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324,522 | In early 2011, Australian mining company Lynas was reported to be "hurrying to finish" a US$230 million rare-earth refinery on the eastern coast of Peninsular Malaysia's industrial port of Kuantan. The plant would refine ore — lanthanides concentrate from the Mount Weld mine in Australia. The ore would be trucked to Fremantle and transported by container ship to Kuantan. Within two years, Lynas was said to expect the refinery to be able to meet nearly a third of the world's demand for rare-earth materials, not counting China. The Kuantan development brought renewed attention to the Malaysian town of Bukit Merah in Perak, where a rare-earth mine operated by a Mitsubishi Chemical subsidiary, Asian Rare Earth, closed in 1994 and left continuing environmental and health concerns. In mid-2011, after protests, Malaysian government restrictions on the Lynas plant were announced. At that time, citing subscription-only "Dow Jones Newswire" reports, a "Barrons" report said the Lynas investment was $730 million, and the projected share of the global market it would fill put at "about a sixth." An independent review initiated by the Malaysian Government, and conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2011 to address concerns of radioactive hazards, found no non-compliance with international radiation safety standards. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=145440 | 324,349 |
19,639 | Through further anthropological studies regarding "personal insights" and the psycho-social effects of psilocybin, it can be seen in many traditional societies that powerful mind-active substances such as psilocybin are regularly "consumed ritually for therapeutic purposes or for transcending normal, everyday reality." Positive effects that psilocybin has on individuals can be observed by taking on an anthropological approach and moving away from the Western bio-medical society; this is aided by the studies done by Leary. Within certain traditional societies where the use of psilocybin is frequent for shamanic healing rituals, group collectives praise their guide, healer and shaman for helping alleviate them of pains, aches and hurt. They do this through a group ritual practice where participants, or just the guide, ingests psilocybin to help extract any "toxic psychic residues or sorcerous implants" found in one's body. Group therapies using classic psychedelics are becoming more commonly used in the Western world in clinical practice. This may continue to grow as long providing the evidence remains indicative of safety and efficacy. In social sense, the group is shaped by their experiences surrounding psilocybin and how they view the plant collectively. As mentioned in anthropologist article, the group partake in a "journey" together, thus adding to the spiritual, social body, where roles, hierarchies and gender are subjectively understood. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38468 | 19,631 |
356,033 | Transcendental Meditation in education (also known as Consciousness-Based Education) is the application of the Transcendental Meditation technique in an educational setting or institution. These educational programs and institutions have been founded in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Africa and Japan. The Transcendental Meditation technique became popular with students in the 1960s and by the early 1970s centers for the Students International Meditation Society were established at a thousand campuses in the United States with similar growth occurring in Germany, Canada and Britain. The Maharishi International University was established in 1973 in the United States and began offering accredited degree programs. In 1977 courses in Transcendental Meditation and the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI) were banned from New Jersey public high schools on religious grounds by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This "dismantled" the TM program's use of government funding in US public schools but "did not constitute a negative evaluation of the program itself". Since 1979, schools that incorporate the Transcendental Meditation technique using private, non-governmental funding have been reported in the United States, South America, Southeast Asia, Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28677895 | 355,850 |
1,140,511 | Diver trails also called wreck trails can be used to allow scuba-divers to visit and understand archaeological sites that are suitable for scuba-diving One excellent example is the Florida Public Archaeology Network's (FPAN) "Florida Panhandle Shipwreck Trail." The Florida Panhandle Shipwreck Trail features 12 shipwrecks including artificial reefs and a variety of sea life for diving, snorkeling and fishing offshore of Pensacola, Destin, Panama City and Port St. Joe, Florida. Otherwise presentation will typically rely on publication (book or journal articles, web-sites and electronic media such as CD-ROM). Television programs, web videos and social media can also bring an understanding of underwater archaeology to a broad audience. The "Mardi Gras" Shipwreck Project integrated a one-hour HD documentary, short videos for public viewing and video updates during the expedition as part of the educational outreach. Webcasting is also another tool for educational outreach. For one week in 2000 and 2001, live underwater video of the "Queen Anne's Revenge" Shipwreck Project was webcast to the Internet as a part of the "QAR DiveLive" educational program that reached thousands of children around the world. Created and co-produced by Nautilus Productions and Marine Grafics, this project enabled students to talk to scientists and learn about methods and technologies used by the underwater archaeology team. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5720331 | 1,139,917 |
1,191,419 | When drugs are covered under patent protection, only the pharmaceutical company that holds the patent is allowed to manufacture, market, and eventually profit from them. The lifetime of the patent varies between countries and also between drugs; in the United States, most drug patents last about twenty years. Once the patent has expired, the drug can be manufactured and sold by other companies - at which point, it is referred to as a generic drug. Its availability on the market as a generic drug removes the monopoly of the patent holder, thereby encouraging competition and causing a significant drop in drug prices, which ensures that life-saving and important drugs reach the general population at fair prices. However, the company holding the initial patent may get a new patent by forming a new version of the drug that is significantly changed compared to the original compound. Patentability of different isomers has been controversial over the past ten years and there have been a number of related legal issues. In making their determinations, courts have looked at factors including: (i) Whether the racemate was known in the prior art. (ii) The difficulty in resolving the enantiomers. (iii) The stereoselectivity of the relevant receptor. (iv) Other secondary considerations of non-obviousness such as commercial success, unexpected results, and satisfaction of long-felt needs in the art. The decisions made regarding these issues have varied and there is no clear answer to the legality of patenting stereoisomers. These issues have been resolved on a case-by-case basis. With the number of current pharmaceuticals currently being marketed as racemic mixtures, it is likely that patentability will continue to be debated in the near future. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23616040 | 1,190,785 |
1,177,056 | The competition is founded and orchestrated by Professors Wolfgang Ketter and John Collins and the platform software is developed collaboratively by researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Centre for Future Energy Business, the Institute for Energy Economics at the University of Cologne, and the Computer Science department at the University of Minnesota. The platform uses a variety of real-world data about weather, market prices and aggregate demand, and customer behavior. Broker agents are developed by research teams around the world and entered in annual tournaments. Data from those tournaments are publicly available and can be used to assess agent performance and interactions. The platform exploits competitive benchmarking to facilitate research into, among other topics, tariff design in retail electricity markets, bidding strategies in wholesale electricity markets, performance of markets as penetration of sustainable energy resources or electric vehicles is ramped up or down, effectiveness of machine learning approaches, and alternative policy approaches to market regulation. The software has contributed to research topics ranging from the use of electric vehicle fleets as virtual power plants to how an electricity customer decision support system (DSS) can be used to design effective demand response programs using methods such as dynamic pricing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38803848 | 1,176,433 |
674,748 | This area of study began for Broca with the dispute between the proponents of cerebral localization – whose views derived from the phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall – and their opponents led by Pierre Flourens. Phrenologists believed that the human mind has a set of various mental faculties, each one represented in a different area of the brain. With specific areas representing personality characteristics like one's aggressiveness or spirituality, but also memory and linguistic abilities. Their opponents claimed that, by careful ablation (specific way of removing material) of various brain regions, Flourens had disproved Gall's hypotheses. However, Gall's former student, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, kept the localization of function hypothesis alive (especially with regards to a "language center"), although he rejected much of the remaining phrenological thinking. In 1848, Bouillaud relied on his work with brain-damaged patients to challenge other professionals to disprove him by finding a case of frontal lobe damage unaccompanied by a disorder of speech. His son-in-law, Ernest Aubertin (1825–1893), began seeking out cases to either support or disprove the theory, and he found several in support of it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=145048 | 674,395 |
173,899 | Amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887 in Germany by Romanian chemist, Lazăr Edeleanu, who named the drug "phenylisopropylamine". This concoction was one of a series of compounds related to the plant derivative ephedrine, which had been isolated from the Chinese ephedra plant that same year by Nagai Nagayoshi. Shortly after the first synthesis of amphetamine, Nagai synthesized methamphetamine from ephedrine in 1893. In 1919, methamphetamine hydrochloride, also known as "crystal meth", was synthesized by pharmacologist Akira Ogata via reduction of ephedrine using red phosphorus and iodine. The sympathomimetic properties of amphetamine were unknown until 1927, when pioneer psychopharmacologist Gordon Alles independently resynthesized it and tested it on himself while searching for an artificial replacement for ephedrine. At the time, Alles referred to the amphetamine compound as Benzedrine, a term derived from the name "benzyl-methyl carbinamine". In 1934, Smith, Kline & French made the first amphetamine pharmaceutical when they began selling a decongestant inhaler containing the volatile amphetamine free base under the trade name Benzedrine. One of the first attempts at using amphetamine in a scientific study was done by M. Nathanson, a Los Angeles physician, in 1935. He studied the subjective effects of amphetamine in 55 hospital workers who were each given 20 mg of Benzedrine. The two most commonly reported drug effects were "a sense of well being and a feeling of exhilaration" and "lessened fatigue in reaction to work". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40542151 | 173,808 |
1,871,822 | Aseem Prakash is a professor of Political Science, the Walker Family Professor of the College of music and Sciences and the Founding Director of the UW Center for Environmental Politics. He serves as the General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Business and Public Policy and the Associate Editor of Business & Society. In addition to serving on editorial boards of several additional journals, he has been elected as the Vice-President of the International Studies Association (2015-2016). Professor Prakash is a member of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Board on Environmental Change and Society and International Research Fellow at the Center for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford. He was elected to the position of the Vice President of the International Studies Association for the period, 2015-2016. He is the recipient of International Studies Association, International Political Economy Section's 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award that recognizes "outstanding senior scholars whose influence and path-breaking intellectual work will continue to impact the field for years to come as well as the Associations' 2018 James N. Rosenau Award for "scholar who has made the most important contributions to globalization studies". The European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Regulatory Governance awarded him the 2018 Regulatory Studies Development Award that recognizes a senior scholar who has made notable "contributions to the field of regulatory governance." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20784833 | 1,870,745 |
2,106,329 | The prize is one of the orders, decorations, and medals of Ukraine, which are described by the Government of Ukraine as "the highest form of recognition of citizens for outstanding services in the development of economy, science, culture, social sphere, defense of the Fatherland, protection of constitutional human rights and freedoms, state building and public activity". In full, the award is given for: Humanities, natural and technical sciences, positively influencing the social progress and maintaining the recognition of the national science in the world; for the development and introduction of new techniques, materials and technologies, new ways and methods of treatment and prevention of diseases that meet the level of the world advances; for works that constitute a significant contribution to solving problems of environmental protection and ensuring ecological safety; creation of textbooks meeting the contemporary requirements and encouraging effective knowledge acquisition, and essentially influencing the improvement of future specialists' training. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64562528 | 2,105,116 |
1,226,988 | In a 2012 study it is claimed that "new mathematical modelling, diagnostic, communications, and informatics technologies can identify and report hitherto unknown microbes in other species, and thus new risk assessment approaches are needed to identify microbes most likely to cause human disease". The study investigates challenges in moving the global pandemic strategy from response to pre-emption. Some scientists are screening blood samples from wildlife for new viruses. The international Global Virome Project (GVP) aims to identify the causes of fatal new diseases before emergence in human hosts by genetically characterizing viruses found in wild animals. The project aims to enlist an international network of scientists to collect hundreds of thousands of viruses, map their genomes, characterize and risk-stratify them to identify which ones to pay attention to. However, some infectious disease experts have criticized the project as too broad and expensive due to limited global scientific and financial resources and because only a small percentage of the world's zoonotic viruses may cross into humans and pose a threat. They argue for prioritizing rapidly detecting diseases when they cross into humans and an improving the understanding of their mechanisms. A successful prevention of a pandemic from specific viruses may also require ensuring that it does not re-emerge – for instance by sustaining itself in domestic animals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63478457 | 1,226,327 |
1,668,874 | That same year in the physiology laboratory two floors above FitzGerald's Connaught Labs office, Frederick Banting and Charles Best (medical scientist) under the auspices of J.J.R. Macleod successfully extracted insulin from the pancreas of dogs, fetal calves, and adult cows. In particular, Banting's experimental work with calf pancreas tissue took place at Connaught's farm site, where calves were involved in smallpox vaccine production. FitzGerald had arranged access to Connaught's modest facilities, along with $5,000 from the Labs' reserves, to expedite the team's work. In the months that followed, the researchers worked to refine the extracts to a degree safe for human injection with the help of biochemist James Collip. Tensions mounted during this time between the four "co-discovers" of insulin, exacerbated greatly by Collip's suggestion that he could return anytime to Alberta with his purification work and patent it. FitzGerald therefore stepped in as peacemaker to prepare a seminal research and development agreement between the Connaught Laboratories and the researchers. It established two key conditions: 1) that the collaborators would sign a contract agreeing not to take out a patent with a commercial pharmaceutical firm during an initial working period with Connaught; and 2) that no changes in the research policy would be allowed unless first discussed among FitzGerald and the four collaborators. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61019378 | 1,667,934 |
113,806 | His first teaching position in the United States was at the Malkin Conservatory (Boston University). He moved to Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which later named a music building on their respective campuses Schoenberg Hall. He was appointed visiting professor at UCLA in 1935 on the recommendation of Otto Klemperer, music director and conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; and the next year was promoted to professor at a salary of $5,100 per year, which enabled him in either May 1936 or 1937 to buy a Spanish Revival house at 116 North Rockingham in Brentwood Park, near the UCLA campus, for $18,000. This address was directly across the street from Shirley Temple's house, and there he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin. The Schoenbergs were able to employ domestic help and began holding Sunday afternoon gatherings that were known for excellent coffee and Viennese pastries. Frequent guests included Otto Klemperer (who studied composition privately with Schoenberg beginning in April 1936), Edgard Varèse, Joseph Achron, Louis Gruenberg, Ernst Toch, and, on occasion, well-known actors such as Harpo Marx and Peter Lorre. Composers Leonard Rosenman and George Tremblay and the Hollywood orchestrator Edward B. Powell studied with Schoenberg at this time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67025 | 113,761 |
1,148,043 | Toward the end of June, the squadron moved to Picauville Airfield, France, and for the rest of the war concentrated on providing close air support for ground forces. It supported Operation Cobra, the breakout at Saint Lo in July with attacks on military vehicles and artillery positions. The squadron engaged and destroyed a German armored column near Avranches, France, on 29 July 1944. After immobilizing leading and trailing elements of the 3-mile (4.8 km) long column, the rest of the tanks and trucks were systematically destroyed with multiple sorties. Its operations from D-Day through September 1944 supporting the liberation of Belgium earned the squadron a citation in the Order of the Day of the Belgian Army. The squadron received a Distinguished Unit Citation for action on 24 September 1944 when the 4th Armored Division experienced a counterattack by enemy forces and urgently needed air support. Elements of the 405th Group attacked the enemy armor despite an 800-foot ceiling that forced attacks to be made from low level in the face of intense flak. A second group element was unable to locate the tank battle because of the adverse weather, but located a reinforcing column of armor and trucks, causing major damage. A third element attacked warehouses and other buildings in the vicinity that were being used by the enemy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17892971 | 1,147,438 |
206,481 | Since 1975 ion chromatography has been widely used in many branches of industry. The main beneficial advantages are reliability, very good accuracy and precision, high selectivity, high speed, high separation efficiency, and low cost of consumables. The most significant development related to ion chromatography are new sample preparation methods; improving the speed and selectivity of analytes separation; lowering of limits of detection and limits of quantification; extending the scope of applications; development of new standard methods; miniaturization and extending the scope of the analysis of a new group of substances. Allows for quantitative testing of electrolyte and proprietary additives of electroplating baths. It is an advancement of qualitative hull cell testing or less accurate UV testing. Ions, catalysts, brighteners and accelerators can be measured. Ion exchange chromatography has gradually become a widely known, universal technique for the detection of both anionic and cationic species. Applications for such purposes have been developed, or are under development, for a variety of fields of interest, and in particular, the pharmaceutical industry. The usage of ion exchange chromatography in pharmaceuticals has increased in recent years, and in 2006, a chapter on ion exchange chromatography was officially added to the United States Pharmacopia-National Formulary (USP-NF). Furthermore, in 2009 release of the USP-NF, the United States Pharmacopia made several analyses of ion chromatography available using two techniques: conductivity detection, as well as pulse amperometric detection. Majority of these applications are primarily used for measuring and analyzing residual limits in pharmaceuticals, including detecting the limits of oxalate, iodide, sulfate, sulfamate, phosphate, as well as various electrolytes including potassium, and sodium. In total, the 2009 edition of the USP-NF officially released twenty eight methods of detection for the analysis of active compounds, or components of active compounds, using either conductivity detection or pulse amperometric detection. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1787246 | 206,374 |
1,008,699 | Psychoacoustics is applied within many fields of software development, where developers map proven and experimental mathematical patterns in digital signal processing. Many audio compression codecs such as MP3 and Opus use a psychoacoustic model to increase compression ratios. The success of conventional audio systems for the reproduction of music in theatres and homes can be attributed to psychoacoustics and psychoacoustic considerations gave rise to novel audio systems, such as psychoacoustic sound field synthesis. Furthermore, scientists have experimented with limited success in creating new acoustic weapons, which emit frequencies that may impair, harm, or kill. Psychoacoustics are also leveraged in sonification to make multiple independent data dimensions audible and easily interpretable. This enables auditory guidance without the need for spatial audio and in sonification computer games and other applications, such as drone flying and image-guided surgery. It is also applied today within music, where musicians and artists continue to create new auditory experiences by masking unwanted frequencies of instruments, causing other frequencies to be enhanced. Yet another application is in the design of small or lower-quality loudspeakers, which can use the phenomenon of missing fundamentals to give the effect of bass notes at lower frequencies than the loudspeakers are physically able to produce (see references). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25663206 | 1,008,178 |
235,572 | The implications of psychological essentialism are numerous. Prejudiced individuals have been found to endorse exceptionally essential ways of thinking, suggesting that essentialism may perpetuate exclusion among social groups (Morton, Hornsey & Postmes, 2009). For example, essentialism of nationality has been linked to anti-immigration attitudes(Rad & Ginges, 2018). In multiple studies in India and the United States, Rad & Ginges (2018) showed that in lay view, a person's nationality is considerably fixed at birth, even if that person is adopted and raised by a family of another nationality at day one and never told about their origin. This may be due to an over-extension of an essential-biological mode of thinking stemming from cognitive development. Paul Bloom of Yale University has stated that "one of the most exciting ideas in cognitive science is the theory that people have a default assumption that things, people and events have invisible essences that make them what they are. Experimental psychologists have argued that essentialism underlies our understanding of the physical and social worlds, and developmental and cross-cultural psychologists have proposed that it is instinctive and universal. We are natural-born essentialists." Scholars suggest that the categorical nature of essentialist thinking predicts the use of stereotypes and can be targeted in the application of stereotype prevention (Bastian & Haslam, 2006). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48081 | 235,453 |
728,382 | In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright similarly identified vehicular mobility as a principal planning metric. Car-based suburbs had already been developed in the Country Club District in 1907-1908 (including later the world's first car-based shopping centre of Country Club Plaza), as well as in Beverly Hills in 1914 and Palos Verdes Estates in 1923. Wright began to idealise this vision in his Broadacre City starting in 1924, with similarities to the garden city and regional planning movements. The fundamental idea was for technology to liberate individuals. In his Usonian vision, he described the city as"spacious, well-landscaped highways, grade crossings eliminated by a new kind of integrated by-passing or over- or under-passing all traffic in cultivated or living areas … Giant roads, themselves great architecture, pass public service stations . . . passing by farm units, roadside markets, garden schools, dwelling places, each on its acres of individually adorned and cultivated ground".This was justified as a democratic ideal, as "“Democracy is the ideal of reintegrated decentralization … many free units developing strength as they learn by function and grow together in spacious mutual freedom.” This vision was however criticized by Herbert Muschamp as being contradictory in its call for individualism while relying on the master-architect to design it all. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45346 | 727,998 |
1,774,262 | Despite the improvements to the civil engineering curriculum, Atherton knew that further evolution was needed. To that end, he challenged Louis Reber, a mathematics instructor, to attend MIT for graduate work in mechanical engineering – and to pay particular attention to the processes and procedures used for engineering education – in order to develop Penn State's two-year mechanic arts program into a four-year mechanical engineering curriculum. Reber took to the challenge, and also studied engineering education methods in use at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Stevens Institute of Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Minnesota to establish a baseline for Penn State's program, which at that time consisted of mechanical drawing, woodworking, and carpentry. Reber also supervised the installation of a forge and foundry, and in 1884 asked for $3,500 to construct new building solely devoted to mechanic arts; Atherton immediately approved Reber's request, and the resulting building was the first structure erected for purely academic purposes. Machinery and equipment for the building were purchased at reduced prices from equipment manufacturers based on the advertising potential and inherent goodwill to be found in labeling items “for educational purposes.” | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31430357 | 1,773,265 |
1,264,835 | The popularization of woodblock printing during the Tang dynasty made the written word available to greater audiences. As a result of the much wider distribution and circulation of reading materials, the general populace were for the first time able to purchase affordable copies of texts, which correspondingly led to greater literacy. While the immediate effects of woodblock printing did not create a drastic change in Chinese society, in the long term, the accumulated effects of increased literacy enlarged the talent pool to encompass civilians of broader social-economic circumstances and backgrounds, who would be seen entering the imperial examinations and passing them by the later Song dynasty. The extent of woodblock printing is attested to by one of the world's oldest surviving printed documents, a miniature Buddhist "dharani" sutra unearthed at Xi'an in 1974, dating roughly from 650 to 670. A copy of the "Diamond Sutra" found at Dunhuang is the earliest surviving full-length book printed at regular size, complete with illustrations embedded within the text and dated precisely to 868. Among the earliest documents to be printed were Buddhist texts as well as calendars, the latter essential for calculating and marking which days were auspicious and which days were not. The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials in China had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country. Of this, he said: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31641740 | 1,264,147 |
1,409,453 | Subsequent work in Ames' lab involved looking at an overview of what was mutagenic or carcinogenic, and to what degree. Previously, scientists tended to only look for positive or negative results without considering the magnitude of the effect, which meant that as more and more items were shown to be potentially mutagenic, there was no system for evaluating the relative dangers. He also continued to test various natural and man-made compounds, and discovered that, despite what he and others had assumed, naturally occurring compounds were not turning out to be benign as compared to man-made ones. His continued work eventually led to his falling out of favor with many environmentalists. As natural chemicals turned out to also be frequently mutagenic, he argued that environmental exposure to manufactured chemicals may be of limited relevance to human cancer, even when such chemicals are mutagenic in an Ames test and carcinogenic in rodent assays. He contended that most human genetic damage arises from essential micronutrients lacking in poor diets and the oxidation of DNA during normal metabolism, and that the most important environmental carcinogens may include some whose chief effect is to cause the chronic division of stem cells whereby the normal protective mechanisms of a cell become less effective. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=850454 | 1,408,661 |
1,071,607 | The Stöber process is a chemical process used to prepare silica () particles of controllable and uniform size for applications in materials science. It was pioneering when it was reported by Werner Stöber and his team in 1968, and remains today the most widely used wet chemistry synthetic approach to silica nanoparticles. It is an example of a sol-gel process wherein a molecular precursor (typically tetraethylorthosilicate) is first reacted with water in an alcoholic solution, the resulting molecules then joining together to build larger structures. The reaction produces silica particles with diameters ranging from 50 to 2000 nm, depending on conditions. The process has been actively researched since its discovery, including efforts to understand its kinetics and mechanisma particle aggregation model was found to be a better fit for the experimental data than the initially hypothesized LaMer model. The newly acquired understanding has enabled researchers to exert a high degree of control over particle size and distribution and to fine-tune the physical properties of the resulting material in order to suit intended applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32297166 | 1,071,053 |
551,982 | The identification of structures with a high guanine association became apparent in the early 1960s, through the identification of gel-like substances associated with guanines. More specifically, this research detailed the four-stranded DNA structures with a high association of guanines, which was later identified in eukaryotic telomeric regions of DNA in the 1980s. The importance of discovering G-quadruplex structure was described through the statement, “If G-quadruplexes form so readily "in vitro", Nature will have found a way of using them "in vivo"” - Aaron Klug, Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry (1982). Interest in "in vivo" function of G-quadruplexes surged after large scale genome-wide analysis showed the prevalence of potential G-quadruplex (pG4)-forming sequences within gene promoters of human, chimpanzee, mouse, and rat - presented in the First International G-quadruplex Meeting held in April 2007 in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2006, the prevalence of G-quadruplexes within gene promoters of several bacterial genomes was reported predicting G-quadruplex-mediated gene regulation. With the abundance of G-quadruplexes "in vivo", these structures hold a biologically relevant role through interactions with the promoter regions of oncogenes and the telomeric regions of DNA strands. Current research consists of identifying the biological function of these G-Quadruplex structures for specific oncogenes and discovering effective therapeutic treatments for cancer based on interactions with G-quadruplexes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4238684 | 551,694 |
751,079 | The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke states that physical therapy can improve motor control and overall body strength in individuals with hypotonia. This is crucial to maintaining both static and dynamic postural stability, which is important since postural instability is a common problem in people with hypotonia. A physiotherapist can develop patient specific training programs to optimize postural control, in order to increase balance and safety. To protect against postural asymmetries the use of supportive and protective devices may be necessary. Physical therapists might use neuromuscular/sensory stimulation techniques such as quick stretch, resistance, joint approximation, and tapping to increase tone by facilitating or enhancing muscle contraction in patients with hypotonia. For patients who demonstrate muscle weakness in addition to hypotonia strengthening exercises that do not overload the muscles are indicated. Electrical Muscle Stimulation, also known as Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) can also be used to "activate hypotonic muscles, improve strength, and generate movement in paralyzed limbs while preventing disuse atrophy". When using NMES it is important to have the patient focus on attempting to contract the muscle(s) being stimulated. Without such concentration on movement attempts, carryover to volitional movement is not feasible. NMES should ideally be combined with functional training activities to improve outcomes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=980745 | 750,681 |
679,017 | By 1964, the US Government issued new requirements regarding the SST Program which required Lockheed to modify their design, by now called the L-2000-2. The new design had numerous modifications to the wing; one change was rounding the front of the forward delta in order to eliminate the pitch-up tendency. To increase high-speed aerodynamic efficiency, the wing's thickness was reduced to 2.3%, the leading edges were made sharper, the sweep angles were changed from 80/60° to 85/62°, and substantial twist and camber were added to the forward delta; much of the rear delta was twisted upwards to allow the elevons to remain flush at Mach 3.0. In addition, wing/body fairings were added on the underside of the fuselage where the wings are located, allowing a more normally shaped nose to be used. To retain low-speed performance, the rear delta was enlarged considerably; to increase the payload, the trailing edge featured a forward sweep of 10°, extending the inner part of the wing rearward. The new nose reduced the overall length to 214 ft (65.2 m) while retaining virtually the same internal dimensions. Wingspan was identical as before, and despite the thinner wing, the increased wing area of 9,026 ft² (838.5 m²) allowed the same takeoff performance. The airplane's overall lift-to-drag ratio increased from 7.25 to 7.94. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=265811 | 678,663 |
1,934,593 | On June 24, 1977, MPTA-098 was delivered by Rockwell International to the National Space Technology Laboratory (NSTL), in Hancock County, Mississippi, where it was mated with MPTA-ET, mounted in a launch orientation and used for static engine tests. On July 2, 1979, MPTA-098 suffered major structural damage due to a fractured fuel valve on Space Shuttle Main Engine number 2002. The fracture allowed hydrogen to leak into the enclosed aft compartment, raising the pressure to beyond the structural capability of the heat shield supports, severely damaging the structure. After extensive repairs were completed, testing resumed in September, but on November 4, a high-pressure oxidizer turbopump failed 9.7 seconds into a scheduled 510-second test. Finally, on December 17, 1979, a complete static firing was accomplished that included all three Space Shuttle Main Engines running at up to 100 percent of rated thrust for 554 seconds, exceeding the predicted maximum time that the SSMEs would burn during an operational shuttle launch. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2227921 | 1,933,485 |
279,840 | By 15 January 1923, "Langley" had begun flight operations and tests in the Caribbean Sea for carrier landings. In June, she steamed to Washington, D.C., to give a demonstration at a flying exhibition before civil and military dignitaries. She arrived at Norfolk on 13 June, and commenced training along the Atlantic coast and Caribbean which carried her through the end of the year. This publicity cruise stopped at Bar Harbor, Maine, Portland, Maine, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Gloucester, Massachusetts, Boston and New York City. After entering port and anchoring, "Langley" published a takeoff and landing schedule so interested civilians might watch. Although the aviators did some formation flying over the cities, people were more interested in watching the shipboard takeoffs and landings. The planes seldom attained flying speed on deck when taking off while the ship was at anchor with little or no wind, but the pilots were confident their Vought VE-7s could reach flying speed during the drop from the flight deck before reaching the water. In 1924, "Langley" participated in more maneuvers and exhibitions, and spent the summer at Norfolk for repairs and alterations, she departed for the West Coast late in the year and arrived in San Diego, California, on 29 November to join the Pacific Battle Fleet. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=199421 | 279,690 |
1,192,067 | For over a century the casualties of war have provided valuable lessons that can be applied within the civilian sector. Specifically the past decade has seen a paradigm shift in early resuscitation of critically injured patients. Instead of replacing blood volume with high volumes of crystalloid and packed red blood cells with the sporadic use of fresh frozen plasma and platelets, we have now learned that maintaining a transfusion ratio of 1:1:1 of plasma to red blood cells to platelets in patients requiring massive transfusion results in improved outcomes [Borgman 2007] While this was initially demonstrated in the military setting, Holcomb and colleagues extrapolated this to the civilian trauma center showing improved results as well Broad implementation across both the military and civilian sector has demonstrated a decreased mortality in critically injured patients. Debate has gone back and forth as to the correct ratio that should be used; however, recently Holcomb and colleagues published the Prospective Observational Multicenter Major Trauma Transfusion (PROMMTT) Study. They compared administration a higher ratio of plasma and platelets (1:1:1) compared to a lower ratio (1:1:2). The patients that received a higher ratio had an associated three to four-fold decrease in mortality. To help mitigate confounding variables a randomized control trial called the Pragmatic Randomized Optimal Platelet and Plasma Ratios (PROPPR) has been performed to evaluate the transfusion requirement. There was no difference in 24 hour or 30 day mortality between the 1:1:1 group and the 1:1:2 group - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2107789. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36643113 | 1,191,431 |
1,723,468 | The first institutions of formal higher education were established at this time in the Islamic universities of Al-Azhar in Cairo and Sankore in Timbuktu. By the eleventh century, universities were developing in Europe, largely in reaction to the previous narrow religious doctrine. The establishment of the University of Bologna marked the beginning of the European university tradition. This was also the time when the term 'qualification' acquired a more definite meaning, although it retained its emphasis on social class structures. The nineteenth century brought with it a wave of liberalism and consciousness of equal rights and opportunities, accompanied by increased specialization and bureaucratization. The increased need for skilled employees eventually resulted in an emphasis on credentials which persists to the present day. During the twentieth century the emphasis shifted to human capital theory and technological development, eventually leading to concerns whether the education system was able to meet the demands of the labour market. At the time it was argued that the strong divisions were creating barriers to learning, and that there was a need to do away with the sharp distinction between academic and vocational systems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53715889 | 1,722,498 |
522,703 | The glowing objects were also observed in various places in the Soviet Union, mostly in the northwest. The appearance of an unidentified object over Helsinki reportedly caused heavy radio traffic in Soviet territory. In the European part of the Soviet Union "bright, luminous bodies surrounded by extended shells and emitting light rays or jets of quaint shapes" were reported. The "shells" reportedly "transformed and diffused within 10 to 15 minutes", while "a more long-lived, stable glow was observed, mostly in the northeastern part of the sky". The eyewitnesses included paramedics, on-duty "militsiya" functionaries, seamen and the longshoremen at Petrozavodsk's port, members of the military, local airport staff and an amateur astronomer. The phenomenon was also observed by the members of the IZMIRAN geophysical expedition near Lekhta. In Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, the sighting of an unidentified object was reported by three night shift employees of Pulkovo Airport, including air traffic controller B. Blagirev. According to Blagirev, he spotted a fireball-like object slightly larger than Venus at 3:55 am in the north-north-east at an azimuth of 10°. The object was surrounded by a spacious, rhythmically glowing coat with intricate structure and "the observed phenomenon had nothing similar to aurora". The object moved ascendantly to the observer, to the south-south-west, then it changed direction to north-north-west and eventually disappeared. All three airport employees failed to identify what they saw. Further reports in the Soviet Union came from Primorsk (two eyewitnesses), Petrodvorets (one eyewitness), Lomonosov (three eyewitnesses), Podporozhye (three eyewitnesses), Polovina (one eyewitness), Leppäsyrjä (one eyewitness), Kem (several eyewitnesses), Põltsamaa, Liiva, Priozersk, Kestenga, Valday and other places. Many reports were accompanied by drawings from eyewitnesses. By 30 December 1978, the Soviet researchers collected a total of 85 reports on the Petrozavodsk phenomenon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36918866 | 522,431 |
1,227,611 | LCD shutters consist of an encapsulated liquid that changes its polarization in response to an applied electrical field. The response is fairly linear, so even a small amount of leaked power reaching the surrounding shutters causes the image to become blurry. To counteract this effect and improve switching speed, LCDs use an Active matrix addressing of transparent thin-film transistors to switch each shutter directly. This adds complexity to the LCD screen and makes them more challenging to manufacture. The shutters are not perfect and allow light to leak through, reducing relative brightness and color gamut. Additionally, the use of a polarizer to create the shutter limits the viewing angles where a visually indistinguishable contrast-ratio experience may be had. Most importantly, the switching process takes some time, on the order of milliseconds, which leads to the blurring of fast-moving scenes. Massive investment in the LCD manufacturing process has addressed most of these issues, but no single LCD-based solution has proven able to overcome all aforementioned issues. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1530649 | 1,226,950 |
1,769,437 | Transportation, the postal system, and telecommunications employed over 12 million people in 1985. Long-distance transportation was carried primarily by railroads, inland waterways, and highways. The government-run railroad network was the backbone of the freight system, and rail lines extended to nearly all parts of China. In most areas, however, the rail system had too few feeder lines and was inadequately integrated. Much of the rail system had been improved in the 1980s; many heavily used stretches were converted to double track or upgraded, and several key new lines were constructed to relieve congested areas. Most locomotives in use in the early 1980s were picturesque but outdated steam engines. By 1987, however, several railroad districts had converted entirely to more modern and efficient diesel or electric locomotives, and domestic production of modern engines was supplemented by imported models. Within their limitations the railroads functioned fairly efficiently and made intensive use of the rail network. In 1986 the railroads carried 874.5 billion ton-kilometers of freight, 45 percent of the national freight total and a 7.8 percent increase over 1985. They also carried nearly 1.1 billion passengers, 20 percent of the national total. Despite reasonably good performance, the ability of the economy to move goods between cities and regions was severely limited by deficiencies in the system, and improvement of the railroads continued to be a high priority for state investment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14189344 | 1,768,443 |
2,161,898 | DoD is moving towards a performance-based strategy and contracting focus as the preferred weapon systems sustainment plan, streamlining contracting and financing mechanisms in order to buy availability and readiness measured by performance criteria. Performance Based Logistics (PBL) strategy is applied to achieve near-term improvements in end-to-end sustainment, material readiness, and Total life-cycle systems management (TLCSM) through public-private partnerships that combine best practice capabilities of industry and organic support. Leverage point models illustrate where small differences in operational thinking can make a large impact on cost, readiness or productivity. In DoD context, these models are built with a perspective (e.g. O&S) that makes clear purpose, and emphasize variables such as the accumulations of end items and components in states of repair and disrepair. LPM identifies high-level leverage points such as reliability investment, improved parts availability, and investment in Diagnosis/Test. LPM results may be used to support Program Objective Memorandum (POM) or Reduced Total Ownership Cost (R-TOC) efforts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6031226 | 2,160,663 |
1,540,127 | The cost of added physical complexity is a corresponding increase in computational cost, so much so that a full three-dimensional explicit treatment of combustion in wildland fuels by direct numerical simulation (DNS) at scales relevant for atmospheric modeling does not exist, is beyond current supercomputers, and does not currently make sense to do because of the limited skill of weather models at spatial resolution under 1 km. Consequently, even these more complex models parameterize the fire in some way, for example, papers by Clark use equations developed by Rothermel for the USDA forest service to calculate local fire spread rates using fire-modified local winds. And, although FIRETEC and WFDS carry prognostic conservation equations for the reacting fuel and oxygen concentrations, the computational grid cannot be fine enough to resolve the reaction rate-limiting mixing of fuel and oxygen, so approximations must be made concerning the subgrid-scale temperature distribution or the combustion reaction rates themselves. These models also are too small-scale to interact with a weather model, so the fluid motions use a computational fluid dynamics model confined in a box much smaller than the typical wildfire. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20115268 | 1,539,254 |
460,307 | The first prototype XP-84 was transferred to Muroc Army Air Field (present-day Edwards Air Force Base) where it flew for the first time on February 28, 1946, with Major William A. Lien at the controls. It was joined by the second prototype in August, both aircraft flying with J35-GE-7 engines producing 3,745 pound-force (16.66 kN) of thrust. The fifteen YP-84As delivered to Patterson Field (present-day Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) for service tests differed from XP-84s in having an upgraded J35-A-15 engine, carrying six 0.50 inch (12.7 mm) Browning M2 machine guns (four in the nose and one in each wing root), and having the provision for wingtip fuel tanks holding 226 US gallons (870 L) each. Due to delays with delivery of jet engines and production of the XP-84A, the Thunderjet had undergone only limited flight testing by the time production P-84Bs began to roll out of the factory in 1947. In particular, the impact of wingtip tanks on aircraft handling was not thoroughly studied, which proved problematic later. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=442516 | 460,081 |
231,462 | Thus, the strong equivalence principle can be tested by searching for fifth forces (deviations from the gravitational force-law predicted by general relativity). These experiments typically look for failures of the inverse-square law (specifically Yukawa forces or failures of Birkhoff's theorem) behavior of gravity in the laboratory. The most accurate tests over short distances have been performed by the Eöt–Wash group. A future satellite experiment, SEE (Satellite Energy Exchange), will search for fifth forces in space and should be able to further constrain violations of the strong equivalence principle. Other limits, looking for much longer-range forces, have been placed by searching for the Nordtvedt effect, a "polarization" of solar system orbits that would be caused by gravitational self-energy accelerating at a different rate from normal matter. This effect has been sensitively tested by the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. Other tests include studying the deflection of radiation from distant radio sources by the sun, which can be accurately measured by very long baseline interferometry. Another sensitive test comes from measurements of the frequency shift of signals to and from the Cassini spacecraft. Together, these measurements have put tight limits on Brans–Dicke theory and other alternative theories of gravity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=857235 | 231,343 |
1,234,762 | ΜΑΘ is primarily a venue for mathematical competition. Different competitions have varying ways to test the students mathematical knowledge. Each student who chooses to participate in a competition takes an "individual" test that corresponds to his or her level of competition. All competitions include this feature. Most individual tests consist of 30 multiple-choice questions (not including tie-breakers), A-E, where answer choice "E" is "None of the Above", or "None of These Answers"; abbreviated NOTA. Students are typically allotted 1 hour for the entire test. In most states they are graded on the following scale: +4 points for a correct answer, −1 points for an incorrect answer that was chosen, and 0 points if the question was left blank. This scoring system makes guessing statistically neutral. 120 points is considered a perfect score. Some competitions (e.g., Nationals and—as of the 2012/13 season—Florida) use alternate, but equivalent systems of scoring, such as +5 for a correct answer, 0 for an incorrect answer and +1 for a blank. A perfect score under this system would be 150. Calculators are never allowed to be used in the competitions; the statistics division is the exception to this rule. This rule is in place for multiple reasons, the first being that modern calculators may include the ability to solve entire problems without any analyzation of the equation, which would mean that students not having the mathematical knowledge but the ability to use a calculator could unfairly get problems correct. The second reason being so problems can remain arithmetically simple, in other words so that a problem can utilize simple numbers and focus on the concepts without worrying that a calculator would give an advantage of some sort. Statistics is an exception because the field of statistics utilizes calculators and computers tremendously and not allowing calculators would require the students to carry out unavoidable tedious calculations by hand, thus taking away focus from the concepts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1392891 | 1,234,099 |
1,683,990 | In a 1988 Isis review of a combined reprint of the second edition, including both the first and second volumes bound together, published in New York by the American Institute of Physics and Tomash Publishers in 1981, science historian Bruce J. Hunt says that the books stand up "remarkably well" to time and that it is unlikely that others would try to write such books in modern times, as the "encyclopedic sweep is too broad" and the "purely internalist focus too narrow" for recent trends, though he says "we can be glad that someone "did" write it" and that it is, perhaps, fortunate that Whittaker did so such a long time ago. He goes on to state his appreciation for the new reprint. In contrast to the first volume on The Classical Theories, Hunt notes that the second volume, "The Modern Theories", is "rarely cited today, except in connection with this controversy" and that it has had "relatively little influence" on later publications in the history of modern physics. He goes on to say the first volume "continues to be a standard reference". He says that book's greatest weakness is that it lacks a "real historical sense", that it misses wider contexts and is therefore incomplete, as it focuses on theories rather than people. Hunt closes by noting that the book is, in many ways, a "relic of a past age", but remains "very useful" when "approached critically" and praises Whittaker as "one of the last and most thoughtful of the great Victorian mathematical physicists." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65293114 | 1,683,046 |
185,197 | X-rays were put to diagnostic use very early; for example, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton opened a radiographic laboratory in the United Kingdom in 1896, before the dangers of ionizing radiation were discovered. Indeed, Marie Curie pushed for radiography to be used to treat wounded soldiers in World War I. Initially, many kinds of staff conducted radiography in hospitals, including physicists, photographers, physicians, nurses, and engineers. The medical speciality of radiology grew up over many years around the new technology. When new diagnostic tests were developed, it was natural for the radiographers to be trained in and to adopt this new technology. Radiographers now perform fluoroscopy, computed tomography, mammography, ultrasound, nuclear medicine and magnetic resonance imaging as well. Although a nonspecialist dictionary might define radiography quite narrowly as "taking X-ray images", this has long been only part of the work of "X-ray departments", radiographers, and radiologists. Initially, radiographs were known as roentgenograms, while "skiagrapher" (from the Ancient Greek words for "shadow" and "writer") was used until about 1918 to mean "radiographer". The Japanese term for the radiograph, レントゲン (rentogen), shares its etymology with the original English term. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=95807 | 185,100 |
1,826,089 | Choir conductor Maria Gamborg Helbekkmo became Emeritus Professor in 2012. Torunn Bakken Hauge (rhythmic music pedagogue) retired in 2018. In 2019, a Full Professor, Njål Vindenes (guitarist), resigned in protest (with much media attention) as the music programs continued to be radically downsized, worsened by a merger and restructure, to become less than half their original size. The department is located on Floor 4 of a new 51,000 square metre building constructed in 2014 for Bergen University College, in Kronstad, just south of downtown Bergen. The HiB Faculty of Education currently has 2300 students and 150 staff members (around 17 of whom are full-time in music at Griegakademiet), and music is the oldest (and formerly, largest) graduate program offered by the Faculty, which is also known for its strong programs in drama, children's literature and other arts. The Faculty offers a PhD degree in education, and additional PhD programs have been under development, as indicated in HiB's strategic plan. According to its website, “Grieg Academy, Bergen University College has exchange agreements with educational institutions in Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, England, Germany, USA, Australia, Greece and Austria.” | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2604551 | 1,825,050 |
1,296,754 | Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, a faculty member in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In 2018 he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics. In this technology, a light-sensitive ion channel such as channelrhodopsin-2 is genetically expressed in neurons, allowing neuronal activity to be controlled by light. There were early efforts to achieve targeted optical control dating back to 2002 that did not involve a directly light-activated ion channel, but it was the method based on directly light-activated channels from microbes, such as channelrhodopsin, emerging in 2005 that turned out to be broadly useful. Optogenetics in this way has been widely adopted by neuroscientists as a research tool, and it is also thought to have potential therapeutic applications. Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2007, and continues to develop new optogenetic tools as well as other technologies for the manipulation of brain activity. Previously, Boyden received degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from MIT. During high school, Boyden attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25202727 | 1,296,043 |
490,165 | Born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family, Kemeny attended the Rácz private primary school in Budapest and was a classmate of Nándor Balázs. In 1938 his father left for the United States alone. In 1940, he took the whole Kemeny family to the United States when the adoption of the second anti-Jewish law in Hungary became imminent. His grandfather, however, refused to leave and was murdered in the Holocaust, along with an aunt and uncle. Kemeny's family settled in New York City where he attended George Washington High School. He graduated with the best results in his class three years later. In 1943, Kemeny entered Princeton University where he studied mathematics and philosophy, but he took a year off during his studies to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his boss was Richard Feynman. He also worked there with John von Neumann. Returning to Princeton, Kemeny graduated with an A.B. in mathematics in 1946 after completing a senior thesis, titled "Equivalent logical systems", under the supervision of Alonzo Church. He then remained at Princeton to pursue graduate studies and received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Type-theory vs. set-theory", also under the supervision of Alonzo Church. He worked as Albert Einstein's mathematical assistant during graduate school. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=588721 | 489,911 |
1,215,363 | Stripline was initially preferred to its rival, microstrip, made by ITT. Transmission in stripline is purely TEM mode and consequently there is no dispersion (provided that the dielectric of substrate is not itself dispersive). Also, discontinuity elements on the line (gaps, stubs, posts etc) present a purely reactive impedance. This is not the case with microstrip; the differing dielectrics above and below the strip result in longitudinal non-TEM components to the wave. This results in dispersion and discontinuity elements have a resistive component causing them to radiate. In the 1950s Eugene Fubini, at the time working for AIL, jokingly suggested that a microstrip dipole would make a good antenna. This was intended to highlight the drawbacks of microstrip, but the microstrip patch antenna has become the most popular design of antenna in mobile devices. Stripline remained in the ascendent for its performance advantages through the 1950s and 1960s but eventually microstrip won out, especially in mass produced items, because it was easier to assemble and the lack of an upper dielectric meant that components were easier to access and adjust. As the complexity of printed circuits increased, this convenience issue became more important until today microstrip is the dominant planar technology. Miniaturisation also leads to favouring microstrip because its disadvantages are not so severe in a miniaturised circuit. However, stripline is still chosen where operation over a wide band is required. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4269572 | 1,214,711 |
1,500,230 | The biggest advantage of recombineering is that it obviates the need for conveniently positioned restriction sites, whereas in conventional genetic engineering, DNA modification is often compromised by the availability of unique restriction sites. In engineering large constructs of >100 kb, such as the Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes (BACs), or chromosomes, recombineering has become a necessity. Recombineering can generate the desired modifications without leaving any 'footprints' behind. It also forgoes multiple cloning stages for generating intermediate vectors and therefore is used to modify DNA constructs in a relatively short time-frame. The homology required is short enough that it can be generated in synthetic oligonucleotides and recombination with short oligonucleotides themselves is incredibly efficient. Recently, recombineering has been developed for high throughput DNA engineering applications termed 'recombineering pipelines'. Recombineering pipelines support the large scale production of BAC transgenes and gene targeting constructs for functional genomics programs such as EUCOMM (European Conditional Mouse Mutagenesis Consortium) and KOMP (Knock-Out Mouse Program). Recombineering has also been automated, a process called "MAGE" -Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering, in the Church lab. With the development of CRISPR technologies, construction of CRISPR interference strains in "E. coli" requires only one-step oligo recombineering, providing a simple and easy-to-implement tool for gene expression control. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5117528 | 1,499,385 |
1,492,880 | Jameson's research showed that the kinetics of flotation of fine particles was a strong function of the bubble diameter and that the way to improve recoveries was to use small bubbles in the order of 300 microns (μm) in diameter. What was needed was a practical method of making such bubbles in large quantities, of the order of billions per second. The device needed to be simple to construct and operate, capable of running for long periods with minimal maintenance, and should be resistant to blockage by stray large particles in the feed. He began to look at the theory of bubble breakup in sheared flows, that is, in flow fields in which layers of liquid slide over each other. Lewis and Davidson had recently published a theory to predict the maximum size of bubbles in a well-characterised flow environment. By balancing the forces acting on a bubble in a shearing flow, including the disruptive dynamic stresses from the liquid motion and the restoring force of surface tension, it was possible to predict the critical shear rate required to produce a bubble of given size. Jameson then looked for simple and practical ways of generating the required shear rates, and found inspiration in the kitchen sink. If a jet of water from a tap plunges into a basin full of water, a shear layer develops around the jet, that entrains air from the atmosphere into the water, and at the same time, breaks up the entrained air into fine bubbles. The effect is magnified if there is a detergent in the water. Detergents, known as frothers, are used in flotation to prevent bubble coalescence, and to create stable froths. By the correct choice of jet velocity and diameter, it is possible to provide a controlled shear environment that can generate bubbles of a suitable size for flotation, with the added advantage that the air is naturally aspirated by the jet, so there is no need for a compressor or blower. Thus the idea of the Jameson Cell was born. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40142408 | 1,492,041 |
303,835 | , the main United States Air Force (USAF) SEAD aircraft is the F-16CJ Fighting Falcon following the retirement of the EF-111A Raven; while the United States Navy (USN) replaced the EA-6B Prowler with the Boeing EA-18G Growler. The Air Force and Navy in recent decades have emphasized multirole aircraft over dedicated single-role designs with aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and F-15E Strike Eagle capable of carrying the AGM-88 HARM and fulfilling the SEAD mission. The use of so-called "dumb planes" which lack the dedicated detection equipment of a true Wild Weasel is supposedly offset by their ability to carry a "smart missile" as well as perform a variety of missions besides SEAD, with a lower operating cost. However, there is concern that such platforms are less effective for this role because of the lack of specialized equipment, forcing them to employ expensive anti-radiation missiles in a less accurate and cost-effective manner. The advent of Fifth-generation fighters has seen somewhat of a return to dedicated role aircraft: while the F-22 Raptor is capable of carrying ground ordnance, the aircraft's primary mission is air superiority unlike the more balanced profile of the F-16 and F/A-18. The F-35 Lightning II is intended to fulfill the ground strike mission. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=573491 | 303,673 |
1,881,766 | The Sycamores were not ranked in the Associated Press (AP) or United Press International preseason polls, and coaches in their Missouri Valley Conference (MVC) did not pick them to win the league. The team, which had been coached by Bob King in was led by senior forward Larry Bird, who had averaged 30.0 points per game during the previous season (second in NCAA Division I basketball) and been named an All-American in 1978. Indiana State's lineup also featured Carl Nicks, a junior guard who was returning to the school after spending his sophomore season at Gulf Coast Community College. However, the four starters from the 1977–78 team other than Bird had graduated. Before the start of the season, King suffered a heart attack and left the job; he was replaced by Bill Hodges. The Sycamores won their first game versus Lawrence University by a score of 99–56, and followed that performance by traveling to Purdue and winning by 10 points. Bird scored 40 points in Indiana State's next contest, a 74–70 victory at Evansville. That began a streak of seven games in which Bird scored over 30 points, including a 48-point effort against Butler. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44630767 | 1,880,685 |
162,123 | As industrialisation took effect in the late 18th and early 19th century, the United Kingdom possessed a strong national government that provided a standard currency, an efficient legal system, efficient taxation, and effective support for overseas enterprise both within the British Empire and in independent nations. Parliament repealed medieval laws that restricted business enterprise, such as specification of how many threads could be in a woollen cloth, or regulating interest rates. Taxation fell primarily on landed wealth, not accumulated capital nor income. In 1825 Parliament repealed the Bubble Act of 1720 and facilitated capital accumulation. After the General Enclosure Act of 1801, farming became more productive and feed the growing urban industrial workforce. The Navigation Acts remained important into the 1820s, and enforced by the Royal Navy, facilitated international trade. The road system was developed through government-sponsored local turnpikes. However, there were few examples of government-financed canals, and none of railroads, unlike early major transport projects in Japan, in Russia, or in the mid-nineteenth century USA. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33643110 | 162,038 |
1,303,133 | Sandage was one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century. He was born in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1948. In 1953 he received a PhD from the California Institute of Technology; the German-born Wilson Observatory-based astronomer Walter Baade was his advisor. During this time Sandage was a graduate student assistant to cosmologist Edwin Hubble. He continued Hubble's research program after Hubble died in 1953. In 1952 Baade surprised his fellow astronomers by announcing (at the 1952 Conference of the International Astronomical Union, in Rome) his determination of two separate populations of Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, resulted in a doubling of the estimated age of the universe (from 1.8 to 3.6 billion years). Hubble had posited the earlier value; he had considered only the weaker Population II Cepheid variables as standard candles. After Baade's pronouncements, Sandage showed that astronomers' previous assumption, that the brightest stars in galaxies were of approximately equal inherent intensity, was mistaken in the case of H II regions which he found not to be stars and inherently brighter than the brightest stars in distant galaxies. This resulted in another 1.5-fold increase in the calculated age of the universe, to approximately 5.5 billion years. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1980s Sandage was regarded as the pre-eminent observational cosmologist, making contributions to all aspects of the cosmological distance scale, ranging from calibrators within our own Milky Way Galaxy, to cosmologically distant galaxies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=726376 | 1,302,417 |
1,996,366 | At the early stage, Datta was associated as a lecturer in botany with Ramkrishna Mission, Vivekananda Centenary College, West Bengal, India from 1976 to 1979. Then he joined Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal as a lecturer and became Reader in Botany in 1985 and served there up to 1989. During the time, he moved to Germany with the prestigious DAAD fellowship and worked with Prof. G. Wenzel. He then took up an assignment as a senior scientist at Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland. In 1987, he became the group leader and senior scientist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Datta worked over there on rice genetic engineering for six years and was associated with Prof. Ingo Potrykus. Meanwhile, he spent six months as visiting Associate Professor at University of California, Davis, USA. For a short span of time in 1993, he joined as a staff research scientist at International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi. Datta moved to join International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Manila, Philippines as Senior Plant Biotechnologist in 1993. During IRRI tenure, he became the HarvestPlus Rice crop Leader. He returned to India in 2005 to join as Sir Rash Behari Ghosh Chair Professor at the University of Calcutta. He established Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Laboratory and became the coordinator of Translational Rice Research Programme funded by DBT, Govt. of India. In 2009, he was appointed as DDG (Crop Science), ICAR, the apex body of India for coordinating, guiding, and managing research and education in agriculture, and served there up to 30.01.2015. From 31 January 2015, he started working as the Pro-Vice Chancellor (SAHA UPACHARYA) in the Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Later, Datta had become the Vice-Chancellor of the Visva-Bharati University. For a while, he held a DBT-Distinguished Biotechnology Research Professor position at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India. In 2020, Datta has become the Founder Vice-Chancellor of the Biswa Bangla Biswabidyalay, West Bengal, India. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50335448 | 1,995,223 |
1,861,764 | Similar to other nucleolytic ribozymes, the twister ribozyme selectively cleaves phopshodiester bonds, through an S2-related mechanism, into a 2',3'-cyclic phosphate and 5' hydroxyl product. Both experimental and modelling evidence have supported a concerted general-acid-base catalysis involving highly conserved adenine (A1) and guanine (G33) bases, where N3 of A1 acts as a proton donor and G33 the general base. The twister ribozyme generates catalytic activity by specifically orienting the to-be-cleaved P O bond for in-line nucleophilic attack within the active site. Currently, it is known that the rate of reaction of the twister ribozyme is dependent on both pH and temperature. Replacements of the pro-S nonbridging oxygen of the scissile phosphate with a thiol group leads to reduced self-cleavage rates, suggesting that the mechanism is not reliant on bound magnesium. Rescue of the thiol-derivative by cadmium cations indicates that divalent metal ions play a role in rate enhancement. A likely mechanism for this is the stabilization of the transition state by reducing electrostatic strain on the substrate strand from the growing negative charge during cleavage. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41149453 | 1,860,695 |
127,984 | In June 2017, Julia Computing raised US$4.6million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Founder Collective, the same month was "granted $910,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support open-source Julia development, including $160,000 to promote diversity in the Julia community", and in December 2019 the company got $1.1million funding from the US government to "develop a neural component machine learning tool to reduce the total energy consumption of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings". In July 2021, Julia Computing announced they raised a $24 million Series A round led by Dorilton Ventures, which also owns team Williams Racing, that partnered with Julia Computing. Williams' Commercial Director said: "Investing in companies building best-in-class cloud technology is a strategic focus for Dorilton and Julia's versatile platform, with revolutionary capabilities in simulation and modelling, is hugely relevant to our business. We look forward to embedding Julia Computing in the world's most technologically advanced sport". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38455554 | 127,932 |
172,676 | Studies using positron emission tomography scanning of adult humans have shown that brown adipose tissue is still present in most adults in the upper chest and neck (especially paravertebrally). The remaining deposits become more visible (increasing tracer uptake, meaning more metabolically active) with cold exposure, and less visible if an adrenergic beta blocker is given before the scan. These discoveries could lead to new methods of weight loss, since brown fat takes calories from normal fat and burns it. Scientists have been able to stimulate brown fat growth in mice. One study of APOE knock out mice showed cold exposure could promote atherosclerotic plaque growth and instability. The study mice were subjected to sustained low temperatures of 4 °C for 8 weeks which may have caused a stress condition, due to rapid forced change rather than a safe acclimatisation, that can be used to understand the effect on adult humans of modest reductions of ambient temperature of just 5 to 10 °C. Furthermore, several newer studies have documented the substantial benefits of cold exposure in multiple species including humans, for example researchers concluded that "activation of brown adipose tissue is a powerful therapeutic avenue to ameliorate hyperlipidaemia and protect from atherosclerosis" and that brown fat activation reduces plasma triglyceride and cholesterol levels and attenuates diet-induced atherosclerosis development. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=315620 | 172,585 |
98,362 | The planet Vulcan setting was created using a mixture of on-location photography at Minerva Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park and set recreation. Yellowstone was selected after filming in Turkish ruins proved to be too expensive. Securing permission for filming the scenes was difficult in the middle of the summer tourist season, but the Parks Department acquiesced so long as the crew remained on the boardwalks to prevent damage to geological formations. Zuberano, who had helped select the site for the shoot, traveled to Yellowstone and returned with a number of photos. Minor also made a trip and returned to create a large painting depicting how the scene might look. In consultations with Michelson, the crew decided to use miniatures in the foreground to create the Vulcan temples, combined with the real hot springs in the background. In the film, the bottom third of the frames were composed of miniature stairs, rocks, bits of red glass and a Vulcan statue. The center of the frame contained Nimoy's shots and the park setting, while the final third of the frame was filled with a matte painting. On August 8, the day after production began at Paramount, an 11-person second unit left for Yellowstone. The sequence took three days to shoot. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=277006 | 98,320 |
657,848 | Several studies support the conclusion that ophiolites formed as oceanic lithosphere. Seismic velocity structure studies have provided most of the current knowledge of the oceanic crust's composition. For this reason, researchers carried out a seismic study on an ophiolite complex (Bay of Islands, Newfoundland) in order to establish a comparison. The study concluded that oceanic and ophiolitic velocity structures were identical, pointing to the origin of ophiolite complexes as oceanic crust. The observations that follow support this conclusion. Rocks originating on the seafloor show chemical composition comparable to unaltered ophiolite layers, from primary composition elements such as silicon and titanium to trace elements. Seafloor and ophiolitic rocks share a low occurrence of silica-rich rocks; those present have a high sodium and low potassium content. The temperature gradients of the metamorphosis of ophiolitic pillow lavas and dykes are similar to those found beneath ocean ridges today. Evidence from the metal-ore deposits present in and near ophiolites and from oxygen and hydrogen isotopes suggests that the passage of seawater through hot basalt in the vicinity of ridges dissolved and carried elements that precipitated as sulfides when the heated seawater came into contact with cold seawater. The same phenomenon occurs near oceanic ridges in a formation known as hydrothermal vents. The final line of evidence supporting the origin of ophiolites as seafloor is the region of formation of the sediments over the pillow lavas: they were deposited in water over 2 km deep, far removed from land-sourced sediments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=239406 | 657,504 |
2,115,644 | Since April 2005, at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology in Montreal, Canada has the Sonia Landy Sheridan fonds, documentation, archives, texts, digital files and artwork, master videotapes of the program by John Mabey, sound tapes, early computer original Sheridan discs. In 2006, Kathryn Farley was awarded a "Grant for Researcher in Residence" by the Daniel Langlois Foundation to chart the history of the Generative Systems, a groundbreaking instructional program founded in 1970 by Professor Sonia Landy Sheridan at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and trace its seminal impact on the development of technological arts education. Farley worked in close contact with Web designer, Ludovic Carpentier, and archivist Vincent Bonin, to conceive of an interface that illuminates the complex matrix of ideas, processes and practices that Generative Systems gave rise to, drew inspiration from and transformed during its lifespan. Information is arranged within the matrix in a way that emphasizes the interconnected components of the program, helping to demonstrate its collaborative, experimental and process-oriented features in real-time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53694838 | 2,114,427 |
409,637 | German anatomist Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters is generally credited with the discovery of the axon by distinguishing it from the dendrites. Swiss Rüdolf Albert von Kölliker and German Robert Remak were the first to identify and characterize the axon initial segment. Kölliker named the axon in 1896. Louis-Antoine Ranvier was the first to describe the gaps or nodes found on axons and for this contribution these axonal features are now commonly referred to as the nodes of Ranvier. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish anatomist, proposed that axons were the output components of neurons, describing their functionality. Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Gasser earlier developed the classification system for peripheral nerve fibers, based on axonal conduction velocity, myelination, fiber size etc. Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley also employed the squid giant axon (1939) and by 1952 they had obtained a full quantitative description of the ionic basis of the action potential, leading to the formulation of the Hodgkin–Huxley model. Hodgkin and Huxley were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for this work in 1963. The formulae detailing axonal conductance were extended to vertebrates in the Frankenhaeuser–Huxley equations. The understanding of the biochemical basis for action potential propagation has advanced further, and includes many details about individual ion channels. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=958 | 409,435 |
810,760 | Single-cell proteins (SCP) or microbial proteins refer to edible unicellular microorganisms. The biomass or protein extract from pure or mixed cultures of algae, yeasts, fungi or bacteria may be used as an ingredient or a substitute for protein-rich foods, and is suitable for human consumption or as animal feeds. Industrial agriculture is marked by a high water footprint, high land use, biodiversity destruction, general environmental degradation and contributes to climate change by emission of a third of all greenhouse gases; production of SCP does not necessarily exhibit any of these serious drawbacks. As of today, SCP is commonly grown on agricultural waste products, and as such inherits the ecological footprint and water footprint of industrial agriculture. However, SCP may also be produced entirely independent of agricultural waste products through autotrophic growth. Thanks to the high diversity of microbial metabolism, autotrophic SCP provides several different modes of growth, versatile options of nutrients recycling, and a substantially increased efficiency compared to crops. A 2021 publication showed that photovoltaic-driven microbial protein production could use 10 times less land for an equivalent amount of protein compared to soybean cultivation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14981166 | 810,328 |
1,508,596 | QTCs were discovered in 1996 by technician David Lussey while he was searching for a way to develop an electrically conductive adhesive. Lussey founded Peratech Ltd, a company devoted to research work and usage of QTCs. Peratech Ltd. and other companies are working on developing quantum tunneling composite to improve touch technology. Currently, there is restricted use of QTC due to its high cost, but eventually this technology is expected to become available to the general user. Quantum tunneling composites are combinations of polymer composites with elastic, rubber-like properties elastomer, and metal particles (nickel). Due to a no-air gap in the sensor contamination or interference between the contact points is impossible. There is also little to no chance of arcing, electrical sparks between contact points. In the QTC's inactive state, the conductive elements are too far from one another to pass electron charges. Thus, current does not flow when there is no pressure on the quantum-tunneling composite. A characterization of a QTC is its spiky silicon covered surface. The spikes do not actually touch, but when a force is applied to the QTC, the spikes move closer to each other and a [quantum] effect occurs as a high concentration of electrons flow from one spike tip to the next. The electric current stops when the force is taken away. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22981865 | 1,507,748 |
7,857 | The first Soviet pocket battery-powered programmable calculator, Elektronika "B3-21", was developed by the end of 1976 and released at the start of 1977. The successor of B3-21, the Elektronika B3-34 wasn't backward compatible with B3-21, even if it kept the reverse Polish notation (RPN). Thus B3-34 defined a new command set, which later was used in a series of later programmable Soviet calculators. Despite very limited abilities (98 bytes of instruction memory and about 19 stack and addressable registers), people managed to write all kinds of programs for them, including adventure games and libraries of calculus-related functions for engineers. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of programs were written for these machines, from practical scientific and business software, which were used in real-life offices and labs, to fun games for children. The Elektronika MK-52 calculator (using the extended B3-34 command set, and featuring internal EEPROM memory for storing programs and external interface for EEPROM cards and other periphery) was used in Soviet spacecraft program (for Soyuz TM-7 flight) as a backup of the board computer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7593 | 7,854 |
1,951,070 | Prof. Bauer has taught physics and astronomy classes on the undergraduate and graduate level since 1988. He is particularly interested in the introductory physics curriculum for engineering and science majors. For decades he has collaborated closely with his MSU colleagues Walter Benenson and Gary Westfall. They obtained NSF funding to develop novel teaching and laboratory techniques, and authored multimedia physics CDs for their students at MSU's Lyman Briggs School. Based on this work they co-authored cliXX Physik, a complete physics textbook on CD-rom. In 1992, they became early adopters of the Internet for teaching and learning by developing the first version of their online homework system. In subsequent years, they were instrumental in creating the LearningOnline Network with CAPA (LON-CAPA), which is now used at more than 70 universities and colleges in the United States and around the world. Since 2008, Bauer and Westfall have been part of a team of instructors, engineers, and physicists, who investigate the use of peer-assisted learning in the introductory physics curriculum. This project has received funding from the NSF STEM Talent Expansion Program, and its best practices have been incorporated into their textbook "University Physics", which was published in 2010 by McGraw-Hill, and which has also been translated into Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. The second edition was published in 2013, and an e-book in 2015. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34288438 | 1,949,949 |
1,327,359 | Zeresenay "Zeray" Alemseged (born 4 June 1969) is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who was the Chair of the Anthropology Department at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, United States. He recently joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. He is best known for his discovery, on 10 December 2000, of Selam, also referred to as “Lucy’s child”, the almost-complete fossilized remains of a 3.3 million-year-old child of the species "Australopithecus afarensis". The “world’s oldest child”, she is the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor discovered to date. Selam represents a milestone in understanding of human and pre-human evolution and contributes significantly to understanding of the biology and childhood of early species in the human lineage; a subject about which we have very little information. Alemseged discovered Selam while working with the Dikika Research Project (DRP), a multi-national research project, which he both initiated in 1999 and leads. The DRP has thus far made many important paleoanthropological discoveries and returns to the field each year to conduct further important research. Alemseged's specific research centers on the discovery and interpretation of hominin fossil remains and their environments, with emphasis on fieldwork designed to acquire new data on early hominin skeletal biology, environmental context, and behavior. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7098772 | 1,326,632 |
2,159,039 | Weatherchem's standard line includes products with flap-style dispensing for one-handed use, as well as products with non-removable grinders. Weatherchem's original Flapper Dispensing Closure was introduced in 1983. That patented technology is used in the food industry by such companies as McCormick, as well as in the healthcare, personal-care and chemical industries. Weatherchem's NutraFlapper can be found on Nature Made and similar product lines, while its Agricap, a heavy-duty, tamper-evident closure, can be found in the agricultural chemicals market. In 2006, the company introduced four new products: the Grinder NR, LiquiFlapper, FlapMate and NutraGen II. The Grinder NR is a dry-spice packaging system with a non-removable grinder and a non-refillable polyethylene container. (The Grinder NR design is specifically intended to discourage reuse in order to force consumers to purchase high-profit-margin new units instead of simply refilling already-purchased units with economical bulk spices.) LiquiFlapper is used for the controlled dispensing of liquid products. The sift-resistant FlapMate eliminates the need for liner removal. NutraGen II is designed for the dispensing of larger pills. Through its technical services group, Weatherchem provides in-line manufacturing trials, product performance studies and guidance on sustainability practices in manufacturing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22222529 | 2,157,807 |
787,317 | Examples like the one above are not as common in real commerce as they conceivably could be, mostly because of separation of concerns, where each part of a complex system is expected to give performance that does not make any limiting assumptions about other parts of the system. In the car transmission example, the separation of concerns is that individual firms and customers accept no lack of freedom or options from others in the supply chain. For example, in the car buyer's view, the car manufacturer is "not within its rights" to assume that no field-service mechanic will ever repair the old transmission instead of replacing it. The customer expects that that decision will be preserved for "him" to make later, at the repair shop, based on which option is less expensive for him at that time (figuring that replacing one shaft is cheaper than replacing a whole transmission). This logic is not always valid in reality; it might have been better for the customer's total ownership cost to pay a lower initial price for the car (especially if the transmission service is covered under the standard warranty for 10 years, and the buyer intends to replace the car before then anyway) than to pay a higher initial price for the car but preserve the option of total interchangeability of every last nut, bolt, and shaft throughout the car (when it is not going to be taken advantage of anyway). But commerce is generally too chaotically multivariate for this logic to prevail, so total interchangeability ends up being specified and achieved even when it adds expense that was "needless" from a holistic view of the commercial system. But this may be avoided to the extent that customers experience the "overall" value (which their minds can detect and appreciate) without having to understand its logical analysis. Thus buyers of an amazingly affordable car (surprisingly low initial price) will probably never complain that the transmission was not field-serviceable as long as "they themselves" never had to pay for transmission service in the lifespan of their ownership. This analysis can be important for the manufacturer to understand (even if it is lost on the customer), because he can carve for himself a competitive advantage in the marketplace if he can accurately predict where to "cut corners" in ways that the customer will never have to pay for. Thus he could give himself lower transmission unit cost. However, he must be sure when he does so that the transmissions he's using are reliable, because their replacement, being covered under a long warranty, will be at his expense. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=908518 | 786,894 |
307,940 | The CIA also created The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which was a CIA funding front which provided grants to social scientists and medical researchers investigating questions of interest related to the MKULTRA program. Between 1960 and 1963, the CIA gave $856,782 worth of grants to different organizations. The researchers eventually concluded that LSD's effects were too varied and uncontrollable to make it of any practical use as a truth drug, and the project moved on to other substances. It would be decades before the U.S. government admitted the existence of the project and offered apologies to the families of those who were forced to participate in the experiments. During this time period, the use of LSD for psychochemical warfare was under consideration and testing, among other substances. Looking to replicate the effects of nerve gas created by the Germans during World War II without the toxicity, LSD was sought for use under the pretense that it could induce hysteria and psychoses, or at least an inability to fight without wholesale destruction of the enemy and their properties. Thousands of tests on willing research subjects took place at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, with the ultimate conclusion being that LSD was too unpredictable and uncontrollable for any tactical use. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1119225 | 307,775 |
1,553,102 | In honor to the 276 KU men and women who died in World War II, the Memorial Carillon and Campanile were formally dedicated on May 27, 1951. On March 26, 1952 the KU men's basketball team won its first NCAA National Championship over St. John's, coached by Forrest Clare "Phog" Allen. Clyde Lovellette of Kansas was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player, and is still the only player to lead the nation in scoring and lead his team to a national title in the same year. In 1954, the debate team won their first National Debate Tournament. In one of the most cherished occasions in KU history, Allen Fieldhouse dedicated on March 1, 1955. The KU basketball team would go on to win its only home game of the season on the same night. Supervised by chemical engineering professor Russell Mesler, a 10-kilowatt nuclear reactor became operational on campus in 1961. On February 17, 1962, the Kansas Board of Regents voted to replace the original Fraser Hall, claiming it had "outlived its usefulness." The University of Kansas Graduate School approved establishment of a master's degree in nursing in 1967. In 1968, former senator Robert F. Kennedy held presidential nomination speeches at both KU and K-State. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30729405 | 1,552,221 |
628,031 | 19th century zoology thus converted embryology into an evolutionary science, connecting phylogeny with homologies between the germ layers of embryos. Zoologists including Fritz Müller proposed the use of embryology to discover phylogenetic relationships between taxa. Müller demonstrated that crustaceans shared the Nauplius larva, identifying several parasitic species that had not been recognized as crustaceans. Müller also recognized that natural selection must act on larvae, just as it does on adults, giving the lie to recapitulation, which would require larval forms to be shielded from natural selection. Two of Haeckel's other ideas about the evolution of development have fared better than recapitulation: he argued in the 1870s that changes in the timing (heterochrony) and changes in the positioning within the body (heterotopy) of aspects of embryonic development would drive evolution by changing the shape of a descendant's body compared to an ancestor's. It took a century before these ideas were shown to be correct. In 1917, D'Arcy Thompson wrote a book on the shapes of animals, showing with simple mathematics how small changes to parameters, such as the angles of a gastropod's spiral shell, can radically alter an animal's form, though he preferred a mechanical to evolutionary explanation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57414 | 627,696 |
356,248 | Thermal upgrading produces solid, liquid or gaseous fuels, with heat as the dominant conversion driver. The basic alternatives are torrefaction, pyrolysis, and gasification, these are separated principally by how far the chemical reactions involved are allowed to proceed. The advancement of the chemical reactions is mainly controlled by how much oxygen is available, and the conversion temperature. Torrefaction is a mild form of pyrolysis where organic materials are heated to 400–600 °F (200–300 °C) in a no–to–low oxygen environment. The heating process removes (via gasification) the parts of the biomass that has the lowest energy content, while the parts with the highest energy content remain. That is, approximately 30% of the biomass is converted to gas during the torrefaction process, while 70% remains, usually in the form of compacted pellets or briquettes. This solid product is water resistant, easy to grind, non-corrosive, and it contains approximately 85% of the original biomass energy. Basically the mass part has shrunk more than the energy part, and the consequence is that the calorific value of torrefied biomass increases significantly, to the extent that it can compete with coals used for electricity generation (steam/thermal coals). The energy density of the most common steam coals today is 22–26 GJ/t. There are other less common, more experimental or proprietary thermal processes that may offer benefits, such as hydrothermal upgrading (sometimes called "wet" torrefaction.) The hydrothermal upgrade path can be used for both low and high moisture content biomass, e.g. aqueous slurries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7906908 | 356,065 |
859,834 | The late Hirnantian experienced a dramatic increase in the abundance of black shales. Coinciding with the retreat of the Hirnantian glaciation, black shale expands out of isolated basins to become the dominant oceanic sediment at all latitudes and depths. The worldwide distribution of black shales in the late Hirnantian is indicative of a global anoxic event, which has been termed the Hirnantian ocean anoxic event (HOAE). Molybdenum, uranium, and neodymium isotope excursions found in many different regions also correspond to widespread anoxia. At least in European sections, late Hirnantian anoxic waters were originally ferruginous (dominated by ferrous iron) before gradually becoming more euxinic. In the Yangtze Sea, located on the western margins of the South China microcontinent, the second extinction pulse occurred alongside intense euxinia which spread out from the middle of the continental shelf. However, some evidence suggests that the top of the water column remained well oxygenated even as the seafloor became deoxygenated. On a global scale, euxinia was probably one or two orders of magnitude more prevalent than in the modern day. Global anoxia may have lasted more than 3 million years, persisting through the entire Rhuddanian stage of the Silurian period. This would make the Hirnantian-Rhuddanian anoxia one of the longest-lasting anoxic events in geologic time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=425753 | 859,376 |
948,862 | Since introduction of testing by the IAAF in the early-20th century, female sprinters may be subject to gender verification. This rule was first formally applied to the 100 m at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. No 100 m sprinter has been publicly barred at an Olympic competition. However, there have been historic cases involving two women's medallists: 1932 champion Stanisława Walasiewicz and 1964 bronze medallist Ewa Kłobukowska, both of Poland. Walasiewicz endured accusations during her career due to her appearance, but was never subject to a test. An autopsy following her death in a shooting revealed ambiguous genitalia. Walasiewicz accused Helen Stephens (who beat her in the 1936 final) of being male and, despite there being no relevant rules on the matter, officials performed a physical examination of Stephens' external genitalia and concluded that she was female. Kłobukowska was not tested at the Olympics, thus did not lose her Olympic medals, but was subsequently disqualified at the 1967 European Cup on the basis of having a chromosomal mosaic. Intersex athletes are restricted from competition in the 100 m without having undergone surgery and hormonal therapy, as a result of the 2003 Stockholm consensus ruling by the IOC. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41811060 | 948,358 |
815,771 | During the period between 1866 and 1867, Cope went on trips to western parts of the country. He related to his father his scientific experiences; to his daughter he sent descriptions of animal life as part of her education. Cope found educating his students at Haverford "a pleasure", but wrote to his father that he "could not get any work done." He resigned from his position at Haverford and moved his family to Haddonfield, in part to be closer to the fossil beds of western New Jersey. Due to the time-consuming nature of his Haverford position, Cope had not had time to attend to his farm and had let it out to others, but eventually found he was in need of more money to fuel his scientific habits. Pleading with his father for money to pursue his career, he finally sold the farm in 1869. Alfred apparently did not press his son to continue farming, and Edward focused on his scientific career. He continued his continental travels, including trips to Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. He visited caves across the region. He stopped these cave explorations after an 1871 trip to the Wyandotte Caves in Indiana, but remained interested in the subject. Cope had visited Haddonfield many times in the 1860s, paying periodic visits to the marl pits. The fossils he found in these pits became the focus of several papers, including a description in 1868 of "Elasmosaurus platyurus" and "Laelaps". Marsh accompanied him on one of these excursions. Cope's proximity to the beds after moving to Haddonfield made more frequent trips possible. The Copes lived comfortably in a frame house backed by an apple orchard. Two maids tended the estate, which entertained a number of guests. Cope's only concern was for more money to spend on his scientific work. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=415000 | 815,337 |
1,027,575 | The Gresley 3-cylinder drive arrangement continued to bring a number of practical problems, the root of which was probably the need for the inside cylinder to be steeply inclined in order to give space for the inside connecting rod to clear the leading coupled axle; at the same time, the inside valve spindle had to be parallel with the outside ones from which it derived its motion. This problem had been overcome by what Holcroft called a "twist in the ports" (the passages that carried steam in and out of the cylinders). A consequence was that the length of these passages was greater than that generally recommended, increasing "dead space", and this was combined with a shorter exhaust passage. The net result would be rather different working conditions in the middle cylinder from those on the outside. A contributing problem was that any elongation of the outside valve spindles was multiplied by the conjugated valve gear. Although this had been anticipated at the design stage, the overall consequence was that the inside cylinder had a tendency to give more power than the other two as speed increased, leading to the overloading of the inside connecting rod bearings, especially the big-end which was liable to overheat and fail. Various experiments were tried over the years to cure this chronic ailment, and it was only towards the end of the steam era that a real solution was found in Great Western methods of lubrication and manufacture for the big-end bearing. Other problems persisted, such as a stiff, insensitive regulator and overall design flaws that hampered maintenance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2534748 | 1,027,041 |
850,130 | In February 1991, in woodland near Medford, Oregon, USA, two hikers came across the burning body of a female adult, lying face down in fallen leaves. They alerted the officials and a local deputy sheriff soon arrived. She had been stabbed several times in the upper regions of the chest and back. Both arms were spread outwards from the torso. The lower legs and surface of the neck showed signs of fire damage. The soft tissues of the right arm, torso and upper legs were consumed. The majority of bones of these parts retained their integrity, although friability was increased. Between the victim's mid-chest and knees the fleshy parts of the body were mostly destroyed. Crime scene personnel reported that the pelvis and spine were "not recoverable", having been reduced to a grey powder. Her killer had soaked the clothes and corpse in nearly a pint of barbecue starter fluid and set her on fire. In the well-oxygenated outdoor environment, this combination of circumstances—an immobile and clothed body with a high fat-to-muscle ratio, accelerant (lighter fluid), and artificial ignition—made it prime for the wick effect to occur. The murderer was arrested and made a full confession. He claimed to have set the body alight some thirteen hours before it was discovered. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2220692 | 849,678 |
84,246 | Unbound bilirubin (Bf) levels can be used to predict the risk of neurodevelopmental handicaps within infants. Unconjugated hyperbilirubinemia in a newborn can lead to accumulation of bilirubin in certain brain regions (particularly the basal nuclei) with consequent irreversible damage to these areas manifesting as various neurological deficits, seizures, abnormal reflexes and eye movements. This type of neurological injury is known as kernicterus. The spectrum of clinical effect is called bilirubin encephalopathy. The neurotoxicity of neonatal hyperbilirubinemia manifests because the blood–brain barrier has yet to develop fully, and bilirubin can freely pass into the brain interstitium, whereas more developed individuals with increased bilirubin in the blood are protected. Aside from specific chronic medical conditions that may lead to hyperbilirubinemia, neonates in general are at increased risk since they lack the intestinal bacteria that facilitate the breakdown and excretion of conjugated bilirubin in the feces (this is largely why the feces of a neonate are paler than those of an adult). Instead the conjugated bilirubin is converted back into the unconjugated form by the enzyme β-glucuronidase (in the gut, this enzyme is located in the brush border of the lining intestinal cells) and a large proportion is reabsorbed through the enterohepatic circulation. In addition, recent studies point towards high total bilirubin levels as a cause for gallstones regardless of gender or age. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=68344 | 84,212 |
11,885 | Monitoring and controlling operations of sustainable urban and rural infrastructures like bridges, railway tracks and on- and offshore wind-farms is a key application of the IoT. The IoT infrastructure can be used for monitoring any events or changes in structural conditions that can compromise safety and increase risk. The IoT can benefit the construction industry by cost-saving, time reduction, better quality workday, paperless workflow and increase in productivity. It can help in taking faster decisions and save money with Real-Time Data Analytics. It can also be used for scheduling repair and maintenance activities in an efficient manner, by coordinating tasks between different service providers and users of these facilities. IoT devices can also be used to control critical infrastructure like bridges to provide access to ships. Usage of IoT devices for monitoring and operating infrastructure is likely to improve incident management and emergency response coordination, and quality of service, up-times and reduce costs of operation in all infrastructure related areas. Even areas such as waste management can benefit from automation and optimization that could be brought in by the IoT. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12057519 | 11,880 |
925,901 | Worldwide, 69–77% of baryte is used as a weighting agent for drilling fluids in oil and gas exploration to suppress high formation pressures and prevent blowouts. As a well is drilled, the bit passes through various formations, each with different characteristics. The deeper the hole, the more baryte is needed as a percentage of the total mud mix. An additional benefit of baryte is that it is non-magnetic and thus does not interfere with magnetic measurements taken in the borehole, either during logging-while-drilling or in separate drill hole logging. Baryte used for drilling petroleum wells can be black, blue, brown or gray depending on the ore body. The baryte is finely ground so that at least 97% of the material, by weight, can pass through a 200-mesh (75 μm) screen, and no more than 30%, by weight, can be less than 6 μm diameter. The ground baryte also must be dense enough so that its specific gravity is 4.2 or greater, soft enough to not damage the bearings of a tricone drill bit, chemically inert, and containing no more than 250 milligrams per kilogram of soluble alkaline salts. In August 2010, the American Petroleum Institute published specifications to modify the 4.2 drilling grade standards for baryte to include 4.1 SG materials. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59442 | 925,415 |
2,061,518 | "Harris shares with certain other authors of navigational books, (though not the anonymous writers of The Admiralty Manual of Navigation Vols I to IV), an urgent desire to instruct and a certain amount of ill-hidden scorn for those who won't take his instruction on board, especially when he is advocating new methods. "And it is as difficult to prevail upon People to leave any old Custom, however erroneous; I have sometimes been very plain in shewing the Absurdities of some things". Much time and space, for example, perhaps rather too much, is devoted to the utter destruction of the false notion that the departure and the meridional distance are one and the same; he comes back and back to this theme throughout the book. In this he anticipates the impatience of Captain STS Lecky, who in his famous Tables of 1890 reserves the epithets 'Mugwump' and 'not fit to navigate an Essex barge or a Runcorn flat' for those who might fail to act upon his advice. Even the urbane Captain JAG Troup, Royal Navy, in his truly excellent 1934 work "On the Bridge", has a chuckle at the expense of those who don't observe ordinary caution and good practice at sea. And in our own day, the sharp-witted, stressed out guardian of bridge standards can be a formidable teacher of would-be officers of the watch. There is, it seems, a style of instruction common to didactic, experienced navigators and Harris belongs in the mainstream of this convention." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30866164 | 2,060,330 |
534,581 | The ancient Greeks have used the word "ethos" (ἔθος or ἦθος), in this context best rendered by "character" (in the sense of patterns of being and behaviour, but not necessarily with "moral" implications), to describe the ways music can convey, foster, and even generate emotional or mental states. Beyond this general description, there is no unified "Greek ethos theory" but "many different views, sometimes sharply opposed." Ethos is attributed to the "tonoi" or "harmoniai" or modes (for instance, Plato, in the "Republic" (iii: 398d–399a), attributes "virility" to the "Dorian," and "relaxedness" to the "Lydian" mode), instruments (especially the aulos and the cithara, but also others), rhythms, and sometimes even the genus and individual tones. The most comprehensive treatment of musical ethos is provided by Aristides Quintilianus in his book "On Music", with the original conception of assigning ethos to the various musical parameters according to the general categories of male and female. Aristoxenus was the first Greek theorist to point out that ethos does not only reside in the individual parameters but also in the musical piece as a whole (cited in Pseudo-Plutarch, "De Musica" 32: 1142d ff; see also Aristides Quintilianus 1.12). The Greeks were interested in musical ethos particularly in the context of education (so Plato in his "Republic" and Aristotle in his eighth book of his "Politics"), with implications for the well-being of the State. Many other ancient authors refer to what we nowadays would call psychological effect of music and draw judgments for the appropriateness (or value) of particular musical features or styles, while others, in particular Philodemus (in his fragmentary work "De musica") and Sextus Empiricus (in his sixth book of his work "Adversus mathematicos"), deny that music possesses any influence on the human person apart from generating pleasure. These different views anticipate in some way the modern debate in music philosophy whether music on its own or absolute music, independent of text, is able to elicit emotions on the listener or musician. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25111124 | 534,302 |
208,432 | In 1944 the strategy decided upon by the allied forces for the Burma Campaign consisted of fortified compounds inside Japanese territory due to increasing large Japanese patrols along the border. This change was in part forced upon them by strengthened Japanese patrols along the Burmese frontier, making a repeat of the successful infiltration in 1943 unlikely. In an imaginative move prompted by Colonel Philip Cochran's assurance that he could transport both troops and supplies by glider, Wingate arranged for the bulk of the force to enter Burma by air, greatly accelerating the force's ability to reach its target objectives. The pathfinders would land in gliders in preselected open fields in Burma, and prepare them for large-scale landings by transport aircraft. The air support provided by Cochran and Alison proved critical to the success of the operation. In three months, 600 sorties by Dakota transport aircraft transferred 9,000 troops, 1,300 pack animals and 245 tons of supplies to landing zones across Burma. Many of the soldiers who would later fight in Operation Thursday. The Air Commandos in Burma would achieve numerous military "firsts" such as; ground forces coordinating air strikes via radio, medevacing wounded by air. When the Burma road was reopened in January 1945 the Air Commandos were inactivated in preparation for the invasion of mainland Japan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17549821 | 208,325 |
1,031,164 | A topic as emotional and involving as political preference is especially subject to the selective exposure phenomenon. In fact, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1948) found selective exposure early on to be a necessary link in their theory that campaigns primarily reinforce and activate preexisting political notions. The ever-increasing number of media options further facilitates the public's ability to selectively expose themselves to desired media messages. The explosion of the Internet has put the individual in the driver's seat with regard to what kind of information s/he will encounter. McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod (2002) stated that information selection and "exposure is much more specialized and individualized" (p. 221) in the era of the World Wide Web. Furthermore, cable channel options continue to multiply with specific, niche target audiences in mind. Some researchers worry that this increased level of fragmentation makes it possible for people to effectively avoid diverse viewpoints and perspectives (McLeod, Kosicki, & McLeod, 2002). If a person limits his/her information acquisition to that which is only consistent with a personal point of view, s/he will surely not contribute to a fully informed electorate. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22330799 | 1,030,628 |
1,431,000 | Fibroscopes have proved extremely useful both medically and industrially (where the term borescope is usually employed). Other innovations included the use of additional fibres to channel light to the objective end from a powerful external source (typically a xenon arc lamp) thereby achieving the high level of full spectrum illumination needed for detailed viewing and good quality colour photography. At the same time this allowed the fibroscope to remain cool, which was especially important in medical applications. (The previous use of a small filament lamp on the tip of the endoscope had left the choice of either viewing in a very dim red light or increasing the light output at the risk of burning the inside of the patient.) In the medical application, alongside the improvement to the optics, came the ability to 'steer' the tip via controls in the endoscopist's hands and innovations in remotely operated surgical instruments contained within the body of the endoscope itself. It was the beginning of key-hole surgery as we know it today. These advances were, of course equally useful industrially. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18770211 | 1,430,196 |
1,505,864 | As is the case for all current methods of reviewing epilepsy surgery outcomes, the Engel classification system has subjective components. A "disabling seizure" is subjective and can vary in definition from person to person. While one epileptic experiencing a seizure when driving a car may find the seizure "disabling", the same magnitude of seizure may be interpreted as mild, and thus "nondisabling", by an epileptic resting in bed. Every class other than class I is also subjective because there is no quantitative definition of what determines a rare occurrence or method to measure worthwhileness. One doctor and patient may consider two seizures in a year as a rare occurrence while another doctor may consider ten in a year as rarely occurring. The worthwhileness of the operation is ambiguous because worth can be interpreted differently by various patients and healthcare professionals. Keeping those caveats in mind, most neurologists and neurosurgeons who specialize in epilepsy would most likely agree, as would many persons with epilepsy and even laypeople, that any seizure that leads to a period of status epilepticus (seizure activity, especially of the tonic-clonic, or grand mal, type, for longer than about five to ten minutes, or more – some now say it should be as little as two – without an intervening return to normal, or any repeat seizures without a return to consciousness) is a medical emergency, objectively a major problem, and cannot be considered a satisfactory outcome (unless perhaps if the person had a fatal or very severe form of a neurodegenerative syndrome or other disease where such severe repeat seizures are not unusual, and there are a number of these diseases; even then, such an outcome is usually still not a cure, just an amelioration of a fatal condition or a very disabling condition). Continuing to have to endure a large number of tonic-clonic seizures (grand mal seizures) over a period of days, months, or even over the course of a year or two, would make it impossible to drive and very hard to hold a job away from home entailing much stress, and would pose limits on one's abilities to safely carry out the activities of daily living without at least some monitoring or assistance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24299930 | 1,505,018 |
280,397 | In June 2015, the Smithsonian made public a report which documented the need for extensive renovations to the Air and Space Museum. Many of the building's mechanical and environmental systems were redesigned during its construction from 1972 to 1976, which left them inadequate to handle the environmental, visitor, and other stresses placed on the building and its exhibits. Subsequently, these systems are in serious disrepair and exhibits are being harmed. The report noted that the HVAC system is close to failure, and the roof has been compromised so badly that it must be replaced. The Tennessee marble façade has cracked and become warped, and in some areas is so damaged it could fall off the building. The museum's glass curtain walls (among those elements of the 1976 structure whose design was altered for cost reasons) are too permeable to ultraviolet radiation. Several exhibits (such as the spacesuit worn by John Young during the Gemini 10 mission, and the coating on the "Spirit of St. Louis" aircraft) have been damaged by this radiation. Additionally, the Smithsonian's report noted that cutbacks in building design prior to and during construction left the museum with too few amenities, main entrances which are partially obscured, and exhibit space which does not meet current ADA accessibility standards. New security measures, required after the September 11 attacks in 2001, have created extensive queues which extend outside the building. Exposed, lengthy queues are both a security hazard and often cause visitors to wait in inclement weather. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=221550 | 280,246 |
1,240,213 | As stated in the previous section, there were many busy suburban railroads in the Soviet Union which required a faster and more powerful replacement for the obsolete S units, but also one which was compatible with the low passenger platforms used on these lines (which the ER1 could not accommodate). Accordingly, it was decided to update the ER1 trainsets with exits which were compatible with both high and low platforms; the updated design was to be known as the ER2. The new exits required changes to the underframe, which could have had deleterious consequences for the cars' structural integrity; to avoid this, the cars' side walls, headstocks, door frames, and head-end bulkheads (on cars with engineers' cabs) had to be reinforced. Also, to maximize commonality of parts with the ER9 AC electric trainsets (which were to be produced concurrently with the ER2 on the same assembly lines), the brakes were redesigned—instead of 1 master cylinder actuating all of a given car's brake shoes, 4 brake cylinders were installed (2 per truck). The designers also took the opportunity to improve the electrical equipment: lead-acid storage batteries were replaced with safer alkaline storage batteries, and the motor-generator windings were redesigned. (Both of these improvements were already tested on selected ER1 trainsets.) The new trainset was given the factory designation 62-61. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8412180 | 1,239,544 |
1,492,488 | The earliest custom hardware attack may have been the Bombe used to recover Enigma machine keys in World War II. In 1998, a custom hardware attack was mounted against the Data Encryption Standard cipher by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Their "Deep Crack" machine cost U.S. $250,000 to build and decrypted the DES Challenge II-2 test message after 56 hours of work. The only other confirmed DES cracker was the COPACOBANA machine (Cost-Optimized PArallel COde Breaker) built in 2006. Unlike Deep Crack, COPACOBANA consists of commercially available FPGAs (reconfigurable logic gates). COPACOBANA costs about $10,000 to build and will recover a DES key in under 6.4 days on average. The cost decrease by roughly a factor of 25 over the EFF machine is an impressive example for the continuous improvement of digital hardware. Adjusting for inflation over 8 years yields an even higher improvement of about 30x. Since 2007, SciEngines GmbH, a spin-off company of the two project partners of COPACOBANA has enhanced and developed successors of COPACOBANA. In 2008 their COPACOBANA RIVYERA reduced the time to break DES to the current record of less than one day, using 128 Spartan-3 5000's. It is generally believed that large government code breaking organizations, such as the U.S. National Security Agency, make extensive use of custom hardware attacks, but no examples have been declassified . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2174032 | 1,491,649 |
2,114,538 | The Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park contains multiple man-made, fresh water habitats within a small area, resulting in high biodiversity and the presence of amphibians, fish, and insects. Two lakes, marshland, shingle beach, alder carr, shallow pools, willow beds and meadow are contained within the park. The two lakes are pumped water from a chalk borehole deep underground to ensure the water quality is suitable for wildlife. Water level is controlled carefully to mimic natural seasonal variations, so that water levels are low in summer and high in winter. The lakes are surrounded by marshes where reeds grow, providing shelter and food for birds, including grebes and warblers. The shingle beach has sandy soil and rocks for dragonflies to breed and butterflies to bask. The carr is a waterlogged woodland dominated by alder, which tolerates submerged roots in wet ground. There is also dead wood in the area, providing habitats for invertebrates. Willow in the park is coppiced on a regular basis and stocked up as mulch to lie on the ground to retain moisture and prevent grass from growing. Shallow pools are found in the willow woodland and are a habitat for frogs and invertebrate. Ephemeral and seasonal pools are found next to the bat tower. When the pool dries up, specialised invertebrates and small crustaceans dominate the habitat. The meadowland is dominated by wildflowers, which provides food to bees and butterflies, the primary producers in the food chain. Several species of moths previously thought to be locally extinct were found in the Ecology Park recently. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27540848 | 2,113,323 |
2,029,953 | Neuronal microphysiological systems, also referred to as a "brain-on-a-chip," are a combination of 3D cultures and a microfluidics platform, which circulates the media provided to the cultured cells. These devices are beneficial as they improve cell viability and better model physiological conditions as they improve oxygen availability and nutrient delivery to inner layers of 3D cultures. These systems additionally introduce physiological cues such as fluid sheer stress, tension, and compression which allows these in vitro conditions to better resemble the in vivo environment. MPS were shown to replicate Amyloid-β aggregation, hyperphosphorylated tau, and neuroinflamation as well as display microglial recruitment, release of cytokines and chemokines, and microglial neurotoxic activation as a response of more physiologically relevant cell-cell interactions. These systems can also be developed incorporating brain endothelial cells to mimic the blood–brain barrier, making this an extremely useful model for BBB dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease, screening novel therapeutics potential to pass from the blood into the brain, therapeutic pharmacokinetics, as well as drug adsorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, and toxicity (ADMET) tendencies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67639494 | 2,028,785 |
313,545 | The GLM model does not take into account the contribution of relationships between multiple voxels. Whereas GLM analysis methods assess whether a voxel or region's signal amplitude is higher or lower for one condition than another, newer statistical models such as multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), utilize the unique contributions of multiple voxels within a voxel-population. In a typical implementation, a classifier or more basic algorithm is trained to distinguish trials for different conditions within a subset of the data. The trained model is then tested by predicting the conditions of the remaining (independent) data. This approach is most typically achieved by training and testing on different scanner sessions or runs. If the classifier is linear, then the training model is a set of weights used to scale the value in each voxel before summing them to generate a single number that determines the condition for each testing set trial. More information on training and testing classifiers is at statistical classification. Another method used the same fMRI dataset for visual object recognition in the human brain is depending on multi-voxel pattern analysis (fMRI voxels) and multi-view learning which is described in, this method used meta-heuristic search and mutual information to eliminate noisy voxels and select the significant BOLD signals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=226722 | 313,376 |
1,716,345 | Still much is not understood concerning remyelination. New pathways are being discovered constantly in the areas of gene regulation, antibody use as antagonists, and promotion of stem cells to differentiate. There are many regulation factors, such as Lingo-1, Olig-1, Id2, Id4, Hes5, and Sox6, that are not very well understood in their role that may hold the key to developing new treatments for demyelinating diseases. One of the biggest difficulties of studying demyelinating diseases and thus remyelination is that it takes place in the central nervous system. Studying remyelination most thoroughly would involve unethical and invasive experiments and observation on the human brain and spinal cord. Because of this, scientists are limited to studying patients with demylinating diseases after they have died. It is nearly impossible to discern what exactly happened through the progress of the diseased person because most persons die in the chronic stages of their demyelinating disease. The other method of studying demyelinating diseases is using animals. Specifically, rats and mice are commonly used to investigate remyelination. The most commonly employed models rely on toxins that are used to generate focal or generalised demyelination in the CNS. Unlike in MS-mimmicking animal models, such as Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, or EAE, toxin models allow for precisely controlled demyelination. EAE is induced by immunologically sensitising animals to myelin components. Although EAE is not the same as MS, it reproduces a similar environment and many of the same effects. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7138424 | 1,715,376 |
1,382,954 | Following the constitution of Squadron 1, "Tunny" departed on the first operational deterrent patrol on 23 October 1959. "Halibut" meanwhile joined the Pacific Fleet in November 1960, becoming the fifth and final Regulus submarine to serve in the US Navy. The policy of keeping four missiles at sea at all times meant that "Grayback", "Growler" and "Halibut" could undertake Western Pacific cruises alone, while "Tunny" and "Barbero", both only capable of accommodating a pair of missiles, had to be at sea simultaneously. The system was found to have significant limitations, not just concerning those inherent in the Regulus missile itself. In order to launch a missile, the submarine was forced to surface and have a missile removed from the hangar to be loaded onto the launcher. This operation was undertaken manually on the two smallest boats, was partly automated on the second two, and fully automated on "Halibut", but still took approximately 15 minutes to complete, during which time the submarine was on the surface and potentially vulnerable to air and sea attack. Once the missile was launched, the submarine was able to dive, but had to remain at periscope depth in order for the remote control system to operate and guide the missile to its target. Additionally, although the nuclear-powered "Halibut" was able to maintain station constantly for the duration of her cruise, the four diesel-powered boats needed to make refuelling stopovers during the periods that they were at sea, in order to maximise their time on station - these stops would usually take place either in Adak in Alaska, or at Midway Island. Nevertheless, between October 1959 and July 1964, when "Halibut" returned to Hawaii following its final patrol, the Regulus force had maintained at least one submarine constantly on station in the Western Pacific in the strategic deterrent role. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59895854 | 1,382,188 |
473,154 | NAA can perform non-destructive analyses on solids, liquids, suspensions, slurries, and gases with no or minimal preparation. Due to the penetrating nature of incident neutrons and resultant gamma rays, the technique provides a true bulk analysis. As different radioisotopes have different half-lives, counting can be delayed to allow interfering species to decay eliminating interference. Until the introduction of ICP-AES and PIXE, NAA was the standard analytical method for performing multi-element analyses with minimum detection limits in the sub-ppm range. Accuracy of NAA is in the region of 5%, and relative precision is often better than 0.1%. There are two noteworthy drawbacks to the use of NAA; even though the technique is essentially non-destructive, the irradiated sample will remain radioactive for many years after the initial analysis, requiring handling and disposal protocols for low-level to medium-level radioactive material; also, the number of suitable activation nuclear reactors is declining; with a lack of irradiation facilities, the technique has declined in popularity and become more expensive. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21933 | 472,918 |
894,136 | FL commonly presents as an otherwise asymptomatic enlargement of lymph nodes in the neck, armpit, groin, femoral canal, or other sites in individuals (median age 65) without a known history of ISFL or abnormal numbers of circulating t(14:18)q32:q21-conatianing lymphocytes. These enlargements may have been present for months to years and during this time waxed and waned in size. Less commonly, FL presents as extra-nodal masses in the skin, thyroid gland, salivary gland, breast, testicles. spleen, liver, and/or lung. Regardless of the type of presentation, FL is usually (~80% of cases) at an advanced stage at diagnosis as indicated by involvement of the bone marrow (50% to 70% of cases), multiple lymph nodes in different parts of the body, and/or other tissues. A minority (<33%) of FL patients present with B symptoms, i.e. recurrent unexplained fevers, recurrent night sweats, and/or weight loss ≥10% in the past 6 months. Generally, the disease has an indolent and prolonged course with a median life expectancy of 15–20 years: a large percentage of patients die from other causes than their FL disease. However, each year, including the early years after diagnosis, some 2-3% of FL cases transform to t-FL; Median survival has been ~4.5 years after the onset of this transformation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3034995 | 893,666 |
763,571 | Any vacuum tube operating at several thousand volts or more can produce X-rays as an unwanted byproduct, raising safety issues. The higher the voltage, the more penetrating the resulting radiation and the more the hazard. CRT displays, once common in color televisions and computer displays, operate at depending on size, making them the main concern among household appliances. Historically, concern has focused less on the cathode ray tube, since its thick glass envelope is impregnated with several pounds of lead for shielding, than on high voltage (HV) rectifier and voltage regulator tubes inside earlier TVs. In the late 1960s it was found that a failure in the HV supply circuit of some General Electric TVs could leave excessive voltages on the regulator tube, causing it to emit X-rays. The models were recalled and the ensuing scandal caused the US agency responsible for regulating this hazard, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to require that all TVs include circuits to prevent excessive voltages in the event of failure. The hazard associated with excessive voltages was eliminated with the advent of all-solid-state TVs, which have no tubes other than the CRT. Since 1969, the FDA has limited TV X-ray emission to 0.5 mR (milliroentgen) per hour. With the switch from CRTs to other screen technologies starting in the 1990s, there are no vacuum tubes capable of emitting X-rays at all. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=907899 | 763,162 |
1,881,397 | Mycorrhizae and their related symbioses have been around for millions of years – dating as far back as the Triassic Period (200–250 million years ago) and even older. While there are still many gaps in the timeline of mycorrhizae, the oldest known forms of the fungal group can be dated back as far as 450 million years ago or older, where the first wave the eukaryotic fungi came about alongside the evolution of early land plants. There are some later lineages that consisted only of arbuscular mycorrhizae until the early Cretaceous Period (75–140 million years ago) when the clade began to drastically branch off into various forms of mycorrhizae, most of which would be specialized to particular niches, environments, climates, and plants. However, these lineages are separate from the lineages that other major types of mycorrhizae derived from. There are essential mycorrhizae that evolved from other symbioses such as Ascomycota, (which shares a phylum with Basidiomycota, another major mycorrhiza) which evolved to eventually become Ericoid mycorrhizae or Ectomycorrhizae. Some of the derived families are more complex due to specialized or multifunctional roots, which were not present in earlier times before Pangaea. The climate of the environments these groups of mycorrhizae occupied (which developed on rocky surfaces) were arid, not allowing for much diversification in life due to fixed niches. The downside to looking into the history of most fungi and plant symbioses is that typically, fungi do not preserve very well, so finding a fungal fossil of more ancient periods is not only difficult, but offers only specific information about the fungus and the environment in which it developed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59393212 | 1,880,316 |
1,177,107 | OSeMOSYS provides a framework for the analysis of energy systems over the medium (10–15 years) and long term (50–100 years). OSeMOSYS uses pure linear optimization, with the option of mixed integer programming for the treatment of, for instance, discrete power plant capacity expansions. It covers most energy sectors, including heat, electricity, and transport. OSeMOSYS is driven by exogenously defined energy services demands. These are then met through a set of technologies which draw on a set of resources, both characterized by their potentials and costs. These resources are not limited to energy commodities and may include, for example, water and land-use. This enables OSeMOSYS to be applied in domains other than energy, such as water systems. Technical constraints, economic restrictions, and/or environmental targets may also be imposed to reflect policy considerations. OSeMOSYS is available in extended and compact MathProg formulations, either of which should give identical results. In its extended version, OSeMOSYS comprises a little more than 400 lines of code. OSeMOSYS has been used as a base for constructing reduced models of energy systems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38803848 | 1,176,484 |
162,235 | By this stage, unemployment had increased slightly to 1.6 million although the economy continued to grow, the UK was continuing to lose large numbers of manufacturing jobs due to companies encountering financial problems or switching production overseas to save labour costs. This was particularly evident in the car industry, with General Motors (Vauxhall) and Ford having significantly cut back on UK operations, while Peugeot (the French carmaker who had bought the former Rootes Group and Chrysler Europe operations in the late 1970s) had completely withdrawn from Britain. These closures resulted in thousands of job losses, although the biggest single blow to the car industry came in 2005 when MG Rover went into liquidation; more than 6,000 jobs were lost at the carmaker alone and some 20,000 more were lost in associated supply industries and dealerships, not to mention the business failures and job cuts which befell businesses that had relied largely on trade from the carmaker's employees. This was the largest collapse of any European carmaker in modern times. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33643110 | 162,150 |
2,634 | The F-22's high cruise speed and operating altitude over prior fighters improve the effectiveness of its sensors and weapon systems, and increase survivability against ground defenses such as surface-to-air missiles. The ability to supercruise, or sustain supersonic flight without using afterburners, allows it to intercept targets that afterburner-dependent aircraft would lack the fuel to reach. The use of internal weapons bays permits the aircraft to maintain comparatively higher performance over most other combat-configured fighters due to a lack of parasitic drag from external stores. The F-22's thrust and aerodynamics enable regular combat speeds of Mach 1.5 at , thus providing 50% greater employment range for air-to-air missiles and twice the effective range for JDAMs than with prior platforms. Its structure contains a significant amount of high-strength materials to withstand stress and heat of sustained supersonic flight. Respectively, titanium alloys and bismaleimide/epoxy composites comprise 42% and 24% of the structural weight. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66299 | 2,634 |
1,596,006 | Born in Lukang, Changhua, Taiwan, in 1941, Wang received his BS (1964) degree from National Cheng Kung University and his MS (1966) and PhD (1970) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1970 to 1972 he was the Assistant Professor at MIT. From 1972 to 1979, he worked at the General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center as a physicist/engineer. In 1979 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department of UCLA, where he is a Professor and leads the Device Research Laboratory (DRL). He served as Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at UCLA from 1993 to 1996. His research activities include semiconductor nano devices, and nanotechnology; self-assembly growth of quantum structures and cooperative assembly of quantum dot arrays Si-based Molecular Beam Epitaxy, quantum structures and devices; Nano-epitaxy of hetero-structures; Spintronics materials and devices; Electron spin and coherence properties of SiGe and InAs quantum structures for implementation of spin-based quantum information; microwave devices. He was the inventor of strained layer MOSFET, quantum SRAM cell, and band-aligned superlattices. He holds 45 patents and published over 700 papers. He is a passionate teacher and has mentored hundreds of students, including MS and PhD candidates. Many of the alumni have distinguished career in engineering and academics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31184632 | 1,595,107 |
1,516,754 | William H. Phelps (New York, June 14, 1875 – Caracas, December 8, 1965) was an American ornithologist and businessman. He studied biology at Milton Academy and Harvard College. In the summer of 1896 he decided to go on an ornithological exploration to Venezuela following the advice of Wirt Robinson, who had visited Margarita Island the year before, and from his mentor Frank M. Chapman. After a long stay in Sucre and Monagas, he became fascinated with the country and its birds. He returned to the United States with a small collection of specimens that he brought to Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History. The specimens he collected became the basis for his first publication published with Chapman in 1897. Once he finished his studies at Harvard, Phelps returned to Venezuela in 1897, to marry Alicia Elvira Tucker and settle in Maturín. There he began one of many successful business ventures by selling coffee and in 1930 founded Radio Caracas Radio. In 1938 he founded the Phelps Collection considered the largest ornithological collection in Latin America and the largest private collection in the world. It is a mandatory study resource on tropical birds for experts who wish to know more about this area. Currently the Phelps Collection has a heritage of 80,000 birds in feathers, a thousand preserved in alcohol and 1,500 skeletons. His second son, William H. Phelps Jr. founded RCTV in 1953, became one of his foremost collaborators in all matters concerning ornithology. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29302481 | 1,515,902 |
1,917,446 | The Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences (PGSS) is now the only remaining part of the Pennsylvania Governor's Schools of Excellence, a group of five-week summer programs for gifted and highly intelligent high-school students in the state of Pennsylvania. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has hosted the program since its inception in 1982. Most recently, it has been directed by Physics Professor Dr. Barry Luokkala. Participants are required to be Pennsylvania high school students between their junior and senior years and are required to live in the dormitories for the full five weeks of the program. Admission is very competitive - approximately 500 of the most scientifically gifted students in the state compete for 56 to 60 slots in the program. The aim of PGSS is to promote interest in science rather than to advance students' knowledge in a specific area. The curriculum includes five "core" courses in Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics, and numerous electives. In addition to taking classes, students are required to participate in a lab course and a research-style team project. The emphasis is on cooperation, rather than competition - students are encouraged to both collaborate with other students on academic work and to interact socially. The Residence Life staff provides a number of structured social events to foster friendship and teamwork. There is at least one event per day and is advertised on the social calendar in the dorm lobby. For many students, the social development gained from the program rivals the scientific knowledge they acquire. The students leave the program with a strong bond; most attend an organized reunion the following year after the 4th week of the program. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5053468 | 1,916,346 |
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