biofilter/bio-oxidation system is a fairly simple device to construct and operate and offers a cost-effective solution provided the pollutant is biodegradable within a moderate time frame (increasing residence time = increased size and capital costs), at reasonable concentrations (and lb/hr loading rates) and that the airstream is at an organism-viable temperature. For large volumes of air, a biofilter may be the only cost-effective solution. There is no secondary pollution (unlike the case of incineration where additional CO and NO are produced from burning fuels) and degradation products form additional biomass, carbon dioxide and water. Media irrigation water, although many systems recycle part of it to reduce operating costs, has a moderately high biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and may require treatment before disposal. However, this "blowdown water", necessary for proper maintenance of any bio-oxidation system, is generally accepted by municipal publicly owned treatment works without any pretreatment.
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Even more productive was the Early Cretaceous Chinese Jehol Biota of Liaoning that since the 1990s has brought forth hundreds of exquisitely preserved two-dimensional fossils, often showing soft tissue remains. Chinese researchers such as Lü Junchang have again named many new taxa. As discoveries also increased in other parts of the world, a sudden surge in the total of named genera took place. By 2009, when they had increased to about ninety, this growth showed no sign of levelling-off. In 2013, M.P. Witton indicated that the number of discovered pterosaur species had risen to 130. Over ninety percent of known taxa has been named during the "renaissance". Many of these were from groups the existence of which had been unknown. Advances in computing power allowed to determine their complex relationships through the quantitative method of cladistics. New and old fossils yielded much more information when subjected to modern ultraviolet light or roentgen photography, or CAT-scans. Insights from other fields of biology were applied to the data obtained. All this resulted in a substantial progress in pterosaur research, rendering older accounts in popular science books completely outdated.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24824
| 97,871
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1,946,070
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TRAAK channels play a critical role in the maintenance of the resting membrane potential in excitable cell types. More recently, TRAAK channels have been identified as an integral component of the nervous system, contributing to a variety of important biological functions such as: neurite migration, neurotransmission, and signal transduction across several sensory modalities. TRAAK and related mechanosensitive ion channels initiate these and other complex physiological processes by detecting asymmetrical pressure gradients generated across the inner and outer leaflets of the cell membrane, characterizing a rich profile of mechanical bilayer interactions. Furthermore, "KCNK4" expression patterns the axonal segments of neurons in both central and peripheral nervous systems by inserting TRAAK membrane protein channels at the Nodes of Ranvier and allowing for saltatory conduction. The pathologies that are associated with improper "KCNK4" expression such as Hirchsprung's Disease and FHEIG (facial dysmorphism, hypertrichosis, epilepsy, developmental/ID delay, and gingival overgrowth) syndrome, manifest accordingly as a constellation of neurological symptoms resulting from neuronal dysplasia. Animal models containing known syndromic "KCNK4" mutations have recapitulated these phenotypic abnormalities. High TRAAK channel density has also been implicated in the resulting cerebral ischemia following the event of a stroke.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14874824
| 1,944,958
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2,023,990
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N fixation is performed by diazotrophs (N fixing bacteria and archaea), which convert N gas into ammonia (NH). The amount of N fixation and the distribution of diazotrophs in the ocean is determined by the availability of oxygen (O), light, phosphorus (P), iron (Fe), and organic matter, as well as habitat temperature. N fixation has been found in some anoxic systems, generally associated with sulfate reducers or oxidizers. However, heterotrophic denitrification is a more dominant process under anoxic conditions. Denitrification is the reduction of NO and NO to the gaseous form of nitrogen (N), including the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (NO). Heterotrophic denitrification is a multi-step process that uses organic matter to reduce NO to N in oxygen-depleted environments like OMZs and sediments. In OMZs, different steps in the denitrification processes are performed by separate groups of bacteria, and these denitrifiers are often found directly on sinking organic matter particles, which are hotspots of microbial activity. The first step of denitrification is nitrate reduction where NO is reduced to NO by the protein nitrate reductase. Anaerobic ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (anammox) convert NO and NH to N using an enzyme called hydrazine oxidoreductase. Genomic studies conducted in these ecosystems reveal a growing abundance of the genes encoding for the proteins responsible for the dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) and anammox at the core of these OMZs. Such studies provide information to map out the nitrogen cycle and demystify missing links and unexplored pathways in the water column. Anammox is often coupled to denitrification as a source of NH in OMZs or to DNRA in sediments. DNRA has been found to be the dominant process supplying NH near the shelf and upper slope of sediments because of the presence of large bacterial mats made up of the giant sulfur-oxidizing bacteria "Thioploca" spp. and "Beggiatoa" spp. which reduce NO and/or NO to NH using reduced sulfur. Denitrification and anammox account for about 30-50% of the N losses in OMZs, where the total N loss determined by the supply of sinking organic matter available.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58708458
| 2,022,826
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1,952,589
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Studies of BLOC-1 in the nervous system have begun to link numerous molecular and cellular mechanisms to its proposed contribution to schizophrenia. Knock-down studies of the dysbindin gene DTNBP1 via siRNA demonstrated that the dysbindin subunit is integral for the signaling and recycling of the D2 receptor (DRD2) but not the D1 receptor. BLOC-1 mutations in dysbindin therefore can alter dopaminergic signaling in the brain which may confer symptoms of schizophrenia. These results appear to be relevant to the whole complex as the majority of expressed dysbindin localized to the BLOC-1 complex in the mouse brain. Furthermore, proper neurite extension appears to be regulated by BLOC-1, which may have molecular links to the ability of BLOC-1 to physically associate in vitro with SNARE proteins such as SNAP-25, SNAP-17, and syntaxin 13. This interaction with SNAREs could aid in membrane trafficking toward neurite extensions. Studies in Drosophila melanogaster indicate pallidin is non-essential for synaptic vesicle homeostasis or anatomy but is essential under conditions of increased neuronal signaling to maintain vesicular trafficking from endosomes via recycling mechanisms. The effects of a non-functional Bloc1s6 gene (encoding for pallidin) on the metabolome of the post-natal mouse hippocampus were explored using LC-MS, revealing altered levels of a variety of metabolites. Particularly intriguing effects include an increase in glutamate (and its precursor glutamine), an excitatory neurotransmitter linked to schizophrenia, as well as decreases in the neurotransmitters phenylalanine and tryptophan. Overall, modifications in the metabolome of these mice extend to nucleobase molecules and lysophospholipids as well, implicating further dysregulation effects of BLOC-1 deficiencies to plausible molecular contributions of schizophrenia.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14498136
| 1,951,468
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100,249
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The fabrication of lead-free piezoceramics pose multiple challenges, from an environmental standpoint and their ability to replicate the properties of their lead-based counterparts. By removing the lead component of the piezoceramic, the risk of toxicity to humans decreases, but the mining and extraction of the materials can be harmful to the environment. Analysis of the environmental profile of PZT versus sodium potassium niobate (NKN or KNN) shows that across the four indicators considered (primary energy consumption, toxicological footprint, eco-indicator 99, and input-output upstream greenhouse gas emissions), KNN is actually more harmful to the environment. Most of the concerns with KNN, specifically its NbO component, are in the early phase of its life cycle before it reaches manufacturers. Since the harmful impacts are focused on these early phases, some actions can be taken to minimize the effects. Returning the land as close to its original form after NbO mining via dam deconstruction or replacing a stockpile of utilizable soil are known aids for any extraction event. For minimizing air quality effects, modeling and simulation still needs to occur to fully understand what mitigation methods are required. The extraction of lead-free piezoceramic components has not grown to a significant scale at this time, but from early analysis, experts encourage caution when it comes to environmental effects.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24975
| 100,204
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709,032
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A few hours after docking while the crew were performing leak checks in preparation for hatch opening, "Nauka"'s onboard computers experienced a software glitch, due to which an erroneous direct command fired onboard thrusters, causing the ISS to rotate out of orientation unexpectedly. NASA and Roscosmos ground controllers worked to remotely fix the glitch issue, while at the same time instructing the crew to close all window shutters and stand-by for computer reboot. Controllers initially attempted to counteract the inadvertent thrust through the use of thrusters on the "Zvezda" service module, a job later transferred to the Progress MS-17 vehicle. The station made one and a half complete rotations over the next 44 minutes, after which "Nauka" burned through its remaining fuel and Mission Control Moscow disabled the engines. "Nauka"'s control system was transferred from flight mode to "docked with the ISS" mode, and thrust control was returned to Progress MS-17 and "Zvezda", allowing attitude control of the station to be regained. Because of the glitch, all activities were temporarily scrubbed and the launch of Boeing Orbital Flight Test 2 was delayed 96 hours while the crew continued checkouts of "Nauka". On 3 August 2021, it was decided to use "Zvezda"s engines to correct the station's orbit parameters for the relocation of Soyuz MS-18 and the launch of Soyuz MS-19. The burn was originally planned for 19 August, but was instead executed on 21 August and lasted for 50 seconds.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=977414
| 708,663
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1,363,182
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The Model D was a biplane fitted with a wheeled tricycle undercarriage. The construction was primarily of spruce, with ash used in parts of the engine bearers and undercarriage beams, with doped linen stretched over it. The outrigger beams were made of bamboo. Prevented by patents from using the Wright Brothers' wing warping technique to provide lateral control, and with neither the Wrights nor himself likely to have known about its prior patenting in 1868 England, Curtiss did not use the "June Bug's" "wing-tip" aileron configuration, but instead used between-the-wing-panels "inter-plane" ailerons, instead, as directly derived from his earlier Curtiss No. 1 and Curtiss No. 2 pushers. In the end, this proved to be a superior solution. Both the interplane and trailing-edge ailerons on these early aircraft did not use a hand or foot-operated mechanism to operate them, but very much like the earlier Santos-Dumont 14-bis had adopted in November 1906, required the pilot to "lean-into" the turn to operate the ailerons — on the Curtiss pushers, a transverse-rocking, metal framework "shoulder cradle", hinged longitudinally on either side of the pilot's seat - initially as straight metal tubes resting against the pilot's upper arms; and later achieved with "armrests" in a similar location; achieved the connection between the pilot and aileron control cabling. Almost all Model Ds were constructed with a pusher configuration, with the propeller behind the pilot. Because of this configuration, they were often referred to as the "Curtiss Pusher". Early examples were built in a canard configuration, with elevators mounted on struts at the front of the aircraft in addition to a horizontal stabilizer at the rear. Later, the elevators were incorporated into the tail unit, and the canard surface arrangement dispensed with, resulting in what became called the Curtiss "Headless" Pushers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2127899
| 1,362,429
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1,901,702
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Immediately following his doctoral studies, Shepherd took a research position with the Central Electricity Generating Board to study atmospheric physics and air pollution. In 1974, he moved to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to undertake research into the marine disposal of radioactive waste. In 1976, his research within MAFF changed direction towards mathematical modelling of fishing fleet operations and fish population dynamics, a focus which continued until the 1990s. During 1978–1979, Shepherd first became a visiting researcher at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) of Columbia University, a sabbatical activity that he later returned to in 1999. Through the 1980s, he rose through the ranks of MAFF, ultimately reaching the position of deputy director in 1989, a role in which he was tasked with the assessment and management of fish stocks, and directly provided advice to MAFF Ministers. During this period, Shepherd also served in a succession of International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) working groups and advisory committees on fisheries matters.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40452477
| 1,900,613
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Alguersuari, who qualified eleventh, was the fastest driver not advancing to the final session. His best time of 1:47.666 was 1.8 seconds slower than Vettel's pace in the second session. Alguersuari's time was followed by Hülkenberg, who was backed up by Sutil on his first run in the second session, and described his car's balance like "night and day". Hülkenberg was demoted five positions on the grid after the Williams team changed his gearbox after the race at Monza. As a consequence, Petrov inherited 12th position having pushed hard on a set of option tyres. He had lost control of his car after he went deep, under braking, heading for turn five (a corner that was damp from the earlier rain shower), with his right-rear wheel hitting the wall. Petrov's crash meant he took no further part in qualifying. He was ahead of Buemi, in the slower of the two Toro Rossos, who lost a large amount of grip and got stuck in traffic. Heidfeld took 14th ahead of his fellow countryman Sutil in 15th. Liuzzi had a problem with his front brakes on the first run of the second session and managed 16th. Timo Glock, Heikki Kovalainen and Lucas di Grassi were the quickest drivers unable to advance beyond the first part of qualifying. The eleventh row of the grid was filled by Jarno Trulli and Klien. Senna took 23rd. Massa was unable to set a timed lap as his gearbox seized without warning forcing him to stop on the circuit; Ferrari chose to replace his engine and gearbox as a precaution. Massa's engine change was his ninth of the season which incurred a ten-place grid penalty, but since he started from 24th position, the penalty was nullified.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24511010
| 1,034,600
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471,849
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Space motion sickness can lead to degraded astronaut performance. SMS threatens operational requirements, reduces situational awareness, and threatens the safety of those exposed to micro-g environments. Lost muscle mass leads to difficulty with movement, especially when astronauts return to earth. This can pose a safety issue if the need for emergency egress were to arise. Loss of muscle power makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for astronauts to climb through emergency egress hatches or create unconventional exit spaces in the case of a crash upon landing. Additionally, bone resorption and inadequate hydration in space can lead to the formation of kidney stones, and subsequent sudden incapacitation due to pain. If this were to occur during critical phases of flight, a capsule crash leading to worker injury and/or death could result. Short-term and long-term health effects have been seen in the cardiovascular system from exposure to the micro-g environment that would limit those exposed after they return to Earth or a regular gravity environment. Steps need to be taken to ensure proper precautions are taken into consideration when dealing a micro-g environment for worker safety. Orthostatic intolerance can lead to temporary loss of consciousness due to the lack of pressure and stroke volume. This loss of consciousness inhibits and endangers those affected and can lead to deadly consequences.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=559869
| 471,613
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It became clear in the aftermath that leaders of these fringe groups had used fears of apocalyptic outcomes to manipulate followers into dramatic scenes of mass repentance or renewed commitment to their groups, additional giving of funds and more overt commitment to their respective organizations or churches. The "Baltimore Sun" noted this in their article, "Apocalypse Now — Y2K spurs fears", where they reported the increased call for repentance in the populace in order to avoid God's wrath. Christian leader, Col Stringer, in his commentary has published, "Fear-creating writers sold over 45 million books citing every conceivable catastrophe from civil war, planes dropping from the sky to the end of the civilized world as we know it. Reputable preachers were advocating food storage and a "head for the caves" mentality. No banks failed, no planes crashed, no wars or civil war started. And yet not one of these prophets of doom has ever apologized for their scare-mongering tactics." Some prominent North American Christian ministries and leaders generated huge personal and corporate profits through sales of Y2K preparation kits, generators, survival guides, published prophecies and a wide range of other associated merchandise. Christian journalist, Rob Boston, has documented this in his article "False Prophets, Real Profits — Religious Right Leaders' Wild Predictions of Y2K Disaster Didn't Come True, But They Made Money Anyway".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25739013
| 43,195
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The first proximal cause of the accident was maintenance work in the adjacent high-voltage yard by the Swedish grid operator Svenska Kraftnät. An incorrect interlock procedure caused a disconnector to open which sustained an arc that caused a two-phase short circuit in equipment directly adjacent to the plant. This short caused the station generators to disconnect from the grid and, due to the failure of further safety systems this disconnection, in turn, led to a large overvoltage on various supplies within the station. The overvoltage caused failure of the control circuitry of two of the four redundant UPS systems which supplied the safety critical equipment at the plant, including cooling pumps and control circuitry. Though diesel generators started correctly even on these two systems, the lack of control circuitry led to their being unable to engage with their corresponding circuits. The other two UPS systems functioned correctly, surviving the overvoltage, probably due to an undetermined subtle difference in wiring or equipment between the two pairs of units. The reactor fully and effectively scrammed immediately on detecting these supply failures, however staff relied on neutron detector readings to determine reactor state due to lack of information on control rod state. At all times effective cooling was maintained by the pumps operating on the two functioning circuits. Though a number of options remained to operators had further equipment failed, a single cause (one short-circuit) leading to such a cascade of failures was seen as a challenge to the principle of redundancy and safety in depth.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2887370
| 428,402
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Dr. Doshi's city garden methods are revolutionary for being appropriate to apply in reduced spaces as terraces and balconies, even on civil construction walls, and for not requiring big investments in capital or long hours of work. His farming practice is purely organic and is mainly directed to domestic consumption. His gardening tools are composed of materials available in the local environment: sugarcane waste, polyethylene bags, tires, containers and cylinders, and soil. The containers and bags (open at both ends) are filled with the sugarcane stalks, compost, and garden soil, which make possible the use of a minimal quantity of water is compared to open fields. Doshi states that solar energy can replace soil in cities. He also recommends the idea of chain planning, or growing plants in intervals and in small quantities rather than at once and in large amounts. He has grown different types of fruit such as mangos, figs, guavas, bananas and sugarcane stalks in his terrace of in Bandra. The concept of city farming developed by Doshi consumes the entire household's organic waste. He subsequently makes the household self-sufficient in the provision of food: of fruits and vegetables are produced daily for 300 days a year.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=450257
| 927,581
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In October 2008, Brazil selected three finalists for its F-X2 fighter programme: the Dassault Rafale B/C, the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, and the Gripen NG. The Brazilian Air Force initially planned to procure at least 36 and possibly up to 120 later, to replace its Northrop F‐5EM and Dassault Mirage 2000C aircraft. In February 2009, Saab submitted a tender for 36 Gripen NGs. In early 2010, the Brazilian Air Force's final evaluation report reportedly placed the Gripen ahead, a decisive factor being lower unit cost and operational costs. After delays due to financial constraints, on 18 December 2013, President Dilma Rousseff announced the Gripen NG's selection. Key factors were domestic manufacturing opportunities, full Transfer of Technology (ToT), participation in its development, and potential exports to Africa, Asia and Latin America; Argentina and Ecuador are interested in procuring Gripens via Brazil, and Mexico is considered an export target. Another factor was the distrust of the US due to the NSA surveillance scandal. The Gripen is not immune to foreign pressure: the UK may use their 30% component percentage in the Gripen to veto an Argentinian sale over the Falkland Islands dispute; thus Argentina is considering other fighters instead.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=87577
| 15,307
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1,544,280
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Department of the Navy, Naval Ship Systems Engineering Station, 1983–1987. Transferred to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in 1987. Worked in the Verification Office, Electromechanical Branch, Robotics Branch, Guidance and Controls Branch, all within the Engineering Directorate. Senior EVA Tool Development Engineer for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Project. Project Manager for HST EVA crew aids and tools. Program Manager for HST EVA Hardware. Responsibilities included the budget, schedule, design, analysis, fabrication, test, and integration for breadboard, WETF/NBS, engineering, and flight hardware, documentation, and review process. Additional duties included systems engineering support for the HST WETF/NBS Servicing Mission Simulations as a utility diver and EMU suited subject. Richards is the inventor of the Pistol Grip Tool (PGT). The PGT is a self-contained, computer- controlled, battery-powered 3/8 inch drive power tool with a pistol-style handle. Numerous torque, speed and turn limits can be programmed into the tool for mission-specific applications. A light emitting diode display on the tool tells the astronaut what torque he or she is applying, at what speed, and how many turns the motor has made. It also displays error messages. The motorized torque ranges from 2 to 25 foot-pounds, the speed from 5 to 60 rotations per minute, and the number of turns from 0 to 999. In manual mode, the Pistol Grip Tool can apply 38 foot-pounds of torque. The specifications for every fastener are preprogrammed into the PGT before each mission and the PGT then logs the actual data during EVA. The PGT has been used on every NASA spacewalk (EVA), since 1996.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=656291
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660,245
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Mann then attended Yale University, intending to obtain a PhD in physics, and received both an MS and an MPhil in physics in 1991. His interest was in theoretical condensed matter physics but he found himself being pushed towards detailed semiconductor work. He looked at course options with a wider topic area and was enthused by PhD adviser Barry Saltzman about climate modelling and research. To try this out he spent the summer of 1991 assisting a postdoctoral researcher in simulating the period of peak Cretaceous warmth when carbon dioxide levels were high, but fossils indicated most warming at the poles, with little warming in the tropics. Mann then joined the Yale Department of Geology and Geophysics, obtaining an MPhil in geology and geophysics in 1993. His research focused on natural variability and climate oscillations. He worked with the seismologist Jeffrey Park, and their joint research adapted a statistical method developed for identifying seismological oscillations to find various periodicities in the instrumental temperature record, the longest being about 60 to 80 years. The paper Mann and Park published in December 1994 came to conclusions similar to those from a study developed in parallel using different methodology and published in January of that year, which found what was later called the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=345811
| 659,900
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19,675
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American banker and amateur ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina P. Wasson, a physician, studied the ritual use of psychoactive mushrooms by the native population in the Mazatec village Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico. In 1957, Wasson described the psychedelic visions that he experienced during these rituals in "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", an article published in the popular American weekly "Life" magazine. Later the same year they were accompanied on a follow-up expedition by French mycologist Roger Heim, who identified several of the mushrooms as "Psilocybe" species. Heim cultivated the mushrooms in France, and sent samples for analysis to Albert Hofmann, a chemist employed by the Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Sandoz (now Novartis). Hofmann, who had in 1938 created LSD, led a research group that isolated and identified the psychoactive compounds from "Psilocybe mexicana". Hofmann was aided in the discovery process by his willingness to ingest mushroom extracts to help verify the presence of the active compounds. He and his colleagues later synthesized a number of compounds chemically related to the naturally occurring psilocybin, to see how structural changes would affect psychoactivity. The new molecules differed from psilocybin in the position of the phosphoryl or hydroxyl group at the top of the indole ring, and in the numbers of methyl groups (CH) and other additional carbon chains.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38468
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Mumtaz died in Burhanpur on 17 June 1631, after complications with the birth of their fourteenth child, a daughter named Gauhara Begum. She had been accompanying her husband whilst he was fighting a campaign in the Deccan Plateau. Her body was temporarily buried in a garden called Zainabad on the banks of the Tapti River in Burhanpur. The contemporary court chroniclers paid an unusual amount of attention to this event and Shah Jahan's grief at her demise. Immediately after hearing the news, the emperor was reportedly inconsolable. He was not seen for a week at court and considered abdicating and living his life as a religious recluse. The court historian Muhammad Amin Qazwini, wrote that before his wife's death the emperor's beard had "not more than ten or twelve grey hairs, which he used to pluck out', turned grey and eventually white" and that he soon needed spectacles because his eyes deteriorated from constant weeping. Since Mumtaz had died on Wednesday, all entertainments were banned on that day. Jahan gave up listening to music, wearing jewelry, sumptuous clothes or perfumes for two years. So concerned were the imperial family that an honorary uncle wrote to say that "if he continued to abandon himself to his mourning, Mumtaz might think of giving up the joys of Paradise to come back to earth, this place of misery – and he should also consider the children she had left to his care." The Austrian scholar Ebba Koch compares Shah Jahan to "Majnun, the ultimate lover of Muslim lore, who flees into the desert to pine for his unattainable Layla."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13325558
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At the end of World War II, the United States Army Air Forces began to consider new directions for future military aircraft guns. The higher speeds of jet-powered fighter aircraft meant that achieving an effective number of hits would be extremely difficult without a much higher volume of fire. While captured German designs (principally the Mauser MG 213C) showed the potential of the single-barrel revolver cannon, the practical rate of fire of such a design was still limited by ammunition feed and barrel wear concerns. The Army wanted something better, combining an extremely high rate of fire with exceptional reliability. In 1947, the Air Force became a separate branch of the military. The new Air Force made a request for a new aircraft gun. A lesson of World War II air combat was that German, Italian, and Japanese fighters could attack American aircraft from long range with their cannon main armament. American fighters with .50 caliber (12.7 mm) main armament, such as the P-51 and P-47, had to be close to enemy aircraft in order to hit and damage them. The Hispano cannon carried by the P-38 and P-61, while formidable against propeller-driven planes, had a relatively low rate of fire in the age of jets, while other cannons were notoriously unreliable.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44071
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While the exact function of the coccosphere is unclear, many potential functions have been proposed. Most obviously coccoliths may protect the phytoplankton from predators. It also appears that it helps them to create a more stable pH. During photosynthesis carbon dioxide is removed from the water, making it more basic. Also calcification removes carbon dioxide, but chemistry behind it leads to the opposite pH reaction; it makes the water more acidic. The combination of photosynthesis and calcification therefore even out each other regarding pH changes. In addition, these exoskeletons may confer an advantage in energy production, as coccolithogenesis seems highly coupled with photosynthesis. Organic precipitation of calcium carbonate from bicarbonate solution produces free carbon dioxide directly within the cellular body of the alga, this additional source of gas is then available to the Coccolithophore for photosynthesis. It has been suggested that they may provide a cell-wall like barrier to isolate intracellular chemistry from the marine environment. More specific, defensive properties of coccoliths may include protection from osmotic changes, chemical or mechanical shock, and short-wavelength light. It has also been proposed that the added weight of multiple layers of coccoliths allows the organism to sink to lower, more nutrient rich layers of the water and conversely, that coccoliths add buoyancy, stopping the cell from sinking to dangerous depths. Coccolith appendages have also been proposed to serve several functions, such as inhibiting grazing by zooplankton.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47520
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The initial models included the Executive and the Altera (previously, the SE), both available with a choice of either engine and four-speed automatic or five-speed manual transmissions. From October 1996, fully equipped Advance and Altera LS models (the latter, the equivalent of the previous Elite model) were added. The 2.4-litre four-cylinder engine produced and , while the 3.0-litre V6 produced and , claiming a markedly quicker sprint and improved acceleration times. The four-speed electronic "INVECS II" automatic transmission was new and could adapt to the driver's pattern of use and road conditions to select the optimum gear for any situation, thanks to "fuzzy-logic". Although the power-assisted rack and pinion mechanism had the same mounting points as the Diamante, the components were manufactured to MMAL's specifications in Australia, by TWR. Suspensions were independent (MacPherson struts) at the front, instead of the multi-link designs of the Diamante, which nevertheless donated its rear multi-link to the Australia sedan (while the wagon adopted a different and more compact design altogether). Brakes included discs all around (front ventilated) with the option of a Bosch 5.3 ABS. The braking system also included Australia's first "Banksia" parking brake (developed by PBR), some 10 to 20 percent lighter and cheaper than conventional systems at the time.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=903910
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In 2016, two studies further pinpointed the responsible region to chromosome 11 and a 4.5-Mb covering chromosomal rearrangement. The scientists were able to show that the first genetic change happened 3.8 million years ago on the resident chromosome, when a part of it broke off and was reintroduced in the wrong direction. This inversion created the faeder allele. About 500,000 years ago another rare recombination event of faeder and resident allele in the very same inverted region led to the satellite allele. The 4.5 Mb inversion covers 90 genes, one of them is the centromere coding gene N- CENPN-, which is located exactly at one of the inversion breakpoints. The inactivation of the gene has severe deleterious effects and pedigree data of a captive ruff colony suggests that the inversion is homozygous lethal. Over the course of the past 3.8 million years, further mutations have accumulated within the inversion i.e. three deletions ranging from 3.3 to 17.6 kb. Two of these deletions remove evolutionary highly conserved elements close to two genes- HSD17B2 and SDR42E1-both holding important roles in metabolism of steroid hormones. Hormone measurements around mating time showed that whereas residents have a sharp increase of testosterone, faeders and satellites only experience higher androstenedione levels, a substance which is considered an intermediate in testosterone biosynthesis. The authors conclude that one or more of the deletions act as a "cis"-acting regulatory mutation which is altering the expression of one or both genes and eventually contributes to the different male phenotypes and behaviour.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=350073
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In 2014, a research team led by Eric Quandt in the lab of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin described the application of a new technique called Recursive Genomewide Recombination and Sequencing (REGRES) to identify potentiating mutations among the 70 present in the Ara-3 lineage that evolved Cit. This method used multiple rounds of a process in which F plasmid based conjugation between a 33,000 generation Cit clone, CZB154, and the Cit founding clone of the LTEE to purge mutations not required for either manifestation of a weak or strong form of the Cit trait, which they refer to as Cit. They found that the "rnk-citT" module responsible for the phenotypic switch to Cit was sufficient to produce a weak Cit phenotype in the ancestor. They also identified a mutation that had occurred in the lineage leading to CZB154 after the initial evolution of Cit that conferred a strong, Cit phenotype in the ancestor absent any mutation but the "rnk-citT" module. This mutation, found in the regulatory region of a gene called "dctA", caused a massive increase in the expression of the DctA transporter, which functions to import C-dicarboxylates into the cell. This increased DctA expression, they found, permitted Cit cells to re-uptake succinate, malate, and fumarate released into the medium by the CitT transporter during import of citrate. They identified a similar mutation in Cit clones in the Ara-3 population that increased DctA expression by restoring function to a gene that regulates it, "dcuS", that had been deactivated in the ancestral clone. Quandt et al. concluded that the "dctA" mutation was not involved in potentiation, but refinement. This led them to suggest that evolution of Cit in the Ara-3 population might have been contingent upon a genetic background and population-specific ecology that permitted the early, weak Cit variants to persist in the population long enough for refining mutations to arise and render growth on citrate strong enough to provide a significant fitness benefit.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17998857
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A one-year archaeological survey was performed at the school in 2003. The survey found evidence of human activity in the campus' wooded property dating at least 3,600 years, with elements dating from around 1700 BCE and up until the mid-20th century. The survey was a requirement of New York's State Historic Preservation Office in order for the school to construct a new residential complex in a expansion to its campus; it was funded by the CIA and conducted by Landmark Archaeology, a company based in Altamont, New York. The surveyors focused on a site between the Hudson River and Route 9. The site contained two house structures, a dam, a mill, retaining walls, and outbuildings and barns, and was found to be eligible as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. Excavations unearthed foundation walls, a well, cistern, and post molds, and about 40,000 artifacts. Prehistoric objects, dating to the Late Archaic period, included stone tools, byproducts of tool production, projectile points, and fire hearths found in the site's portion used for crop cultivation. A larger area held artifacts from the mid-to-late 1700s, including ceramics, tobacco pipes, coins, buttons, buckles, military objects, thimbles, domesticated animal remains, and an inscribed piece of slate. Due to the findings, the CIA revised its plans to prevent construction on a large portion of the site.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52318792
| 1,521,485
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An ambitious construction programme of five twin reactor stations, Dungeness B, Hinkley Point B, Hunterston B, Hartlepool and Heysham was quickly rolled out, and export orders were eagerly anticipated. For political reasons the CEGB was instructed to spread the 'first generation' orders between three different 'design & build' consortia and a variety of major subcontractors. In consequence the first three CEGB stations, whilst sharing the same design concept and the same fuel pin design, were completely different in detail design. This resulted in the three consortia having to compete for the same limited number of expert staff, the need for each design to have a unique (and very complex) safety case, and the need to support for the life of the programme three (later four) different AGR reactor designs. The AGR stations also proved to be complex and difficult to construct on site. Notoriously bad labour relations at the time added to the problems. The lead station, Dungeness B was ordered in 1965 with a target completion date of 1970. After problems with nearly every aspect of the reactor design it finally began generating electricity in 1983, 13 years late. The following reactor designs at Hinkley Point and Hunterston, ordered a year or two later, proved to be significantly better than the Dungeness design, and indeed were commissioned ahead of Dungeness. The next AGR design, built at Heysham 1 and Hartlepool, sought to reduce overall cost of design by reducing the footprint of the station and the number of ancillary systems. However this led to difficulties in construction. The final two AGRs at Torness and Heysham 2 returned to a modified and 'debugged' Hinkley design with much greater seismic withstand and have proved to be the most successful performers of the fleet. Former Treasury Economic Advisor, David Henderson, described the AGR programme as one of the two most costly British government-sponsored project errors, alongside Concorde.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=143352
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Since his arrival in America, Priestley had continued to defend his Christian Unitarian beliefs; now, falling increasingly under the influence of Thomas Cooper and Elizabeth Ryland-Priestley, he was unable to avoid becoming embroiled in political controversy. In 1798, when, in response to the Pinckney affair, a belligerent President Adams sought to enlarge the navy and mobilise the militia into what Priestley and Cooper saw as a 'standing army', Priestley published an anonymous newspaper article: "Maxims of political arithmetic", which attacked Adams, defended free trade, and advocated a form of Jeffersonian isolationism. In the same year, a small package, addressed vaguely: "Dr Priestley in America," was seized by the Royal Navy on board a neutral Danish boat. It was found to contain three letters, one of which was signed by the radical printer John Hurford Stone. These intercepted letters were published in London, and copied in numerous papers in America. One of the letters was addressed to "MBP", with a note: "I inclose a note for our friend MBP—but, as ignorant of the name he bears at present among you, I must beg you to seal and address it." This gave the intercepted letters a tinge of intrigue. Fearful lest they be taken as evidence of him being a 'spy in the interest of France', Priestley sent a clumsy letter to numerous newspaper editors, in which he naively named "MBP" (Member of the British Parliament) as Mr. Benjamin Vaughan, who "like me, thought it necessary to leave England, and for some time is said to have assumed a feigned name." William Cobbett, in his "Porcupine's Gazette", 20 August 1798, added that Priestley "has told us who Mr MBP is, and has confirmed me in the opinion of their both being spies in the interest of France."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40176
| 320,171
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As a forerunner in Europe, Spain adopted the metre as geodetic standard. In 1866 Spain joined the geodetic association and was represented by Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero. He had devised a geodetic standard calibrated against the metre which had been compared to the Toise of Borda (a copy of the Toise of Peru constructed for the measurement of the Paris meridian arc by Delambre and Mechain), which served as a comparison module for the measurement of all geodesic bases in France. A copy of the Spanish metric geodetic standard was made for Egypt. In 1863, Ibáñez and Ismail Effendi Mustafa compared the Spanish Standard with the Egyptian Standard in Madrid. These comparisons were essential, because of the expansibility of solid materials with raise in temperature which had been demonstrated during the 18th century. The famous French physicist and geodesist Pierre Bouguer had exhibited its effect to a large assembly at the Hotel des Invalides. Indeed, one fact had constantly dominated all the fluctuations of ideas on the measurement of geodesic bases: it was the constant concern to accurately assess the temperature of standards in the field; and the determination of this variable, on which depended the length of the instrument of measurement, had always been considered by geodesists as so difficult and so important that one could almost say that the history of measuring instruments is almost identical with that of the precautions taken to avoid temperature errors. Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler's use of the metre in coastal survey, which had been an argument for the introduction of the Metric Act of 1866 allowing the use of the metre in the United States, probably also played a role in the choice of the metre as international scientific unit of length and the proposal, in 1867, by the European Arc Measurement (German: "Europäische Gradmessung") to “establish a European international bureau for weights and measures”.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28200487
| 864,061
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Before the microneurography technique was developed in the late 1960s, impulses in peripheral nerves had been recorded in animal experiments alone using a technique that involved dissection and splitting the nerve. This approach is not tolerable for general use in humans although it has been pursued in one single study. Actually, the concern of nerve damage was a major obstacle for the development of microneurography because the approach of inserting a needle electrode in a human nerve was generally regarded as potentially dangerous and involving substantial risk of permanent nerve damage. The two Swedish scientists who developed the microneuropgraphy technique (Hagbarth and Vallbo) handled the medical-ethical concern by performing a large series of experiments on their own nerves during a period of about 2 years while carefully checking for nerve damage. Working at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Academic Hospital, Uppsala, they collected data resulting in the first papers representing three areas to become major fields of microneurography, i.e. afference from intra-muscular sense organs during voluntary contractions, response of cutaneous sense organs related to touch stimuli, and efferent sympathetic activity controlling the constriction of human blood vessels. The microneurography approach of Hagbarth and Vallbo based on epoxy resin coated tungsten microelectrodes is now generally accepted whereas an alternative attempt using glass coated platina-iridium electrodes had obviously limited success as it yielded a single short note alone.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7360700
| 1,592,222
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By keeping much of their air forces in reserve, the Allies conceded air superiority to the "Luftwaffe" but operations on 10 May cost 347 aircraft and by the end of the month the "Luftwaffe" had lost 30 percent of its aircraft, with another 13 percent badly damaged. Intensive and costly air operations were made in support of Panzer Group Kleist, which had 1,222 tanks, 545 half-tracks and 39,373 lorries and cars, enough to cover of road. On the approach to the Meuse crossings, the panzer group moved in four -long columns over only four roads and had to reach the crossings by the evening of 13 May or the Allies might have time to react. Huge risks were taken to get the columns forward, including running petrol lorries in the armoured columns to refuel vehicles at every stop. Had Allied bombers been able to pierce the fighter screen, the German advance could have been turned into a disaster. To keep going for three days and nights, drivers were given Pervitin stimulants. Tooze wrote that these expedients were limited to about 12 divisions and that the rest of the German army invaded France on foot, supplied by horse and cart from railheads as in 1914. The Channel coast provided a natural obstacle about away, a distance over which motorised supply could function efficiently over the dense French road network, commandeering supplies from French farms as they went.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51751618
| 1,693,886
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Conway has been a critic of the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory of male-to-female transsexualism that all trans women are motivated either by feminine homosexuality or autogynephilia. She was also a key person in the campaign against J. Michael Bailey's book about the theory, "The Man Who Would Be Queen." American transgender rights activist Andrea James, Conway and University of Chicago economics professor Dierdre McCloskey wrote letters to Northwestern University, accusing Bailey of "conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of the study." American bioethicist Alice Dreger in her book "Galilieo's Middle Finger" criticized Conway for filing a lawsuit against Bailey which had "no legal basis", referring to her allegation that Bailey lacked a license as a clinical psychologist when he wrote letters in support of a young trans woman seeking to transition. According to Dreger, as Bailey did not receive compensation for his services, he would not have needed a license in Illinois, and was "completely forthright in his letters supporting the women, both about the fact that he had only had brief conversations with them (as opposed to having provided them with extensive counseling) and about his own qualifications and expertise... [and] even attached copies of his CV." As Dreger argues, "presumably all this was why [Illinois] never bothered to pursue the charge." In response, Conway argued that Dreger "deflects attention away from Bailey's book and the massive trans community protest, and caricatures the entire controversy as nothing more than a vicious effort by three rather witch-like women to 'ruin the life' of a brilliant scientist. In doing so, she stoops to new lows as a dirty-trickster by misquoting sources, exploiting sleazy innuendos and fabricating entire story-episodes in order to defame the three women."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=747715
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Paul Preuss was born in the mountain town of Altaussee, Austria on 19 August 1886. His father, Eduard, a Hungarian of Jewish descent, taught music; his mother, Caroline Lauchheim, an Alsatian, had been a private tutor for a baron. They met when Eduard was engaged to give Caroline's wards music lessons. Based in Vienna, Eduard Preuss and family (including two older sisters, Sophie and Mina) spent summers in Altaussee, following the migratory patterns of the vacationing Viennese upper class that employed him. As a boy, Preuss would often accompany his father, an amateur botanist, on his rambles throughout the local mountains of Altaussee. Never a robust child, at the age of six, Preuss was struck with a polio-like virus that left him partially paralyzed and confined to a bed or a wheelchair throughout that winter and spring. Once sufficiently recovered, the boy practiced gymnastic exercises and took walks to increase his strength. Though his father died when Preuss was in his tenth year, the latter continued the tradition of their mountain rambles, sometimes accompanied by his sisters or friends but often alone. At the age of eleven, he began pursuing summits in earnest, inaugurating his career as a mountaineer. Later, as his interest in alpinism intensified, he would train by placing inverted glasses on top of a wardrobe and doing pull-ups on these unstable supports – excellent practice for loose rock. One-armed pull-ups also became part of his routine (though apparently not on a glass).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5889884
| 1,123,119
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Interim regulations implementing the Commercial Space Launch Act were issued within a year of the Act's passage and final regulations were issued a year later. The licensing framework created at that time was modular and designed to handle any type of space vehicle or spacecraft. At the time it was designed based on the most modern regulatory principles. The regulatory approach was based on the assumption that the era of traditional expendable launch vehicles would be brief and that before long, new, different designs would emerge; this was not a view held by the traditional space community. This turned out to be true, more than OCST had envisioned. The first Office of Commercial Space Transportation regulatory action was a precedent setting payload approval of "cremains", which consisted of human cremated remains enclosed in lipstick style capsules. Within the first 8 years, 30 licensed launches would occur (31 if one includes Starstruck) and an innovative aircraft launched vehicle would be licensed and a re-entry vehicle approval action would be well underway. A review of Hawaii's Palima Point as a prospective spaceport location had been completed (although political factors had caused the state to drop its proposal) and two other states had approached OCST with prospective proposals. The concept that the license process had to look forward to new concepts had been validated.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1800820
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In 1872, George Brayton applied for a patent for his "Ready Motor", a reciprocating heat engine operating on a gas power cycle. The engine was a two-stroke and produced power on every revolution. Brayton engines used a separate piston compressor and piston expander, with compressed air heated by internal fire as it entered the expander cylinder. The first versions of the Brayton engine were vapor engines which mixed fuel with air as it entered the compressor by means of a heated-surface carburetor. The fuel / air was contained in a reservoir / tank and then it was admitted to the expansion cylinder and burned. As the fuel/air mixture entered the expansion cylinder, it was ignited by a pilot flame. A screen was used to prevent the fire from entering or returning to the reservoir. In early versions of the engine, this screen sometimes failed and an explosion would occur. In 1874, Brayton solved the explosion problem by adding the fuel just prior to the expander cylinder. The engine now used heavier fuels such as kerosene and fuel oil. Ignition remained a pilot flame. Brayton produced and sold "Ready Motors" to perform a variety of tasks like water pumping, mill operation, running generators, and marine propulsion. The "Ready Motors" were produced from 1872 to sometime in the 1880s; several hundred such motors were likely produced during this time period. Brayton licensed the design to Simone in the UK. Many variations of the layout were used; some were single-acting and some were double-acting. Some had under walking beams; others had overhead walking beams. Both horizontal and vertical models were built. Sizes ranged from less than one to over 40 horsepower. Critics of the time claimed the engines ran smoothly and had a reasonable efficiency.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=411441
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In 2015, the FDA approved a new Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD), an updated guideline giving instructions to pharmaceutical companies, veterinarians and producers about how to administer necessary drugs through the animal's feed and water. Around the same time, the FDA published a report of antibiotics sold or distributed for food-producing animals which found that between 2009 and 2013, just over 60% were "medically-important" drugs also used in humans; the rest were from drug classes like ionophores, which are not used in human medicine. Following this, the FDA asked drug companies to voluntarily edit its labels to exclude growth promotion as an indication for antibiotic usage. It subsequently reports that "Under Guidance for Industry (GFI) #213, which went into effect January 1, 2017, antibiotics that are important for human medicine can no longer be used for growth promotion or feed efficiency in cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other food animals." These new 2017 guidelines for instance prohibited using a drug off-label for non-therapeutic purposes, which would make using the re-labeled drug for growth enhancement illegal. In addition, some drugs were reclassified from 'Over the Counter' (OTC) to 'Veterinary Feed Directive' (VFD); VFD drugs require a veterinarian's authorization before they can be delivered in feed. As a result, the FDA reported a 33% decrease from 2016 to 2017 in domestic sales of medically important antibiotics for use in livestock. Despite this progress, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) remains concerned that sales of antibiotics to the beef and pork industries remain elevated in 2017 compared with the poultry industries, and their use could still primarily be for preventing diseases in healthy animals, which further increases the threat on antibiotic resistance. However, the FDA policy remains the same as it stated in 2013:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40364158
| 460,499
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Like the mixed relay, USA was able to assemble a new team of four fresh athletes. Phyllis Francis led off taking an early lead, making up the 3-turn stagger distance and passing both teams, Canada and Ukraine to her outside early into the final turn. Poland's lone fresh athlete Iga Baumgart-Witan and Jamaica's Anastasia Le-Roy held relatively close to the stagger, passing just three step and five steps behind. GBR's Zoey Clark and Belgium's Hanne Claes kept them in the mix after one leg. Second leg for USA was their young hurdling star Sydney McLaughlin. She was so far ahead at the break, there was no need for strategic maneuvering, and she ran a perfect tangent from lane 7 to the beginning of the far turn taking a 5 metre lead on Patrycja Wyciszkiewicz with Britain's Jodie Williams close behind. McLaughlin built up a 9 metre lead by her handoff to the hurdle world record holder Dalilah Muhammad, who true to form from her hurdle race, took off hard, expanding the gap to 15 metres through the first turn. It was almost 20 metres over Poland's Małgorzata Hołub-Kowalik by the handoff, which behind her, Jamaica's Stephenie Ann McPherson was able to pull back lost ground against Britain's fresh Emily Diamond. On anchor USA put 400 meter 4th place Wadeline Jonathas, Jamaica had their rested bronze medalist Shericka Jackson while Poland also had their best finalist, 7th place Justyna Święty-Ersetic, but with that lead, the battle was for silver. Tightening the gap through the turn, Jackson ran by GBR's Laviai Nielsen and Święty-Ersetic on the backstretch. With Jonathas long gone over 20 metres ahead, Święty-Ersetic stayed on Jackson's shoulder through the final turn then pulled into lane 2 for running room. She couldn't sprint by Jackson, but Święty-Ersetic slowly narrowed the gap. Just before Jonathas crossed the finish line, Święty-Ersetic edged back ahead. Unable to respond, Jackson gave up the fight and eased across the finish line with bronze 3 metres behind.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61921788
| 1,519,873
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1,057,956
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The Pleistocene glaciations scoured the landscape clean and covered much of it in deep quaternary sediments. Therefore, no undisputed Early or Middle Palaeolithic sites or finds are known from Sweden. As far as it is currently known, the country's prehistory begins in the Allerød interstadial c. 12,000 BC with Late Palaeolithic hunting camps of the Bromme culture at the edge of the ice in what is now the country's southernmost province. Shortly before the close of the Younger Dryas (c. 9,600 BC), the west coast of Sweden (Bohuslän) was visited by hunter-gatherers from northern Germany. This cultural group is commonly referred to as the Ahrensburgian and were engaged in fishing and sealing along the coast of western Sweden during seasonal rounds from the Continent. Currently, we refer to this group as the Hensbacka culture and, in Norway, as the Fosna culture group (see: Oxford Journal Hensbacka Schmitt). During the late Preboreal period, colonization continued as people move towards the north-east as the ice receded. Archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that they arrived first from the south-west and, in time, also from the north-east and met half-way. The genomes of early Scandinavian hunter-gatherers show that the group from the south and the another one from the northeast eventually mixed in Scandinavia. Besides their cultural differences in e.g. tool making, the two groups also differed in appreance. The populations from the south had darker skin and blue eyes while the groups arriving from the north had light skin and variance in eye color.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13840112
| 1,057,407
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458,066
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The density of light paths from WDM was the key to the massive expansion of fiber optic capacity that enabled the growth of the Internet in the 1990s. Since the 1990s, the channel count and capacity of dense WDM systems has increased substantially, with commercial systems able to transmit close to 1 Tbit/s of traffic at 100 Gbit/s on each wavelength. In 2010, researchers at AT&T reported an experimental system with 640 channels operating at 107 Gbit/s, for a total transmission of 64 Tbit/s. In 2018, Telstra of Australia deployed a live system that enables the transmission of 30.4 Tbit/s per fiber pair over 61.5 GHz spectrum, equal to 1.2 million 4K Ultra HD videos being streamed simultaneously. As a result of this ability to transport large traffic volumes, WDM has become the common basis of nearly every global communication network and thus, a foundation of the Internet today. Demand for bandwidth is driven primarily by Internet Protocol (IP) traffic from video services, telemedicine, social networking, mobile phone use and cloud-based computing. At the same time, machine-to-machine, IoT and scientific community traffic require support for the large-scale exchange of data files. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, global IP traffic will be more than 150,700 Gbits per second in 2022. Of that, video content will equal 82% of all IP traffic, all transmitted by optical networking.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3843580
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The high-water mark of polygenic theories was Josiah Nott and Gliddon's voluminous eight-hundred page tome titled "Types of Mankind", published in 1854. Reproducing the work of Louis Agassiz and Samuel Morton, the authors spread the virulent and explicitly racist views to a wider, more popular audience. The first printing sold out quickly and by the end of the century it had undergone nine editions. Although many Southerners felt that all the justification for slavery they needed was found in the Bible, others used the new science to defend slavery and the repression of American Indians. Abolitionists, however, felt they had to take this science on its own terms. And for the first time, African American intellectuals waded into the contentious debate. In the immediate wake of Types of Mankind and during the pitched political battles that led to Civil War, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the statesman and persuasive abolitionist, directly attacked the leading theorists of the American School of Anthropology. In an 1854 address, entitled "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered", Douglass argued that "by making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, [slaveowners] excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman... For let it be once granted that the human race are of multitudinous origin, naturally different in their moral, physical, and intellectual capacities ... a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution... There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden, Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen" (p. 287).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1676362
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Because most oceanographic activity in Canada is federally funded, the cutbacks of 1985 affected scientific research in this field. For example, the Pacific Ocean research facilities of the Defence Research Board were closed. However, in spite of this, the Bedford Institute of Oceanography has maintained its status as Canada's premier oceanographic institution. Consolidation over the years has brought the oceanographic activities of four departments under the roof of the Institute, and at the present time, over 400 scientists, engineers, technicians, support staff and others conduct targeted research in a number of fields. National Defence activities support ocean surveillance through the Maritime Forces Atlantic's Route Survey Office and focus on surveys of the sea floor in areas of military interest. The Shellfish Section of Environment Canada conducts ocean water quality surveys and microbiological studies of shellfish. The Geological Survey of Canada is also present and has established itself as Canada's principal marine geoscience facility with emphasis on geophysics, geochemistry, marine and petroleum geology and the coastal/off-shore landmass. The Science Division and Canadian Hydrographic Service of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans are also represented. Associated researchers study the marine climate and environment, marine and diadromous fish, shellfish, mammals and plants. The institute operates four research vessels, CCGS Matthew acquired in 1990 along with the famous CCGS Hudson (1964), CCGS Navicula (1968) and CCGS Alfred Needler (1982).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18401364
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Non-Gaussian statistics arise due to the nonlinear mapping of random initial conditions into output states. For example, modulation instability amplifies input noise, which ultimately leads to soliton formation. Also, in systems displaying heavy-tailed statistical properties, random input conditions often enter through a seemingly insignificant, nontrivial, or otherwise-hidden variable. Such is generally the case for optical rogue waves; for example, they can begin from a specific out-of-band noise component, which is usually very weak and unnoticed. Yet, in the output states, these minor input variations can be magnified into large potential swings in key observables. The latter may, therefore, exhibit substantial fluctuations for no readily apparent reason. Thus, the appearance of extreme statistics is often striking not only because of their counterintuitive probability assignments, but also because they frequently signify a nontrivial or unexpected sensitivity to initial conditions. It is important to recognize that rogue waves in both optics and hydrodynamics are classical phenomena and, therefore, intrinsically deterministic. However, determinism does not necessarily indicate that it is straightforward or practical to make useful predictions. Optical rogue waves and their statistical properties can be investigated in numerical simulations with the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation, a classical propagation equation that is also used to model supercontinuum generation and, more generally, pulse propagation in optical fiber. In such simulations, a source of input noise is needed to produce the stochastic output variations. Frequently, input phase noise with a power amplitude of one photon per mode is employed, corresponding to shot noise. Yet, noise levels beyond the one-photon-per-mode level are generally more experimentally realistic and often needed.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42450197
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Pure-tone audiometry screening, in which there is typically no attempt to find threshold, has been found to accurately assess hearing status in children six years and older, when trained health workers in the community of rural Bangladeshi village used a simple condition play response procedure (Berg et al., 2006). Recommended test frequencies are 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz, at 20 dB HL according to the ASHA (1997) guidelines for screening audiometry. However, 500 Hz has been found to identify the auditory impact of otitis media with effusion in children and should be included at 25 dB HL when permitted by ambient noise levels (WHO, 1997). In regards to equipment, noise-excluding earphones are advisable in order to limit external noise factors. If possible, though costly, an effective way to reduce background noise is through the use of a mobile hearing screening facility. Examples of such a facility include the use of a 4x4 vehicles in the HARK Project of South Africa (Ogilvy & Michelson, 2003). These facilities incorporate a sound-treated environment for hearing screening. Lastly, in order to reduce operator errors, Roeser and Clark (2004) recommend a minimum training program of no less than five days while WHO recommends an initial three-week training program (WHO, 2004) for ‘primary ear health workers.’
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49432879
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The figure to the right shows 15-second samples of the raw counts (per 20.48ms) observed in a 1973 sounding-rocket-borne exposure to three of the X-ray brightest binary sources in our galaxy: Her X-1 (1.7 days), Cyg X-3 (0.2 day), and Cyg X-1 (5.6 days). The 1.24 second pulsar period associated with Her X-1 is immediately evident from the data, while the rate profile for Cyg X-3 is completely consistent with the statistical fluctuations in counts expected for a source that is constant, at least for the 15s duration of the exposure shown; the Cyg X-1 data, on the other hand, clearly exhibit the chaotic "shot noise" behavior characteristic of this black-hole candidate and also provided preliminary evidence for the additional feature of millisecond "burst" sub-structure, noted for the first time in this observation. The sharp cut-off at ~24 keV in the flat spectrum observed for Her X-1 in this exposure provided the first reported evidence for radiative transfer effects to be associated with a highly magnetized plasma near the surface of a neutron star. The black-body spectral component observed for Cyg X-3 during this experiment gave strong evidence that this emission is from the immediate vicinity of a compact object the size of a neutron star.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25119101
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401,570
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One of the most recent of Rensselaer's research centers is the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, a 218,000 square-foot research facility and a national pacesetter for fundamental and applied research in biotechnology. The primary target of the research center is biologics, a research priority based on data-driven understanding of proteomics, protein regulation, and gene regulation. It involves using biocatalysis and synthetic biology tools to block or supplement the actions of specific cells or proteins in the immune system. Over the past decade, CBIS has produced over 2,000 peer-reviewed publications with over 30,000 citations and currently employs over 200 scientists and engineers. The center is also used primarily to train undergraduate and graduate students, with over 1,000 undergraduates and 200 doctoral students trained. The center also has numerous academic and industry partners including the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. These partnerships have resulted in numerous advances over the last decade through new commercial developments in diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices, and regenerative medicine which are a direct result of research at the center. Examples of advancements include the creation of synthetic heparin, antimicrobial coatings, detoxification chemotherapy, on-demand bio-medicine, implantable sensors, and 3D cellular array chips.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=194026
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Early work with biofuel cells, which began in the early 20th century, was purely of the microbial variety. Research on using enzymes directly for oxidation in biofuel cells began in the early 1960s, with the first enzymatic biofuel cell being produced in 1964. This research began as a product of NASA's interest in finding ways to recycle human waste into usable energy on board spacecraft, as well as a component of the quest for an artificial heart, specifically as a power source that could be put directly into the human body. These two applications – use of animal or vegetable products as fuel and development of a power source that can be directly implanted into the human body without external refueling – remain the primary goals for developing these biofuel cells. Initial results, however, were disappointing. While the early cells did successfully produce electricity, there was difficulty in transporting the electrons liberated from the glucose fuel to the fuel cell's electrode and further difficulties in keeping the system stable enough to produce electricity at all due to the enzymes’ tendency to move away from where they needed to be in order for the fuel cell to function. These difficulties led to an abandonment by biofuel cell researchers of the enzyme-catalyst model for nearly three decades in favor of the more conventional metal catalysts (principally platinum), which are used in most fuel cells. Research on the subject did not begin again until the 1980s after it was realized that the metallic-catalyst method was not going to be able to deliver the qualities desired in a biofuel cell, and since then work on enzymatic biofuel cells has revolved around the resolution of the various problems that plagued earlier efforts at producing a successful enzymatic biofuel cell.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16138478
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There is no obvious single reason for the pseudotooth birds' extinction. A scenario of general ecological change – exacerbated by the beginning ice age and changes in ocean currents due to plate tectonic shifts (e.g. the emergence of the Antarctic circumpolar current or the closing of the Isthmus of Panama) – is more likely, with the pseudotooth birds as remnants of the world's Paleogene fauna ultimately failing to adapt. In that respect it may be significant that some lineages of cetaceans, like the primitive dolphins of the Kentriodontidae or the shark-toothed whales, flourished contemporary with the Pelagornithidae and became extinct at about the same time. Also, the modern diversity of pinniped and cetacean genera evolved largely around the Mio-Pliocene boundary, suggesting that many ecological niches emerged or became vacant. In addition, whatever caused the Middle Miocene disruption and the Messinian Salinity Crisis did affect the trophic web of Earth's oceans not insignificantly either, and the latter event led to a widespread extinction of seabirds. Together, this combination of factors led to Neogene animals finally replacing the last remnants of the Paleogene fauna in the Pliocene. In that respect, it is conspicuous that the older pseudotooth birds are typically found in the same deposits as plotopterids and penguins, while younger forms were sympatric with auks, albatrosses, penguins and Procellariidae – which, however, underwent an adaptive radiation of considerable extent coincident (and probably caused by) with the final demise of the Paleogene-type trophic web. Although the fossil record is necessarily incomplete, as it seems cormorants and seagulls were very rarely found in association with the Pelagornithidae.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9205088
| 1,050,713
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Badè had a long-standing interest in archaeology. He traveled in the Middle East in 1909 and had planned to start fieldwork in Syria in 1914, but World War I and his appointment as Muir's executor intervened. He continued to study archaeology, including the methods employed in desert areas of the American Southwest. In 1925 he went to Palestine to organize an excavation, having corresponded with William F. Albright to identify suitable locations for excavation. Albright considered Tell en-Nasbeh, (about 7 miles north of Jerusalem) a possible location of the biblical city of Mizpah in Benjamin but favored Nabi Samwil as the most likely. Badè chose to excavate Tell en-Nasbeh which proved to be the correct location. The site was initially identified in part based on a German World War I aerial photograph showing evidence of walls and alteration of vegetation over buildings. Badè brought his characteristic thoroughness and organizational talent to bear, seeking advice from prominent archaeologists including Albright and Clarence S. Fisher. Badè led five seasons of excavation (1926, 1927, 1929, 1932, 1935), meticulously documenting artifacts and mapping the site. Among the artifacts was the onyx seal of Ja'azanaiah, Servant of the King, plausibly identified with a Judean officer of that name mentioned twice in the Bible. Badè funded the excavation in part with royalties from the Muir books and with gifts from friends. The identification of Tell En-Nasbeh with Mizpah is now generally accepted. As of 1988, no other Palestinian site of comparable size had been excavated as thoroughly.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38524295
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FitzRoy's instructions set detailed requirements for geological survey of a circular coral atoll to investigate how coral reefs formed, particularly if they rose from the bottom of the sea or from the summits of extinct volcanoes, and to assess the effects of tides by measurement with specially constructed gauges. FitzRoy chose the Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, and on arrival there on 1 April 1836, the entire crew set to work, first erecting FitzRoy's new design of a tide gauge that allowed readings to be taken from the shore. Boats were sent all around the island to carry out the survey, and despite being impeded by strong winds, they took numerous soundings to establish depths around the atoll and in the lagoon. FitzRoy noted the smooth and solid rock-like outer wall of the atoll, with most life thriving where the surf was most violent. He had great difficulty in establishing the depth reached by living coral, as pieces were hard to break off and the small anchors, hooks, grappling irons, and chains they used were all snapped off by the swell as soon as they tried to pull them up. He had more success using a sounding line with a bell-shaped lead weight armed with tallow hardened with lime; this would be indented by any shape that it struck to give an exact impression of the bottom; it would also collect any fragments of coral or grains of sand.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21185695
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Thwaites' greatest achievement was in the design and supervision of the construction of Melbourne's underground sewerage scheme, which was at the time the largest civil engineering project in the history of Victoria. He initially gave evidence to the Royal Commission into the Sanitary Conditions of Melbourne in 1889 at which he produced a detailed and comprehensive scheme for underground sewers for Melbourne. While British engineer James Mansergh was brought to Australia to advise on the Sewerage System and proposed a number of design options, a 2011 biography by Robert La Nauze has demonstrated that Mansergh drew strongly from Thwaites' earlier report, and it was left to Thwaites, when appointed to the task, to put the plans into practice and he successfully argued for a modification of Mansergh's proposals by reducing the size of the main sewer pipes and so "...removed a design fault in Mansergh’s scheme that would have led to embarrassing blockages". The large main sewers proposed by Mansergh would not have created sufficient velocity to scour the solids, particularly in the early stages before many properties were connected, and so Thwaites believed they would require manual cleaning. His solution was to reduce the diameter of the mains, and use ovoid section sewers, which had a narrow section at the base that concentrated the flow and therefore increased the velocity. Other changes were the construction of a single pumping station at Spotswood and a single sewage treatment farm at Werribee.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38987490
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The method was developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby. It is based on the fact that radiocarbon () is constantly being created in the Earth's atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and thereafter the amount of it contains begins to decrease as the undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of in a sample from a dead plant or animal, such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone, provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. The older a sample is, the less there is to be detected, and because the half-life of (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to approximately 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally make accurate analysis of older samples possible. Libby received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 1960.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26197
| 338,161
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20-Hydroxyecdysone and other ecdysteroids are marketed as ingredients in nutritional supplements for various sports, particularly bodybuilding. A comprehensive study, designed to find any strength or athletic improvement from 20-hydroxyecdysone, was published in 2006. The study looked for improvement in actual exercises performed and tested for improvements/increases in chemical indicators such as body composition and free/available testosterone. The results of the 2006 study concluded that using 30 mg per day of 20-hydroxyecdysone administered orally did not significantly affect anabolic or catabolic responses to resistance training, body composition, or training adaptations. However, a number of earlier studies (,) supported the anabolic effects of 20-Hydroxyecdysone. A more recent study conducted in 2019 by a team that included the Department for Molecular and Cellular Sports Medicine at the German Sport University Cologne, found that significantly higher increases in muscle mass were observed in participants dosed with ecdysterone, with significantly more pronounced increases in one-repetition bench press performance. The study was funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and demonstrated a significant dose-responsive anabolic effect of 20-Hydroxyecdysone supplementation on athletes during resistance training. Furthermore, recent studies () have elucidated that the mechanism of action of 20-Hydroxyecdysone on human muscle cells is relatively selective activation of the beta form of the estrogen receptor (ERβ), which is known to result in muscle hypertrophy.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1092225
| 792,641
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In 1958, Philip LeCompte reexamined acute onset disease and short duration by studying 4 related insulitis cases. LeCompte theorised that insulitis was a rare, but significant lesion that may have been under-diagnosed, and the cellular infiltrate could be caused by an infection agent, a functional strain of the islets, a reaction to damage from a nonbacterial source, or an antigen-antibody reaction. In 1965, pathologist Willy Gepts speculated about the possible immunological origin insulitis may have had when he published the first analysis on insulitis and juvenile diabetes with a relatively large sample size, 22 patients. All 22 patients studied had all died within 6 months of diagnosis and Gepts found the presence of insulitis in 68% (15/22) of the patients, which was significant as it showed a much higher prevalence than previously discovered. In a follow up study, Gepts also found a highly-variable pancreatic beta-cell mass reduction, averaging ~10% less than what was found in non-diabetic controls, a tendency for inflammation to be found in islets that still had insulin immunoreactivity, and further evidence of an autoimmune process at work. Further study in 1978 led Gepts to the conclusion that “insulitis represents an immune reaction of the delayed type, specifically directed against beta-cells,”(In’t Veld, 2011). Studies on pancreatic disease from the 1920s to 1970s revealed many things about insulitis, and when combines with immunologic and genetic studies on patients with type 1 diabetes pointed towards a connection between insulitis and type 1 diabetes, and an autoimmune basis for type 1 diabetes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16821436
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Limits of the method are related to the parameter sets used, and to the underlying molecular mechanics force fields. One run of an MD simulation optimizes the potential energy, rather than the free energy of the protein , meaning that all entropic contributions to thermodynamic stability of protein structure are neglected, including the conformational entropy of the polypeptide chain (the main factor that destabilizes protein structure) and hydrophobic effects (the main driving forces of protein folding). Another important factor is intramolecular hydrogen bonds, which are not explicitly included in modern force fields, but described as Coulomb interactions of atomic point charges. This is a crude approximation because hydrogen bonds have a partially quantum mechanical and chemical nature. Furthermore, electrostatic interactions are usually calculated using the dielectric constant of vacuum, although the surrounding aqueous solution has a much higher dielectric constant. Using the macroscopic dielectric constant at short interatomic distances is questionable. Finally, van der Waals interactions in MD are usually described by Lennard-Jones potentials based on the Fritz London theory that is only applicable in a vacuum. However, all types of van der Waals forces are ultimately of electrostatic origin and therefore depend on dielectric properties of the environment. The direct measurement of attraction forces between different materials (as Hamaker constant) shows that "the interaction between hydrocarbons across water is about 10% of that across vacuum". The environment-dependence of van der Waals forces is neglected in standard simulations, but can be included by developing polarizable force fields.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=198608
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Brusatte was born in Ottawa, Illinois to Jim and Roxanne Brusatte. He was educated at the Ottawa Township High School. From 2002, he attended the University of Chicago from where he earned his BS in geophysical sciences in 2006. He studied under Paul Sereno. He was elected a Student Marshal, the highest academic honor the university bestows to undergraduates. He was also the winner of the John Crerar Foundation Science Writing Prize and the Howard Hughes Institute Undergraduate Research Fellowship. In 2006, he was awarded the Marshall Scholarship to study in the United Kingdom. He entered the University of Bristol and obtained an MSc in both palaeobiology and earth sciences in 2008. His master's thesis was about the origin of a group of dinosaurs and was titled "Basal Archosaur Phylogeny and Evolution", on which he was supervised by Michael J. Benton. He returned to the US to join the Columbia University, from where he completed his MPhil in 2011 and PhD in 2013 from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. During this period he concurrently worked as a researcher at the Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History. He became a Chancellor's Fellow in Vertebrate Palaentology at the School of GeoSciences in the University of Edinburgh in February 2013.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7124671
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Ancient writers like Zosimus in the 5th century AD condemned the "reserve" policy as a major weakening of the military force. Other modern scholars (Ferrill et al.) also see the pullback as a strategic mistake, arguing that it left lower quality "second string" limitanei forces to stop an enemy until the distant mobile reserve arrived. While the drop in quality did not happen immediately, it is argued that over time, the limitanei declined into lightly armed, static watchman type troops that were of dubious value against increasing barbarian marauders on the frontiers. The pullback of the best infantry was based more on political reasons (shoring up the power bases of the emperors and various elites) rather than on military reality. In addition, it is claimed, the "forward" policy was not at all a static "Maginot" approach, but that traditional heavy legions and supporting cavalry could still move to a trouble spot by redeploying them from fortifications elsewhere along a particular frontier. Some scholars challenge the notion that a "mobile reserve" in the modern military sense existed in the Roman Empire, and instead argue that the shifts in an organization represent a series of field armies deployed in various areas as needed, particularly in the East. Others point to the heavy fiscal difficulties and political turmoil of the later Empire that made it difficult to continue a traditional policy.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30855309
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George Robert Carruthers (October 1, 1939 – December 26, 2020) was an African American inventor, physicist, engineer and space scientist. Carruthers perfected a compact and very powerful ultraviolet camera/spectrograph for NASA to use when it launched Apollo 16 in 1972. He designed it so astronauts could use it on the lunar surface, making all adjustments inside their bulky space suits. Upon instructions from Carruthers, they used the camera to record the Earth's outermost atmosphere, noting its variations, and also mapped portions of the far-ultraviolet sky recording stars and galaxies, and the gaseous media between them. In 1970, sending his instruments aboard Aerobee sounding rockets, he had demonstrated that molecular hydrogen exists in the interstellar medium. Among numerous citations and awards, in 2003, Carruthers was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and he received an honorary doctorate for Engineering from Michigan Technological University. He also was awarded the 2011 National Medal for Technology and Invention from President Barack Obama, "For invention of the Far UV Electrographic Camera, which significantly improved our understanding of space and earth science."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2385684
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The great law-giver, Solon, having served as Archon of Athens for 22 years, retired from public life and saw the city, almost immediately, fall under the dictatorship of Peisistratus. Though a dictator, Peisistratus understood Solon's wisdom, carried on his policies and after his death, his son Hippias continued this tradition (though maintaining a dictatorship that favored the aristocracy). His younger brother was assassinated (inspired, according to Thucydides, by a love affair gone wrong and not, as later thought, politically motivated) Hippias then became wary of the Athenians, instituted a rule of terror and was finally overthrown by the army under Kleomenes I of Sparta and Cleisthenes of Athens. Cleisthenes reformed the Athenian constitution and established democracy in the city during 507 BCE. He also followed Solon's lead, but instituted new laws that decreased the artistocracy's power, raised the status of the common people and attempted to join the separate tribes of the mountain, the plain and the shore into one, unified people under a new form of government. According to Will Durant, "The Athenians themselves were exhilarated by this adventure into sovereignty...they knew the zest of freedom in action, speech and thought; and from that moment they began to lead all Greece in literature and art, even in statesmanship and war". This foundation of democracy, of a free state consisting of men who "owned the soil that they tilled and who ruled the state that governed them", stabilized Athens and provided the groundwork for the Golden Age.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21792815
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The official figures are too low to account for the acute health effects reported by some local residents and documented in two books; such health effects require exposure to at least 100,000 millirems (100 rems) to the whole body - 1000 times more than the official estimates. The reported health effects are consistent with high doses of radiation, and comparable to the experiences of cancer patients undergoing radio-therapy but have many other potential causes. The effects included "metallic taste, erythema, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, deaths of pets, farm and wild animals, and damage to plants." Some local statistics showed dramatic one-year changes among the most vulnerable: "in Dauphin County, where the Three Mile Island plant is located, the 1979 death rate among infants under one year represented a 28 percent increase over that of 1978, and among infants under one month, the death rate increased by 54 percent." Physicist Ernest Sternglass, a specialist in low-level radiation, noted these statistics in the 1981 edition of his book "Secret Fallout: low-level radiation from Hiroshima to Three-Mile Island". In their final 1981 report, however, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, examining death rates within the 10-mile area around TMI for the 6 months after the accident, said that the TMI-2 accident did not cause local deaths of infants or fetuses.
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The game's themes of revenge and retribution were inspired by Druckmann's own experiences growing up in the West Bank, where violence was a frequent topic. He specifically recalled watching footage of the 2000 Ramallah lynching and how, after hearing the cheering crowds, his mind immediately turned to violent thoughts of revenge against them; he later admitted to feeling "gross and guilty" for having these thoughts. He wanted the player to feel a "thirst for revenge" before making them realize the reality of their actions. Once he had settled on a basic concept, the remainder of the narrative outline was complete within weeks. He noted that some members of the team felt reluctant about the game's cynicism, but ultimately he preferred a divisive story than a "mundane" one. He found that stories showing the cost of revenge were more nuanced, and wanted to use the interactivity of the medium to push these feelings to players. He found that people often want to bring someone to justice after witnessing a horrible act, but are unable to do so due to laws and society; in the game's world, where these societal structures no longer exist, he saw an opportunity to explore this concept. When researching for the game, he watched the documentary films "" (1996) and its sequels "" (2000) and "" (2011), and found it particularly interesting when parents would make comments in interviews about wanting to hurt or kill the West Memphis Three over the murder allegations; he felt that these comments were the "perversion of love", wanting to commit a heinous act to bring justice for those they love. He also referenced Dave Grossman's 1996 book "On Killing", which discusses the desensitization of violence for soldiers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64504979
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After Mao died on September 9, 1976, his rival, Deng Xiaoping, denounced during the Cultural Revolution as reactionary and therefore forced to retire from all his offices, slowly re-emerged as China's new leader in 1978. At first, the new development was slowed. Then, several key projects deemed unnecessary were simply cancelled—the Fanji ABM system, the Xianfeng Anti-Missile Super Gun, the ICBM Early Warning Network 7010 Tracking Radar and the land-based high-power anti-missile laser program. Nevertheless, some development did proceed. The first Yuanwang-class space tracking ship was commissioned in 1979. The first full-range test of the DF-5 ICBM was conducted on May 18, 1980. The payload reached its target located 9300 km away in the South Pacific () and retrieved five minutes later by helicopter. Further development of the Long March rocket series allowed the PRC to initiate a commercial launch program in 1985, which has since launched more than 50 foreign satellites, primarily for European, African and Asian interests.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=343674
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He was active in Irish politics in the 1990s and led the Christian Solidarity Party between 1993 and 1999. He now holds libertarian and what he terms (philosophically) anarchistic views. His philosophical interests include political philosophy, philosophy of law and philosophy of religion. He has appeared from time to time on radio and TV in Ireland and the UK, contributing to discussions on topical social and political issues. More recently, some recordings of him speaking on different topics can be found online. He describes himself as Catholic in religion, in social matters, conservative, and in political matters, libertarian. His book "Murray Rothbard" (Vol. 15 in the series "Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers") was published by Continuum in 2010 and became available in paperback in August 2013. "Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State", was published by Continuum in July 2012 (UK) [September 2012 USA]. A comprehensive history of Western political thought from the perspective of liberty, "Freedom's Progress?", was published by Imprint Academic in September 2017. "ZAP: Free Speech and Tolerance in the light of the Zero Aggression Principle", was published by Societas in October 2019. "After #MeToo: Feminism, Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity and Sundry Cultural Delights", also published by Societas, appeared in March 2020. "Hidden Agender: Transgenderism's Struggle against Reality", was published (again by Societas) in March 2021. In an article, "Can You Own Yourself?" (2011), Casey argue that voluntary slavery contracts are logically possible if the concept of self-owned property is actively interpreted.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4215185
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In 1983 Bryan founded Pan Australian Mining Ltd (now the $740 million Pan Australian Resources) and, as managing director, oversaw the development of a major gold mine at Mount Leyshon, near Charters Towers in Queensland. He was also chairman of Highlands Pacific, a mineral explorer in Papua New Guinea. Bryan became the first honorary life member of the then Queensland Mining Council (QMC) in November 1995. His membership was on the recommendation of the Executive Committee which referred to Bryan’s personal contribution to the formation of the Council. Bryan was involved in 18 months of discussions and negotiations to bring about the merger of the Queensland Coal Association and the Queensland Chamber of Mines in 1991. Bryan is also a founding Director of the Sustainable Minerals Institute and the Bryan Research Centre within the University of Queensland. He achieved considerable success in the role of founding chairman for the Queensland Gas Company. In an article, “I’m Going Sailing”, in The Deal, December 2008, Bryan wrote:"The trick was to find thick coal seams where the gas could accumulate… from years of drilling in the Surat Basin… I knew of a number of drilling rigs that had caught fire after encountering gas. Safety procedures were pretty rudimentary then. The drillers would smoke when it took their fancy. Up would come the gas, and bang went the rig. We identified where half a dozen rigs had been lost over the years. It was a rather crude prospecting tool, but it worked."Bryan formed a partnership with Dick Groves, a consultant geologist and his partner Bob Bell, and after a shaky start (described as "far more ideas than money"), Bryan recruited Richard Cottee as managing director. The company's value rose from a market cap of less than $20 million to $5.6 billion in eight years to become a leading coal seam gas producer in Queensland.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56835246
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A 1987 study at Indiana University Bloomington used 14 "Mechanical Universe" episodes as part of an introductory course on Newtonian mechanics, with generally positive results:[T]hese tapes were particularly effective in placing Newtonian mechanics in a historical perspective; dramatizing the historical overthrow of Aristotelian and medieval ideas; illustrating the diverse nature of scientists and the scientific endeavor; stimulating student interest and enthusiasm; and, through excellent animation, illustrating the time dimension of certain mechanics concepts. The companion text [...] was placed on library reserve for the course but was not extensively utilized by students.A follow-up study found that the videos could also be helpful explaining physics to professors in other fields. Negative reactions generally had less to do with the intrinsic perceived quality of the episodes than with the time the science-history material took away from content seen as "critical exam-preparing instruction". The investigator recalled:[S]ome students, thinking that the videotape material would not be covered on the tests, headed for the doors when the lights dimmed! To counter this tendency I started to use a few test questions based on historical or literary details discussed in the videotapes. Some students were outraged: "What is this, a poetry class?"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4840666
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However, on 11 December 1974 a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Federal Republic of Germany and the US about the common future production of a main battle tank; this made any application of Chobham armour dependent on the eventual choice for a tank type. Earlier in 1974 the Americans had asked the Germans to redesign the existing Leopard 2 prototypes, considered by them too lightly armoured, and had suggested adoption of "Burlington" for this purpose, of which type the Germans had already been informed in March 1970; the Germans however in response in 1974 initiated a new armour development programme of their own. Having already designed a system that in their opinion offered satisfactory protection against shaped charges, consisting of multiple-laminate spaced armour with the spaces filled with ceramic polystyrene foam as fitted to the Leopard 1A3, they put a clear emphasis on improving KE-penetrator protection, reworking the system into a perforated metal module armour. A version with added Burlington was considered, including ceramic inserts in the various spaces, but rejected as it would push vehicle weight well over sixty metric tonnes, a weight then seen as prohibitive by both armies. The US Army in the summer of 1974 faced the choice between the German system and their own Burlington, a decision made more difficult because Burlington offered, relative to steel armour, no weight advantage against KE-penetrators: the total armour system would have a RHA equivalence against them of about 350 mm (compared to about 700 mm against shaped charges). No consensus developing, General Creighton Abrams himself decided the issue in favour of Burlington. Eventually each army procured its own national tank design, the project of a common tank failing in 1976. In February 1978 the first tanks protected by Burlington left the factory when the first of eleven pilot M1 tanks were delivered by Chrysler Corporation to the US Army.
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In the 15th century, Ghiyath al-Kashi computed the value of π to the 16th decimal place. Kashi also had an algorithm for calculating "n"th roots. In 1533, Regiomontanus's table of sines and cosines were published. Scipione del Ferro and Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia discovered solutions for cubic equations. Gerolamo Cardano published them in his 1545 book "Ars Magna", together with a solution for the quartic equations, discovered by his student Lodovico Ferrari. The radical symbol for square root was introduced by Christoph Rudolff. Michael Stifel's important work "Arithmetica integra" contained important innovations in mathematical notation. In 1556, Niccolò Tartaglia used parentheses for precedence grouping. In 1557 Robert Recorde published "The Whetstone of Witte" which introduced the equal sign (=), as well as plus and minus signs for the English reader. In 1564, Gerolamo Cardano analyzed games of chance beginning the early stages of probability theory. In 1572 Rafael Bombelli published his "L'Algebra" in which he showed how to deal with the imaginary quantities that could appear in Cardano's formula for solving cubic equations. Simon Stevin's book "De Thiende" ('the art of tenths'), published in Dutch in 1585, contained a systematic treatment of decimal notation, which influenced all later work on the real number system. The New algebra (1591) of François Viète introduced the modern notational manipulation of algebraic expressions. For navigation and accurate maps of large areas, trigonometry grew to be a major branch of mathematics. Bartholomaeus Pitiscus coin the word "trigonometry", publishing his "Trigonometria" in 1595.
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Soviet overflights resumed in June 1957 from Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska to the Russian Far East, which had less effective radar systems. Others originated from Lahore, Pakistan. A Lahore flight on 5 August provided the first photographs of the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam: the CIA had been unaware of its existence until then. Other flights examined the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and the Saryshagan missile test site. After a few more overflights that year, only five more took place before the May 1960 incident because of Eisenhower's increasing caution. The president sought to avoid angering the Soviets as he worked to achieve a nuclear test ban; meanwhile, the Soviets began trying to shoot down U-2 flights that never entered Soviet airspace, and the details in their diplomatic protests showed that Soviet radar operators were able to effectively track the aircraft. To reduce visibility Lockheed painted the aircraft in a blue-black color that helped them blend in against the darkness of space, and the CIA aircraft received the more powerful Pratt & Whitney J75-P-13 engine that increased maximum altitude by , to . In April 1958, CIA source Pyotr Semyonovich Popov told his handler George Kisevalter that a senior KGB official had boasted of having "full technical details" of the U-2, leading Bissell to conclude the project had a leak. The source of the leak was never identified, although there was speculation that it was Lee Harvey Oswald, then a radar operator at a U-2 base in Japan.
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Bragg's interest in physics developed, particularly in the field of electromagnetism. In 1895, he was visited by Ernest Rutherford, en route from New Zealand to Cambridge; this was the commencement of a lifelong friendship. Bragg had a keen interest in the new discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen. On 29 May 1896 at Adelaide, Bragg demonstrated before a meeting of local doctors the application of "X-rays to reveal structures that were otherwise invisible". Samuel Barbour, senior chemist of F. H. Faulding & Co., an Adelaide pharmaceutical manufacturer, supplied the necessary apparatus in the form of a Crookes tube, a glass discharge tube. The tube had been obtained at Leeds, England, where Barbour visited the firm of Reynolds and Branson, a manufacturer of photographic and laboratory equipment. Barbour returned to Adelaide in April 1896. Barbour had conducted his own experiments shortly after return to Australia, but results were limited due to limited battery power. At the University, the tube was attached to an induction coil and a battery borrowed from Sir Charles Todd, Bragg's father-in-law. The induction coil was utilized to produce the electric spark necessary for Bragg and Barbour to "generate short bursts of X-rays". The audience was favorably impressed. Bragg availed himself as a test subject, in the manner of Röntgen and allowed an X-ray photograph to be taken of his hand. The image of the fingers in his hand revealed "an old injury to one of his fingers sustained when using the turnip chopping machine on his father's farm in Cumbria".
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Their primitive synapsid and therapsid ancestors were very large (between ) but cynodonts gradually decreased in size (to ) even before the Permian-Triassic extinction event, probably due to competition with other therapsids. After the extinction event, the probainognathian cynodont group rapidly decreased in size (to 4 in–1.5 ft (10–50 cm)) due to new competition with archosaurs and transitioned to nocturnality, evolving nocturnal features, pulmonary alveoli, bronchioles and a developed diaphragm for a larger surface area for breathing, enucleated erythrocytes, a large intestine which bears a true colon after the cecum, endothermy, a hairy, glandular and thermoregulatory skin (which releases sebum and sweat), and a 4-chambered heart to maintain their high metabolism, larger brains, and fully upright hindlimb (forelimbs remained semi sprawling, and became like that only later, in therians). Some skin glands may have evolved into mammary glands in females for fulfilling the metabolic demands of their offspring (which increased 10 times). Many skeletal changes occurred also: the dentary bone became stronger and held differentiated teeth, the pair of nasal openings in the skull became fused. These evolutionary changes lead to the first mammals (size around ). They also adapted to a burrowing lifestyle, losing their big tail-based leg muscles which allowed dinosaurs to become bipedal, and explains why bipedal mammals are so rare.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10727548
| 148,977
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325,077
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Piaget attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of social relationships, introducing a fundamental distinction between different types of said relationships. Where there is constraint because one participant holds more power than the other the relationship is asymmetrical, and, importantly, the knowledge that can be acquired by the dominated participant takes on a fixed and inflexible form. Piaget refers to this process as one of social transmission, illustrating it through reference to the way in which the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of the group. Similarly, where adults exercise a dominating influence over the growing child, it is through social transmission that children can acquire knowledge. By contrast, in cooperative relations, power is more evenly distributed between participants so that a more symmetrical relationship emerges. Under these conditions, authentic forms of intellectual exchange become possible; each partner has the freedom to project his or her own thoughts, consider the positions of others, and defend his or her own point of view. In such circumstances, where children's thinking is not limited by a dominant influence, Piaget believed "the reconstruction of knowledge", or favorable conditions for the emergence of constructive solutions to problems, exists. Here the knowledge that emerges is open, flexible and regulated by the logic of argument rather than being determined by an external authority.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=95274
| 324,904
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2,012,666
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For best isolation results, it is imperative that fecal samples be collected, refrigerated and sent to the diagnostic laboratory as soon as possible to maintain sample integrity. For rectal swabs, Amies or Cary-Blair transport mediums are recommended in order to protect the sample from toxic effects of oxygen on "Campylobacter" species. Traditionally, filtration methods have been used to help isolate "C. upsaliensis" with filter pore size of 0.45 𝛍m in order to decrease contamination from other bacteria and fungi. There are limitations to this method however as samples with less than 105 CFU per gram of feces are not likely to be successfully isolated. Culture environments with 5-10% oxygen and 1-10% carbon dioxide at 37℃ is recommended. Selective medias with oxygen scavenging properties from blood or charcoal are generally used with additions of antibiotics like cefaperazone and antifungals. On blood agars like Skirrow’s media, "C. upsaliensis" colonies appear smooth, pink, regular edged, shiny and convex. On charcoal agars, colonies appear flat, grey with a metallic sheen, and are likely to spread. Theoretically, culture methods are great for susceptibility testing to guide antimicrobial use in addition to its use in identification, however the lack of internationally accepted criteria limits susceptibility testing in this species.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13719794
| 2,011,513
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1,098,983
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However, the Chase hypothesis has been criticized by Tonio Andrade. According to Andrade, the Chinese themselves considered guns to be highly valuable against nomads. During the Ming-Mongol wars of the 1300s and early 1400s, guns were utilized. In October 1428, the Xuande Emperor led an imperial border unit of 3,000 against a roughly equal force of Mongols. The Ming opened fire on the Mongols using handheld firearms and killed more than half of them. Firearms were also used in defending against a Mongol invasion in 1449 and guns were in high demand along the northern borders where gun emplacements were common. Several sources make it clear that Chinese military leaders found guns to be highly effective against nomads throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. The military scholar Weng Wanda goes as far as to claim that only with firearms could one hope to succeed against the fast moving Mongols, and purchased special guns for both the Great Wall defenses and offensive troops who fought in the steppes. Andrade also points out that Chase downplays the amount of warfare going on outside of the northern frontier, specifically southern China where huge infantry battles and sieges such as in Europe were the norm. In 1368 the Ming army invaded Sichuan, Mongolia, and Yunnan. Although little mention of firearm is used in accounts of the Mongolia campaign, Ming cannons readily routed the war elephants of Yunnan, and in the case of Sichuan, both sides employed equally potent firearms. When the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang died, the civil war which ensued had Chinese armies fighting one another, again with equally powerful firearms. After the usurper Yongle's victory, the Ming embarked upon yet another five expeditions into Mongolia alongside an invasion of Dai Viet, many of their troops wielding firearms. In 1414 the Ming army clashed with an Oirat force near the Tula River and frightened them so much with their guns that the Oirats fled without their spare horses, only to be ambushed by concealed Chinese guns. According to a Chinese observer the Oirats avoided battle several days later, "fearing that the guns had arrived again." In Vietnam, as with Yunnan, the war elephants fared poorly and were defeated with a combination of arrows and firearms. Chinese firearms were used in defensive fortifications to some effect, but were ineffective at targeting individual targets such as Vietnamese guerillas presented themselves.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56557517
| 1,098,423
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48,895
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Ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCM) and their truck-like launch vehicles were employed at bases in Europe; they were withdrawn from service to comply with the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Many of the anti-ship versions were converted into TLAMs at the end of the Cold War. The Block III TLAMs that entered service in 1993 can fly 3 percent farther using their new turbofan engines and use Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to strike more precisely. Block III TLAM-Cs retain the Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation (DSMAC) II navigation system, allowing three kinds of navigation: GPS-only, which allow for rapid mission planning, with some reduced accuracy, DSMAC-only, which take longer to plan but terminal accuracy is somewhat better; and GPS-aided missions that combine DSMAC II and GPS navigation for greatest accuracy. Block IV TLAMs have an improved turbofan engine that allows them to get better fuel economy and change speeds in flight. The Block IV TLAMs can loiter better and have electro-optical sensors that allow real-time battle damage assessment. The Block IVs can be given a new target in flight and can transmit an image, via satcom, immediately before impact to help determine whether the missile is on target and the likely damage from the attack.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31238
| 48,875
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1,110,507
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In 1917 the Foreign Data Section of the Army Signal Corps’ Airplane Engineering Department was established at McCook Field, and a NASIC predecessor operated the Army Aeronautical Museum of the Material Division, August 22, 1935. The Office of the Chief of Air Corps's Information Division had become the OCAC Intelligence Division by 1939, which transferred into the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) as AC/AS, Intelligence and was known as A-2 (in April, 1942, the Air Intelligence School was at the Harrisburg Academy.) The United States Army Air Forces evaluated foreign aircraft during World War II with the "T-2 Intelligence Department at Wright Field and Freeman Field, Indiana". In July 1944, Wright Field analysts fired a V-1 engine reconstructed from "Robot Blitz" wreckage (an entire V-1 was reconstructed at Republic Aviation by September 8). Post-war, Operation Lusty recruited German technology experts who were interrogated prior to working in the United States, e.g., Dr. Herbert Wagner at a Point Mugu USMC detachment and Walter Dornberger at Bell Aircraft. The "capability…anticipated for Soviet intercontinental jet bombers" (e.g., in NSC 20/4 in the fall of 1945) determined a Radar Fence was needed for sufficient U.S. warning and that the "1954 Interceptor" (F-106) was needed (specified in the January 13, 1949, Air Development Order): "the appearance of a Soviet jet bomber [was in the] 1954…May Day parade".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38616763
| 1,109,942
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2,200,823
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Coherent microwave scattering is a diagnostic technique used in the characterization of classical microplasmas. In this technique, the plasma to be studied is irradiated with a long-wavelength microwave field relative to the characteristic spatial dimensions of the plasma. For plasmas with sufficiently low skin-depths, the emission from the target is periodically polarized in a uniform fashion, and the scattered field can be measured and analyzed. In this case, the emitted radiation resembles that of a short-dipole predominantly determined by electron contributions rather than ions. The scattering is correspondingly referred to as constructive elastic. Various properties can be derived from the measured radiation such as total electron numbers, electron number densities (if the plasma volume is known), local magnetic fields through magnetically-induced depolarization, and electron collision frequencies for momentum transfer through the scattered phase. Notable advantages of the technique include a high sensitivity, ease of calibration using a dielectric scattering sample, good temporal resolution, low shot noise, non-intrusive probing, species-selectivity when coupled with resonance-enhanced multiphoton ionization (REMPI), single-shot acquisition, and the capability of time-gating due to continuous scanning.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=71498717
| 2,199,571
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743,153
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Additional preclinical and clinical data, suggest that Substance P [SP] and IL-6 may act in concert to promote major depression. SP, a hybrid neurotransmitter-cytokine, is co-transmitted with BDNF through paleo-spinothalamic circuitry from the periphery with collaterals into key areas of the limbic system. However, both IL6 and SP mitigate expression of BDNF in brain regions associated with negative affect and memory. SP and IL6 both relax tight junctions of the blood brain barrier, such that effects seen in fMRI experiments with these molecules may be a bidirectional mix of neuronal, glial, capillary, synaptic, paracrine, or endocrine-like effects. At the cellular level, SP is noted to increase expression of interleukin-6 (IL-6) through PI-3K, p42/44 and p38 MAP kinase pathways. Data suggest that nuclear translocation of NF-κB regulates IL-6 overexpression in SP-stimulated cells. This is of key interest as: 1) a meta-analysis indicates an association of major depressive disorder, C-reactive protein and IL6 plasma concentrations, 2) NK1R antagonists [five molecules] studied by 3 independent groups in over 2000 patients from 1998 to 2013 validate the mechanism as dose-related, fully effective antidepressant, with a unique safety profile. (see Summary of NK1RAs in Major Depression), 3) the preliminary observation that plasma concentrations of IL6 are elevated in depressed patients with cancer, and 4) selective NK1RAs may eliminate endogenous SP stress-induced augmentation of IL-6 secretion pre-clinically. These and many other reports suggest that a clinical study of a neutralizing IL-6 biological or drug based antagonist is likely warranted in patients with major depressive disorder, with or without co-morbid chronic inflammatory based illnesses; that the combination of NK1RAs and IL6 blockers may represent a new, potentially biomarkable approach to major depression, and possibly bipolar disorder.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1613644
| 742,759
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915,261
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At the beginning of World War II, Utah State was one of six colleges selected by the United States Navy to give a Primary School in the highly unusual Electronics Training Program (ETP). Starting March 23, 1942, and each month thereafter, a new group of 100 Navy students arrived for three months of 14-hour days in concentrated electrical engineering study. Smart Gymnasium was converted to a dormitory, and Old Main was fitted out for classrooms and laboratories. Larry S. Cole was named Program Director and Waldo G. Hobson was the Director of Instruction. ETP admission required passing the Eddy Test, one of the most selective qualifying exams given during the war years. At a given time, some 300 Navy students were on the campus, greatly augmenting the war-years regular enrollment of 1000. Sidney R. Stock had earlier developed the Radio and Aviation Department and entered the Navy as a Lieutenant Commander to assist in organizing electronics training. He was a member of the committee in Washington that planned the ETP and shortly returned to Utah State as the Officer-in-Charge. The ETP Primary School continued at Utah State until August 1944, graduating about 2,750 students in 30 classes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=267513
| 914,780
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492,035
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"Ulysses" was launched October 6, 1990, and reached Jupiter for its "gravitational slingshot" in February 1992. It passed the south solar pole in June 1994 and crossed the ecliptic equator in February 1995. The solar X-ray and cosmic gamma-ray burst experiment (GRB) had 3 main objectives: study and monitor solar flares, detect and localize cosmic gamma-ray bursts, and in-situ detection of Jovian aurorae. "Ulysses" was the first satellite carrying a gamma burst detector which went outside the orbit of Mars. The hard X-ray detectors operated in the range 15–150 keV. The detectors consisted of 23-mm thick × 51-mm diameter CsI(Tl) crystals mounted via plastic light tubes to photomultipliers. The hard detector changed its operating mode depending on (1) measured count rate, (2) ground command, or (3) change in spacecraft telemetry mode. The trigger level was generally set for 8-sigma above background and the sensitivity is 10 erg/cm (1 nJ/m). When a burst trigger is recorded, the instrument switches to record high resolution data, recording it to a 32-kbit memory for a slow telemetry read out. Burst data consist of either 16 s of 8-ms resolution count rates or 64 s of 32-ms count rates from the sum of the 2 detectors. There were also 16 channel energy spectra from the sum of the 2 detectors (taken either in 1, 2, 4, 16, or 32 second integrations). During 'wait' mode, the data were taken either in 0.25 or 0.5 s integrations and 4 energy channels (with shortest integration time being 8 s). Again, the outputs of the 2 detectors were summed.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44062
| 491,781
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89,432
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On July 14, 2011, "The Jerusalem Post" reported that the IDF had begun developing a successor for the Merkava series of tanks. The development was begun in part by the arrival of the Trophy active protection system. With the system's ability to intercept threats at a stand-off distance, there was a review of the need for vehicles like the Merkava to have thick, heavy layers of armor. The Merkava Tank Planning Directorate set up a team to study principles for a future tank and present ideas for an armored fighting vehicle to provide mobile firepower on a future battlefield. The team reviewed basic design principles including lessening its weight, armor thickness compared to an APS to intercept anti-tank threats, reducing the crew size, and the type of main gun. Horsepower abilities and heavy and light track systems compared to a wheeled chassis were also considered. With future battlefield condition developments affecting design features, the vehicle may not be considered a "tank" in the traditional sense. By July 2012, details began to emerge of considerations for developing technologies for the new design. One possibility is the replacement of the traditional main gun with a laser cannon or an electromagnetic cannon. Other improvements could include a hybrid-electric engine and a reduced crew of two. The goals of the new tank are to make it faster, better protected, more interoperable and lethal than the prior Merkava.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=166378
| 89,395
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