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827,519 | In temperate climates, honey bees usually form swarms in late spring. A swarm typically contains about half the workers together with the old queen, while the new queen stays back with the remaining workers in the original hive. When honey bees emerge from a hive to form a swarm, they may gather on a branch of a tree or on a bush only a few meters from the hive. The bees cluster about the queen and send out 20–50 scouts to find suitable new nest locations. The scouts are the most experienced foragers in the cluster. If a scout finds a suitable location, she returns to the cluster and promotes it by dancing a version of the waggle dance. This dance conveys information about the quality, direction, and distance of the new site. The more excited she is about her findings, the more vigorously she dances. If she can convince others they may take off and check the site she found. If they approve they may promote it as well. In this decision-making process, scouts check several sites, often abandoning their own original site to promote the superior site of another scout. Several different sites may be promoted by different scouts at first. After some hours and sometimes days, a preferred location eventually emerges from this decision-making process. When all scouts agree on the final location, the whole cluster takes off and swarms to it. Sometimes, if no decision is reached, the swarm will separate, some bees going in one direction; others, going in another. This usually results in failure, with both groups dying. A new location is typically a kilometre or more from the original hive, though some species, e.g., "Apis dorsata", may establish new colonies within as little as 500 meters from the natal nest. This collective decision-making process is remarkably successful in identifying the most suitable new nest site and keeping the swarm intact. A good hive site has to be large enough to accommodate the swarm (about 15 litres in volume), has to be well-protected from the elements, receive an optimal amount of sunshine, be some height above the ground, have a small entrance and be capable of resisting ant infestation - that is why tree cavities are often selected. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=207874 | 827,075 |
592,951 | Since the advent of high-power rocketry, which began in the mid-1980s with the availability of G- through J-class motors (each letter designation has up to twice the energy of the one before), a number of companies have shared the market for larger and more powerful rockets. By the early 1990s, Aerotech Consumer Aerospace, LOC/Precision, and Public Missiles Limited (PML) had taken up leadership positions, while a host of engine manufacturers provided ever larger motors, and at much higher costs. Companies like Aerotech, Vulcan, and Kosdon were widely popular at launches during this time as high-power rockets routinely broke Mach 1 and reached heights over . In a span of about five years, the largest regularly made production motors available reached N, which had the equivalent power of over 1,000 D engines combined, and could lift rockets weighing with ease. Custom motor builders continue to operate on the periphery of the market today, often creating propellants that produce colored flame (red, blue, and green being common), black smoke and sparking combinations, as well as occasionally building enormous motors of P, Q, and even R class for special projects such as extreme-altitude attempts over . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=134827 | 592,647 |
1,398,822 | Type-6 episodic ataxia (EA6) is a rare form of episodic ataxia, identified initially in a 10-year-old boy who first presented with 30 minute bouts of decreased muscle tone during infancy. He required "balance therapy" as a young child to aid in walking and has a number of ataxic attacks, each separated by months to years. These attacks were precipitated by fever. He has cerebellar atrophy and subclinical seizures. During later attacks, he also presented with distortions of the left hemifield, ataxia, slurred speech, followed by headache. After enrolling in school, he developed bouts of rhythmic arm jerking with concomitant confusion, also lasting approximately 30 minutes. He also has presented, at various times, with migraines. This patient carries a proline to arginine substitution in the fifth transmembrane-spanning segment of the gene SLC1A3. This gene encodes the excitatory amino acid transporter 1 (EAAT1) protein, which is responsible for glutamate uptake. In cell culture assays, this mutation results in drastically decreased glutamate uptake in a dominant-negative manner. This is likely due to decreased synthesis or protein stability. As this protein is expressed heavily in the brainstem and cerebellum, it is likely that this mutation results in excitotoxicity and/or hyperexcitability leading to ataxia and seizures. Mutations in EAAT1 (GLAST) have subsequently been identified in a family with episodic ataxia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8064365 | 1,398,047 |
1,124,640 | Surgery to remove the clot is possible, but rarely performed. In the past, surgical removal of the renal vein clot was the primary treatment but it is very invasive and many complications can occur. In the past decades, treatment has shifted its focus from surgical intervention to medical treatments that include intravenous and oral anticoagulants. The use of anticoagulants may improve kidney function in RVT cases by removing the clot in the vein and preventing further clots from occurring. Patients who already have nephrotic syndrome may not need to take anticoagulants. In this case, patients should keep an eye out and maintain reduced level of proteinuria by reducing salt and excess protein, and intaking diuretics and statins. Depending on the severity of RVT, patients may be on anticoagulants from a year up to a lifetime. As long as the albumin levels in the bloodstream are below 2.5g/L, it is recommended that RVT patients continue taking anticoagulants. Main anticoagulants that can be used to treat RVT include warfarin and low molecular weight heparin. Heparin has become very popular, because of its low risk of complications, its availability and because it can easily be administered. Warfarin is known to interact with many other drugs, so careful monitoring is required. If a nephrotic syndrome patient experiences any of the RVT symptoms (flank or back pain, blood in the urine or decreased kidney function), he or she should immediately see a doctor to avoid further complications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3219980 | 1,124,065 |
1,713,343 | The first successful numerical prediction was performed using the ENIAC digital computer in 1950 by a team led by American meteorologist Jule Charney. The team include Philip Thompson, Larry Gates, and Norwegian meteorologist Ragnar Fjørtoft, applied mathematician John von Neumann, and computer programmer Klara Dan von Neumann, M. H. Frankel, Jerome Namias, John C. Freeman Jr., Francis Reichelderfer, George Platzman, and Joseph Smagorinsky. They used a simplified form of atmospheric dynamics based on solving the barotropic vorticity equation over a single layer of the atmosphere, by computing the geopotential height of the atmosphere's pressure surface. This simplification greatly reduced demands on computer time and memory, so the computations could be performed on the relatively primitive computers of the day. When news of the first weather forecast by ENIAC was received by Richardson in 1950, he remarked that the results were an "enormous scientific advance." The first calculations for a 24‑hour forecast took ENIAC nearly 24 hours to produce, but Charney's group noted that most of that time was spent in "manual operations", and expressed hope that forecasts of the weather before it occurs would soon be realized. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30890995 | 1,712,377 |
1,220,400 | One 1 June 2005, President Roh Moo-hyun's administration would draft the "Defense Reform 2020" to further establish a more technologically advanced military and sophisticated defense capability for the country. Part of the reform involves reducing the manpower of the military from 650,000 to 500,000 by 2020, but would procure new military assets to improve, develop and/or expand its operations as part of its restructuring. As such, the South Korean defense industry would experience a very large surge in developing and manufacturing new weapons and equipment to meet these demands. For example, since the army would be the primary branch to reduce the number of personnel new UAVs, tanks, artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and others weapons would be develop for them to offset the manpower reduction. The South Korean navy would also aim to become a blue water navy and thus new ships and submarines would be procured. Likewise, the air force would also desire to enhance its own capabilities by acquiring its own "high-low mix" of fighters (i.e. F-15K), attack helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, aerial refueling and airborne early warning and control aircraft. On 1 January 2006, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) was established to further enhance the administration of military projects and procurements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66301957 | 1,219,746 |
753,337 | Angiogenesis represents an excellent therapeutic target for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. It is a potent, physiological process that underlies the natural manner in which our bodies respond to a diminution of blood supply to vital organs, namely "neoangiogenesis": the production of new collateral vessels to overcome the ischemic insult. A large number of preclinical studies have been performed with protein-, gene- and cell-based therapies in animal models of cardiac ischemia, as well as models of peripheral artery disease. Reproducible and credible successes in these early animal studies led to high enthusiasm that this new therapeutic approach could be rapidly translated to a clinical benefit for millions of patients in the Western world with these disorders. A decade of clinical testing both gene- and protein-based therapies designed to stimulate angiogenesis in underperfused tissues and organs, however, has led from one disappointment to another. Although all of these preclinical readouts, which offered great promise for the transition of angiogenesis therapy from animals to humans, were in one fashion or another, incorporated into early stage clinical trials, the FDA has, to date (2007), insisted that the primary endpoint for approval of an angiogenic agent must be an improvement in exercise performance of treated patients. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64972 | 752,935 |
807,981 | Casey and his team developed and built the second Tornado Intercept Vehicle, dubbed TIV 2, to be featured in their next IMAX movie and the "Storm Chasers" series. Work began in September 2007 by forty welding students at the Great Plains Technology Center in Lawton, Oklahoma and was completed in time for the 2008 tornado chase season. TIV 2 was designed to address some of the problems experienced with the original TIV, namely its low ground clearance, lack of four-wheel drive, and low top speed. It is based on a Dodge Ram 3500 that was strengthened and converted to six-wheel drive by adding a third axle. After season two the six-wheel drive system was modified to four-wheel drive. It is powered by a 6.7-liter Cummins turbocharged diesel engine, modified with propane and water injection to produce . This gives TIV 2 an estimated top speed of over . Its fuel capacity is , giving TIV 2 an approximate range of . The body of TIV 2 is constructed of a 1/8-inch steel skin welded over a square tubing steel frame. The windows in TIV 2 are all bullet-resistant interlayered polycarbonate sheets and tempered glass. TIV 2 also features an IMAX filming turret similar to the one on the original TIV. The original TIV's somewhat cumbersome hydraulic claws were not used on TIV 2 in favor of six hydraulic skirts that drop down to deflect wind over the TIV to stabilize it and protect the underside from debris, and four hydraulically operated anchoring spikes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9566962 | 807,551 |
237,015 | The first optical observation of a CME was made on 14 December 1971 using the coronagraph of Orbiting Solar Observatory 7 (OSO-7). It was first described by R. Tousey of the Naval Research Laboratory in a research paper published in 1973. The discovery image (256 × 256 pixels) was collected on a Secondary Electron Conduction (SEC) vidicon tube, transferred to the instrument computer after being digitized to 7 bits. Then it was compressed using a simple run-length encoding scheme and sent down to the ground at 200 bit/s. A full, uncompressed image would take 44 minutes to send down to the ground. The telemetry was sent to ground support equipment (GSE) which built up the image onto Polaroid print. David Roberts, an electronics technician working for NRL who had been responsible for the testing of the SEC-vidicon camera, was in charge of day-to-day operations. He thought that his camera had failed because certain areas of the image were much brighter than normal. But on the next image the bright area had moved away from the Sun and he immediately recognized this as being unusual and took it to his supervisor, Dr. Guenter Brueckner, and then to the solar physics branch head, Dr. Tousey. Earlier observations of "coronal transients" or even phenomena observed visually during solar eclipses are now understood as essentially the same thing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=255297 | 236,896 |
1,609,444 | Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder(OCPD) is a personality type where the need for perfectionism in all aspects of life takes precedence. Despite the fact that OCPD is the most common personality disorder in the general population, published studies looking at the brain correlates of this disorder are practically nonexistent. In a recent study, ten individuals diagnosed with OCPD and ten healthy controls underwent a clinical assessment interview and a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) acquisition. The results show that OCPD patients presented an increased functional connectivity in the precuneus (i.e., a posterior node of the DMN), known to be involved in the retrieval manipulation of past events in order to solve current problems and develop plans for the future. These results suggest that this key node of the DMN may play an important role in OCPD. OCPD patients exhibit altered spontaneous neural activity as compared to healthy controls in multiple brain regions, which may reflect different characteristic symptoms of OCPD pathophysiology, including cognitive inflexibility, excessive self-control, lower empathy, and visual attention bias. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63336797 | 1,608,539 |
71,210 | The .338 Lapua Magnum fills the gap between weapons chambered for standard military rounds such as the 7.62×51mm NATO and large, heavy rifles firing the .50 BMG cartridge. It also offers an acceptable amount of barrel wear, which is important to military snipers who tend to fire thousands of rounds a year in practice. This was achieved by coupling a sensible case volume (7.40 ml) to bore area (56.86 mm/0.5686 cm) ratio (13.01 O) with ample space for loading relatively long slender projectiles that can provide good aerodynamic efficiency and external ballistic performance for the projectile diameter. Like every other comparable large magnum rifle cartridge, the .338 Lapua Magnum presents a stout recoil. An appropriate fitting stock and an effective muzzle brake helps to reduce recoil-induced problems, enabling the operator to fire more rounds before getting too uncomfortable to shoot accurately. Good factory loads, multiple projectile weights and factory special application ammunition are all available. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=689792 | 71,183 |
1,668,174 | Cabbage-family cultivation is a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide, reflecting its value as a vegetable crop, source of vegetable oil, component of fodder crop for livestock feed, and ingredient in condiments and spices. In 2007, the cabbage crop in the US exceed $413M (1.4M+ tons). Black rot is considered the most important disease of cabbage and other crucifers because Xcc infections may not become apparent until the warm summer months (well after planting), the pathogen spreads rapidly, and losses due to the disease may exceed 50% in warm, wet climates. The importance of using disease-free seed and/or transplants is highlighted by the fact that "as few as three infected seeds in 10,000 (0.03%) can cause black rot epidemics in a field." In transplant beds, an initial infection level of 0.5% can rise to 65% in just three weeks. In fact more recent work indicates that spread can be much more rapid than this: with overhead gantry irrigation, spread of the pathogen greatly exceeded symptom spread to the extent that in one experiment almost 100% of the transplants were infested in a block of 15 module trays (around 4500 plants) six weeks after sowing from a single primary infector. Modelling of the rate of spread in transplants indicates that the widely used tolerance standard for seed health testing (0·01%) should be revised to 0·004%. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29223911 | 1,667,235 |
1,163,279 | The M86 antipersonnel mine is manually armed by removing the safety clip and then the arming strap assembly. A camming action breaks the shorting bar and forces the battery ball against the battery breaking the glass ampule containing an electrolyte which activates the reserve battery and provides power. The shorting bar hook, attached to the cam, shears the shorting bar (a safety device across the detonator). After a 60-second (nominal) electronic time delay, a piston actuator in the Safe and Arm mechanism is electrically fired, moving a slider to align the detonator with an explosive lead in the slider. At the same time, seven sensor trip-lines are released. Approximately three or four trip-lines will deploy up to 20 feet from the mine, depending upon the at-rest position of the mine. The remaining trip-lines may be hindered due to their proximity to the resting surface. After an additional 10-second electronic time delay, allowing the munition to return to equilibrium, the mine is fully armed electronically. Disturbance of a trip-line, or the mine itself, now triggers a switch which completes an electronic firing circuit. The S&A electric detonator initiates the S&A firing train which initiates a detonating cord which then initiates a thin layer of liquid propellant, which by gravity rests under the kill mechanism, shattering the plastic mine body and propelling the kill mechanism upwards from 6 inches to 8 feet above the ground where it detonates. The kill mechanism is a spheroid internally embossed and loaded with 21 grams of Comp A5 and when detonated, propels fragments in a high velocity spherical pattern. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5058960 | 1,162,662 |
1,331,287 | The multiple cores of the Kentsfield mostly benefits applications that can easily be broken into a small number of parallel threads (such as audio and video transcoding, data compression, video editing, 3D rendering and ray-tracing). To take a specific example, multi-threaded games such as Crysis and Gears of War which must perform multiple simultaneous tasks such as AI, audio and physics benefit from quad-core CPUs. In such cases, the processing performance may increase relative to that of a single-CPU system by a factor approaching the number of CPUs. This should, however, be considered an upper limit as it assumes that the user-level software is properly threaded. To return to the above example, some tests have demonstrated that Crysis fails to take advantage of more than two cores at any given time. On the other hand, the impact of this issue on broader system performance can be significantly reduced on systems which frequently handle numerous unrelated simultaneous tasks such as multi-user environments or desktops which execute background processes while the user is active. There is still, however, some overhead involved in coordinating execution of multiple processes or threads and scheduling them on multiple CPUs which scales with the number of threads/CPUs. Finally, on the hardware level there exists the possibility of bottlenecks arising from the sharing of memory and/or I/O bandwidth between processors. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24100323 | 1,330,558 |
740,607 | Communities have discontinued water fluoridation in some countries, including Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Changes have been motivated by political opposition to water fluoridation, but sometimes the need for water fluoridation was met by alternative strategies. The use of fluoride in its various forms is the foundation of tooth decay prevention throughout Europe; several countries have introduced fluoridated salt, with varying success: in Switzerland and Germany, fluoridated salt represents 65% to 70% of the domestic market, while in France the market share reached 60% in 1993 but dwindled to 14% in 2009; Spain, in 1986 the second West European country to introduce fluoridation of table salt, reported a market share in 2006 of only 10%. In three other West European countries, Greece, Austria and the Netherlands, the legal framework for production and marketing of fluoridated edible salt exists. At least six Central European countries (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania) have shown some interest in salt fluoridation; however, significant usage of approximately 35% was only achieved in the Czech Republic. The Slovak Republic had the equipment to treat salt by 2005; in the other four countries attempts to introduce fluoridated salt were not successful. When Israel implemented the 2014 Dental Health Promotion Program, that includes education, medical followup and the use of fluoride-containing products and supplements, it evaluated that mandatory water fluoridation was no longer necessary, stating "supply of fluoridated water forces those who do not so wish to also consume water with added fluoride. This approach is therefore not accepted in most countries in the world.". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=763637 | 740,215 |
565,728 | Sims entered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), initially studying math. She decided that the job prospects were poor and switched to chemistry, graduating with her Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1971. She then spent a year in graduate school, conducting X-ray crystallographic studies of metallocarboranes, and published three articles in "Inorganic Chemistry". Noting a lack of employment opportunity for chemists who had earned PhDs, she decided to pursue medicine instead. The following year she moved to the UCLA School of Medicine, where she received her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree in 1976. At the time, medicine was considered a "non-traditional" career for women, and there were only about 15 women in the medical school class of 150. She completed her internship at Harbor General Hospital in 1977. At Harbor General she met Bill Fisher, a fellow intern a year ahead of her. He too was a military brat—the son of a United States Air Force officer—and also hoped to one day fly in space. She chose to specialize in emergency medicine and worked in several hospitals in the Los Angeles area, doing eight 24-hour shifts per month. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1397856 | 565,438 |
1,359,622 | A continuous-wave (CW) NO DIAL system based on the Scheimpflug principle has been developed by employing a compact high-power CW multimode 450 nm laser diode as the light source. Laser emissions at the on-line and off-line wavelengths of the NO absorption spectrum are implemented by tuning the injection current of the laser diode. Lidar signals are detected by a 45° tilted area CCD image sensor satisfying the Scheimpflug principle. Range-resolved NO concentrations on a near-horizontal path are obtained by the NO DIAL system in the range of 0.3–3 km and show good agreement with those measured by a conventional air pollution monitoring station. A detection sensitivity of ± 0.9 ppbv at 95% confidence level in the region of 0.3–1 km is achieved with 15-minute averaging and 700 m range resolution during hours of darkness, which allows accurate concentration measurement of ambient NO. The low-cost and robust DIAL system demonstrated in this work opens up many possibilities for field NO remote sensing applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46736055 | 1,358,871 |
905,941 | The results indicated that nuclei of unbinilium were produced at high (~70 MeV) excitation energy which underwent fission with measurable half-lives just over 10 s. Although very short (indeed insufficient for the element to be considered by IUPAC to exist, because a compound nucleus has no internal structure and its nucleons have not been arranged into shells until it has survived for 10 s, when it forms an electronic cloud), the ability to measure such a process indicates a strong shell effect at "Z" = 120. At lower excitation energy (see neutron evaporation), the effect of the shell will be enhanced and ground-state nuclei can be expected to have relatively long half-lives. This result could partially explain the relatively long half-life of Og measured in experiments at Dubna. Similar experiments have indicated a similar phenomenon at element 124 but not for flerovium, suggesting that the next proton shell does in fact lie beyond element 120. In September 2007, the team at RIKEN began a program utilizing Cm targets and have indicated future experiments to probe the possibility of 120 being the next proton magic number (and 184 being the next neutron magic number) using the aforementioned nuclear reactions to form Ubn*, as well as Cm+Cr. They also planned to further chart the region by investigating the nearby compound nuclei Og*, Og*, Ubb*, and Ubb*. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67491 | 905,465 |
1,380,461 | Due to Hutchinson, the European attitudes towards ecology entered America. Before Hutchinson, ecology and natural history were considered identical. After Hutchinson it became legitimate to study the physical and chemical properties of ecosystems in their own right. Hutchinson also raised the idea of climate change 30 years before the problem became popular. He taught his students as early as 1947 that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead to a global temperature increase. He considered the causes and preventatives for extinction, resource management, and the social anthropology of endangered cultures decades before they were attracting attention as crises. He influenced many different areas of ecology, contributing to his designation as the "Father of Modern Ecology". His many graduate students went on to careers in ecology. He was the first to describe and resolve the paradox of the plankton in 1961. Upon his death, Yvette H. Edmondson noted "The era that ended with G.E. Hutchinson's death was not only that of a thoughtful man and the growth of a science imprinted by his thinking. Even more sadly, we may be seeing the end of an intellectual climate in which the sparking mind of one individual can so illuminate a science. Science by committee casts a very different light." In 1982, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, now called the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, honored Hutchinson by creating the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award, one of the Society's major awards that is given annually to recognize excellence in any aspect of limnology or oceanography. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2321755 | 1,379,698 |
8,444 | Columbia is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Columbia was the first North American site where the uranium atom was split. The College of Physicians and Surgeons played a central role in developing the modern understanding of neuroscience with the publication of "Principles of Neural Science", described by historian of science Katja Huenther as the "neuroscience 'bible' ". The book was written by a team of Columbia researchers that included Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas Jessell. Columbia was the birthplace of FM radio and the laser. The first brain-computer interface capable of translating brain signals into speech was developed by neuroengineers at Columbia. The MPEG-2 algorithm of transmitting high quality audio and video over limited bandwidth was developed by Dimitris Anastassiou, a Columbia professor of electrical engineering. Biologist Martin Chalfie was the first to introduce the use of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in labeling cells in intact organisms. Other inventions and products related to Columbia include Sequential Lateral Solidification (SLS) technology for making LCDs, System Management Arts (SMARTS), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) (which is used for audio, video, chat, instant messaging and whiteboarding), pharmacopeia, Macromodel (software for computational chemistry), a new and better recipe for glass concrete, Blue LEDs, and Beamprop (used in photonics). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6310 | 8,441 |
834,332 | As for socialism, Mises (1944) and Hayek (1937) insisted that bureaucrats in individual ministries could not coordinate their plans without a price system. If decentralized socialism cannot work, central authorities must plan production. However, central planners face the local knowledge problem in forming a comprehensive plan for production. Mises and Hayek saw centralization as inevitable in socialism. Opponents argued that in principle an economy can be seen as a set of equations. Thus, there should be no need for prices. Using information about available resources and the preferences of people, it should be possible to calculate an optimal solution for resource allocation. Friedrich von Hayek responded that the system of equations required too much information that would not be easily available and the ensuing calculations would be too difficult. This is partly because individuals possess useful knowledge but do not realise its importance, may have no incentive to transmit the information, or may have incentive to transmit false information about their preferences. He contended that the only rational solution is to utilize all the dispersed knowledge in the market place through the use of price signals. The early debates were made before the much greater calculating powers of modern computers became available but also before research on chaos theory. In the 1980s, Alexander Nove argued that the calculations would take millions of years even with the best computers. It may be impossible to make long-term predictions for a highly complex system such as an economy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9297 | 833,883 |
1,184,578 | On January 9, "Mirny" collided with an ice field and knocked out four-pound ship gref. Strength of the construction and skills of lieutenant Nikolay Obernisov minimized damage, so the leak did not even open. On January 12 the expedition passed 8 icebergs and crossed 61 south latitude, the weather all that time was cloudy, and it was raining with snow. On January 15 the expedition crossed the Antarctic Circle at 66° south latitude and 3° west longitude. The next day Bellingshausen described his observations as "ices that we imagined as white clouds through the coming snow" that lasted from horizon to horizon. This was the first observation of ice shelfs. The observation point was 69°21'28" south latitude and 2°14'50" west longitude – area of modern Bellingshausen's ice shelf near with Princess Martha Coast at Lazarev Sea. On January 17, for a short time the sun appeared, which made it possible to get closer to "Mirny", but then the weather worsened again. On January 21, participants of the expedition secondly observed "ice masses", the limits of which were not visible. One hundred four days passed from the departure from Rio, and living conditions were close to extreme. In the living deck and officer cabins, the stoves were heated daily (instead of heating pads, they used forcefully heated in fire cannonballs. However, the crew still had to clean condensation three times per day, which constantly accumulated. Due to constant wet snow and fog, the crew had difficulties with drying clothes and beds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40880361 | 1,183,951 |
382,651 | When Hollywood beckoned concert hall composers in the 1930s with promises of better films and higher pay, Copland saw both a challenge for his abilities as a composer as well as an opportunity to expand his reputation and audience for his more serious works. In a departure from other film scores of the time, Copland's work largely reflected his own style, instead of the usual borrowing from the late-Romantic period. He often avoided the full orchestra, and he rejected the common practice of using a leitmotif to identify characters with their own personal themes. He instead matched a theme to the action, while avoiding the underlining of every action with exaggerated emphasis. Another technique Copland employed was to keep silent during intimate screen moments and only begin the music as a confirming motive toward the end of a scene. Virgil Thomson wrote that the score for "Of Mice and Men" established "the most distinguished populist musical style yet created in America". Many composers who scored for western movies, particularly between 1940 and 1960, were influenced by Copland's style, though some also followed the late Romantic "Max Steiner" approach, which was considered more conventional and desirable. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51298 | 382,456 |
960,070 | The Hawaiian honeycreepers form a large, highly morphologically diverse species group of birds that began radiating in the early days of the Hawaiian archipelago. While today only 17 species are known to persist in Hawaii (3 more may or may not be extinct), there were more than 50 species prior to Polynesian colonization of the archipelago (between 18 and 21 species have gone extinct since the discovery of the islands by westerners). The Hawaiian honeycreepers are known for their beaks, which are specialized to satisfy a wide range of dietary needs: for example, the beak of the ʻakiapōlāʻau ("Hemignathus wilsoni") is characterized by a short, sharp lower mandible for scraping bark off of trees, and the much longer, curved upper mandible is used to probe the wood underneath for insects. Meanwhile, the ʻiʻiwi ("Drepanis coccinea") has a very long curved beak for reaching nectar deep in "Lobelia" flowers. An entire clade of Hawaiian honeycreepers, the tribe Psittirostrini, is composed of thick-billed, mostly seed-eating birds, like the Laysan finch ("Telespiza cantans"). In at least some cases, similar morphologies and behaviors appear to have evolved convergently among the Hawaiian honeycreepers; for example, the short, pointed beaks of "Loxops" and "Oreomystis" evolved separately despite once forming the justification for lumping the two genera together. The Hawaiian honeycreepers are believed to have descended from a single common ancestor some 15 to 20 million years ago, though estimates range as low as 3.5 million years. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1909 | 959,561 |
1,112,929 | The plasmon resonant frequency is highly sensitive to the refractive index of the environment; a change in refractive index results in a shift in the resonant frequency. As the resonant frequency is easy to measure, this allows LSP nanoparticles to be used for nanoscale sensing applications. Also, nanoparticles exhibiting strong LSP properties, such as gold nanorods, could enhance the signal in surface plasmon resonance sensing. Nanostructures exhibiting LSP resonances are used to enhance signals in modern analytical techniques based on spectroscopy. Other applications that rely on efficient light to heat generation in the nanoscale are heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), photothermal cancer therapy, and thermophotovoltaics. So far, high efficiency applications using plasmonics have not been realized due to the high ohmic losses inside metals especially in the optical spectral range (visible and NIR)., Additionally surface plasmons have been used to create super lenses, invisibility cloaks, and to improve quantum computing. Another interesting area of research in plasmonics is the ability to turn plasmons "on" and "off" via modification of another molecule. The ability to turn plasmons on and off has important consequences for increasing sensitivity in detection methods. Recently, a supramolecular chromophore was coupled with a metal nanostructure. This interaction changed the localized surface plasmon resonance properties of the silver nanostructure by increasing the absorption intensity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38931518 | 1,112,363 |
1,498,188 | Compared to the bacterial enzyme, plant versions of the synthase are much harder to crystallize, and as of August 2019 no experimental atomic structures of the plant cellulose synthase catalytic domain is known. However, at least two high-confidence structures have been predicted for these enzymes. The broader of the two structures (Sethaphong 2013), which includes the entire middle cytoplasmic domain (again sandwiched between TM helices), gives a useful view of the enzyme: two plant-specific insertions called the PC-R (plant-conserved region, similar in all plants) on the N-terminal end and CS-R (class-specific region, determines the subclass number after CesA) on the C-terminal end punctuate the usual GT catalytic core, probably providing the unique rosette-forming function of plant CesA. (Some CesA proteins possess an additional insertion.) The structure seems to explain the effects of many known mutations. The positioning of the two insertions, however, do not match the scattering result from Olek 2014. An 2016 experimental model of the PC-R () domain helps to fill in this gap, as it greatly improves the fit against Olek's previous result. It also matches the Sethaphong 2015 prediction of an antiparallel coiled-coil well. The two groups continue to further their understandings of the "CesA" structure, with Olek et al focusing on experimental structures and Sethaphong et al focusing on plant studies and building better computer models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14650763 | 1,497,344 |
159,552 | Given the necessary degree of uncertainty for which prospect theory is applied, it should come as no surprise that it and other psychological models are applied extensively in the context of political decision-making. Both rational choice and game theoretical models generate significant predictive power in the analysis of politics and international relations (IR). But prospect theory, unlike the alternative models, (1) is "founded on empirical data", (2) allows and accounts for dynamic change, (3) addresses previously-ignored modular elements, (4) emphasizes the situation in the decision-making process, (5) "provides a micro-foundational basis for the explanation of larger phenomena", and (6) stresses the importance of loss in utility and value calculations. Moreover, again unlike other models, prospect theory "asks different sorts of questions, seeks different evidence, and reaches different conclusions." However, there exist shortcomings inherent in prospect theory's political application, such as the dilemma regarding an actor's perceived position on the gain-loss domain spectrum, and the discordance between ideological and pragmatic (i.e. 'in the lab' versus 'in the field') assessments of an actor's propensity toward seeking or avoiding risk. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=197284 | 159,467 |
1,679,120 | By acquiring images every 2 minutes in wavelengths invisible to the human eye, it allowed detailed study of the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere and the magnetosphere's response during a magnetic storm. From its distant orbit, the spacecraft produced a wealth of images of the previously invisible region of space in the inner magnetosphere, exceeded all its scientific goals. A senior review in 2005, just previous to its loss, described the mission as "extremely productive", having confirmed several theoretical predictions (e.g. plasmasphere plumes, pre-midnight ring-current injection, and continuous antiparallel reconnection), discovered numerous new and unanticipated phenomena (e.g. plasmasphere shoulders, subauroral proton arcs, and a secondary interstellar neutral atom stream), and answered a set of outstanding questions regarding the source region of kilometric continuum radiation, the role of solar wind pressure pulses in ionospheric outflow, and the relationship between proton and electron auroras during substorms. When the spacecraft went silent in December 2005, it had already been approved a mission extension until 2010. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1090498 | 1,678,177 |
1,215,456 | The primary movements in art which influenced education at Vkhutemas were constructivism and suprematism, although individuals were versatile enough to fit into many or no movements—often teaching in multiple departments and working in diverse media. The leader figure of suprematist art, Kazimir Malevich, joined the teaching staff of Vkhutemas in 1925, though his group—Unovis, of the Vitebsk art college that included El Lissitzky—exhibited at Vkhutemas as early as 1921. While constructivism was ostensibly developed as an art form in graphics and sculpture, it had architecture and construction as its underlying subject matter. This influence pervaded the school. The artistic education at Vkhutemas tended to be multidisciplinary, which stemmed from its origins as a merger of a fine arts college and a craft school. A further contributor to this was the generality of the basic course, which continued after students had specialised and was complemented by a versatile faculty. Vkhutemas cultivated polymath masters in the Renaissance mold, many with achievements in graphics, sculpture, product design, and architecture. Painters and sculptors often made projects related to architecture; examples include "Tatlin's Tower", Malevich's "Architektons", and Rodchenko's "Spatial Constructions". Artists moved from department to department, such as Rodchenko from painting to metalworking. Gustav Klutsis, who was head of a workshop on colour theory, also moved from painting and sculptural works to exhibition stands and kiosks. El Lissitzky, who had trained as an architect, also worked in a broad cross section of media such as graphics, print and exhibition design. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3014315 | 1,214,804 |
2,113,781 | Arntzen's research focus spans plant cell-molecular biology and protein engineering. He was an early proponent of using plant biotechnology to enhance food quality and value, to express pharmacologically active products in plants, and to overcome health and agricultural constraints in the developing world. He is a pioneer in the development of plant-based vaccines for human disease prevention with special emphasis on needs of poor countries and disease prevention in animal agriculture. After 2001, this research was extended to the creation of effective vaccines and therapeutics to reduce the threats of biowarfare agents. Research initiated at ASU and funded by the US Army in 2002 focused on use of tobacco to bio-manufacture vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to prevent for treat disease caused by potential biowarefare agents. In 2011, he and his team at the Biodesign Institute were developing a vaccine for the Ebola virus using mice. An outcome of this research was the creation of ZMapp, a therapeutic used to treat Ebola patients. ZMapp remains as the leading candidate therapeutic for this disease. Fast Company chose him as the Most Creative Person in Business in 2015 for his work on fighting Ebola with tobacco-made therapeutics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25822067 | 2,112,566 |
439,519 | In 1987, Lovaas published a study which demonstrated that, following forty hours a week of treatment, 9 of the 19 autistic children developed typical spoken language, increased IQs by 30 points on average, and were placed in regular classrooms. A 1993 follow-up study found that 8 maintained their gains and were "indistinguishable from their typically developing peers", scoring in the normal range of social and emotional functioning. His studies were limited because Lovaas did not randomize the participants or treatment groups. This produced a quasi-experiment in which he was able to control the assignment of children to treatment groups. His manipulation of the study in this way may have been responsible for the observed effects. The true efficacy of his method cannot be determined since his studies cannot be repeated for ethical reasons. A 1998 study subsequently recommended that EIBI programs be regarded with skepticism. In 1999, the United States Surgeon General said, "Thirty years of research has demonstrated the efficacy of applied behavioral methods in reducing inappropriate behavior and in increasing communication, learning, and appropriate social behavior", and he also endorsed the 1987 study. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1317207 | 439,305 |
228,451 | Construction has begun on the largest artificial breeding and protection base for the endangered giant salamander in China. The base in Jing'an County, in the eastern province of Jiangxi, will breed the amphibians for scientific research, the traditional Chinese medicine industry and for exhibition in aquariums. Located in the Sanzhaolun Forest Park, the 10.83 million yuan (1.35 million U.S. dollars) project is intended to breed 60,000 giant salamanders annually when it is completed by the end of next year. The base, covering 10,000 square meters, would boost efforts to save the world's largest amphibian from extinction, said Li Xinfa, head of the Jing'an County Giant Salamander Research Center. The number of wild giant salamanders has declined rapidly due to their value as a source of traditional Chinese medicine ingredients and as food, and due to poaching, loss of habitat and pollution. It is included in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species meaning commercial international trade in wild specimens is prohibited, and it is under state protection in China. EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered) aims to ensure the future of this salamander by helping to create an environmental education programme encouraging sustainable management of wild populations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9428033 | 228,334 |
529,072 | Lambert was born in 1728 into a Huguenot family in the city of Mulhouse (now in Alsace, France), at that time a city-state allied to Switzerland. Some sources give 26 August as his birth date and others 28 August. Leaving school at 12, he continued to study in his free time while undertaking a series of jobs. These included assistant to his father (a tailor), a clerk at a nearby iron works, a private tutor, secretary to the editor of "Basler Zeitung" and, at the age of 20, private tutor to the sons of Count Salis in Chur. Travelling Europe with his charges (1756–1758) allowed him to meet established mathematicians in the German states, The Netherlands, France and the Italian states. On his return to Chur he published his first books (on optics and cosmology) and began to seek an academic post. After a few short posts he was rewarded (1763) by an invitation to a position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where he gained the sponsorship of Frederick II of Prussia, and became a friend of Euler. In this stimulating and financially stable environment, he worked prodigiously until his death in 1777. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=93085 | 528,798 |
974,847 | This live conversion was crude compared to early-21st-century electronic digital conversion techniques. Image degradation was unavoidable with this system as the monitor and camera's optical limitations significantly lowered the original SSTV signal's contrast, brightness and resolution. If the scan converter's settings were incorrectly set, as they were at the Goldstone station during the first few minutes of Apollo 11's moonwalk, the negative impact on the image could be very obvious. When Armstrong first came down the Lunar Module's ladder, he was barely visible because the contrast and the vertical phase were not set correctly by the scan converter operator. The video seen on home television sets was further degraded by the very long and noisy analog transmission path. The converted signal was sent by satellite from the three receiving ground stations to Houston. Then the network pool feed was sent by microwave relay to New York, where it was broadcast live to the United States and the world. Because all of these links were analog, each one added additional noise and distortion to the signal. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6549167 | 974,336 |
466,728 | In 1986 United States president Ronald Reagan announced the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program, intended to develop two X-30 aircraft capable of single stage to orbit (SSTO), as well as horizontal takeoff and landing from conventional runways. The aircraft was to be a hydrogen fuelled air-breathing space plane, with a low speed accelerator system to bring the aircraft up to Mach 3, where the main dual-mode scramjet engines (ramjet/scramjet) would take over. At the edge of the atmosphere, a rocket was to take over and provide the final energy for orbital insertion. It was based on a classified DARPA research program called Copper Canyon. This research program suggested that Mach 25 might be possible. As the program proceeded it became clear that Mach 17 was probably the limit, whilst the weight penalty and complexity of the skin heat exchanger and other propulsion systems was going to be substantial. The program was established by the secretary of defence in 1985, and was funded to the end of FY1994, when the decision was made that the 15 billion dollars required to build the two X-30 test craft were excessive. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4841481 | 466,495 |
2,170,873 | Although it is not thought to directly target components of the TCR/CD3 complex, Alemtuzumab, or Campath-1H, has been utilized because of its strong ability to deplete T cells, in many cases for up to 3 years. It is a monoclonal antibody that targets CD52, a protein that is expressed on the surface of mature lymphocytes. Originally approved for B cell cancers, its use has spread to off-label indications. One such indication includes renal transplantation, whereby its use remains controversial. This is not because the antibody is not extremely efficient at immune-suppressing patients, but due to the inherent risk of patients developing serious complications. Furthermore, the use of Alemtuzumab in transplantation may also be a question related to reimbursement, as it is comparably cheaper to other drugs used to treat clinical episodes of transplant rejection, and it can significantly shorten the duration of a patients hospital visit. Alemtuzumab is now being tested in clinical trials for the treatment of autoimmune diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis, where it has shown considerable promise at preventing multiple sclerosis symptoms in Relapsing-Remitting patients. However, many patients treated with alemtuzumab went on to develop other autoimmune diseases, especially those involving the thymus, as well as a plethora of infections. In general, the data suggest that alemtuzumab is excellent at inducing immune suppression. However, as a SCITT agent, it appears to overstep the required immune modulation, placing patients at unnecessary risk. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28353188 | 2,169,635 |
785,528 | It was in this context that the so-called American School of Anthropology thrived as the champion of polygenism or the doctrine of multiple origins—sparking a debate between those influenced by the Bible who believed in the unity of humanity and those who argued from a scientific standpoint for the plurality of origins and the antiquity of distinct types. Like the monogenists, these theories were not monolithic and often used words like races, species, hybrid, and mongrel interchangeably. A scientific consensus began to emerge during this period "that there exists a Genus Homo, embracing many primordial types of 'species'". Charles Caldwell, Samuel George Morton, Samuel A. Cartwright, George Gliddon, Josiah C. Nott, and Louis Agassiz, and even South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond were all influential proponents of this school. While some were disinterested scientists, others were passionate advocates who used science to promote slavery in a period of increasing sectional strife. All were complicit in establishing the putative science that justified slavery, informed the Dred Scott decision, underpinned miscegenation laws, and eventually fueled Jim Crow. Samuel G. Morton, for example, claimed to be just a scientist but he did not hesitate to provide evidence of Negro inferiority to John C. Calhoun, the prominent pro-slavery Secretary of State to help him negotiate the annexation of Texas as a slave state. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1676362 | 785,107 |
1,386,320 | Prior to 1953, the UF collection consisted of only a few hundred specimens, mostly acquired through public donation, and of little scientific value. Beginning in 1953, serious fossil prospecting began at the University of Florida, initially led by Robert S. Bader and Walter A. Auffenberg, both then members of the Department of Biology. Clayton Ray became the museum's first curator of vertebrate paleontology in 1959. He left in 1963 to take a position at the Smithsonian. Recognizing the importance of vertebrate paleontology in Florida, in 1964 museum director J. C. Dickinson hired two vertebrate paleontology curators, S. David Webb and Thomas H. Patton. Together they quickly moved the museum's research program to the forefront of the field, symbolized by their hosting in Gainesville the prestigious annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in the fall of 1964, the first time this meeting had been held in the Southeastern United States. Patton left in the mid-1970s to pursue a career in the legal profession, and was replaced in 1977 by Bruce J. MacFadden. Webb retired in 2003, and Jonathan I. Bloch was hired to fill the vacant curator position. Since 1964 the FLMNH VP curators have mentored many dozens of graduate students, produced numerous books, monographs, and research papers, and directed field operations in Florida, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the western U.S. Another important feat was the creation of the Florida Paleontological Society and the forming of a strong bond between the professional paleontologists at the museum and the amateur fossil collectors throughout the state of Florida. Although technically curators in other museum divisions, Walter Auffenberg (Herpetology) and Charles A. Woods (Mammalogy) both had research interests that included paleontology and helped build the collection. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1143787 | 1,385,553 |
413,473 | Statistical analysis of marine losses at this time suggests that the decrease in diversity was caused more by a decrease in speciation than by an increase in extinctions. Nevertheless, a pronounced turnover in plant spores and a collapse of coral reef communities indicates that an ecological catastrophe did occur at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. Older hypotheses on extinction have proposed that gradual climate or sea level change may be the culprit, or perhaps one or more asteroid strikes. However, the most well-supported and widely-held theory for the cause of the Tr-J extinction places the blame on the start of volcanic eruptions in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP). The CAMP is the most aerially extensive known large igneous province, with its flood basalts extending across parts of southwestern Europe, northwestern Africa, northeastern South America, and southeastern North America, and was responsible for outputting a high amount of carbon dioxide to induce profound global warming and ocean acidification. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31188 | 413,271 |
1,701,380 | Alan Kin-tak Lau () is an engineer and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the President and Chair Professor of Product Innovation at Technological and Higher Education Institute (Thei) of Hong Kong. Prior to this appointment, he was Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research Performance and Development at Swinburne University of Technology. He is also the Independent Non-Executive Director of King’s Flair International, the International Vice President and Trustee Board member of The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (2014-2019) and an Academic Advisor at Asia University. He also chairs the professional accreditation panel for APEC/IPEA for Korea. From 2014 to 2016, he was the Alex Wong/Gigi Wong Endowed Professor in Product Design Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HPKU). Currently, he is a Fellow of European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Academy of Sciences. Lau has conducted research in the field of Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Materials Engineering. His work has been focused on aerospace composites, Unmanned aerial vehicle, product design and engineering and bio-composites. Lau is recognized as Australian National Research Leader in Composite Materials 2019, published by The Australian Post. Currently, he is Director of Oceania Cybersecurity Centre Limited and Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory Company. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57033612 | 1,700,425 |
91,573 | There are varying opinions about the effect of the Green Revolution on wild biodiversity. One hypothesis speculates that by increasing production per unit of land area, agriculture will not need to expand into new, uncultivated areas to feed a growing human population. However, land degradation and soil nutrients depletion have forced farmers to clear forested areas in order to maintain production. A counter-hypothesis speculates that biodiversity was sacrificed because traditional systems of agriculture that were displaced sometimes incorporated practices to preserve wild biodiversity, and because the Green Revolution expanded agricultural development into new areas where it was once unprofitable or too arid. For example, the development of wheat varieties tolerant to acid soil conditions with high aluminium content permitted the introduction of agriculture in sensitive Brazilian ecosystems such as Cerrado semi-humid tropical savanna and Amazon rainforest in the geoeconomic macroregions of Centro-Sul and Amazônia. Before the Green Revolution, other Brazilian ecosystems were also significantly damaged by human activity, such as the once 1st or 2nd main contributor to Brazilian megadiversity Atlantic Rainforest (above 85% of deforestation in the 1980s, about 95% after the 2010s) and the important xeric shrublands called Caatinga mainly in Northeastern Brazil (about 40% in the 1980s, about 50% after the 2010s – deforestation of the Caatinga biome is generally associated with greater risks of desertification). This also caused many animal species to suffer due to their damaged habitats. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=72727 | 91,533 |
1,053,364 | Collaborative adaptive management is often celebrated as an effective way to deal with natural resource management under high levels of conflict, uncertainty and complexity. The effectiveness of these efforts can be constrained by both social and technical barriers. As the case of the Glenn Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program in the US illustrates, effective collaborative adaptive management efforts require clear and measurable goals and objectives, incentives and tools to foster collaboration, long-term commitment to monitoring and adaptation, and straightforward joint fact-finding protocols. In Colorado, USA, a ten-year, ranch-scale (2590 ha) experiment began in 2012 at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Central Plains Experimental range to evaluate the effectiveness and process of collaborative adaptive management on rangelands. The Collaborative Adaptive Rangeland Management or “CARM” project monitors outcomes from yearling steer grazing management on 10, 130 ha pastures conducted by a group of conservationists, ranchers, and public employees, and researchers. This team compares ecological monitoring data tracking profitability and conservation outcomes with outcomes from a “traditional” management treatment: a second set of ten pastures managed without adaptive decision making but with the same stocking rate. Early evaluations of the project by social scientists offer insights for more effective adaptive management. First, trust is primary and essential to learning in adaptive management, not a side benefit. Second, practitioners cannot assume that extensive monitoring data or large-scale efforts will automatically facilitate successful collaborative adaptive management. Active, long-term efforts to build trust among scientists and stakeholders are also important. Finally, explicit efforts to understand, share and respect multiple types of manager knowledge, including place-based ecological knowledge practiced by local managers, is necessary to manage adaptively for multiple conservation and livelihood goals on rangelands. Practitioners can expect adaptive management to be a complex, non-linear process shaped by social, political and ecological processes, as well as by data collection and interpretation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1206605 | 1,052,818 |
1,852,790 | The AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility is given by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and honours scientists and engineers whose exemplary actions, often taken at significant personal cost, have served to foster scientific freedom and responsibility and increased scientific awareness throughout the world. The establishment of this new Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was announced by AAAS executive officer William D. Carey on 23 October 1980. The award, presented for the first time at the 1982 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, consisted of a plaque and a cash prize of $1,000. According to the AAAS, these types of exemplary actions include "acting to protect the public's health, safety or welfare; focusing public attention on important potential impacts of science and technology on society by their responsible participation in public policy debates." The 2018 recipient of the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was civil and environmental engineer Marc Edwards. The AAAS stated that he was given the award for his ability "to apply his engineering expertise to revealing dangerous levels of lead contamination in water supplies" in the area of Flint Michigan. According to Marc, Flint Michigan "represents misconduct by local and federal government engineers and scientists... and allowed an unprecedented exposure to the best known nerve toxin in the most powerful city in America, and perhaps even the world". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21123525 | 1,851,728 |
1,279,922 | The Renaissance was the age of collectors and travellers, when many of the stories were actually demonstrated as true when the living or preserved specimens were brought to Europe. Verification by collecting of things, instead of the accumulation of anecdotes, then became more common, and scholars developed a new faculty of careful observation. The Renaissance brought expanded interest in both empirical natural history and physiology. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius inaugurated the modern era of Western medicine with his seminal human anatomy treatise "De humani corporis fabrica", which was based on dissection of corpses. Vesalius was the first in a series of anatomists who gradually replaced scholasticism with empiricism in physiology and medicine, relying on first-hand experience rather than authority and abstract reasoning. Bestiaries—a genre that combines both the natural and figurative knowledge of animals—also became more sophisticated. Conrad Gessner great zoological work, "Historiae animalium", appeared in four volumes, 1551–1558, at Zürich, a fifth being issued in 1587. His works were the starting-point of modern zoology. Other major works were produced by William Turner, Pierre Belon, Guillaume Rondelet, and Ulisse Aldrovandi. Artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, often working with naturalists, were also interested in the bodies of animals and humans, studying physiology in detail and contributing to the growth of anatomical knowledge. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=250535 | 1,279,227 |
859,962 | In 2005, the Cleveland Clinic became the first US hospital to approve the procedure. In December 2008, a team at the Cleveland Clinic, led by Maria Siemionow and including a group of supporting doctors and six plastic surgeons (Steven Bernard, Dr Mark Hendrickson, Robert Lohman, Dan Alam and Francis Papay) performed the first face transplant in the US on a woman named Connie Culp. It was the world's first near-total facial transplant and the fourth known facial transplant to have been successfully performed to date. This operation was the first facial transplant known to have included bones, along with muscle, skin, blood vessels, and nerves. The woman received a nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw, and even some teeth from a brain-dead donor. As doctors recovered the donor's facial tissue, they paid special attention to maintaining arteries, veins, and nerves, as well as soft tissue and bony structures. The surgeons then connected facial graft vessels to the patient's blood vessels in order to restore blood circulation in the reconstructed face before connecting arteries, veins and nerves in the 22-hour procedure. She had been disfigured to the point where she could not eat or breathe on her own as a result of a traumatic injury several years ago, which had left her without a nose, right eye and upper jaw. Doctors hoped the operation would allow her to regain her sense of smell and ability to smile, and said she had a "clear understanding" of the risks involved. Connie died July 29, 2020. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1000053 | 859,504 |
1,200,745 | Many marine fauna utilise coastal habitats as critical nursery areas, for shelter and feeding, yet these habitats are increasingly at risk from agriculture, aquaculture, industry and urban expansion. Indeed, these systems are subject to what may be called "a triple whammy" of increasing industrialisation and urbanisation, an increased loss of biological and physical resources (fish, water, energy, space), and a decreased resilience to the consequences of a warming climate and sea level rise. This has given rise to the complete loss, modification or disconnection of natural coastal ecosystems globally. For example, almost 10% of the entire Great Barrier Reef coastline in Australia (2,300 km) has been replaced with urban infrastructure (e.g., rock seawalls, jetties, marinas), causing massive loss and fragmentation of sensitive coastal ecosystems. Global loss of seagrass reached around 7% of seagrasses area per year by the end of the twentieth century. A global analysis of tidal wetlands (mangroves, tidal flats, and tidal marshes) published in 2022 estimated global losses of from 1999-2019, however, this study also estimated that these losses were largely offset by the establishment of of new tidal wetlands that were not present in 1999. Approximately three-quarters of the net decrease between 1999 and 2019 occurred in Asia (74.1%), with 68.6% concentrated in three countries: Indonesia (36%), China (20.6%), and Myanmar (12%). Of these global tidal wetland losses and gains, 39% of losses and 14% of gains were attributed to direct human activities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65970498 | 1,200,104 |
899,943 | Finding a cure for the diseases caused by frameshift mutations is rare. Research into this is ongoing. One example is a primary immunodeficiency (PID), an inherited condition which can lead to an increase in infections. There are 120 genes and 150 mutations that play a role in primary immunodeficiencies. The standard treatment is currently gene therapy, but this is a highly risky treatment and can often lead to other diseases, such as leukemia. Gene therapy procedures include modifying the zinc fringer nuclease fusion protein, cleaving both ends of the mutation, which in turn removes it from the sequence. Antisense-oligonucleotide mediated exon skipping is another possibility for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. This process allows for passing over the mutation so that the rest of the sequence remains in frame and the function of the protein stays intact. This, however, does not cure the disease, just treats symptoms, and is only practical in structural proteins or other repetitive genes. A third form of repair is revertant mosaicism, which is naturally occurring by creating a reverse mutation or a mutation at a second site that corrects the reading frame. This reversion may happen by intragenic recombination, mitotic gene conversion, second site DNA slipping or site-specific reversion. This is possible in several diseases, such as X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome, and Bloom syndrome. There are no drugs or other pharmacogenomic methods that help with PIDs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=610997 | 899,468 |
1,941,270 | Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, one of Thomsen's early assistants, set out in 1850 to investigate an interesting find of flint tools linked to a heap of ancient oyster shells at Meilgaard in Northern Djursland. Worsaae surmised that perhaps “this had been a sort of eating-place for the people of the neighborhood in the earliest prehistoric times”; and further excavations indeed confirmed that the ancient shell heaps were signs of human prehistoric activity, being kitchen middens - Danish term "køkkenmødding" - and leftovers from their meals. A later commission initiated in 1893-1895, executed a large scale, thorough and interdisciplinary excavation at the Limfjord. The site is named Ertebølle and so the rich and defining archaeological find coined the now well-known Stone Age culture of Ertebølle. Apart from archaeology, participating scientific disciplines included botany, zoology and geology, and such kitchen middens has since been viewed as important archaeological sites internationally. Due to land-shift after the melting of the ice, many kitchen midden sites, originally on the coast, were later submerged: The first submerged settlement excavated in Denmark was Tybrind Vig in 1977. The site was excavated over the following decade. 300 m from the shore and 3 m below the surface, divers excavated sensationally well-preserved artefacts from the Ertebølle Culture. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4650284 | 1,940,159 |
1,340,819 | Considered one of the most beautiful bamboos in cultivation, "Fargesia murielae" is native to the mountains of central China, introduced by Ernest Henry Wilson in 1913 and named after his daughter. Its common name "umbrella bamboo" describes the graceful weeping habit of this plant. It grows at elevations of . It usually grows up to , with a diameter of about 0.5 inch, and is hardy to . Its USDA plant hardiness zone is 5 through 9 which is not desirable in climates with high heat and humidity such as southeastern states. The leaves are longer than they are wide, have pointed ends, and are arranged singly along the leaf stem. It quickly forms a dense clump of closely spaced canes that are hard to see under a mass of foliage. The new shoots are light blue with tan culm sheaths, aging to a yellowish-green. Its growth and appearance is facilitated in an environment that receives afternoon shade and sunlight throughout the day. Like all other fargesias, it does not have running rhizomes and needs no containment to prevent spread. It will maintain its green-pigmented foliage throughout the winter, though it will most likely shed a few leaves in late fall. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35699194 | 1,340,086 |
2,177,771 | Modification had also been extended past hydrophobic and hydrophilic attachments, charged compounds have also been introduced to TRPs. Kobayashi et al. had previously performed successful modifications to separate bioactive ionic compounds, and continued on that success to improve separation efficiency of bioactive compounds. Common methods of separating angiotensin peptides had involved reverse-phased high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) and cation-exchange chromatography. RP-HPLC requires the use of organic solvents, which is not favored and current trends are moving away from that. Hydrophobic interaction chromatography requires high concentration salt elutions and eluent cleaning to remove the salt. To address the shortcomings of the previous methods, Kobayashi’s group grafted acrylic acid (anionic acrylate under neutral conditions) and tert-butylacrylamide (hydrophobic) monomers onto PNIPAAm, resulting in PNIPAAm-co-AAc-co-tBAAm (IAtB) onto silica beads as a stationary phase medium. The reason for incorporating both ionic and hydrophobic compounds is multifaceted. The ionic compound improves interactivity with the ionic species, but raises the LCST significantly. The hydrophobic addition counteracts against the raise in LCST and lowers it to a more standard value, but also interacts with the hydrophobic surfaces of biological compounds. This resulted in successful and resolved elution of angiotensin peptides. Additionally, they were able to tune the retention factor for the analytes through isocratic temperature gradient elution. Ideal elutions occurred at 35 °C, but decreasing the temperature to 10 °C or raising it to 50 °C caused faster elutions either way. This is a strong indication that electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions can be similarly affected by changes in temperature. The major advantages from applying these success of this study include stationary phase versatility and maintaining bioactivity of the analytes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37850414 | 2,176,526 |
1,479,327 | Bechtel joined the family business in 1948. While he initially wanted to enter into home building, he was convinced by his father by showcasing Bechtel Corporation's global projects in a three week trip. He succeeded his father, Stephen Bechtel Sr., as president of Bechtel Corporation in 1960 and chairman in 1969. His career with the company spanned 30 years until his retirement in 1990. During his time, the company which was earlier known for its work on the Hoover Dam and the Bay Area Rapid Transit, expanded its global footprint by working on the Channel Tunnel between France and the United Kingdom, King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh as well as Jubail Industrial City in Saudi Arabia. The last is considered one of the largest civil engineering projects of the time. The company was involved in the build out of oil platforms in the North Sea, liquefied natural gas plants in Algeria, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates, and also in the cleanup of the nuclear reactor site Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1324576 | 1,478,494 |
462,524 | Males become sexually mature at one year, females may mature in either two or three years. Males will establish breeding territories and maintain them throughout the entirety of the breeding period, with the season occurring from spring through summer, with variations depending on location and temperature. During this breeding period, an egg clutch consisting of 1000 to 7000 eggs is laid in surface films about 15–30 cm in diameter and are attached to vegetation in shallow water in order to protect the eggs from predators. Females may sometimes lay two clutches of eggs in a single season, with their size reaching a maximum of 98–105 mm. Females who were ready to mate typically came into male territories and assumed a low posture to demonstrate the clear power difference between the two (the lower posture emphasizes their subordination as does the fact that they come to the males once ready to mate). However, females did still exhibit selection when choosing a male as the process of choosing a mate typically took 2 to 3 days. In this case, females tend to favor males who exhibit territoriality and have strong mating calls (the basis for this is selfish as it lies in the female’s desire for the greatest reproductive success and the best traits to be passed down to their children). Once a female was a few centimeters in front of the male, she would back her body into his and once physical contact was reached, the males would clasp the females and fertilization would begin. There are several instances where females will not be clasped due to the stimuli which initiate amplexus (when the male clasps the female from the back) not being created. Once fertilization occurred, almost all of the eggs were deposited into the resident male’s territory (not the satellite male's, implying that polyandry for the female is not a common practice in this species) which promotes protection for the offspring. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13010117 | 462,295 |
126,856 | Small scale crystallography can be done with a local X-ray tube source, typically coupled with an image plate detector. These have the advantage of being relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain, and allow for quick screening and collection of samples. However, the wavelength of the light produced is limited by the availability of different anode materials. Furthermore, the intensity is limited by the power applied and cooling capacity available to avoid melting the anode. In such systems, electrons are boiled off of a cathode and accelerated through a strong electric potential of ~50 kV; having reached a high speed, the electrons collide with a metal plate, emitting "bremsstrahlung" and some strong spectral lines corresponding to the excitation of inner-shell electrons of the metal. The most common metal used is copper, which can be kept cool easily, due to its high thermal conductivity, and which produces strong K and K lines. The K line is sometimes suppressed with a thin (~10 µm) nickel foil. The simplest and cheapest variety of sealed X-ray tube has a stationary anode (the Crookes tube) and run with ~2 kW of electron beam power. The more expensive variety has a rotating-anode type source that run with ~14 kW of e-beam power. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34151 | 126,804 |
2,061,990 | Professional science in Canada began with the founding of the Geological Survey of Canada, by the Legislature of the Province of Canada, in 1841. William Logan was appointed the first director in 1842 and after establishing headquarters in Montreal in 1843 began field work searching for coal in the area between Pictou, Nova Scotia, and the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada. His assistant Alexander Perry conducted a similar search in the area between Lakes Huron and Erie. Although no coal was found the surveys demonstrated the importance of systematic study of Canada's land mass. The survey grew during the forties and in 1851 participated in the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, England, as well as the Universal Exposition in Paris, in 1855. The efforts of the survey were so successful that in 1863 it was able to publish its first major work, "The Geology of Canada". With Confederation the survey's area of geographic responsibility grew dramatically as did its reputation, being recognized by the government as an important agent in the establishment of a mining industry in Canada. This recognition also resulted in the headquarters being moved to Ottawa in 1881. As Canada grew the survey studied the routes of the new Canadian Pacific Railway as well as other areas of the west and north. Director Dawson surveyed British Columbia and the Yukon; Robert Bell studied the north and the coastal areas of Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait. Geologist Tyrell found coal and fossils in Alberta and J. Mackintosh Bell studied the area from Lake Athabasca to Great Bear Lake in 1900. Sailing aboard the "Neptune" geologist Low explored the Arctic archipelago in 1903–04. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18401364 | 2,060,800 |
1,030,298 | France adopted the EU laws on growing GMOs in 2007 and was fined €10 million by the European Court of Justice for the six-year delay in implementing the laws. In February 2008, the French government used the safeguard clause to ban the cultivation of MON 810 after Senator Jean-François Le Grand, chairman of a committee to evaluate biotechnology, said there were "serious doubts" about the safety of the product. Twelve scientists and two economists on the committee accused Le Grand of misrepresenting the report and said they did not have "serious doubts", although questions remained concerning the impact of Bt-maize on health and the environment. The EFSA reviewed studies the French government had submitted to back up its claim, and concluded that there was no new evidence to undermine its prior safety findings and considered the decision "scientifically unfounded". The High Council for Biotechnology subcommittee dealing with economic, ethical and social aspects recommended an additional "GMO-free" label for anything containing less than 0.1% GMO which is due to come in late 2010. In 2011, the European Court of Justice and the French Conseil d'État ruled that the French farm ministry ban of MON 810 was illegal, as it failed "to give proof of the existence of a particularly high level of risk for the health and the environment". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33942954 | 1,029,764 |
186,423 | Scripting languages are, by definition, able to be extended; for example, a MS-DOS/Windows 95/98 and Windows NT type systems allows for shell/batch programs to call tools like KiXtart, QBasic, various BASIC, Rexx, Perl, and Python implementations, the Windows Script Host and its installed engines. On Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems, awk and sed are used to extend the string and numeric processing ability of shell scripts. Tcl, Perl, Rexx, and Python have graphics toolkits and can be used to code functions and procedures for shell scripts which pose a speed bottleneck (C, Fortran, assembly language &c are much faster still) and to add functionality not available in the shell language such as sockets and other connectivity functions, heavy-duty text processing, working with numbers if the calling script does not have those abilities, self-writing and self-modifying code, techniques like recursion, direct memory access, various types of sorting and more, which are difficult or impossible in the main script, and so on. Visual Basic for Applications and VBScript can be used to control and communicate with such things as spreadsheets, databases, scriptable programs of all types, telecommunications software, development tools, graphics tools and other software which can be accessed through the Component Object Model. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28938 | 186,326 |
691,114 | Atypical as Lederberg was at Asilomar, his optimistic vision of genetic engineering would soon lead to the development of the biotechnology industry. Over the next two years, as public concern over the dangers of recombinant DNA research grew, so too did interest in its technical and practical applications. Curing genetic diseases remained in the realms of science fiction, but it appeared that producing human simple proteins could be good business. Insulin, one of the smaller, best characterized and understood proteins, had been used in treating type 1 diabetes for a half century. It had been extracted from animals in a chemically slightly different form from the human product. Yet, if one could produce synthetic human insulin, one could meet an existing demand with a product whose approval would be relatively easy to obtain from regulators. In the period 1975 to 1977, synthetic "human" insulin represented the aspirations for new products that could be made with the new biotechnology. Microbial production of synthetic human insulin was finally announced in September 1978 and was produced by a startup company, Genentech. Although that company did not commercialize the product themselves, instead, it licensed the production method to Eli Lilly and Company. 1978 also saw the first application for a patent on a gene, the gene which produces human growth hormone, by the University of California, thus introducing the legal principle that genes could be patented. Since that filing, almost 20% of the more than 20,000 genes in the human DNA have been patented. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6012335 | 690,751 |
218,782 | The Boeing C-97 Stratofreighter was a long-range heavy military cargo aircraft developed from the B-29 and B-50 bombers. Design work began in 1942, the first of three prototype XC-97s flew on 9 November 1944 (none saw combat), and the first of six service-test YC-97s flew on 11 March 1947. All nine were based on the 24ST alloy structure and Wright R-3350 engines of the B-29, but with a larger-diameter fuselage upper lobe (making a figure of eight or "double-bubble" section) and they had the B-29 vertical tail with the gunner's position blanked off. The first of three heavily revised YC-97A incorporating the re-engineered wing (higher-strength 75ST alloy), taller vertical tail and larger Pratt and Whitney R-4360 engines of the B-50 bomber, flew on 28 January 1948 and was the basis of the subsequent sole YC-97B, all production C-97s, KC-97s and civilian Stratocruiser aircraft. Between 1944 and 1958, 888 C-97s in several versions were built, 811 being KC-97 tankers. C-97s served in the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Some aircraft served as flying command posts for the Strategic Air Command, while others were modified for use in Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadrons (ARRS). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=594470 | 218,674 |
1,729,461 | Goldstein, long recognized for his scholarship in classical mechanics and reactor shielding, was the author of the graduate textbook, Classical Mechanics. The book has been a standard text since it first appeared 50 years ago and has been translated into nine languages. He received a B.S. from City College of New York in 1940 and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943. From 1942 to 1946, Goldstein was a staff member of the wartime Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T., where he engaged in research on the theory of waveguides and magnetrons and on the characteristics of radar echoes. He was an instructor in the Physics Department at Harvard University from 1946 to 1949. In 1949–50 he was an AEC postdoctoral Fellow at M.I.T., and served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Physics at Brandeis University, 1952–53. From 1950, Goldstein was a Senior Physicist at Nuclear Development Corporation of America, where he directed theoretical research on the shielding of nuclear reactors and on neutron cross sections of interest for reactor design. Goldstein won the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962 for his "contributions to reactor physics and to nuclear cross sections, and for his leadership in establishing a rational scientific basis for nuclear shield design". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2342319 | 1,728,487 |
199,015 | The new HC-130J aircraft are derived from the Lockheed Martin KC-130J tanker operated by the U.S. Marine Corps. The USCG has six HC-130Js in service, but they are not capable of refueling helicopters in flight. The first delivery of this variant to the United States Coast Guard was in October 2003. They initially operated in a logistic support role until they received significant modifications, including installations of a large window on each side of the fuselage to allow crew members to visually scan the sea surface, the addition of an inverse synthetic aperture sea search radar, flare tubes, a forward-looking infrared/electro-optical sensor, a gaseous oxygen system for the crew and an enhanced communications suite. Aircraft are installed with the Minotaur Mission System and incorporates sensors; radar; and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment and enables aircrews to gather and process surveillance information that can be transmitted to other platforms and units during flight. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=526711 | 198,913 |
305,123 | Abandoning economic liberalism, he instead propounded a system which would replace the traditional state with a brotherhood of man that incorporated industry and society into a single centralized organization. In this new society all people would have equal opportunity within a meritocratic order, ignoring traditional class divisions based on nobility and wealth. Saint-Simon, influenced by earlier French thinkers like Condorcet, believed in a materialist interpretation of history, similar to the later Marxist historical materialism, which could be used to predict future developments, and wherein the economic condition of civilization is determined by the level of technology, with the three general epochs being slavery, serfdom, and finally the proletariat or wage labor. Saint-Simon did not see the working class or proletariat as crucial to change, but instead believed that manufacturers, bankers, artists, scholars, and other educated people would transform society into one where humans made the best possible use of nature and the government was chiefly concerned with the proper administration of material goods and services. Notably, Saint-Simon never fully condemned or repudiated private property as an institution. In his final work "Le Nouveau Christianism" in 1825 he outlined his belief that his political theories were based on Christian principles and that his system embodied certain Christian ideals such as love for others and selflessness. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47246185 | 304,961 |
19,636 | Common responses include pupil dilation (93%); changes in heart rate (100%), including increases (56%), decreases (13%), and variable responses (31%); changes in blood pressure (84%), including hypotension (34%), hypertension (28%), and general instability (22%); changes in stretch reflex (86%), including increases (80%) and decreases (6%); nausea (44%); tremor (25%); and dysmetria (16%) (inability to properly direct or limit motions). The temporary increases in blood pressure caused by the drug can be a risk factor for users with pre-existing hypertension. These qualitative somatic effects caused by psilocybin have been corroborated by several early clinical studies. A 2005 magazine survey of club goers in the UK found that nausea or vomiting was experienced by over a quarter of those who had used psilocybin mushrooms in the last year, although this effect is caused by the mushroom rather than psilocybin itself. In one study, administration of gradually increasing dosages of psilocybin daily for 21 days had no measurable effect on electrolyte levels, blood sugar levels, or liver toxicity tests. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38468 | 19,628 |
1,936,808 | "Lucifer's Requiem" is a Requiem for every person who seeks the eternal light. In "Kathinka's Chant", Kathinka sings with flute and voice at Lucifer's grave a chant that protects the soul of the deceased by means of musical exercises regularly performed for 49 days after the death of the body, and leads it to clear consciousness. The ritual is a 22-fold expansion of the Lucifer formula, reflecting the two sets of repeated-note unceduplets that begin that formula. The flautist, costumed as a cat, is the shamanistic celebrant, and is accompanied by six percussionists representing the six mortal senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and thought. The percussionists play on a set of tuned sound plates (initially eleven of them, arranged in the order of the notes of the Lucifer formula), as well as on a total of at least 30 specially created "magic instruments" which are attached to or form parts of their costumes. The flautist begins with a "salute" and then, following the segments of two mandalas, performs a series of 22 exercises, with two interspersed pauses at positions 7 and 13 out of 24 marked on the two mandalas. The number 7 is emblematic for "Licht" as the number of the days of the week, but is also the number of letters in the name "Lucifer", while 13 is not only a number traditionally associated with misfortune, but is also the number up to which Lucifer repeatedly counts throughout the opera cycle. As the percussionists continue playing through this second pause, the flautist performs an "exchange of the senses", reordering the sound plates and adding a twelfth note, in order to transform Lucifer's formula into that of Eve. She then resumes the exercises and continues without further interruption straight through to the end. The exercises are followed by a "Release of the Senses", a gradual exit, a series of eleven "trombone tones" on the flute, and a final scream. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31521466 | 1,935,700 |
535,197 | Under the overall command of Australian Major General Peter Cosgrove, INTERFET began arriving on 12 September 1999 and was tasked with restoring peace and security, protecting and supporting UNAMET, and facilitating humanitarian assistance operations. With the withdrawal of the Indonesian armed forces, police and government officials from East Timor, UNAMET re-established its headquarters in Dili on 28 September. On 19 October 1999, Indonesia formally recognised the result of the referendum and shortly thereafter a UN peacekeeping force, the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was established, becoming fully responsible for the administration of East Timor during its transition to independence. The hand-over of command of military operations from INTERFET to UNTAET was completed on 28 February 2000. Australia continued to support the UN peacekeeping operation with between 1,500 and 2,000 personnel, as well as landing craft and Blackhawk helicopters and remained the largest contributor of personnel to the peacekeeping mission. During these operations Australian forces regularly clashed with pro-Indonesian militia and on a number of occasions Indonesian forces as well, especially along the border with West Timor. Significant actions occurred in Suai, Mota'ain and at Aidabasalala in October 1999. However, with the security situation stabilised the bulk of the Australian and UN forces were withdrawn by 2005. Two Australians died from non-battle related causes, while a number were wounded in action. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1323516 | 534,918 |
1,656,037 | It provides programs for undergraduate, graduate students on four campuses—three in Lanzhou city centre and one in Yuzhong County, about 30 miles away from the main campus. Total enrolment compromises of approximately 20,000 undergraduates, 10,572 graduates, 2,559 doctoral students, and about 700 registered international students from 64 countries and regions across 5 continents. Undergraduate students study at the Yuzhong campus. There are 6 National Bases for the Training of Researching and Teaching personnel for Fundamental Disciplines. The University operates an additional 35 institutes along with 1 national key Laboratory of the Applied Organic and 3 key laboratories of Arid and Grassland Ecology, West China Environment, Magnetism and Magnetic Materials of the Ministry of Education, a key laboratory of Grassland Agro-ecosystem of the Ministry of Agriculture. Lanzhou University was one of the first universities entitled to enroll Bachelor Master’s and Doctoral degree candidates in 1981. Lanzhou University is one of the top ten universities in contributions to academic publications in international journals frequently cited by ongoing research from around the world, ranking the 26th among all Chinese Universities in number of citations per paper. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=564351 | 1,655,104 |
667,272 | At the time the MOL was canceled, 192 service and 100 civilian personnel were employed on MOL activities. Within weeks, 80 percent of the service personnel were given new duty assignments. The civilians were reassigned to the Space and Missile Systems Organization (SAMSO). The service personnel included fourteen of the seventeen MOL astronauts. Finley had returned to the U.S. Navy in April 1968, and Adams had left in July 1966 to join the X-15 program. He flew in space on his seventh flight on 15 November 1967, only to be killed when his aircraft broke up. Lawrence had died in an F-104 crash at Edwards Air Force Base on 8 December 1967. All the remaining fourteen except Herres wanted to transfer to NASA. Deke Slayton, NASA Director of Flight Crew Operations, believed that he did not need more astronauts. George Mueller, NASA Deputy Administrator, wanted to maintain good relations with the USAF. Slayton took the seven MOL pilots 35 or younger as NASA Astronaut Group 7; all flew on the Space Shuttle, starting with Crippen on STS-1. NASA also took Crews as a test pilot, and he would fly NASA aircraft until 1994. Due to their exposure to highly classified information, those who did not transfer to NASA could not engage in combat for three years because of the risk of capture. Not being able to serve in Vietnam hurt their careers, and some soon left the military. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=615373 | 666,924 |
850,218 | Human factors have been a constant thorn in the side of the designers of military simulations – whereas political-military simulations are often required by their nature to grapple with what are referred to by modellers as "squishy" problems, purely military models often seem to prefer to concentrate on hard numbers. Whilst a warship can be regarded, from the perspective of a model, as a single entity with known parameters (speed, armour, gun power, and the like), land warfare often depends on the actions of small groups or individual soldiers where training, morale, intelligence, and personalities (leadership) come into play. For this reason it is more taxing to model—there are many variables that are difficult to formulate. Commercial wargames, both the tabletop and computer variety, often attempt to take these factors into account: in "", for example, units will generally rout from the field rather than stay to fight to the last man. One valid criticism of some military simulations is these nebulous human factors are often ignored (partly because they are so hard to model accurately, and partly because no commander likes to acknowledge men under his command may disobey him). In recognition of this shortcoming, military analysts have in the past turned to civilian wargames as being more rigorous, or at least more realistic, in their approach to warfare. In the United States, James F. Dunnigan, a prominent student of warfare and founder of the commercial tabletop wargames publisher Simulations Publications Incorporated (SPI, now defunct), was brought into the Pentagon's wargaming circle in 1980 to work with Rand and Science Applications Incorporated (SAI) on the development of a more realistic model. The result, known as "SAS" ("S"trategic "A"nalysis "S"imulation), is still being used. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10280894 | 849,766 |
1,411,485 | The health impacts of groundwater contamination for population of Ukraine, Belarus and bordering states are usually perceived as extremely negative. The Ukrainian government initially implemented a costly and sophisticated remediation program. However, in view of limited financial resources and other more urgent health problems caused by the disaster, these plans were abandoned Not least, such a decision owed to the research results of domestic scholars showing that groundwater contamination does not contribute to the overall health risks substantially in regard to other active pathways of radioactive exposure in the “exclusion zone”, In particular, radioactive contamination of unconfined aquifer, which is usually considered a serious threat, has fewer economical and health impact in Chernobyl because subsurface water in “exclusion zone” is not used for household and drinking needs. The probability of using this water by local residents is excluded by a special status of Chernobyl area and relevant administrative prohibitions. The only group directly and inevitably exposed to health threats are emergency workers engaged in water drainage practices related to Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant reactors deactivation and waste disposal operations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59803219 | 1,410,692 |
401,060 | The USF Tampa Library is the largest and most comprehensive library in the USF System. In addition to providing students access to more than 2 million academic journals, databases, and books, the seven-story USF Tampa library offers tutoring and writing services, laptops, a career resource center, and Course Reserves and reservable group study rooms. The USF Tampa Library also houses several Special and Digital Collections, including literature, oral histories, photographs, artifacts, and the university archives. In 2012, the USF Tampa Library opened the Science, Math and Research Technology (SMART) Lab, a hands-on learning space which includes more than 300 computer work stations. In 2013, USF students successfully protested to keep the library open 24 hours a day/5 days a week during the Fall and Spring semesters for current students, faculty and staff who possess a valid USF ID card. In 2017, renovations were completed on the 5th floor to bring 400 individual study spaces with personal lamps, electrical outlets, and USB ports for device charging, and provided new group study rooms with white boards. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3649046 | 400,861 |
1,334,342 | In 1948, he joined the engineering faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park. A condition of his appointment was that he should quickly attain a PhD. Thus, he did his PhD studies, on microwave spectroscopy, at night, while already a faculty member. He completed his PhD, with a thesis entitled "Microwave Technique in Chemical Kinetics", from The Catholic University of America in 1951. Building on his naval expertise in tube microwave engineering, during the course of his doctoral research he worked out the idea of coherent microwave emissions. He submitted a paper in 1951 for the June 1952 Electron Tube Research Conference held in Ottawa, which was the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser. After this presentation, RCA asked Weber to give a seminar on this idea, and Charles Hard Townes asked him for a copy of the paper. Townes was working along similar lines, as were Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov. Although Weber was jointly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962 and 1963 for his contributions to the development of the laser, it was Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov, the first to build working prototypes of these devices, who received the 1964 Prize, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser–laser principle." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2191496 | 1,333,612 |
775,234 | The history of smallpox extends into pre-history. Genetic evidence suggests that the smallpox virus emerged 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Prior to that, similar ancestral viruses circulated, but possibly only in other mammals, and possibly with different symptoms. Only a few written reports dating from about 500 AD to 1000 AD are considered reliable historical descriptions of smallpox, so understanding of the disease prior to that has relied on genetics and archaeology. However, during the 2nd millennium AD, especially starting in the 16th century, reliable written reports become more common. The earliest physical evidence of smallpox is found in the Egyptian mummies of people who died some 3,000 years ago. Smallpox has had a major impact on world history, not least because indigenous populations of regions where smallpox was non-native, such as the Americas and Australia, were rapidly and greatly reduced by smallpox (along with other introduced diseases) during periods of initial foreign contact, which helped pave the way for conquest and colonization. During the 18th century the disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans each year, including five reigning monarchs, and was responsible for a third of all blindness. Between 20 and 60% of all those infected—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20790125 | 774,818 |
1,435,801 | Many studies have found this pattern to be true and one of the simplest experiments is the framed-line test. The results of it show that Americans pay attention to an object independent of its environment, while Japanese focus attention on the environment and interrelated objects. Hedden et al. used a modified framed-line test in conjunction with fMRI to determine if there were any physiological differences in subjects brains as a result of the cultural differences. They found that when Americans were asked to make more relative judgments and when East Asians to make absolute judgments, both stimulated similar areas of the brain. When either cultures' nonpreferred judgment was provoked the result was the same for both groups. "The frontal and parietal lobes, specifically the left inferior parietal lobe and the right precentral gyrus were more stimulated than when culturally preferred judgments were made." Thus, a person's societal culture determines how activated this neural network becomes when making visual perceptions. Plus, the degree of activation depends on how deep one's cultural background is. As a result of the differences between Western and East Asian cultures, different neural patterns are activated in the brain depending on particular environmental circumstances. Clearly, culture affects the activity of the brain's functional perception mechanisms in order to better navigate their particular cultural environment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7621043 | 1,434,994 |
249,379 | The school's sports teams are called the Sooners, a nickname given to early settlers during the land run who sneaked into the offered territory and staked claims illegally before they were officially allowed to. They participate in the NCAA's Division I-Bowl Subdivision and in the Big 12 Conference. The school sponsors nine sports for both men and women. The university has claimed 36 team national championships, which includes 7 football national championships (football championships are not awarded by the NCAA). By far, OU's most famous and storied athletic program is the football program, which has produced seven Heisman Trophy winners: Billy Vessels in 1952, Steve Owens in 1969, Billy Sims in 1978, Jason White in 2003, Sam Bradford in 2008, Baker Mayfield in 2017, and Kyler Murray in 2018. Many Pro Football Hall of Famers, including Lee Roy Selmon and Troy Aikman, also attended the University of Oklahoma. In 1988, OU became the first school to participate in both the football and basketball national championships in the same year, an achievement unequaled until the 2006 season, when Ohio State and the University of Florida were both in each, with Florida winning both games. Oklahoma also currently holds the record for the longest winning streak in NCAA Division I history when they won 47 consecutive games between 1953 and 1957. In reference to the team's success and popularity as a symbol of state pride, George Lynn Cross, OU's president from 1943 to 1968, once told the Oklahoma State Senate, "I want a university the football team can be proud of." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=323072 | 249,249 |
968,619 | Further advances in liposome research have been able to allow liposomes to avoid detection by the body's immune system, specifically, the cells of reticuloendothelial system (RES). These liposomes are known as "stealth liposomes". They were first proposed by G. Cevc and G. Blume and, independently and soon thereafter, the groups of L. Huang and V. Torchilin and are constructed with PEG (Polyethylene Glycol) studding the outside of the membrane. The PEG coating, which is inert in the body, allows for longer circulatory life for the drug delivery mechanism. Studies have also shown that PEGylated liposomes elicit anti-IgM antibodies, thus leading to an enhanced blood clearance of the liposomes upon re-injection, depending on lipid dose and time interval between injections. In addition to a PEG coating, some stealth liposomes also have some sort of biological species attached as a ligand to the liposome, to enable binding via a specific expression on the targeted drug delivery site. These targeting ligands could be monoclonal antibodies (making an immunoliposome), vitamins, or specific antigens, but must be accessible. Targeted liposomes can target certain cell type in the body and deliver drugs that would otherwise be systemically delivered. Naturally toxic drugs can be much less systemically toxic if delivered only to diseased tissues. Polymersomes, morphologically related to liposomes, can also be used this way. Also morphologically related to liposomes are highly deformable vesicles, designed for non-invasive transdermal material delivery, known as transfersomes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=633963 | 968,109 |
2,112,769 | The College of General Studies evolved from the 1908 Downtown Division of the Pittsburgh Academy. It became the Department of Afternoon, Saturday and Evening Studies in 1911 when it moved from Downtown to Oakland and began offering a limited number of off-campus courses. By 1920, Pitt had expanded its off-campus offerings to 19 locations in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, including Erie and Youngstown. In 1932, Pitt established the University Extension Division, which became known informally as the evening program, with its director reporting directly to the chancellor. On March 11, 1958, the Pitt Board of Trustees, following a recommendation by then Chancellor Edward Litchfield, approved the establishment of the School of General Studies primarily as an alternative for adults wishing to continuing education. Enrollment in the School of General Studies peaked at 18,930 during the 1974–75 academic year, the vast majority of which were part-time students. In 1981, the School of General Studies was renamed the College of General Studies to reflect that its degree was comparable to an Arts and Sciences degree. In the early 1990s, the College of General Studies offered as many as 30 degree majors, which was downgraded to ten in 1998–99 in order to eliminate duplication with majors offered in other Pitt units. In 2002 the McCarl Center for Nontraditional Student Success open followed by a major restructuring of the College of General Studies in 2003. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, for those 50 years old and older, and CGSOnline was established in 2005. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16932747 | 2,111,554 |
1,123,791 | The discipline has relatively flourished since the 1980s, in large part, because of contributions made in the 1970s, even if the outcomes for patients have been disappointing at times. It was a decade during which child psychiatry witnessed a major evolution as a result of the work carried out by, Eva Frommer, Douglas Haldane, Michael Rutter, Robin Skynner and Sula Wolff, among others. The first comprehensive population survey of 9- to 11-year-olds, carried out in London and the Isle of Wight, which appeared in 1970, addressed questions that have continued to be of importance for child psychiatry; for example, rates of psychiatric disorders, the role of intellectual development and physical impairment, and specific concern for potential social influences on children's adjustment. This work was influential, especially since the investigators demonstrated specific continuities of psychopathology over time, and the influence of social and contextual factors in children's mental health, in their subsequent re-evaluation of the original cohort of children. These studies described the prevalence of ADHD (relatively low as compared to the US), identified the onset and prevalence of depression in mid-adolescence and the frequent co-morbidity with conduct disorder, and explored the relationship between various mental disorders and scholastic achievement. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11743428 | 1,123,217 |
1,862,928 | Polydioctylfluorene is a polymer light-emitting device known as PLED, which covalently bonds to the carbon hydrogen chains. PFO is a copolymer of basic polyfluorene, which enables it to release phosphorescent light. This basic fluorene backbone strengthens the molecule on account of the carbon rings. The cross-linking in polydioctylfluorene structure provides an efficient technique for hole-transport layers to emit light. Also, when a solvent-polymer compound is added the β-phase crystalline structure to be maintained. Efficiency in current can reach a maximum of about 17 cd/A and maximum luminance obtained can be approximately 14,000 cd/m(2). The hole-transport layers (HTLs) improve the polymer's anode hole injection and greatly increase electron blocking. By having the capability to control the microstructure of phase domains gives an opportunity to optimize the optoelectronic properties of PFO based products. When needs for optoelectronic emittance are reached in polydioctylfluorene, the electroluminescence given off in dependent on the active layer in the conjugate polymer. Another way to affect the optoelectronic properties is by altering how dense the phase chain segments are ordered. Low densities can be achieved from tremendously slow crystallization while on the other hand directional crystalline solution can be achieved by use of thermal gradients. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17600071 | 1,861,859 |
715,073 | A detailed comparison among PEI and other amino-containing molecules showed an excellent performance of PEI-containing samples with cycles. Also, only a slight decrease was registered in their CO uptake when increasing the temperature from 25 to 100 °C, demonstrating a high contribution of chemisorption to the adsorption capacity of these solids. For the same reason, the adsorption capacity under diluted CO was up to 90% of the value under pure CO and also, a high unwanted selectivity towards SO was observed. Lately, many efforts have been made in order to improve PEI diffusion within the porous structure of the support used. A better dispersion of PEI and a higher CO efficiency (CO/NH molar ratio) were achieved by impregnating a template-occluded PE-MCM-41 material rather than perfect cylindrical pores of a calcined material, following a previously described route. The combined use of organosilanes such as aminopropyl-trimethoxysilane, AP, and PEI has also been studied. The first approach used a combination of them to impregnate porous supports, achieving faster CO-adsorption kinetics and higher stability during reutilization cycles, but no higher efficiencies. A novel method is the so-called "double-functionalization". It is based on the impregnation of materials previously functionalized by grafting (covalent bonding of organosilanes). Amino groups incorporated by both paths have shown synergic effects, achieving high CO uptakes up to 235 mg CO/g (5.34 mmol CO/g). CO adsorption kinetics were also studied for these materials, showing similar adsorption rates as impregnated solids. This is an interesting finding, taking into account the smaller pore volume available in double-functionalized materials. Thus, it can be also concluded that their higher CO uptake and efficiency compared to impregnated solids can be ascribed to a synergic effect of the amino groups incorporated by two methods (grafting and impregnation) rather than to a faster adsorption kinetics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20677877 | 714,699 |
1,338,630 | Above all, whether the typological classification, function or technology, there is a premise in these analytic method. The premise is that archaeologists presume a blueprint of the end-product of stone tool, or say a mental map with step-by-step processes of prehistoric people in mind. This assumption contain the concept that people tend to shape stone tool into certain specific form for specific purpose. This is the foundation of lithic typology and widely accepted. However Hiscock (2004) provides an ethnographic observation from Australia and points out that the processes of making lithic flake are actually more social dynamic and with much negotiation between lithic knappers, the common measure attributes, such as retouched scar, form of flake and optimal economic presumption, are all less related to the function of the end-product. Although there are several other ethnographic studies lead to similar conclusion, Hiscock reminds that these observations are not to overthrow the classification system now but to provide an alternative possibility to consider lithic study. Shott proposed that the settlement mobility and lithic technology are related based on ethnographic and archaeological studies. The technological diversity decreases when the mobility frequency and magnitude become greater, which is consistent with theoretically derived expectations from 14 ethnographic groups. Though diversity decreases, however, the range in the tool's flexibility in function greatly increases. As a result, the tool limit a group can carry can be determined by their mobility. Foragers need only two to three different tool classes in order to survive. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=147620 | 1,337,897 |
1,002,996 | In the USSR, RCA-manufactured radio equipment was introduced on a large scale by Joseph Stalin to construct broadcast networks, and the newly formed All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Television was gearing up a research program in vacuum tubes that was advanced for its time and place. Numerous visits were made by RCA scientific personnel to the USSR in the 1930s, prior to the Cold War, to instruct the Soviet customers on the capabilities of RCA equipment and to investigate customer needs. During one of these visits, in September 1934, RCA's Vladimir Zworykin was shown the first multiple-dynode photomultiplier, or "photoelectron multiplier". This pioneering device was proposed by Leonid A. Kubetsky in 1930 which he subsequently built in 1934. The device achieved gains of 1000x or more when demonstrated in June 1934. The work was submitted for print publication only two years later, in July 1936 as emphasized in a recent 2006 publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), which terms it "Kubetsky's Tube." The Soviet device used a magnetic field to confine the secondary electrons and relied on the Ag-O-Cs photocathode which had been demonstrated by General Electric in the 1920s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=177215 | 1,002,478 |
1,232,755 | In 2004, Kilcullen wrote "Complex Warfighting", which became the basis of the Australian Army's Future Land Operating Concept, approved the next year. It identifies an operating environment heavily influenced by globalization and the United States' conventional military dominance. The concept claims that future conflicts will feature asymmetric threats requiring land forces to be flexible, able to deploy quickly, and operate in urban terrain. The paper calls for "modular, highly educated and skilled forces with a capacity for network-enabled operations, optimised for close combat in combined arms teams. These teams will be small, semi-autonomous, and highly networked, incorporating traditional elements of the combined arms team as well as non-traditional elements such as civil affairs, intelligence, and psychological warfare capabilities. They will have a capacity for protracted independent operations within a joint interagency framework." While not strictly limited to counter-insurgency, it stated that counter-insurgency and other non-traditional actions were going to compose a greater part of warfare in the 21st Century. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9327221 | 1,232,093 |
859,835 | The cause of the Hirnantian-Rhuddanian anoxic event is uncertain. Like most global anoxic events, an increased supply of nutrients (such as nitrates and phosphates) would encourage algal or microbial blooms that deplete oxygen levels in the seawater. The most likely culprits are cyanobacteria, which can use nitrogen fixation to produce usable nitrogen compounds in the absence of nitrates. Nitrogen isotopes during the anoxic event record high rates of denitrification, a biological process which depletes nitrates. The Nitrogen-fixing ability of cyanobacteria would give them an edge over inflexible competitors like eukaryotic algae. At Anticosti Island, a uranium isotope excursion consistent with anoxia actually occurs prior to indicators of receding glaciation. This may suggest that the Hirnantian-Rhuddanian anoxic event (and its corresponding extinction) began during the glaciation, not after it. Cool temperatures can lead to upwelling, cycling nutrients into productive surface waters via air and ocean cycles. Upwelling could instead be encouraged by increasing oceanic stratification through an input of freshwater from melting glaciers. This would be more reasonable if the anoxic event coincided with the end of glaciation, as supported by most other studies. However, oceanic models argue that marine currents would recover too quickly for freshwater disruptions to have a meaningful effect on nutrient cycles. Retreating glaciers could expose more land to weathering, which would be a more sustained source of phosphates flowing into the ocean. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=425753 | 859,377 |
1,254,489 | Dravet syndrome, previously known as severe myoclonic epilepsy of infancy (SMEI), is a neurodevelopmental disorder beginning in infancy and characterized by severe epilepsy that does not respond well to treatment. This syndrome was described by Charlotte Dravet, French psychiatrist and epileptologist (born July 14, 1936). Dravet described this syndrome while working at the Centre Saint Paul at the University of Marseille. At Centre Saint Paul, one of her supervisors was Henri Gastaut, who described the Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. She described this condition in 1978 Estimates of the prevalence of this rare disorder have ranged from 1:20,000 to 1:40,000 births, though the incidence may be found to be greater as the syndrome becomes better recognized and new genetic evidence is discovered. It is thought to occur with similar frequency in both genders, and knows no geographic or ethnic boundaries. The course of Dravet syndrome is highly variable from person to person. Seizures begin during the first year of life and development is normal before their onset. In most cases, the first seizures occur with fever and are generalized tonic-clonic (grand mal) or unilateral (one-sided) convulsions. These seizures are often prolonged, and may lead to status epilepticus, a medical emergency. In time, seizures increase in frequency and begin to occur without fever. Additional seizure types appear, most often these are myoclonic, atypical absence, and focal seizures. Additional features that are seen in significant numbers of patients with Dravet syndrome may include sensory processing disorders and other autism spectrum characteristics, orthopedic or movement disorders, frequent or chronic upper respiratory and ear infections, sleep disturbance, dysautonomia, and problems with growth and nutrition. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41403879 | 1,253,808 |
2,016,392 | Fasciclin 2 (Fas2 or FasII) is a 95 kilodalton cell membrane glycoprotein in the immunoglobulin (Ig) – related superfamily of cell adhesion molecules (CAMs). It was first identified in the developing grasshopper embryo, seen dynamically expressed on a subset of fasciculating axons in the central nervous system (CNS), functioning as a neuronal recognition molecule in the regulation of selective axon fasciculation. Subsequently, fasII was cloned and has mainly been studied in the fruit fly ("Drosophila melanogaster"). Its extracellular structure consists of two Fibronectin type III domains and five Ig-like C2 domains, having structural homology to the neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM) found in vertebrates. Alternative splicing of fasII gives rise to its expression in three major isoforms, including a membrane-associated form that is attached to the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane via a glycophosphatidylinositol (GPI anchor) linkage and two integral transmembrane forms. The larger transmembrane form has an amino acid motif contained in its cytoplasmic domain that is rich in proline, glutamic acid, serine and threonine residues (PEST sequence). The fasciclin 1 (Fas1) and fasciclin 3 (Fas3) genes in "Drosophila" also code for cell adhesion proteins in the nervous system but do not show any structural or functional similarities with NCAM. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38707815 | 2,015,230 |
2,073,469 | The EWOC Conference structure consists of a combination of scientific presentations, workshops, topical networking sessions, career panel and also includes a poster session. Examples of Workshops have included Cultivate Belonging in the Workplace for Yourself and Others; How to Create, Build and Leverage Networks for Sustained Leadership and Career Success and Cultural Change to Enable Diversity & Inclusion, the Psychology of Selves: Beyond Imposter Syndrome, Leading through Influence, Allies Help Turn the Tide, Take Control of Your Time: Say No, Negotiate, Delegate, Beyond Pajamas: Coming out of COVID Isolation Mindfully, Beyond Pajamas: Coming out of COVID Isolation Mindfully, and a Discussion Toward Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Organic Chemistry. Examples of topical networking sessions have focused on Work/Life Balance Discussion, How to start an EWOC Chapter, Publishing like a Boss, Creating a Culture of Safety, Interviewing and choosing a company, and various peer networking discussions for graduate students, postdocs, early career faculty, LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC), and Allies and Advocates, among others. The virtual format of EWOC has been cited as an example of the benefits of virtual conferences because they are "more accessible to people who couldn’t otherwise attend because of travel costs or restrictions or because they have family obligations that make travel onerous." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63929468 | 2,072,277 |
946,723 | The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards was a joint collaboration among states and social studies organizations, including the National Council for the Social Studies, designed to focus social studies education on the practice of inquiry, emphasizing "the disciplinary concepts and practices that support students as they develop the capacity to know, analyze, explain, and argue about interdisciplinary challenges in our social world." The C3 Framework recommends an "Inquiry Arc" incorporating four dimensions: 1. developing questions and planning inquiries; 2. applying disciplinary concepts and tools; 3. evaluating primary sources and using evidence; and 4. communicating conclusions and taking informed action. For example, a theme for this approach could be an exploration of etiquette today and in the past. Students might formulate their own questions or begin with an essential question such as "Why are men and women expected to follow different codes of etiquette?" Students explore change and continuity of manners over time and the perspectives of different cultures and groups of people. They analyze primary source documents such as books of etiquette from different time periods and form conclusions that answer the inquiry questions. Students finally communicate their conclusions in formal essays or creative projects. They may also take action by recommending solutions for improving school climate. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10129706 | 946,220 |
1,758,386 | Chope left Stanford Medical School and Dickson recruited a classmate, Charles E. Smith, to replace him. Smith began an extensive 17-month study of "coccidioidomycosis" in Kern and Tulare County, that also began a lifelong professional focus of study of "C. immitis" and "coccidioidomycosis", even after he became Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley in 1951, until his death in 1967. Research by Smith resulted in more than a few discoveries that included serologic testing, that chlamydospores of the fungus "c. immitis" could be wind-blown dispersing the spores when the hot weather converted the soil to dust, scientific results of military personnel testing in the southern San Joaquin Valley before and during WWII, as well as people of Japanese descent (many US citizens) interned in camps, prisoners of war, and agricultural workers. Diagnoses of active disease and skin testing, showed that it was also found in southern Nevada and Utah, western Texas, as well as Arizona, where the southern and central areas appeared to impose the highest risk of infection in the United States. An important Smith's research added to the fundamental discoveries of microbiology, epidemiology, clinical findings, and diagnosis that had emerged since Posadas' initial case report in 1892. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15086544 | 1,757,393 |
1,775,962 | BFU provides an atmosphere for teaching and learning combining the acquisition of professional knowledge with an improvement of all-round abilities (with an emphasis on forging a rigorous, creative academic style). Systems of optional courses, subsidiary courses, course exemption, and bachelor-to-master continuing education have been established so students may develop according to their own interests and desires. The university also offers extracurricular activities to enrich campus life; these are organized by student societies and associations in fields including science and technology, art, sports, environmental protection, and politics. Some groups have become influential, including the Society of Scientific Exploration and Wilderness Survival and the Association of Beijing College Volunteers for Environmental Protection. The former received the Prize of the Earth, the top prize from the National Bureau of Environmental Protection. In recent years, BFU students of BFU won four consecutive prizes at the College Students' Landscape Gardening Architecture Design Competitions (sponsored by UNESCO and the International Association of Landscape Gardening Architects), the Golden Prize in International College Students' Architecture Design and prizes in garden-design competitions. Achievements were also earned in domestic competitions for scientific inventions, mathematics, and art. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=919316 | 1,774,965 |
420,666 | This relative lack of loud bass is often remedied with a hybrid design using a dynamic loudspeaker, e.g. a subwoofer, to handle lower frequencies, with the electrostatic diaphragm handling middle and high frequencies. Many feel that the best low frequency unit for hybrids are cone drivers mounted on open baffles as dipoles, transmission line woofers or horns, since they possess roughly the same qualities (at least in the bass) as electrostatic speakers, i.e. good transient response, little box coloration, and (ideally) flat frequency response. However, there is often a problem with integrating such a woofer with the electrostatics. This is because most electrostatics are line sources, the sound pressure level of which decreases by 3 dB for each doubling of distance. A cone speaker's sound pressure level, on the other hand, decreases by 6 dB for each doubling of distance because it behaves as a point source. This can be overcome by the theoretically more elegant solution of using conventional cone woofers in an open baffle, or a push-pull arrangement, which produces a bipolar radiation pattern similar to that of the electrostatic membrane. This is still subject to phase cancellation, but cone woofers can be driven to far higher levels due to their longer excursion, thus making equalization to a flat response easier, and they add distortion thereby increasing the area (and therefore the power) under the frequency response graph, making the total low frequency energy higher but the fidelity to the signal lower. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=196048 | 420,461 |
649,146 | Mapping the connectome at the "microscale" (micrometer resolution) means building a complete map of the neural systems, neuron-by-neuron. The challenge of doing this becomes obvious: the number of neurons comprising the brain easily ranges into the billions in more complex organisms. The human cerebral cortex alone contains on the order of 10 neurons linked by 10 synaptic connections. By comparison, the number of base-pairs in a human genome is 3×10. A few of the main challenges of building a human connectome at the microscale today include: data collection would take years given current technology, machine vision tools to annotate the data remain in their infancy, and are inadequate, and neither theory nor algorithms are readily available for the analysis of the resulting "brain-graphs". To address the data collection issues, several groups are building high-throughput serial electron microscopes (Kasthuri et al., 2009; Bock "et al". 2011). To address the machine-vision and image-processing issues, the Open Connectome Project is "alg-sourcing" (algorithm outsourcing) this hurdle. Finally, statistical graph theory is an emerging discipline which is developing sophisticated pattern recognition and inference tools to parse these brain-graphs (Goldenberg et al., 2009). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15978180 | 648,805 |
161,260 | In late 2010, The UK Government Office for Science initiated a "Foresight" project investigating the future of computer trading in the financial markets, led by Dame Clara Furse, ex-CEO of the London Stock Exchange and in September 2011 the project published its initial findings in the form of a three-chapter working paper available in three languages, along with 16 additional papers that provide supporting evidence. All of these findings are authored or co-authored by leading academics and practitioners, and were subjected to anonymous peer-review. Released in 2012, the Foresight study acknowledged issues related to periodic illiquidity, new forms of manipulation and potential threats to market stability due to errant algorithms or excessive message traffic. However, the report was also criticized for adopting "standard pro-HFT arguments" and advisory panel members being linked to the HFT industry. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2484768 | 161,175 |
1,292,787 | The advanced planning study was well received both at MITRE and ESD and it was decided to pursue a practical design to see if these ideas could be translated into a usable system. In 1968 MITRE Technical Director John H. Monahan appointed C. Eric Ellingson to head this effort and Ellingson put together a technical team to pursue these ideas. Early on it became apparent that the CASOFF architecture was sufficiently radical that a "proof of concept" activity was needed to better understand and ultimately demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of such an approach. The demonstration system used a synchronized Time Division Multiple Access architecture and incorporated position location as an integral part of the communications process. Because funds were extremely limited every effort was made to use already available equipment. Transmitters were surplus AN/APX-25 IFF transponders and data processing was accomplished using surplus IBM 4piTC-2 computers that were obtained from the F-111 terrain avoidance program. The unique components called the Control and Display Units (CDU) were built in the MITRE laboratory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=106295 | 1,292,076 |
929,395 | The possibility of the Air National Guard assuming operational control of the mission had first emerged in 1988. The 109th Airlift Wing had been notified that, almost overnight, one of the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW) radar sites that it supported in Greenland was going to be shut down. The other sites would soon follow, and the 109th would be largely out of business because its primary mission had ended. The unit had been informally keeping tabs on Navy LC-130 operations supporting the National Science Foundation in Antarctica. Because of its aging aircraft fleet and extensive depot maintenance period, the United States Navy asked if the 109th could provide limited emergency search and rescue (SAR) capability for two years to support Operation Deep Freeze, which the Air Guard accepted. At that time, it had no thought of taking over the mission. The 109th believed it to be an exercise in futility for its aircraft to deploy to the Antarctic to merely wait for emergency SAR missions, so it asked if the Navy could help carry cargo to the South Pole. The Navy resisted at first because its procedures and cargo configurations differed from those of the Air Guard, but eventually it agreed. The main mission of the U.S. Navy and Air National Guard C-130s was to airlift fuel and supplies to the National Science Foundation's South Pole Station so that its personnel could survive the isolation of the long Antarctic winter, which lasted from February to October. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1777434 | 928,904 |
135,395 | Infants begin with cooing and soft vowel sounds. Shortly after birth, this system is developed as the infants begin to understand that their noises, or non-verbal communication, lead to a response from their caregiver. This will then progress into babbling around 5 months of age, with infants first babbling consonant and vowel sounds together that may sound like "ma" or "da". At around 8 months of age, babbling increases to include repetition of sounds, such as "da-da" and infants learn the forms for words and which sounds are more likely to follow other sounds. At this stage, much of the child's communication is open to interpretation. For example, if a child says "bah" when they're in a toy room with their guardian, it is likely to be interpreted as "ball" because the toy is in sight. However, if you were to listen to the same 'word' on a recorded tape without knowing the context, one might not be able to figure out what the child was trying to say. A child's receptive language, the understanding of others' speech, has a gradual development beginning at about 6 months. However, expressive language, the production of words, moves rapidly after its beginning at about a year of age, with a "vocabulary explosion" of rapid word acquisition occurring in the middle of the second year. Grammatical rules and word combinations appear at about age two. Between 20 and 28 months, children move from understanding the difference between high and low, hot and cold and begin to change "no" to "wait a minute", "not now" and "why". Eventually, they are able to add pronouns to words and combine them to form short sentences. Mastery of vocabulary and grammar continue gradually through the preschool and school years. Adolescents still have smaller vocabularies than adults and experience more difficulty with constructions such as the passive voice. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9627698 | 135,340 |
1,592,592 | 91% of the largest forensic DNA database in the world, the National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database (NDNAD), contains DNA information from residents of England and Wales. The NDNAD stores genetic information of criminally convicted individuals, those who were charged but acquitted of a recordable offence, those who were arrested but never charged with a recordable offense, and those who are under counterterrorism control. Of the 5.5 million people in the database, which represents 10% of the total population, 1.2 million have never been convicted of a crime. The European Court of Human Rights decided, in the case of S and Marper v United Kingdom (2008), that the government must present sufficient justification for differential treatment of DNA profiles of those in the criminal justice system compared to that of non-convicted individuals; essentially, there must be no abuse of retained biological materials and DNA-information. The decision highlighted several existing issues with the current system that poses privacy risks for the individuals involved: the storage of personal information with genetic information, the storage of DNA profiles with the inherent capacity to determine genetic relationships, and fundamentally, the act of storing of cellular samples and DNA profiles produces opportunities for privacy risks. As a result, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 was created to ensure proper use of collected DNA materials and regulate their storage and destruction. However, many problems still persist, as samples can still be retained indefinitely in databases, regardless of whether or not the affected individual was convicted – and even the samples of juvenile delinquents. Critics have argued that this long-term retention could lead to stigmatization of affected individuals and inhibit their re-integration into society and also, are subject to misuse by discriminatory behavior innate to the criminal justice system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55251966 | 1,591,695 |
182,396 | There are multiple potential destinations for hydrocarbons after an oil spill has settled and currents routinely deposit them in extreme environments. Methane bubbles resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were found 1.1 kilometers below water surface level and at concentrations as high as 183 "μ"mol per kilogram. The combination of low temperatures and high pressures in this environment result in low microbial activity. However, bacteria that are present including species of "Pseudomonas", "Aeromonas" and "Vibrio" were found to be capable of bioremediation, albeit at a tenth of the speed they would perform at sea level pressure. Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons increase in solubility and bioavailability with increasing temperature. Thermophilic "Thermus" and "Bacillus" species have demonstrated higher gene expression for the alkane mono-oxygenase "alkB" at temperatures exceeding 60 °C. The expression of this gene is a crucial precursor to the bioremediation process. Fungi that have been genetically modified with cold-adapted enzymes to tolerate differing pH levels and temperatures have been shown to be effective at remediating hydrocarbon contamination in freezing conditions in the Antarctic. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9619 | 182,300 |
1,342,703 | Imaging is usually made at optical wavelengths by lenses and mirrors. However, for X-rays and Gamma-rays, lenses and mirrors are impractical, therefore modulating apertures are often used instead. The pinhole camera is the most basic form of such a modulation imager, but its disadvantage is low throughput, as its small aperture allows through little radiation. Since only a tiny fraction of the light passes through the pinhole, which causes a low signal-to-noise ratio, imaging through pinholes involves unacceptable long exposures. This problem can be overcome to some degree by making the hole larger, which unfortunately leads to a decrease in resolution. Pinhole cameras have a couple of advantages over lenses - they have infinite depth of field, and they don't suffer from chromatic aberration, which can be cured in a refractive system only by using a multiple element lens. The smallest feature which can be resolved by a pinhole is approximately the same size as the pinhole itself. The larger the hole, the more blurred the image becomes. Using multiple, small pinholes might seem to offer a way around this problem, but this gives rise to a confusing montage of overlapping images. Nonetheless, if the pattern of holes is carefully chosen, it is possible to reconstruct the original image with a resolution equal to that of a single hole. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55133455 | 1,341,967 |
144,982 | Open source software tools as well as range of free and paid sentiment analysis tools deploy machine learning, statistics, and natural language processing techniques to automate sentiment analysis on large collections of texts, including web pages, online news, internet discussion groups, online reviews, web blogs, and social media. Knowledge-based systems, on the other hand, make use of publicly available resources, to extract the semantic and affective information associated with natural language concepts. The system can help perform affective commonsense reasoning. Sentiment analysis can also be performed on visual content, i.e., images and videos (see Multimodal sentiment analysis). One of the first approaches in this direction is SentiBank utilizing an adjective noun pair representation of visual content. In addition, the vast majority of sentiment classification approaches rely on the bag-of-words model, which disregards context, grammar and even word order. Approaches that analyses the sentiment based on how words compose the meaning of longer phrases have shown better result, but they incur an additional annotation overhead. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6435232 | 144,924 |
544,292 | In the late 1960s, single-beam hydrographic surveys were conducted using widely spaced track lines and the shallow (peak) soundings in the bottom data were retained in preference to deeper soundings in the sounding record. During that same time period, early side scan sonar was introduced into the operational practices of shallow water hydrographic surveying. The frequencies of the early side scan sonars were a matter of engineering design expediency and the most important aspect of the side scanning echoes was not the value of their amplitudes, but rather that the amplitudes were spatially variable. In fact, important information was deduced about the shape of the bottom and manmade items on the bottom, based on the regions where there were absences of detectable echo amplitudes (shadows) In 1979, in hopes of a technological solution to the problems of surveying in "floating mud", the Director of the National Ocean Survey (NOS) established a NOS study team to conduct investigations to determine the functional specifications for a replacement shallow water depth sounder. The outcome of the study was a class of vertical-beam depth sounders, which is still widely used. It simultaneously pinged at two acoustic frequencies, separated by more than 2 octaves, making depth and echo-amplitude measurements that were concurrent, both spatially and temporally, albeit at a single vertical grazing angle. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=167741 | 544,010 |
73,295 | The UK fleet has slowly been reduced from 7 since 2011. In 2009, the UK effectively limited the service life of the E-3D fleet by de-funding the Project Eagle upgrade which would have seen it upgraded in line with the USAF Block 40/45 standard. "AirForces Monthly" reported that by December 2020, just 2 aircraft were available for operations at any one time. The Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015 had announced the intention to retain the E-3D fleet until 2035, however in March 2019, the Ministry of Defence announced that the E-3Ds would be replaced by five E-7 Wedgetails from 2023. The £1.51 billion contract was awarded to Boeing without a competitive procurement process, a decision criticised by both competitors of Boeing and the UK's Defence Select Committee. The 2021 Integrated Defence Review confirmed a reduced order of three aircraft. On 27 January 2015, the RAF deployed an E-3D Sentry to Cyprus in support of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. The last intended operational flight by an RAF E3 Sentry was supposed to be in July 2021 with the Sentry retired from service, however RAF ZH101 and ZH106 have both flown patrols over Poland / Eastern Europe during Russia's incursions into Ukraine during late February / March 2022. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10384 | 73,268 |
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