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862,710 | To perform computing tasks more quickly (or better in some other way), generally one can invest time and money in improving the software, improving the hardware, or both. There are various approaches with advantages and disadvantages in terms of decreased latency, increased throughput and reduced energy consumption. Typical advantages of focusing on software may include more rapid development, lower non-recurring engineering costs, heightened portability, and ease of updating features or patching bugs, at the cost of overhead to compute general operations. Advantages of focusing on hardware may include speedup, reduced power consumption, lower latency, increased parallelism and bandwidth, and better utilization of area and functional components available on an integrated circuit; at the cost of lower ability to update designs once etched onto silicon and higher costs of functional verification, and times to market. In the hierarchy of digital computing systems ranging from general-purpose processors to fully customized hardware, there is a tradeoff between flexibility and efficiency, with efficiency increasing by orders of magnitude when any given application is implemented higher up that hierarchy. This hierarchy includes general-purpose processors such as CPUs, more specialized processors such as GPUs, fixed-function implemented on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and fixed-function implemented on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2031045 | 862,250 |
403,734 | The Canadian Shield is a collage of Archean plates and accreted juvenile arc terranes and sedimentary basins of the Proterozoic Eon that were progressively amalgamated during the interval 2.45–1.24 Ga, with the most substantial growth period occurring during the Trans-Hudson orogeny, between c. 1.90–1.80 Ga. The Canadian Shield was the first part of North America to be permanently elevated above sea level and has remained almost wholly untouched by successive encroachments of the sea upon the continent. It is the Earth's greatest area of exposed Archean rock. The metamorphic base rocks are mostly from the Precambrian (between 4.5 billion and 540 million years ago) and have been repeatedly uplifted and eroded. Today it consists largely of an area of low relief above sea level with a few monadnocks and low mountain ranges (including the Laurentian Mountains) probably eroded from the plateau during the Cenozoic Era. During the Pleistocene Epoch, continental ice sheets depressed the land surface (creating Hudson Bay) but also tilted up its northeastern "rim" (the Torngat), scooped out thousands of lake basins, and carried away much of the region's soil. The northeastern portion, however, became tilted up so that, in northern Labrador and Baffin Island, the land rises to more than 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) above sea level. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6230 | 403,534 |
1,792,460 | The main problem of the CAFM is that the probes are more expensive and wear out faster than those used in topographic AFM maps, mainly due to the high current densities flowing through the tip/sample nanojunction, but also due to lateral friction. The premature degradation of a CAFM tip not only increases the cost of the experiments, but also reduces the reliability of the data collected. For this reason, when using CAFM, tip conductivity characterization (using a reference sample) before and after the experiments is highly recommended; only if the CAFM tip holds the same conductivity before and after is the data collected considered reliable. The first types of conductive nanoprobes used in CAFM experiments, which are still widely used nowadays, consist on standard silicon nanoprobes (as those used in topographic AFM measurements) varnished with thin metallic films, including Pt, Au, Ru, Ti and Cr, among others. The varnish should be thick enough to withstand the large current densities and frictions, and at the same time thin enough to not increase significantly the radius of the tip apex, maintaining its sharpness and ensuring a high lateral resolution of the CAFM technique. As mentioned, the lifetime of the metal-varnished tips for CAFM experiments is much shorter than in any other AFM mode, mainly due to metallic varnish melting and loss of tip mass during the scans. To solve this problem, CAFM silicon tips varnished with hard materials like phosphorus-doped diamond have appeared. The main problems of diamond-coapted CAFM tips are: i) they are much more expensive, and ii) they are very stiff and can damage (scratch) the surface of the samples under tests. Another option is to use sharpened metallic wires as the tip, but also the use of hone techniques increases their price (compared to metal-coated Si tips). Furthermore, these tips can also degrade (lose their conductivity) by particle adhesion. A cheap and effective methodology to protect CAFM tips from degrading is to coat them with graphene, which can withstand well the high current densities and mechanical friction. Moreover, graphene is inert and slows down particle adhesion to the tip apex. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24580913 | 1,791,453 |
1,442,551 | On April 14, 2011, Mochizuki defeated Masato Yoshino to win the Open the Dream Gate Championship for the second time. On April 24 Mochizuki agreed to form a new alliance with former World-1 members Masato Yoshino, BxB Hulk, PAC and Susumu Yokosuka to battle the promotion's new top heel stable, Blood Warriors. On June 8, the new group was named Junction Three (JIII) in reference to it being a union between the former members of World-1, Kamikaze and the Veteran-gun. And Mochizuki led their team to winning all four Titles on June 19 in Champion Gate. At the end of 2011, Masaaki Mochizuki shared the Fighting Spirit award with Yuji Nagata from New Japan. After a ten-month rivalry, Blood Warriors defeated Junction Three in a fourteen-man elimination tag team match on February 9, 2012, forcing JIII to disband. After forming the Kaettekita Veteran-gun stable with some of Dragon Gate's veterans, Mochizuki and stablemate Don Fujii defeated Shingo Takagi and Yamato on September 23, 2012, to win the Open the Twin Gate Championship for the second time. On September 9, Masaaki Mochizuki took part in the Nagata's 20th anniversary, they defeat Kazuchika Okada, Shinsuke Nakamura and Yujiro Takahashi in the main event with Nagata and Jun Akiyama. From November 20 to December 1, Masaaki Mochizuki once again travelled to New Japan Pro-Wrestling. He and Nagata took part in the round-robin portion of the 2012 World Tag League, finishing with a record of four wins and two losses, narrowly missing advancing to the semifinals of the tournament. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9144587 | 1,441,738 |
1,158,675 | Roe was born in Patricroft, Eccles, Lancashire, the son of Edwin Roe, a doctor, and Annie Verdon. He was the elder brother of Humphrey Verdon Roe. Roe left home when he was 14 to go to Canada where he had been offered training as a surveyor. When he arrived in British Columbia he discovered that a slump in the silver market meant that there was little demand for surveyors, so he spent a year doing odd jobs, then returned to England. There he served as an apprentice with the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. He later tried to join the Royal Navy to study marine engineering at King's College London, but, although he passed the technical and mathematics papers, he was rejected for failing some of the general subjects. As well as doing dockyard work, Roe joined the ship SS "Jebba" of the British & South African Royal Mail Company as fifth engineer on the West African run. He went on to serve on other vessels, finishing his Merchant Navy career as third engineer aboard the SS "Ichanga". It was during these voyages that he became interested in the possibility of building a flying machine, having observed the soaring flight of albatrosses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3357299 | 1,158,061 |
1,479,809 | The study completed by Vaishnaw et al. sought to identify the key region and factors related to the efforts of gene expression of the C4 gene. Their research concluded with the fact that the Sp1 binding site (positioned at -59 to -49) plays an important role in accurately starting basal transcription of C4. Utilization of electromobility shift assays and DNase I footprint analyses demonstrated specific DNA-protein correlations of the C4 promoter at the nuclear factor 1, two E box (-98 to -93 and -78 to -73), and Sp1 binding domains. These findings were later added to in another extensive study, that found a third E box site. In addition, the same findings postulated that two physical entities within the gene sequence could have a role in the expression levels of human C4A and C4B, which include the both presence of the endogenous retrovirus that can have positive or negative regulatory influences affecting C4 transcription and the varying genetic environment (dependent on which genetic modular component is present) past position -1524. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9693587 | 1,478,975 |
605,269 | The United Kingdom (UK) criteria were first published by the Conference of Medical Royal Colleges (with advice from the Transplant Advisory Panel) in 1976, as prognostic guidelines. They were drafted in response to a perceived need for guidance in the management of deeply comatose patients with severe brain damage who were being kept alive by mechanical ventilators but showing no signs of recovery. The Conference sought "to establish diagnostic criteria of such rigour that on their fulfilment the mechanical ventilator can be switched off, in the secure knowledge that there is no possible chance of recovery". The published criteria – negative responses to bedside tests of some reflexes with pathways through the brainstem and a specified challenge to the brainstem respiratory centre, with caveats about exclusion of endocrine influences, metabolic factors and drug effects – were held to be "sufficient to distinguish between those patients who retain the functional capacity to have a chance of even partial recovery and those where no such possibility exists". Recognition of that state required the withdrawal of further artificial support so that death is allowed to occur, thus "sparing relatives from the further emotional trauma of sterile hope". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26700042 | 604,959 |
154,470 | Dogfish sharks experience one of the longest gestation periods of any organism, which can last from around 18 to 24 months. During spawning season, which occurs during the colder months of winter, females can lay anywhere from 2 to 12 eggs, which develop ovoviviparously and the pups are birthed as live young, with about 5 to 6 in each litter of pups, mainly depending on the size of the female. Reproduction occurs in the winter in offshore waters, while pups are normally born in the warmer and deeper offshore waters where it is harder for humans and predators to reach them. The reproductive cycle begins when females produce several large eggs of yellow coloring, which become fertilized once they pass through the shell gland and are wrapped in what is called a "candle", or a kind of reproductive capsule. One can determine if an egg is fertilized when the blastoderm is visible. The candle passes through the rest of the reproductive tract until it reaches the uterus. Attached to the gill region of the pup is a yolk sac which provides nutrients for them as they develop, which they absorb as they grow. Even after fully absorbing the yolk sac, the pups may live in the uterus for a period of time afterwards during the gestation period. Both sexes are greyish brown in color and are countershaded. Males are identified by a pair of pelvic fins modified as sperm-transfer organs, or "claspers". The male inserts one clasper into the female cloaca during copulation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1425524 | 154,400 |
2,136,356 | His research interests directed towards combining different types of chemical information tools for solving structural, mechanistic and stereochemical problems in organic, bioorganic, organometallic chemistry and catalysis, using techniques such as semiempirical molecular orbital methods (the MNDO family), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography and "ab initio" quantum theories. Aware of the complex semantic issues involved in converging different areas of chemistry to address modern multidisciplinary problems, he started investigating the use of the Internet as an information and integrating medium around 1987, focusing in 1994 on the World Wide Web as having the most potential. Peter Murray-Rust and he first introduced Chemical Markup Language (CML) in 1995 as a rich carrier of semantic chemical information and data; and they coined the term "Datument" as a portmanteau word to better express the evolution from the documents produced by traditional academic publishing methods to the Semantic Web ideals expressed by Tim Berners-Lee. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4916053 | 2,135,128 |
495,113 | Later a second, smaller specimen was found, probably of a subadult individual. Its slab and counterslab are separated and both were sold to private collections; neither has an official registration. It was described by S. Christopher Bennet in 2007. This second exemplar is much more complete and better articulated. It shows impressions of a large part of the flight membrane and under UV-light remains of the muscles of the thigh and arm become visible. It provided new information on many points of the anatomy. The skull was shown to have been very short and broad, wider than long. It transpired that Wellnhofer had incorrectly reconstructed the skull in 1975, mistaking the large eye sockets for the "fenestrae antorbitales", skull openings that in most pterosaurs are larger than the orbits but in "Anurognathus" are small and together with the nostrils placed at the front of the flat snout. The eyes pointed forwards to a degree, providing some binocular vision. Most of the skull consisted of bone struts. The presumed pygostyle was absent; investigating the real nine tail vertebrae instead of impressions showed that they were unfused, though very reduced. The wing finger lacked the fourth phalanx. According to Bennett a membrane, visible near the shin, showed that the wing contacted the ankle and was thus rather short and broad. Bennett also restudied the holotype, interpreting bumps on the jaws as an indication that hairs forming a protruding bristle were present on the snout. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3361076 | 494,857 |
893,075 | Recent advancements in modified porous nanocrystalline films have enabled the creation of electrochromic display. The single substrate display structure consists of several stacked porous layers printed on top of each other on a substrate modified with a transparent conductor (such as ITO or ). Each printed layer has a specific set of functions. A working electrode consists of a positive porous semiconductor such as Titanium Dioxide, with adsorbed chromogens. These chromogens change color by reduction or oxidation. A passivator is used as the negative of the image to improve electrical performance. The insulator layer serves the purpose of increasing the contrast ratio and separating the working electrode electrically from the counter electrode. The counter electrode provides a high capacitance to counterbalances the charge inserted/extracted on the SEG electrode (and maintain overall device charge neutrality). Carbon is an example of charge reservoir film. A conducting carbon layer is typically used as the conductive back contact for the counter electrode. In the last printing step, the porous monolith structure is overprinted with a liquid or polymer-gel electrolyte, dried, and then may be incorporated into various encapsulation or enclosures, depending on the application requirements. Displays are very thin, typically 30 micrometer, or about 1/3 of a human hair. The device can be switched on by applying an electrical potential to the transparent conducting substrate relative to the conductive carbon layer. This causes a reduction of viologen molecules (coloration) to occur inside the working electrode. By reversing the applied potential or providing a discharge path, the device bleaches. A unique feature of the electrochromic monolith is the relatively low voltage (around 1 Volt) needed to color or bleach the viologens. This can be explained by the small over- potentials needed to drive the electrochemical reduction of the surface adsorbed viologens/chromogens. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=917126 | 892,605 |
1,484,406 | KZFT filter is design for a reconstruction of periodic signals or seasonality covered by heavy noise. Seasonality is one of the key forms of nonstationarity that is often seen in time series. It is usually defined as the periodic components within the time series. Spectral analysis is a powerful tool to analyze time series with seasonality. If a process is stationary, its spectrum is a continuous form as well. It can be treated parametrically for simplicity of prediction. If a spectrum contains lines, it indicates that the process is not stationary and contains periodicities. In this situation, parametric fitting generally results in seasonal residuals with reduced energies. This is due to the season to season variations. To avoid this problem, nonparametric approaches including band pass filters are recommended. Kolmogorov–Zurbenko Fourier Transform (KZFT) is one of such filters. The purpose of many applications is to reconstruct high resolution wavelet from the noisy environment. It was proven that KZFT provides the best possible resolution in spectral domain. It permits the separation of two signals on the edge of a theoretically smallest distance, or reconstruct periodic signals covered by heavy noise and irregularly observed in time. Because of this, KZFT provides a unique opportunity for various applications. A computer algorithm to implement the KZFT has been provided in the R software. The KZFT is essentially a band pass filter that belongs to the category of short-time Fourier transform (STFT) with a unique time window. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32683147 | 1,483,569 |
1,845,116 | Equity and inclusion in education refers to the principle or policy that provides equal access for all learners to curriculum and programming within an educational setting. Some school boards have policy that includes the terms inclusion and diversity. Equity is a term sometimes confused with equality. Equity and inclusion policy provide a framework for educators and academic administrators that guides training and delivery of instruction and programming. School boards use equity and inclusion principles to promote the use of resources that reflect the diversity of students and their needs. Children have the inherent right to education as determined by the Target 4 Goals of the United Nations. In the past, equity and inclusion referred primarily to students with mental and/or physical challenges that prevented them from learning in regular classrooms. The principle now applies to marginalized students who live with any type of intersectionality based on their social identity. The capabilities approach introduced by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen supports the ideal that each learner should be offered the freedom to choose from the alternative ways they learn and to do it as a shared experience, with the interaction of their peers. It has been shown that schools that are able to implement inclusive and equitable practices tend to be more successful if they have endorsement or support at the regional and national levels of government. Besides the need for infrastructure and resources, cultural attitudes and beliefs strongly influence the creation and sustainability of effective programming in schools. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=69261982 | 1,844,061 |
366,526 | A preliminary estimate of the explosive energy by astronomer Boris Shustov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Astronomy, was , another using empirical period-yield scaling relations and the infrasound records, by Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario gave a value of and represents a best estimate for the yield of this airburst; there remains a potential "uncertainty [in the order of] a factor of two in this yield value". Brown and his colleagues also went on to publish a paper in November 2013 which stated that the "widely referenced technique of estimating airburst damage does not reproduce the [Chelyabinsk] observations, and that the mathematical relations found in the book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" which are based on the effects of nuclear weapons – [which is] almost always used with this technique – overestimate blast damage [when applied to meteor airbursts]". A similar overestimate of the explosive yield of the Tunguska airburst also exists; as incoming celestial objects have rapid directional motion, the object causes stronger blast wave and thermal radiation pulses at the ground surface than would be predicted by a stationary object exploding, limited to the height at which the blast was initiated-where the object's "momentum is ignored". Thus, a meteor airburst of a given energy is "much more damaging than an equivalent [energy] nuclear explosion at the same altitude". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38528850 | 366,334 |
1,826,784 | Artificial micro and nanoswimmers are small scale devices that convert energy into movement. Since the first demonstration of their performance in 2002, the field has developed rapidly in terms of new preparation methodologies, propulsion strategies, motion control, and envisioned functionality. The field holds promise for applications such as drug delivery, environmental remediation and sensing. The initial focus of the field was largely on artificial systems, but an increasing number of "biohybrids" are appearing in the literature. Combining artificial and biological components is a promising strategy to obtain new, well-controlled microswimmer functionalities, since essential functions of living organisms are intrinsically related to the capability to move. Living beings of all scales move in response to environmental stimuli (e.g., temperature or pH), to look for food sources, to reproduce, or to escape from predators. One of the more well-known living microsystems are swimming bacteria, but directed motion occurs even at the molecular scale, where enzymes and proteins undergo conformational changes in order to carry out biological tasks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=68657567 | 1,825,745 |
699,953 | Unhealthy methods of food consumption and dieting has persisted within the training regimen of wrestlers. A study including 243 collegiate wrestling programs in Divisions I, II, and III observed that these tendencies are ingrained within them. The results of the study showed that most of these kids began wrestling between the ages of 8-10 and begun the process of “cutting weight” at 13–14 years of age on average (Nelson Steen et al., 2003). Starting such a physically straining habit at such a young age further enforces the notion that victory should come at any cost, turning such bad habits into common practice. Analysis of nutrition practices of high school wrestlers indicates that roughly 4.8-8.0% test subjects displayed forms of disordered eating (Lakin et al., 1997). The methods of weight loss according to these results reveal numerous disordered forms of eating that result in health issues such as intentional dehydration (≈65%), rubber suits (≈40%), diet pills (≈6%) and vomiting (≈4%) (Lakin et al., 1997). For high school athletes to be making such drastic alterations in their nutritional health, it is fair to say that collegiate wrestlers continue the trend, if not exceeds the likes of their high school counterparts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1893219 | 699,589 |
1,086,353 | In cars, carburetor heat may be controlled automatically (e.g. by a wax-pellet driven flap in the air intake) or manually (often by rotating the air cleaner cover between 'summer' and 'winter' settings), with use both of "heat stove" type systems, and electric-filament booster elements directly attached to the carb or TBI module. The air filter bypass found on aircraft engines is not used, because the air filter on automobiles is not normally exposed to the elements (and an automobile drives around at ground level, and has to share dusty, grimy roads with other cars, so it is much more prone to ingesting dust and grit when running without a filter than an aircraft is) - at least, not so much to allow an obstructive build-up of snow and/or ice upon it - and because it is usually mounted closer to the cylinder block, such that it is able to absorb enough engine heat to keep itself from freezing up (airflow through the generally large-aperture filter is slower than through the throttle body itself, and thus less influenced by cooling effects). However, this is not always sufficient, and some automobiles have a history of temporary engine failure during rain or snow conditions (power output drops below that sufficient to continue propelling the vehicle, or even to prevent stalling whilst unladen, and the car cannot be driven/engine restarted until it has stood awhile without a mass quantity of cold, wet air travelling through it, so that the residual engine heat can melt the accumulated ice). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2643755 | 1,085,795 |
2,198,158 | The process of creating these structures is typically a hassle, requiring multiple step processes in order to synthesis a foam of desired properties. However, polystyrene solid foams have been created through simpler methods such as extrusion from a blowing agent or polystyrene bead expansion. While these methods are typically utilized for insulation or similar industry uses, this production method has also seen use in drug delivery applications [5]. Polystyrene solid foams can also be produced through emulsions. An emulsion can be created through the combination of two immiscible liquids. While many methods are used to create emulsion, Canal et al. used a unique method known as phase inversion temperature (PIT). PIT utilizes phase transitions to produce highly concentrated amounts of emulsion quickly. Through changes in temperature, solubility, and low interfacial tension, PIT is able to efficiently promote emulsion. The porosity of these solid foams is able to be fine-tuned, showing promise for osteogenic and therapeutic applications. For example, proposed osteogenic applications include the promotion of bone integration. The study conducted by Canal et al., utilized polystyrene solid foams as a drug delivery method to evaluate the drug release profile of ketoprofen. Researchers have stated that understanding the release profile for various drugs with polystyrene solid foams could significantly improve treatment outcomes for many disease states. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70690897 | 2,196,907 |
1,564,249 | Prominent in his DARPA research portfolio are Preventing Violent Explosive Neuro Trauma (PREVENT), prevention of explosive blast traumatic brain injury, Revolutionizing Prostheses (RP), development of responsive, brain-controlled, artificial arms, Predicting Health and Disease (PHD), combination of biomarkers and advanced analytics to diagnosis of disease in the presymptomatic state and Battlefield Medicine, development of point-of-care drug manufacturing technology. He also served as a Program Manager and following, the Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office. Ling is recipient of the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, Legion of Merit, Alpha Omega Alpha, Sigma Xi and the Humanitarian Award from the Brain Mapping Foundation. In April of 2020, Ling co-wrote with Michael Stebbins the proposal for the creation of a new federal agency modeled on DARPA, but focused on health. That proposal was adopted by the President Biden's campaign and became the model used to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39561500 | 1,563,362 |
1,294,099 | Aspects of the relationship between the physical body and socio-cultural conditions and practices can be recognized through the study of human remains. This is most often emphasized in a "biocultural bioarchaeology" model. It has often been the case that bioarchaeology has been regarded as a positivist, science-based discipline, while theories of the living body in the social sciences have been viewed as constructivist in nature. Physical anthropology and bioarchaeology have been criticized for having little to no concern for culture or history. Blakey has argued that scientific or forensic treatments of human remains from archaeological sites construct a view of the past that is neither cultural nor historic, and has suggested that a biocultural version of bioarchaeology will be able to construct a more meaningful and nuanced history that is more relevant to modern populations, especially descent populations. By biocultural, Blakey means a type of bioarchaeology that is not simply descriptive, but combines the standard forensic techniques of describing stature, sex and age with investigations of demography and epidemiology in order to verify or critique socioeconomic conditions experienced by human communities of the past. The incorporation of analysis regarding the grave goods interred with individuals may further the understanding of the daily activities experienced in life. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1923764 | 1,293,388 |
1,653,467 | In September 1994, Richard Jefferson coined the term hologenome when he introduced the hologenome theory of evolution at a presentation at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the CSH Symposium and earlier, the unsettling number and diversity of microbes that were being discovered through the powerful tool of PCR-amplification of 16S ribosomal RNA genes was exciting, but confusing interpretations in diverse studies. A number of speakers referred to microbial contributions to mammalian or plant DNA samples as 'contamination'. In his lecture, Jefferson argued that these were likely not contamination, but rather essential components of the samples that reflected the actual genetic composition of the organism being studied, integral to the complex system in which it lives. This implied that the logic of the organism's performance and capabilities would be embedded only in the hologenome. Observations on the ubiquity of microbes in plant and soil samples as well as laboratory work on molecular genetics of vertebrate-associated microbial enzymes impacting hormone action informed this hypothesis. References was made to work indicating that mating pheromones were only released after skin microbiota activated the precursors. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34920670 | 1,652,535 |
1,791,324 | The parasite has a large cellular repertoire of antigenically distinct VSGs (~1500/2000 complete and partial (pseudogenes)) located in telomeric and subtelomeric arrays (on megabase chromosomes or minichromosomes). VSGs are expressed from a bloodstream expression site (BES, ES) in a polycistron by RNA polymerase I (recruited to a ribosomal-type promoter) with other ES-associated genes (ESAGs), of which transferrin receptor (Tfr: ESAG6, ESAG7) is one. Only one VSG gene is expressed at a time, as only one of the ~15 ES are active in a cell. VSG expression is 'switched' by homologous recombination of a silent basic copy gene from an array (directed by homology) into the active telomerically-located expression site. During this transition, trypanosomes simultaneously display both pre- and post-switch VSGs on their surface. This coat replacement process is critical for the survival of recently switched cells because initial VSGs remain targets for the escalating host Ab response. Mosaic VSG genes can be created by homologous recombination of a partial VSG gene from an array. This partial gene may replace any portion of the residing VSG gene, creating a new mosaic VSG. VSG half-life measurements suggest that initial VSGs may persist on the surface of genetically switched trypanosomes for several days. It remains unclear whether the regulation of VSG switching is purely stochastic or whether environmental stimuli affect switching frequency. The fact that switching occurs in vitro suggests that there is at least some host-independent, stochastic element to the process. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40081998 | 1,790,317 |
1,034,568 | Erythropoiesis-stimulating agents have a history of use as blood doping agents in endurance sports, such as horseracing, boxing, cycling, rowing, distance running, race walking, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, biathlon, mixed martial arts, and triathlon. The overall oxygen delivery system (blood oxygen levels, as well as heart stroke volume, vascularization, and lung function) is one of the major limiting factors to muscles' ability to perform endurance exercise. Therefore, the primary reason athletes may use ESAs is to improve oxygen delivery to muscles, which directly improves their endurance capacity. With the advent of recombinant erythropoietin in the 1990s, the practice of autologous and homologous blood transfusion has been partially replaced by injecting erythropoietin such that the body naturally produces its own red cells. ESAs increase hematocrit (% of blood volume that is red cell mass) and total red cell mass in the body, providing a good advantage in sports where such practice is banned. In addition to ethical considerations in sports, providing an increased red cell mass beyond the natural levels reduces blood flow due to increased viscosity, and increases the likelihood of thrombosis and stroke. Due to dangers associated with using ESAs, their use should be limited to the clinic where anemic patients are boosted back to normal hemoglobin levels (as opposed to going above the normal levels for performance advantage, leading to an increased risk of death). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13768757 | 1,034,031 |
1,215,000 | The introduction of the CCD revolutionized high-speed photography in the 1980s. The "staring array" configuration of the sensor eliminated the scanning artifacts. Precise control of the integration time replaced the use of the mechanical shutter. However, the CCD architecture limited the rate at which images could be read off the sensor. Most of these systems still ran at NTSC rates (approximately 60 frame/s), but some, especially those built by the Kodak Spin Physics group, ran faster and recorded onto specially constructed video tape cassettes. The Kodak MASD group developed the first HyG (rugged) high-speed digital color camera called the RO that replaced 16-mm crash sled film cameras. Many new innovations and recording methods were introduced in the RO and further enhancements were introduced in the HG2000, a camera that could run at 1000 frame/s with a 512 x 384 pixel sensor for 2 seconds. Kodak MASD group also introduced an ultra high-speed CCD camera called the HS4540 that was designed and manufactured by Photron in 1991 that recorded 4,500 frame/s at 256 x 256. The HS4540 was used extensively by companies manufacturing automotive air bags to do lot testing which required the fast record speed to image a 30 ms deployment. Roper Industries purchased this division from Kodak in November 1999 and it was merged with Redlake (which was also purchased by Roper Industries). Redlake has since been purchased by IDT, which is today a market leader in the high speed camera market, and continues to serve the automotive crash test market. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3582572 | 1,214,348 |
1,521,474 | During the last 10 million years, volcanic activity shifted to bimodal volcanism with basalt lava flows alternating with rhyolite domes. Dark gray to black basalt and pink or brown rhyolite are particularly common in Elko, Washoe and Humboldt counties. Some small cinder cones formed as recently as the Pleistocene and the Nye County Lunar Crater volcanic field was active only 15,000 years ago. In Nevada's recent geologic past, tectonic changes have created normal faults and creating the basin and range horst and graben terrain. Thinning of the upper crust caused deeper, highly metamorphosed rock masses to rise to the surface, where it is overlain by younger faulted and domed rocks. There are more than 24 metamorphic core complexes in the Basin and Range Province as a whole. In some cases, faulted blocks have shifted more than 50 miles from the apex of the dome. Along detachment surfaces, mylonite forms due to shear. The Ruby Mountains-East Humboldt, close to Elko, and the Northern Snake Range, close to Utah, are the two most researched core complexes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=58635068 | 1,520,613 |
277,592 | As computers and global computer networks continued to advance and emulator developers grew more skilled in their work, the length of time between the commercial release of a console and its successful emulation began to shrink. Fifth generation consoles such as Nintendo 64, PlayStation and sixth generation handhelds, such as the Game Boy Advance, saw significant progress toward emulation during their production. This led to an effort by console manufacturers to stop unofficial emulation, but consistent failures such as "Sega v. Accolade" 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992), "Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation" 203 F.3d 596 (2000), and "Sony Computer Entertainment America v. Bleem" 214 F.3d 1022 (2000), have had the opposite effect. According to all legal precedents, emulation is legal within the United States. However, unauthorized distribution of copyrighted code remains illegal, according to both country-specific copyright and international copyright law under the Berne Convention. Under United States law, obtaining a dumped copy of the original machine's BIOS is legal under the ruling "Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc.", 964 F.2d 965 (9th Cir. 1992) as fair use as long as the user obtained a legally purchased copy of the machine. To mitigate this however, several emulators for platforms such as Game Boy Advance are capable of running without a BIOS file, using high-level emulation to simulate BIOS subroutines at a slight cost in emulation accuracy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18943937 | 277,442 |
1,150,152 | Biological methods isolate cells based on highly specific antigen binding, most commonly by monoclonal antibodies for positive selection. Antibodies against tumor specific biomarkers including EpCAM, HER2 and PSA have been used. The most common technique is magnetic nanoparticle-based separation (immunomagnetic assay) as used in CellSearch or MACS. Other techniques under research include microfluidic separation and combination of immunomagnetic assay and microfluidic separation. As the development of microfabrication technology, microscale magnetic structures are implemented to provide better control of the magnetic field and assist the CTCs detection. Oncolytic viruses such as vaccinia viruses are developed to detect and identify CTCs. Alternative methods exist which use engineered proteins instead of antibodies, such as the malaria VAR2CSA protein, which binds to oncofetal chondroitin sulfate on the surface of CTCs. CTCs may also be retrieved directly from the blood by a modified Seldinger technique, as developed by GILUPI GmbH. An antibody coated metal wire is inserted into a peripheral vein and stays there for a defined period (30 min). During this time, CTCs from the blood can bind to the antibodies (currently anti-EpCAM). After the incubation time, the wire is removed, washed and the native CTCs, isolated from the blood of the patient, can be further analysed. Molecular genetics as well as immunofluorescent staining and several other methods are possible. Advantage of this method is the higher blood volume that can be analysed for CTCs (approx. 750 ml in 30 min compared to 7.5 ml of a drawn blood sample). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16806609 | 1,149,545 |
859,824 | The cause of the glaciation is heavily debated. The appearance and development of terrestrial plants and microphytoplankton, which consumed atmospheric carbon dioxide, may have diminished the greenhouse effect and promoting the transition of the climatic system to the glacial mode. Though more commonly associated with greenhouse gasses and warming, volcanism may have induced cooling. Volcanoes can supply cooling sulfur aerosols to the atmosphere or deposit basalt flows which accelerate carbon sequestration in a tropical environment. In addition, volcanic fertilisation of the oceans with phosphorus may have increased populations of photosynthetic algae and enhanced biological sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Increased burial of organic carbon is another method of drawing down carbon dioxide from the air that may have played a role in the Late Ordovician. Two environmental changes associated with the glaciation were responsible for much of the Late Ordovician extinction. First, the cooling global climate was probably especially detrimental because the biota were adapted to an intense greenhouse, especially because most shallow sea habitats in the Ordovician were located in the tropics. Second, sea level decline, caused by sequestering of water in the ice cap, drained the vast epicontinental seaways and eliminated the habitat of many endemic communities. Falling sea levels may have acted as a positive feedback loop accelerating further cooling; as shallow seas receded, carbonate-shelf production declined and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels correspondingly decreased, fostering even more cooling. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=425753 | 859,366 |
869,894 | Sir Hiram Maxim was an American who moved to England and adopted English nationality. He chose to largely ignore his contemporaries and built his own whirling arm rig and wind tunnel. In 1889, he built a hangar and workshop in the grounds of Baldwyn's Manor at Bexley, Kent, and made many experiments. He developed a biplane design which he patented in 1891 and completed as a test rig three years later. It was an enormous machine, with a wingspan of , a length of , fore and aft horizontal surfaces and a crew of three. Twin propellers were powered by two lightweight compound steam engines each delivering . Overall weight was . Later modifications would add more wing surfaces as shown in the illustration. Its purpose was for research and it was neither aerodynamically stable nor controllable, so it ran on a track with a second set of restraining rails to prevent it from lifting off, somewhat in the manner of a roller coaster. In 1894, the machine developed enough lift to take off, breaking one of the restraining rails and being damaged in the process. Maxim then abandoned work on it but would return to aeronautics in the 20th century to test a number of smaller designs powered by internal combustion engines. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1607990 | 869,434 |
152,576 | The XP-89 had a thin, straight, mid-mounted wing and a crew of two, seated in tandem. The slim rear fuselage and the high-mounted horizontal stabilizer led Northrop employees calling it the Scorpion—a name later formally adopted by the Air Force. The intended armament of four 20-millimeter M24 cannon in a small nose turret was not ready when the XP-89 was completed in 1948. Pending the availability of either of the two turrets under development, an interim six-gun fixed installation, with 200 rounds per gun, was designed for the underside of the nose. The thin wing had an aspect ratio of 5.88, a thickness-to-chord ratio of 9% and used a NACA 0009-64 section, which was selected for its low drag at high speed and stability at low speeds. A further advantage of the straight wing was that it could accommodate heavy weights at the wingtips. The wing could not fit the circular-type (rotating) spoilerons used in the P-61, so Northrop used the "decelerons" designed for the unsuccessful XP-79 prototype. These were clamshell-style split ailerons, which could be used as conventional ailerons, as dive brakes, or function as flaps as needed. All flying surfaces, the flaps and the landing gear were hydraulically powered. The thin wing dictated tall, thin, high-pressure () mainwheel tires, while the low height of the fuselage required the use of dual wheels for the nose gear. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=458875 | 152,508 |
22,135 | Caffeine has both positive and negative health effects. It can treat and prevent the premature infant breathing disorders bronchopulmonary dysplasia of prematurity and apnea of prematurity. Caffeine citrate is on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. It may confer a modest protective effect against some diseases, including Parkinson's disease. Some people experience sleep disruption or anxiety if they consume caffeine, but others show little disturbance. Evidence of a risk during pregnancy is equivocal; some authorities recommend that pregnant women limit caffeine to the equivalent of two cups of coffee per day or less. Caffeine can produce a mild form of drug dependence – associated with withdrawal symptoms such as sleepiness, headache, and irritability – when an individual stops using caffeine after repeated daily intake. Tolerance to the autonomic effects of increased blood pressure and heart rate, and increased urine output, develops with chronic use (i.e., these symptoms become less pronounced or do not occur following consistent use). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6868 | 22,126 |
1,068,754 | After a long history of war and exploration in space, during which no intelligent life was found, humans had returned to planet Earth in an attempt to seek peace and stability in a post-scarcity society guided by AI. A signal is detected from the distant planet Ecosystem 9 in the outer Crux Arm, and the starship "LSV Darwin", captained by Lucy Tak, is sent to investigate. Landing forces are engaged by the Beta (who are designated as such by the humans because their original planet was the "beta candidate" for intelligent life during previous radio telescope surveys, but subsequent investigation did not receive any more signals — likely a consequence of the Silent Ones' attack) and collect samples from the surface, including Goo, which promptly escapes and destroys the "Darwin", reaching the Beta colony site in the re-entering wreckage. Despite their initial conflict, the Beta and the now-stranded humans agree to an alliance to destroy the Goo that threatens them, which is revealed to be part of the artificially intelligent ""Pathfinder"" Von Neumann probe system sent from Earth centuries prior to chart the galaxy in advance of the human expansion. The probes were believed to have been decommissioned when exploration was abandoned, but presumably the Goo on Ecosystem 9 somehow altered its own programming, becoming self-directing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45032290 | 1,068,200 |
184,114 | In sugarcane cultivation, the remaining bagasse after extraction of sugar is used in large amounts for energy production (both process heat and electric energy for use both in the sugar factory itself and for other consumers), and locally it has been thought to be a remarkable source of dioxins. This basically indicates that burning biomass produces dioxins and it should be done at high enough temperatures and there should be proper filtering of flue gases. For the treatment of gases and pollutants, sugarcane industries often use wet gas scrubbers, such as the Venturi type. In addition, other treatment systems also used are electrostatic precipitators and bag filters. These methods may be insufficient Improperly burned biomass, which undergoes only low temperature incomplete combustion, is responsible for much of the negative health effects of indoor air pollution and is a particular problem in the Global South where biomass like wood or cowdung are often the only commonly available fuels for cooking and home heating. In addition to dioxins, other harmful products of incomplete combustion - such as carbon monoxide - are also released when biomass is burned in low oxygen conditions. Using plastic, particularly chlorine-containing plastics such as polyvinyl chloride, as a fuel or firestarter further increases dioxin emissions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20663724 | 184,017 |
465,494 | In multicellular animals the same principle has been put in the service of gene cascades that control body-shape. Each time a cell divides, two cells result which, although they contain the same genome in full, can differ in which genes are turned on and making proteins. Sometimes a 'self-sustaining feedback loop' ensures that a cell maintains its identity and passes it on. Less understood is the mechanism of epigenetics by which chromatin modification may provide cellular memory by blocking or allowing transcription. A major feature of multicellular animals is the use of morphogen gradients, which in effect provide a positioning system that tells a cell where in the body it is, and hence what sort of cell to become. A gene that is turned on in one cell may make a product that leaves the cell and diffuses through adjacent cells, entering them and turning on genes only when it is present above a certain threshold level. These cells are thus induced into a new fate, and may even generate other morphogens that signal back to the original cell. Over longer distances morphogens may use the active process of signal transduction. Such signalling controls embryogenesis, the building of a body plan from scratch through a series of sequential steps. They also control and maintain adult bodies through feedback processes, and the loss of such feedback because of a mutation can be responsible for the cell proliferation that is seen in cancer. In parallel with this process of building structure, the gene cascade turns on genes that make structural proteins that give each cell the physical properties it needs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=356382 | 465,264 |
487,378 | In 1981, Simulaser Corporation was founded by two entrepreneur engineers and began operations near Los Angeles to develop "Advanced MILES" training systems. Under initial contracts from Sandia National Labs, Simulaser produced standard MILES replacement laser transmitters and man-worn detector systems as well as "Advanced MILES" devices that incorporated player identification and scoring systems. These Advanced MILES systems made use of the CMOS 146800-series embedded controllers that had just become available at that time. The systems interleaved unique player identification codes within the weapon code bits transmitted by the laser, which were then stored by the receiver system of any player that was hit. Those systems utilized a controller gun to initialize each player, thus preventing players from "resurrecting" themselves by re-inserting the yellow weapon key. Each player's data was stored in memory until downloaded by the controller unit at the conclusion of the training exercise. Simulaser made use of hybrid microcircuits to reduce the size of certain components and eliminated the electronic module on the back of the helmet to improve player comfort. Simulaser also manufactured laser detector components and systems for vehicle applications sold to Sandia Labs and EG&G Inc., the operations and maintenance contractor at Kirtland AFB for use in training guards and couriers. Simulaser was acquired by Applied Solar Energy Corp. (ASEC, City of Industry, CA), its major supplier of silicon detectors, in 1984. Later, under contract from Fairchild-Weston Systems, Simulaser produced the laser and detector systems for the AGES/ADII (Air-to-Ground Engagement System/Air Defense II) program for the US Army, outfitting a number of helicopters with training systems and producing laser simulators for the HGSS/GVLLD (Hellfire Ground Support System Simulator/Ground-based Vehicle Laser Locator Designator). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=894176 | 487,128 |
685,931 | By 2000, virtually all major airlines, hotel firms, cruise lines and rental car firms had implemented revenue management systems to predict customer demand and optimize available price. These revenue management systems had limited "optimize" to imply managing the availability of pre-defined prices in pre-established price categories. The objective function was to select the best blends of predicted demand given existing prices. The sophisticated technology and optimization algorithms had been focused on selling the right amount of inventory at a given price, not on the price itself. Realizing that controlling inventory was no longer sufficient, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) launched an initiative to better understand the price sensitivity of customer demand. IHG determined that calculating price elasticity at very granular levels to a high degree of accuracy still was not enough. Rate transparency had elevated the importance of incorporating market positioning against substitutable alternatives. IHG recognized that when a competitor changes its rate, the consumer's perception of IHG's rate also changes. Working with third party competitive data, the IHG team was able to analyze historical price, volume and share data to accurately measure price elasticity in every local market for multiple lengths of stay. These elements were incorporated into a system that also measured differences in customer elasticity based upon how far in advance the booking is being made relative to the arrival date. The incremental revenue from the system was significant as this new Price Optimization capability increased Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) by 2.7%. IHG and Revenue Analytics, a pricing and revenue management consulting firm, were selected as finalists for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences for their joint effort in implementing Price Optimization at IHG. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8976534 | 685,574 |
2,136,110 | Harris joined University College London where she worked on condensed matter physics. She joined the faculty at the University of Leeds in 2004, where she holds a joint position at the Astbury Centre for Structural and Molecular Biology. Her research considers the development of theoretical and computational biophysical tools to address open questions in molecular biophysics. Circular DNA sequences are present in bacterial, mitochondrial and cancer genomes, and offer promise for the design of gene vectors. These circular sequences can withstand superhelical stresses, resulting in the formation of DNA supercoils. Whilst such supercoils are frequently observed "in vivo", their closed topology renders them more challenging to study experimentally than their linear counterparts. To this end, minicircles of DNA (closed double-stranded DNA sequences) have been proposed as model systems. Harris developed the mathematical models and atomistic molecular dynamics simulations that can accurately describe these DNA supercoils. Harris was involved with the development of Fluctuating Finite Element Analysis, a mesoscale modelling tool that makes use of contiuum mechanics used to predict bimolecular dynamics in globular macromolecules and proteins. FFEA makes use of 3D volumetric information, such as Cryo Electron Tomography maps. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=69320759 | 2,134,883 |
913,066 | From spectra with rotational resolution, moments of inertia and hence bond lengths and angles can be determined "directly" (at least in principle). From less well-resolved spectra one can still determine important quantities like JT stabilization energies and energy barriers (e.g. to pseudorotation). However, in the whole spectral intensity distribution formula_32 of an electronic transition more information is encoded. It has been used to decide on the presence (or absence) of the geometric phase which is accumulated during the pseudorotational motion around the JT (or other type of) conical intersection. Prominent examples of either type are the ground (X) or an excited (B) state of Na. The Fourier transform of formula_32, the so-called autocorrelation function formula_34 reflects the motion of the wavepacket after an optical (= vertical) transition to the APES of the final electronic state. Typically it will move on the timescale of a vibrational period which is (for small molecules) of the order of 5–50 fs, i.e. ultrafast. Besides a nearly periodic motion, mode–mode interactions with very irregular (also chaotic) behaviour and spreading of the wavepacket may also occur. Near a conical intersection this will be accompanied/complemented by nonradiative transitions (termed internal conversion) to other APESs occurring on the same ultrafast time scale. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1964288 | 912,587 |
1,516,824 | Luis Alberto Machado (Caracas, January 21, 1932 – Caracas, February 23, 2016) Venezuelan lawyer, author and politician. He was best known for his ideas about the malleability of intelligence. He asserted, in his books and writings on the subject, that perceived limits on intelligence are false and are primarily tied to upbringing and social conditioning. He argued that through careful environmental stimulation, especially in the early stages of child development, intelligence can be developed indefinitely and exponentially throughout life. As a politician, he stated that a nation's collective intellectual power was its greatest asset. The president Luis Herrera Campins (1979–1984) appointed him as Minister of Intellectual Development, a cabinet post created specifically for advancing and applying his ideas with government backing. This program was known as the Intelligence Project, and, although given a small budget, resulted in a number of public initiatives aimed at improving educational opportunities in Venezuela. The project was ended in 1984 by president Jaime Lusinchi, but left behind a legacy in authors related to intelligence as Edward De Bono, Martin Seligman, Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg. His experience has been developed in Mexico, China, Israel and South Africa. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29302481 | 1,515,972 |
758,027 | First-generation microkernels typically supported synchronous as well as asynchronous IPC, and suffered from poor IPC performance. Jochen Liedtke assumed the design and implementation of the IPC mechanisms to be the underlying reason for this poor performance. In his L4 microkernel he pioneered methods that lowered IPC costs by an order of magnitude. These include an IPC system call that supports a send as well as a receive operation, making all IPC synchronous, and passing as much data as possible in registers. Furthermore, Liedtke introduced the concept of the "direct process switch", where during an IPC execution an (incomplete) context switch is performed from the sender directly to the receiver. If, as in L4, part or all of the message is passed in registers, this transfers the in-register part of the message without any copying at all. Furthermore, the overhead of invoking the scheduler is avoided; this is especially beneficial in the common case where IPC is used in an remote procedure call (RPC) type fashion by a client invoking a server. Another optimization, called "lazy scheduling", avoids traversing scheduling queues during IPC by leaving threads that block during IPC in the ready queue. Once the scheduler is invoked, it moves such threads to the appropriate waiting queue. As in many cases a thread gets unblocked before the next scheduler invocation, this approach saves significant work. Similar approaches have since been adopted by QNX and MINIX 3. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20023 | 757,622 |
1,035,139 | Saturday evening's qualifying session was divided into three parts. The first part lasted twenty minutes and eliminated the cars that finished eighteenth or lower. The second session lasting fifteen minutes eliminated cars from eleventh to seventeenth. The final ten-minute session set pole position to tenth. Cars which competed in the final session were not allowed to change tyres before the race; these started the race fitted with the tyres with which they set their quickest lap times. It was held in dry weather conditions. Alonso was fastest in the first and third sessions, and clinched his second consecutive pole position with a lap time of 1:45.390 which he set on his first run of the third session. He was restricted to one timed lap in the second session because of an engine mapping problem, which meant Ferrari immediately re-programmed Alonso's engine upon discovering the issue. Alonso was joined on the front row of the grid by Vettel, who recorded a lap 0.067 seconds slower, and felt he could have taken pole position as he misjudged a gap while following Schumacher and brushed a wall exiting the Singapore Sling chicane. Hamilton qualified third and was happy with his starting position despite losing downforce on the track's final sector while running in teammate Button's tow. Button secured fourth and pushed hard in the final session which meant he had slight damage to his rear tyres on his first run, and could not get the optimum tyre temperature in the first section on his second run. Webber managed fifth and admitted that he was struggling to find a good rhythm when driving the circuit. Barrichello qualified in sixth. The two Mercedes drivers took seventh and ninth; Rosberg ahead of Schumacher. Rosberg believed that he should have performed better in qualifying than in the practice session, as he felt the soft tyres lacked grip; Schumacher was satisfied with his qualifying performance. The Mercedes drivers were separated by Kubica, in the faster Renault, who was happy with his lap time despite his car sliding from a lack of grip. Kobayashi rounded out the top ten qualifiers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24511010 | 1,034,599 |
1,256,481 | In late October 2015, Smith adapted the “Dinner with 12 Strangers” program (originally developed at UCLA), which, according to the "Swarthmore Daily", "brings members of the campus community together for a meal at the Courtney Smith House." In March 2016, she penned an opinion editorial in the college's newspaper regarding a Letter to the Editor about members of the board of trustees having a conflict of interest in divesting in fossil fuels. The original article requested that "manager[s] having a duality or possible financial conflict of interest on any matter should not use his or her personal influence in the matter and, if a vote were to be taken, should not vote thereon nor be counted even in determining the quorum for the meeting." Smith, along with the Chair of the Managers of Swarthmore College, Tom Spock, issued that "the assertions in the piece [were] unfounded and present[ed] a distorted picture," adding "the administration are united in their deep commitment to climate action." Smith concluded the letter by stating that the college will not divest, citing the "Board’s responsibility to ensure that both current and future generations of Swarthmore students have access to the financial resources," indicating the importance of dependent investments in their long-term financial goals. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45467234 | 1,255,797 |
1,806,006 | While mobile robots had been in existence since the 1960s, (e.g. Shakey), progress in creating robots that could navigate on their own, outdoors, off-road, on irregular, obstacle-rich terrain had been slow. In fact no clear metrics were in place to measure progress. A baseline understanding of off-road capabilities began to emerge with the DARPA PerceptOR program in which independent research teams fielded robotic vehicles in unrehearsed Government tests that measured average speed and number of required operator interventions over a fixed course over widely spaced waypoints. These tests exposed the extreme challenges of off-road navigation. While the PerceptOR vehicles were equipped with sensors and algorithms that were state-of-the-art for the beginning of the 21st century, the limited range of their perception technology caused them to become trapped in natural cul-de-sacs. Furthermore, their reliance on pre-scripted behaviors did not allow them to adapt to unexpected circumstances. The overall result was that except for essentially open terrain with minimal obstacles, or along dirt roads, the PerceptOR vehicles were unable navigate without numerous, repeated operator intervention. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34529351 | 1,804,989 |
1,255,795 | After Chernobyl, with popular fear and distrust of nuclear power, and most energy companies preferring coal-fired plants, the U.S. nuclear industry went dormant for many years, although legislation continued until 1992. Although nuclear plants were still quite active and even improving production and safety practices, construction of new plants ended in the late 1980s. This was acceptable to many utility companies, because most of the plants were licensed to operate on 20–40 year contracts, despite an unfavorable political climate. Over time, numerous polls showed a steady increase in public support and decrease in opposition, except for a temporary drop in numbers after the September 11 attacks and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. According to a Gallup poll in 2009, 59% of the public favored the use of nuclear energy, including 27% who strongly favored it, an increase from 49% since 2001. Moreover, in 2009, the Gallup poll showed 56% people believed nuclear energy was safe versus 42% who believed it was unsafe. Other polls showed an even larger gap; Bloomberg and "The Los Angeles Times" found that 61% supported nuclear energy, while 30% opposed in 2010. Bisconti Research Inc./Gfk Roper, market researchers commissioned by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear industry lobbying group, found that "A record-high 74 percent of Americans surveyed in a new national poll support nuclear energy and a similar majority of 70 percent says the United States should 'definitely build more' nuclear energy facilities [in 2010]." According to Ann Bisconti, PhD, "This unprecedented support for nuclear energy is being driven largely by people's concerns for meeting future energy demand and environmental goals, but it coincides with statements by President Obama and other national leaders who have voiced strong support for more nuclear power plants." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31284652 | 1,255,111 |
77,120 | Various authors have suggested that extinction events occurred periodically, every 26 to 30 million years, or that diversity fluctuates episodically about every 62 million years. Various ideas, mostly regarding astronomical influences, attempt to explain the supposed pattern, including the presence of a hypothetical companion star to the Sun, oscillations in the galactic plane, or passage through the Milky Way's spiral arms. However, other authors have concluded that the data on marine mass extinctions do not fit with the idea that mass extinctions are periodic, or that ecosystems gradually build up to a point at which a mass extinction is inevitable. Many of the proposed correlations have been argued to be spurious or lacking statistical significance. Others have argued that there is strong evidence supporting periodicity in a variety of records, and additional evidence in the form of coincident periodic variation in nonbiological geochemical variables such as Strontium isotopes, flood basalts, anoxic events, orogenies, and evaporite deposition. One explanation for this proposed cycle is carbon storage and release by oceanic crust, which exchanges carbon between the atmosphere and mantle. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9813 | 77,091 |
1,387,843 | In 2012, the FDA concluded an assessment of scientific research on the effects of BPA and stated in the March 2012 Consumer Update that "the scientific evidence at this time does not suggest that the very low levels of human exposure to BPA through the diet are unsafe" although recognizing "potential uncertainties in the overall interpretation of these studies including route of exposure used in the studies and the relevance of animal models to human health. The FDA is continuing to pursue additional research to resolve these uncertainties." Yet on 17 July 2012, the FDA banned BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups. A FDA spokesman said the agency's action was not based on safety concerns and that "the agency continues to support the safety of BPA for use in products that hold food." Since manufacturers had already stopped using the chemical in baby bottles and sippy cups, the decision was a response to a request by the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry's main trade association, who believed that a ban would boost consumer confidence. The ban was criticized as "purely cosmetic" by the Environmental Working Group, which stated that "If the agency truly wants to prevent people from being exposed to this toxic chemical associated with a variety of serious and chronic conditions it should ban its use in cans of infant formula, food and beverages." The Natural Resources Defense Council called the move inadequate saying, the FDA needs to ban BPA from all food packaging. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57552333 | 1,387,076 |
1,220,103 | This cellular automata paradigm gave rise to a third wave of social simulation emphasizing agent-based modeling. Like micro-simulations, these models emphasized bottom-up designs but adopted four key assumptions that diverged from microsimulation: autonomy, interdependency, simple rules, and adaptive behavior. Agent-based models are less concerned with predictive accuracy and instead emphasize theoretical development. In 1981, mathematician and political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton published a major paper in "Science" titled "The Evolution of Cooperation" which used an agent-based modeling approach to demonstrate how social cooperation based upon reciprocity can be established and stabilized in a prisoner's dilemma game when agents followed simple rules of self-interest. Axelrod and Hamilton demonstrated that individual agents following a simple rule set of (1) cooperate on the first turn and (2) thereafter replicate the partner's previous action were able to develop "norms" of cooperation and sanctioning in the absence of canonical sociological constructs such as demographics, values, religion, and culture as preconditions or mediators of cooperation. Throughout the 1990s, scholars like William Sims Bainbridge, Kathleen Carley, Michael Macy, and John Skvoretz developed multi-agent-based models of generalized reciprocity, prejudice, social influence, and organizational information processing. In 1999, Nigel Gilbert published the first textbook on Social Simulation: "Simulation for the social scientist" and established its most relevant journal: the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=984692 | 1,219,449 |
727,239 | Taking the example of a current high definition (HD) video system, with 1920 by 1080 pixels, the Nyquist theorem states that it should be possible, in a perfect system, to resolve fully (with true black to white transitions) a total of 1920 black and white alternating lines combined, otherwise referred to as a spatial frequency of 1920/2=960 line pairs per picture width, or 960 cycles per picture width, (definitions in terms of cycles per unit angle or per mm are also possible but generally less clear when dealing with cameras and more appropriate to telescopes etc.). In practice, this is far from the case, and spatial frequencies that approach the Nyquist rate will generally be reproduced with decreasing amplitude, so that fine detail, though it can be seen, is greatly reduced in contrast. This gives rise to the interesting observation that, for example, a standard definition television picture derived from a film scanner that uses oversampling, as described later, may appear sharper than a high definition picture shot on a camera with a poor modulation transfer function. The two pictures show an interesting difference that is often missed, the former having full contrast on detail up to a certain point but then no really fine detail, while the latter does contain finer detail, but with such reduced contrast as to appear inferior overall. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4079673 | 726,857 |
922,123 | The first attempts to explain Jovian atmospheric dynamics date back to the 1960s. They were partly based on terrestrial meteorology, which had become well developed by that time. Those shallow models assumed that the jets on Jupiter are driven by small scale turbulence, which is in turn maintained by moist convection in the outer layer of the atmosphere (above the water clouds). The moist convection is a phenomenon related to the condensation and evaporation of water and is one of the major drivers of terrestrial weather. The production of the jets in this model is related to a well-known property of two dimensional turbulence—the so-called inverse cascade, in which small turbulent structures (vortices) merge to form larger ones. The finite size of the planet means that the cascade can not produce structures larger than some characteristic scale, which for Jupiter is called the Rhines scale. Its existence is connected to production of Rossby waves. This process works as follows: when the largest turbulent structures reach a certain size, the energy begins to flow into Rossby waves instead of larger structures, and the inverse cascade stops. Since on the spherical rapidly rotating planet the dispersion relation of the Rossby waves is anisotropic, the Rhines scale in the direction parallel to the equator is larger than in the direction orthogonal to it. The ultimate result of the process described above is production of large scale elongated structures, which are parallel to the equator. The meridional extent of them appears to match the actual width of jets. Therefore, in shallow models vortices actually feed the jets and should disappear by merging into them. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30873277 | 921,637 |
1,651,126 | Though Blakie and Brookfield acknowledge the problematic aspects of defining land degradation, with definitional variation depending in large part on the scholar or stakeholder in question, they do outline a general idea of reduced soil fertility and reduced ability of a given area of land to provide for people's subsistence needs, as compared to earlier periods in human history on that same land area. Paul Farmer discusses the effects of land degradation in central Haiti on local people's ability to produce sufficient food for their families within the environs of their own communities. Farmer links malnutrition in a Haitian village with vulnerability to infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, both in terms of chance of infection and severity of symptoms for those infected. While the extremely low percentage of the U.S. population involved in agriculture strongly suggests that direct access to arable land is not an absolute necessity for food security and nutritional health, land degradation in many developing nations is accelerating the rate of rural to urban migration at a more accelerated rate than most major cities are equipped to handle. Leatherman and Goodman also allude to land degradation co-occurring with decreases in food security and nutritional status in some communities in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Walter Edgar discusses the correlation between land degradation and economic disruption, as well as nutritional hardship, in the U.S. state of South Carolina in the decades following the Reconstruction Period. Coupled with land expropriation, land degradation has the effect of thrusting unprepared subsistence producers or other peasant farmers into a fast-paced and complex market economy heavily influence by policy makers who are far removed from the concerns and worldview of small scale farmers in developing countries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17200325 | 1,650,194 |
2,143,640 | Similar to other meshfree methods for PDEs, the finite point method (FPM) has its origins in techniques developed for scattered data fitting and interpolation, basically in the line of weighted least-squares methods (WLSQ). The latter can be regarded as particular forms of the moving least-squares method (MLS) proposed by Lancaster and Salkauskas. WLSQ methods have been widely used in meshfree techniques because allow retaining most of the MLS, but are more efficient and simple to implement. With these goals in mind, an outstanding investigation which led to the development of the FPM began in (Oñate, Idelsohn & Zienkiewicz, 1995a) and (Taylor, Zienkiewicz, Oñate & Idelsohn, 1995). The technique proposed was characterized by WLSQ approximations on local clouds of points and an equations discretization procedure based on point collocation (in the line of Batina’s works, 1989, 1992). The first applications of the FPM focused on adaptive compressible flow problems (Fischer, Onate & Idelsohn, 1995; Oñate, Idelsohn & Zienkiewicz, 1995a; Oñate, Idelsohn, Zienkiewicz & Fisher, 1995b). The effects on the approximation of the local clouds and weighting functions were also analyzed using linear and quadratic polynomial bases (Fischer, 1996). Additional studies in the context of convection-diffusion and incompressible flow problems gave the FPM a more solid base; cf. (Oñate, Idelsohn, Zienkiewicz & Taylor, 1996a) and (Oñate, Idelsohn, Zienkiewicz, Taylor & Sacco, 1996b). These works and (Oñate & Idelsohn, 1998) defined the basic FPM technique in use today. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50991882 | 2,142,409 |
1,148,749 | "Simple Math" received positive reviews from music critics upon release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received a weighted average of 73, based on sixteen reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Adam Pfleider of AbsolutePunk called the album a "shocking absorption" and awarded a near-perfect rating of 95%. He noted that, "in a year that's produced an overwhelming amount of great music, "Simple Math" is another outstanding painting worth the public's attention. When Hull sings "Believe me, all is brilliant," it really is once again for this band." BBC Music journalist Mike Diver also gave a favorable review. Despite stating that, "its 10 songs aren’t all of the level needed to propel its makers into the biggest indie-rock leagues", he was of the opinion that "Simple Math", "contains some of their finest songs yet. There are moments of real beauty, though the prettiest arrangements come complete with necessarily ugly imagery." Drowned in Sound critic Robert Cooked wrote, "What’s great about Manchester Orchestra is that they don’t quite fit into a box. Sadly, this makes them another one of those bands that don’t sell as many records as they deserve to." Awarding a score of seven out of ten, he added that the album is an "intelligent slab of thrilling, stadium-sized rock that does away with the genre’s dumb clichés. It’s hard not to get a kick out of hearing such an independent spirit raging through this album, even if commercially, "Simple Math" doesn’t quite add up." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30136844 | 1,148,142 |
72,204 | In Europe, take home naloxone pilots were launched in the Channel Islands and in Berlin in the late 1990s. In 2008 the Welsh Assembly government announced its intention to establish demonstration sites for take-home naloxone, and in 2010 Scotland instituted a national naloxone program. Inspired by North American and European efforts, non-governmental organizations running programs to train drug users as overdose responders and supply them with naloxone are now operational in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Noting the high risk of overdose among people with HIV who inject drugs, international HIV donors including the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Open Society Foundations, have supported the purchase and distribution of naloxone to those at risk in low- and middle income countries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=142818 | 72,177 |
2,145,053 | The coordination method can best be seen as a conceptual framework that prescribes a certain workflow when working with multiple languages. The three successive steps that constitute this workflow are not supported by an integrated workbench or development environment. The focus is rather on extending the developer's existing environments to add support for (1) identification, (2) specification, and (3) application. The main advantage of this approach has been that developers have actually tested our work and given us feedback. This kind of evaluation of the method is valuable because it reduces the risk of solving a purely hypothetical problem. Several papers introduce the different steps of the coordination method, report on this evaluation, and elaborates on the technical aspects of each individual experiment. Overall, the results have been promising: a significant number of errors have been found in production systems and given rise to a constructive dialog with developers on future tool requirements. A development process based on these guidelines and supported by tools constitutes a serious attempt to solve the coordination problem and make domain-specific multimodeling a practical proposition. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21468960 | 2,143,822 |
1,566,457 | Years later, in 2002, the Professional Windsurfing Association (PWA) upon inducting both Drake and Schweitzer into the inaugural class of the Windsurfing Hall of Fame, called Drake "The father of windsurfing" and Schweitzer "The man who brought windsurfing to the masses." Windsurfing's origin story has long and often been misconstrued through the lens of popular media and personal bias. The convenient and romanticized storyline of a sailor and a surfer, combining their two respective sports into a single new sport is idealized and not historically fact-based. More accurately, it was the combination of an intrepid, highly skilled engineer and a motivated, out of work businessman that together created the modern sport of windsurfing. Drake stated repeatedly, in various interviews, that although he alone can probably be credited with the entire invention, without Schweitzer playing a key motivating role he may never have completed the engineering design phase and moved forward with building and testing the original prototype. Patent disputes in the 1980s uncovered earlier sailboard designs by Peter Chilvers and Newman Darby such that Drake accepted that he was the third inventor of the concept. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23117343 | 1,565,570 |
1,066,845 | On 23 November 1916, while flying an Airco DH.2 (Serial No. 5964), Hawker left Bertangles Aerodrome at 1300 hours as part of 'A' Flight, led by Captain (later Air Vice Marshal) J. O. Andrews and including Lieutenant (later Air Marshal) R.H.M.S Saundby. Andrews led the flight in an attack on two German aircraft over Achiet. Spotting a larger flight of German aircraft above, Andrews was about to break off the attack, but spotted Hawker diving to attack. Andrews and Saundby followed him to back him up in his fight; Andrews drove off one of the Germans attacking Hawker, then took bullets in his engine and glided out of the fight under Saundby's covering fire. Losing contact with the other DH.2s, Hawker began a lengthy dogfight with an Albatros D.II flown by Leutnant Manfred von Richthofen of Jasta 2. The Albatros was faster than the DH.2, more powerful and, with a pair of lMG 08 machine guns, more heavily armed. Richthofen fired 900 rounds during the running battle. Running low on fuel, Hawker eventually broke away from the combat and attempted to return to Allied lines. The Red Baron's guns jammed 50 yards from the lines, but a bullet from his last burst struck Hawker in the back of his head, killing him instantly. His plane spun from and crashed east of Luisenhof Farm, just south of Bapaume on the Flers Road, becoming the German ace's 11th victim. German Grenadiers reported burying Hawker east of Luisenhof Farm along the roadside. Richthofen claimed Hawker's Lewis gun from the wreck as a trophy and hung it above the door of his quarters. Major Lanoe George Hawker is listed on the Arras Flying Services Memorial for airmen lost with no known grave. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=535536 | 1,066,291 |
57,851 | One place that AM is making a significant inroad is in the aviation industry. With nearly 3.8 billion air travelers in 2016, the demand for fuel efficient and easily produced jet engines has never been higher. For large OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Pratt and Whitney (PW) and General Electric (GE) this means looking towards AM as a way to reduce cost, reduce the number of nonconforming parts, reduce weight in the engines to increase fuel efficiency and find new, highly complex shapes that would not be feasible with the antiquated manufacturing methods. One example of AM integration with aerospace was in 2016 when Airbus was delivered the first of GE's LEAP engine. This engine has integrated 3D printed fuel nozzles giving them a reduction in parts from 20 to 1, a 25% weight reduction and reduced assembly times. A fuel nozzle is the perfect in road for additive manufacturing in a jet engine since it allows for optimized design of the complex internals and it is a low stress, non-rotating part. Similarly, in 2015, PW delivered their first AM parts in the PurePower PW1500G to Bombardier. Sticking to low stress, non-rotating parts, PW selected the compressor stators and synch ring brackets to roll out this new manufacturing technology for the first time. While AM is still playing a small role in the total number of parts in the jet engine manufacturing process, the return on investment can already be seen by the reduction in parts, the rapid production capabilities and the "optimized design in terms of performance and cost". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1305947 | 57,827 |
617,084 | A wearable artificial kidney is a wearable dialysis machine that a person with end-stage kidney disease could use daily or even continuously. A wearable artificial kidney (WAK) is not available, but research teams are in the process of developing such a device. The goal is to develop a portable device that will be able to imitate the functions of the regular kidney. This device would allow for a patient to be treated twenty-four hours a day. With the development of miniature pumps, the hope of an effective wearable hemodialysis device has become realizable. Some patients already receive continuous peritoneal dialysis treatment which allows them to remain ambulatory. However, only a small portion of dialysis patients use peritoneal dialysis treatment because it requires large amounts of dialysate to be stored and disposed. A healthy individual's kidneys filter blood 24 hours/day, 168 hours/week compared to an individual with end-stage renal disease whose dialysis treatment plan is approximately 12 hours a week. The treatment results in a lower quality of life as well as a higher mortality rate for patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD). Therefore, there is a need for an around-the-clock device that will allow ESRD patients to receive dialysis continuously while maintaining a normal life. The FDA approved the first human clinical trial in the United States for a wearable artificial kidney designed by Blood Purification Technologies Inc. The prototype of the WAK is a 10-pound device, powered by nine-volt batteries, which connects to a patient via a catheter, and should use less than 500mL of dialysate. It is designed to run continuously on batteries, allowing patients to remain ambulatory when wearing the device, leading to a greater quality of life. The device is designed to improve other physiological aspects of the patient's health such as improved volume control, decreased hypertension and sodium retention, as well as a decreased rate of cardiovascular disease and stroke. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2400647 | 616,770 |
995,828 | Another excellent and long-term example of this principle being put into practice is the braking system: whilst the actual brake mechanisms are critical, they are not particularly prone to sudden (rather than progressive) failure, and are in any case necessarily duplicated to allow even and balanced application of brake force to all wheels. It would also be prohibitively costly to further double-up the main components and they would add considerable weight. However, the similarly critical systems for actuating the brakes under driver control are inherently less robust, generally using a cable (can rust, stretch, jam, snap) or hydraulic fluid (can leak, boil and develop bubbles, absorb water and thus lose effectiveness). Thus in most modern cars the footbrake hydraulic brake circuit is diagonally divided to give two smaller points of failure, the loss of either only reducing brake power by 50% and not causing as much dangerous brakeforce imbalance as a straight front-back or left-right split, and should the hydraulic circuit fail completely (a relatively very rare occurrence), there is a failsafe in the form of the cable-actuated parking brake that operates the otherwise relatively weak rear brakes, but can still bring the vehicle to a safe halt in conjunction with transmission/engine braking so long as the demands on it are in line with normal traffic flow. The cumulatively unlikely combination of total foot brake failure with the need for harsh braking in an emergency will likely result in a collision, but still one at lower speed than would otherwise have been the case. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2091393 | 995,311 |
450,929 | Robert G. Kramer Sr. became the company's president and CEO April 1, 2019. Prior to that, he was the president and chief operating officer. He has also served as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer and other management positions within the corporation. He received his BA from Clemson University and an MBA from Western Kentucky University. In April 2021, the "Washington Post" reported that Kramer sold $10 million worth of company stock in January and early February 2021 under a November 13, 2020, SEC Rule 10b-5 trading plan, which allows company executives to comply with insider trading laws by setting up predetermined plans to sell company stock. The sale was executed prior to announcements in March about Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses being discarded as well as subsequent ending production of the AstraZeneca vaccine at the Baltimore plant, but the trading plan was set up after the company had experienced COVID-19 vaccine production issues earlier in 2020. On April 19, 2021, the United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis announced an investigation into Emergent BioSolutions, requesting documents and testimony from El-Hibri and Kramer regarding "federal contracts since 2015, all communication with Kadlec as well as information on audits and inspections of its facilities, drug pricing and executive compensation." Later in April, shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that they were misled by company executives regarding the company's COVID-19 production capacity. Kramer's previous significant sale of company stock under a SEC Rule 10b-5 plan was in April 2016, and several other Emergent executives also sold stock at that time. The share price subsequently fell, and a lawsuit was filed by investors regarding misrepresentation of the size of the U.S. government's order for anthrax vaccine from the company. Emergent denied the allegations, but paid the investors a $6.5 million settlement. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6262709 | 450,710 |
101,120 | "Warframe"s planned nemesis system was launched October 31, 2019 as the second phase of "Empyrean", with the Nintendo Switch launch delayed to November 19, 2019. This update revealed the nemesis as a "Kuva Lich" - A once-ordinary Grineer grunt, turned super-soldier through infusion with a mystical resource named Kuva. This enemy establishes their influence over planets in the Origin System, builds a following of "Thralls" which can be defeated to reveal hints on how to defeat the Lich permanently, steals resources from the player if they finish a mission in Lich territory, and has unique personalities, weapons, appearances, and semi-randomly generated names and weaknesses, resistances, and immunities to different types of damage. A Lich can be generated in missions against the Grineer faction by performing an execution on a special enemy named a "Kuva Larvling". Said executions are performed with a newly introduced special weapon named the Parazon - a small blade attached to a rope equipped on the Warframe's wrist. The Parazon is also used to execute Thralls and specific enemies, for the game's Hacking minigame, and visually in some cutscenes. "The Old Blood" also introduced Grendel, the game's 42nd Warframe, together with his signature weapon. Two earlier Warframes, named Vauban and Ember, were adjusted to better function in the game's current state. Additionally, the game's "Melee 3.0" system had its release completed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38333096 | 101,075 |
761,307 | The TMT Observatory Corporation board of directors narrowed the list to two sites, one in each hemisphere, for further consideration: Cerro Armazones in Chile's Atacama Desert and Mauna Kea on Hawaii Island. On July 21, 2009, the TMT board announced Mauna Kea as the preferred site. The final TMT site selection decision was based on a combination of scientific, financial, and political criteria. Chile is also where the European Southern Observatory is building the ELT. If both next-generation telescopes were in the same hemisphere, there would be many astronomical objects that neither could observe. The telescope was given approval by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources in April 2013. There has been opposition to the building of the telescope, based on potential disruption to the fragile alpine environment of Mauna Kea due to construction, traffic, and noise, which is a concern for the habitat of several species, and because Mauna Kea is a sacred site for the Native Hawaiian culture. The Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources conditionally approved the Mauna Kea site for the TMT in February 2011. The approval has been challenged; however, the Board officially approved the site following a hearing on February 12, 2013. Because of the ongoing protests that re-erupted in July 2019, the TMT project officials requested a building permit for a second site choice, the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. Rafael Rebolo, the director of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute, confirmed that he had received a letter requesting a building permit for the site as a backup in case the Hawaii site cannot be constructed. However, environmentalists in the Canary Islands are gearing up to fight against its construction there as well, citing the loss of archeological and cultural sites. In August 2021 the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands revoked the concession of public lands for the TMT construction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4266335 | 760,900 |
1,515,383 | In contrast, harmless bacteria do not cause the translocation of NF-κB into the nucleus thus preventing the inflammation although they can express the same microbe-associated molecular patterns (MAMPs). One possible mechanism explaining this effect was suggested by Neish showing that non-pathogenic "S. typhimurium" PhoPc and "S. pullorum" are able to prohibit the ubiquitination of NF-κB inhibitor molecule nuclear factor of NF-κB light polypeptide gene enhancer in B-cells inhibitor alpha (IκB-κ). Another explanation of commensal tolerance of the epithelium refers to the post-translational modification of a protein by the covalent attachment of one or more ubiquitin (Ub) monomers. The inhibition of ubiquitination leads to reduction of inflammation, because only polyubiquitinated (IκB-κ is targeted for degradation by the 26 S proteasome, allowing NF-κB translocation to the nucleus and activation the transcription of effector genes (for example IL-8). Probiotic bacteria such as "Lactobacilli" are able to modulate the activity of the Ub-proteasome system via inducing reactive oxygen species (ROS) production in epithelial cells. In mammalian cells, ROS have been shown to serve as critical second messengers in multiple signal transduction pathways in response to proinflammatory cytokines. Bacterially induced ROS causes oxidative inactivation of the catalytic cysteine residue of Ub 12 resulting in incomplete but transient loss of cullin-1 neddylation and consequent effects on NF-κB and β-catenin signaling. Another commensal species, "B. thetaiotaomicron", attenuates pro-inflammatory cytokine expression by promoting nuclear export of NF-κB subunit RelA, through a peroxisome proliferator activated receptor γ (PPAR-γ)-dependent pathway. PPAR-γ target transcriptionally active Rel A and induce early nuclear clearance limiting the duration of NF-κB action. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33032376 | 1,514,531 |
1,894,145 | He wrote a paper in England in 1802 supporting French Neologist-inspired changes to chemical nomenclature. During a year in Germany, he published criticisms of the work of ground-breaking scientists: Danish chemist and physicist Hans Christian Ørsted and the German physicist, chemist and mineralogist Christian Samuel Weiss. In 1803, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, he published a paper asserting that the palladium that the English chemist William Hyde Wollaston had extracted from platinum ore the previous year (and had announced and offered for sale anonymously) was in fact an alloy of mercury and platinum. For this seemingly astonishing result, he was awarded the Copley Medal. Wollaston, again anonymously, offered a reward to anyone who could confirm Chenevix's claims experimentally. On his part, Chenevix published a second paper supporting his result in 1805, by which time he'd made Paris his permanent home. Henry Cavendish, an admirer of Wollaston, was the sole Society objector in the vote for the publication. Later that year, Wollaston publicly revealed his authorship (although he had communicated as much to the Royal Society before Chenevix's second paper) and details of how he had, correctly, isolated the element palladium. Chenevix bore no apparent animus in later meetings between the two. How damaging the affair was to Chenevix's reputation as a chemist in the scientific world has been a discussion point for different writers. In 1808 came his criticism of Abraham Werner's classification of minerals. In 1809, he produced his final scientific paper, a method to produce acetone by distilling acetates. An English translation of a paper he wrote in 1808 for "Annales de Chimie" was published in London in 1811 as "Observations on Mineralogical Systems". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5407138 | 1,893,061 |
238,950 | Two critiques of Bem's theory in the journal "Psychological Review" concluded that "studies cited by Bem and additional research show that [the] Exotic Becomes Erotic theory is not supported by scientific evidence." Bem was criticized for relying on a non-random sample of gay men from the 1970s (rather than collecting new data) and for drawing conclusions that appear to contradict the original data. An "examination of the original data showed virtually all respondents were familiar with children of both sexes", and that only 9% of gay men said that "none or only a few" of their friends were male, and most gay men (74%) reported having "an especially close friend of the same sex" during grade school. Further, "71% of gay men reported feeling different from other boys, but so did 38% of heterosexual men. The difference for gay men is larger, but still indicates that feeling different from same-sex peers was common for heterosexual men." Bem also acknowledged that gay men were more likely to have older brothers (the fraternal birth order effect), which appeared to contradict an unfamiliarity with males. Bem cited cross-cultural studies which also "appear to contradict the EBE theory assertion", such as the Sambia tribe in Papua New Guinea, which ritually enforced homosexual acts among teenagers; yet once these boys reached adulthood, only a small proportion of men continued to engage in homosexual behaviour - similar to levels observed in the United States. Additionally, Bem's model could be interpreted as implying that if one could change a child's behavior, one could change their sexual orientation, but most psychologists doubt this would be possible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51614 | 238,830 |
2,044,759 | The study group Walla showed, that deep (i.e. semantic) encoding of a word is associated with more brain activity than a shallow (letter by letter) encoding. Gender-specifically, in women both hemispheres were equally involved, while men were left-lateralized. Smell and memory are closely related, which was studied for words and faces. With Alzheimer patients, in whom dementia had just started (mild cognitive impairment (MCI)) the MEG proved to be predictive in showing whether a certain MCI patient would develop into an Alzheimer patient. This design was also employed for therapy follow-up studies. In the complex of themes “Smell, emotion, memory, words, faces“ an influence of the odorous substance PEA (N-Palmitoyl-ethanolamine) upon the encoding and recognition of faces was found, if these were to be classified into ’appealing’ and ’unappealing.’ Stuttering was investigated as well: 8 stutterers and 8 controls were faced with certain tasks and examined in the MEG. While stuttering in task 1 (silent reading) was not yet noticeable, it was strongly present in task 2 (immediate loud uttering of a word shown): Only the normal controls showed clear neuronal activity prior to the start of speaking. This brain activity is the Readiness Field (RF) or Bereitschaftsfield (BF) and in particular its left-lateralized component BF2 prior to the fluent speech production. With the stutterers' non-fluent speech production, the Bereitschaftsfield was missing or was greatly reduced. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49596807 | 2,043,578 |
825,449 | In 1974, both the 253 and 308 engines (now called 4.2L and 5.0L) were added to the Torana range for the first time in the LH series (after an aborted attempt by Holden Dealer Team boss Harry Firth to introduce the V8 to the smaller LJ in 1972 which was stopped by the "supercar scare"). The engines were also offered on the revised LX released in 1976, which from July of that year saw emission-controlled versions of the 'Red' engines introduced to comply with the new ADR27A regulations on fuel and exhaust emissions. The V8 was dropped as an option in the final model in the Torana series, the UC released in 1978. There was a high performance version of the 308 engine built in 1973 by Repco for the Formula 5000 series. It was built as a 302ci (4940cc) engine using a slightly smaller bore than the production 308 (3.960" versus the 308's 4"). It was a far stronger block than the production block and featured 4 bolt mains and 11.7:1 compression with either Lucas fuel injection or Weber carburettors. GMH used some of the ideas and parts for this engine and produced the higher performance 308 engine (RPO L34) for use in the Torana XU2 for Group C racing homologation. The XU2 was not released at the start of LH production and instead a vehicle called the LH SLR5000 was released that used a standard 5.0L engine. A little while into LH, GMH built a limited number of SLR5000 vehicles with an engine with RPO code L34 along with a whole host of other parts fitted to it for homologation - they never used the XU2 package code (due to its links to the Supercar scare) and the car eventually was nicknamed the L34 as it was never given a special vehicle package code like XU1 prior or A9X that followed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20323291 | 825,006 |
571,411 | The term "neuromarketing" was first published in 2002 in the Master Thesis of Associate Professor Philippe Morel, then a student at the Ecole Nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-Belleville. The chapter "Capitalism II : Infocapitalism (experience)" contains a development with sub-chapter "Hyper-rational Anticipation: Neuroscience and Neuromarketing". The same year, the term "neuromarketing" was published in an article by BrightHouse (after contacting Ass. Pr. Morel about this topic), a marketing firm based in Atlanta and used by Dutch marketing professor Ale Smidts. BrightHouse sponsored neurophysiologic (nervous system functioning) research into marketing divisions; they constructed a business unit that used fMRI scans for market research purposes. The firm rapidly attracted criticism and disapproval concerning conflict of interest with Emory University, who helped establish the division. This enterprise disappeared from public attention and now works with over 500 clients and consumer-product businesses. The "Pepsi Challenge", a blind taste test of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, was a study conducted in 2004 that brought attention to neuromarketing. In 2006, Dr. Carl Marci (US) founded Innerscope Research that focused on Neuromarketing research. Innerscope research was later acquired by the Nielsen Corporation in May 2015 and renamed Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience. Unilever's Consumer Research Exploratory Fund (CREF) had also published white papers on the potential applications of neuromarketing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2663218 | 571,120 |
949,874 | While applied research helped develop Lewin into a practical theorist, what further defined him as an academic and a forerunner was his "action research" – a term he invented himself. Lewin was increasingly interested in the concepts of Jewish migration and identity. He was confused by the concept of how while an individual distanced themselves from performing the Jewish identity in terms of religious expression and performance, they were still considered Jewish in the eyes of Nazis. This concept of denying one's identity and the promotion of self-loathing as a form of coping with a dominant group's oppression represented the crisis of Lewin's own migration to the United States. Lewin, as his student and colleague Ron Lippitt described, "had a deep sensitivity to social problems and a commitment to use his resources as a social scientist to do something about them. Thus in the early 1940s he drew a triangle to represent the interdependence of research, training, and action in producing social change." This diagramming of an academic's interests and actions within this triangulation yields an interesting part of accessing Lewin and his contributions. Rather than noting social justice as the beginning or the end, it was ingrained in every single academic action that Lewin took. It was this particular world view and paradigm that furthered his research and determined precisely how he was going to utilize the findings from his field research. Furthermore, it all reflected upon Lewin the man and his way of coping with the events of his time period. This devotion to action research was possibly a way of resolving a dissonance of his own passage to America and how he left his own back in present-day Poland. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1976138 | 949,370 |
199,726 | Carriage of the existing Red Beard tactical nuclear bomb had been specified at the beginning of the TSR-2 project, but it was quickly realised that Red Beard was unsuited to external carriage at supersonic speeds, had safety and handling limitations, and its 15 kt yield was considered inadequate for the targets assigned. Instead, in 1959, a successor to Red Beard, an "Improved Kiloton Bomb" to a specification known as Operational Requirement 1177 (OR.1177), was specified for the TSR-2. In the tactical strike role, the TSR-2 was expected to attack targets beyond the forward edge of the battlefield assigned to the RAF by NATO, during day or night and in all weathers. These targets comprised missile sites, both hardened and soft, aircraft on airfields, runways, airfield buildings, airfield fuel installations and bomb stores, tank concentrations, ammunition and supply dumps, railways and railway tunnels, and bridges.<ref name="air77/654">"AIR 77/654: The Limitations of 10 kt Free-Fall Tactical Weapon As A Replacement for Red Beard". London: Public Record Office, 2010.</ref> OR.1177 specified 50, 100, 200 and 300 kt yields, assuming a circular error probable of and a damage probability of 0.8, and laydown delivery capability, with burst heights for targets from 0 to above sea level. Other requirements were a weight of up to , a length of up to , and a diameter up to (the same as Red Beard).<ref name="air2/17322">"AIR 2/17322: Draft Air Staff Requirement No. O.R.1177 An Improved Kiloton Bomb". London: Public Record Office, 2010.</ref> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=225702 | 199,623 |
761,303 | Scientists have been considering ELTs since the mid 1980s. In 2000, astronomers considered the possibility of a telescope with a light-gathering mirror larger than 20 meters (65') in diameter. The technology to build a mirror larger than 8.4 meters (28') does not exist; instead scientists considered using either small segments that create one large mirror, or a grouping of larger 8-meter (26') mirrors working as one unit. The US National Academy of Sciences recommended a 30-meter (100') telescope be the focus of U.S. interests, seeking to see it built within the decade. Scientists at the University of California and Caltech began development of a design that would eventually become the TMT, consisting of a 492-segment primary mirror with nine times the power of the Keck Observatory. Due to its light-gathering power and the optimal observing conditions which exist atop Mauna Kea, the TMT would enable astronomers to conduct research which is infeasible with current instruments. The TMT is designed for near-ultraviolet to mid-infrared (0.31 to 28 μm wavelengths) observations, featuring adaptive optics to assist in correcting image blur. The TMT will be at the highest altitude of all the proposed ELTs. The telescope has government-level support from several nations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4266335 | 760,896 |
653,027 | Foote died in 1888 and for almost a hundred years her contributions were unknown, before being rediscovered by women academics in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, new interest in Foote arose when it was realized that her work predated discoveries made by John Tyndall, who had been recognized by scientists as the first person to experimentally show the mechanism of the greenhouse effect involving infrared radiation. Detailed examination of her work by modern scientists has confirmed that three years before Tyndall published his paper in 1859, Foote discovered that water vapor and absorb heat from sunlight. Furthermore, her view that variances in the atmospheric levels of water vapor and would result in climate change, preceded Tyndall's 1861 publication by five years. Because of the limits of her experimental design, and possibly a lack of knowledge of infrared radiation, Foote did not examine or detect the absorption and emission of radiant energy within the thermal infrared range, which is the cause of the greenhouse effect. In 2022, the American Geophysical Union instituted The Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth-Life Science in her honor to recognize outstanding scientific research. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49280323 | 652,684 |
520,671 | Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) performance is limited by the rate at which the charge stored in the cells can be drained (for reading) or stored (for writing). MRAM operation is based on measuring voltages rather than charges or currents, so there is less "settling time" needed. IBM researchers have demonstrated MRAM devices with access times on the order of 2 ns, somewhat better than even the most advanced DRAMs built on much newer processes. A team at the German Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt have demonstrated MRAM devices with 1 ns settling times, better than the currently accepted theoretical limits for DRAM, although the demonstration was a single cell. The differences compared to flash are far more significant, with write speeds as much as thousands of times faster. However, these speed comparisons are not for like-for-like current. High-density memory requires small transistors with reduced current, especially when built for low standby leakage. Under such conditions, write times shorter than 30 ns may not be reached so easily. In particular, to meet solder reflow stability of 260 °C over 90 seconds, 250 ns pulses have been required. This is related to the elevated thermal stability requirement driving up the write bit error rate. In order to avoid breakdown from higher current, longer pulses are needed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=315008 | 520,400 |
161,117 | Towards the late 19th century, the belief that the size of ones skull could determine their level of intelligence was discarded as science and medicine moved forward. A physician by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud expanded upon the ideas of Gall and took a closer look at the idea of distinct cortical regions of the brain each having their own independent function. Bouillaud was specifically interested in speech and wrote many publications on the anterior region of the brain being responsible for carrying out the act of ones speech, a discovery that had stemmed from the research of Gall. He was also one of the first to use larger samples for research although it took many years for that method to be accepted. By looking at over a hundred different case studies, Bouillaud came to discover that it was through different areas of the brain that speech is completed and understood. By observing people with brain damage, his theory was made more concrete. Bouillaud, along with many other pioneers of the time made great advances within the field of neurology, especially when it came to localization of function. There are many arguable debates as to who deserves the most credit for such discoveries, and often, people remain unmentioned, but Paul Broca is perhaps one of the most famous and well known contributors to neuropsychology – often referred to as "the father" of the discipline. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=288292 | 161,032 |
1,567,894 | The first SCIEX product, introduced in 1979, was the TAGA (Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer) quadrupole mass spectrometer system which used atmospheric-pressure chemical ionization (APCI) for direct air analysis. Use of a cryopumped vacuum system run by a liquid helium compressor allowed the instrument to be mounted in a large van for mobile operation, and operated while in motion to monitor concentrations of air pollutants. In 1981 the TAGA 6000, the first commercial triple quadrupole mass spectrometer was introduced, also in both lab-based and mobile configurations. Systems were acquired by, among others, government environmental agencies in Ontario and New York State, and the USEPA, and have been used in various applications such as tracking fugitive emission plumes from industrial sites, analysis of gases from contaminated homes in the Love Canal area and for air monitoring in the Gulf area after the BP spill in 2010. In 1979 the TAGA 3000 was used for real-time monitoring of toxic gas plumes of chlorine, styrene and other gases released from the Mississauga train derailment and fire providing timely information for emergency personnel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70628444 | 1,567,007 |
1,692,160 | Born on 7 January 1948, Sopory secured his graduate degree (BSc) in 1966 and postgraduate degree (MSc) in 1968 from Sri Pratap College, Sri Nagar of the University of Kashmir. Subsequently, he moved to Delhi to start his career by joining University of Delhi as a member of faculty and pursued his doctoral studies there to obtain a PhD in plant molecular biology in 1973. After securing the doctoral degree, he joined Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1973 as an assistant professor and worked there till his superannuation in 1996, holding positions such as associate professor (1978–1984), professor (1985–1996) and Hostel warden. In between, he worked at various overseas educational institutions; Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, (1976–1978), University of Texas at their Department of Botany as a visiting Fulbright fellow (1981–1982), USDA Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, Maryland and University of Munich as a visiting Humboldt Professor (1991–1992). After his superannuation, he joined International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) New Delhi, as a group leader of research in plant molecular biology in 1997, and became the interim director of the institution in 2010. In 2011, he was appointed as the vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a post he held till 13 January 2016). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49086703 | 1,691,209 |
829,408 | Because the first forty official copies are made of the same alloy as the IPK and are stored under similar conditions, periodic verifications using a large number of replicas—especially the national primary standards, which are rarely used—can convincingly demonstrate the stability of the IPK. What has become clear after the third periodic verification performed between 1988 and 1992 is that masses of the entire worldwide ensemble of prototypes have been slowly but inexorably diverging from each other. It is also clear that the IPK lost perhaps 50μg of mass over the last century, and possibly significantly more, in comparison to its official copies. The reason for this drift has eluded physicists who have dedicated their careers to the SI unit of mass. No plausible mechanism has been proposed to explain either a steady decrease in the mass of the IPK, or an increase in that of its replicas dispersed throughout the world. Moreover, there are no technical means available to determine whether or not the entire worldwide ensemble of prototypes suffers from even greater long-term trends upwards or downwards because their mass "relative to an invariant of nature is unknown at a level below 1000μg over a period of 100 or even 50 years". Given the lack of data identifying which of the world's kilogram prototypes has been most stable in absolute terms, it is equally valid to state that the first batch of replicas has, as a group, gained an average of about 25μg over one hundred years in comparison to the IPK. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23837739 | 828,962 |
1,530,286 | The HED domain is often defined by an energy density (units of pressure) above 1 Mbar = 100 GPa ~ 1 Million of Atmosphere. This is comparable to the energy density of a chemical bond such as in a water molecule. Thus at 1 Mbar, chemistry as we know it changes. Experiments at NIF now routinely probe matter at 100 Mbar. At these "atomic pressure" conditions the energy density is comparable to that of the inner core electrons, so the atoms themselves change. The dense HED regime includes highly degenerate matter, with interatomic spacing less than the de Broglie wavelength. This is similar to quantum regime achieved at low temperatures (e.g. Bose–Einstein condensation), however, unlike the low temperature analog, this HED regime simultaneously probes interatomic separations less than the Bohr radius. This opens an entirely new quantum mechanical domain, where core electrons - not just valence electrons - determine material properties and gives rise to core-electron-chemistry and a new structural complexity in solids. Potential exotic electronic, mechanical, and structural behavior of such matter include room temperature superconductivity, high-density electrides, first order fluid-fluid transitions, and new insulator-metal transitions. Such matter is likely quite common throughout the universe, existing in the more than 1000 recently discovered exoplanets. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44277627 | 1,529,421 |
1,471,703 | Though it was not commissioned by any Soviet authority and never mentioned the science by name, Agapov's article was taken as a signal of an official critical attitude towards cybernetics; editions of Norbert Wiener's "" were removed from library circulation, and several other periodicals followed suit, denouncing cybernetics as a "reactionary pseudoscience". In 1951, , of the Institute of Philosophy, led a public campaign against the philosophy of "semantic idealism", characterising Wiener, and cybernetics as a whole, as a part of this "reactionary philosophy". In 1952, another more explicitly anti-cybernetic article was published in the "Literaturnaya Gazeta", definitively starting the campaign and leading the way for a flurry of popular titles denouncing the topic. At the zenith of this criticism, an article in the October 1953 issue of the state ideological organ, "Voprosy Filosofii", was published under the pseudonym "Materialist", entitled "Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?"; it condemned cybernetics as a "misanthropic pseudo-theory" consisting of "mechanicism turning into idealism", pointing to the American military as the "god whom cybernetics served". During this period, Stalin himself never engaged in this rabid criticism of cybernetics, with the head of the Soviet Department of Sciences, Iurii Zhdanov, recalling that "he never opposed cybernetics" and made every effort "to advance computer technology" in order to give the USSR the technological advantage. Though the scale of this campaign was modest, with only around 10 anti-cybernetic publications being produced, Valery Shilov has argued it constituted a "strict directive to action" from the "central ideological organs", a universal declaration of cybernetics as a bourgeois pseudoscience to be criticised and destroyed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54974049 | 1,470,874 |
639,920 | The order has a few unifying characteristics, starting with their tubular nasal passage which is used for olfaction. Procellariiformes that nest in burrows have a strong sense of smell, being able to detect dimethyl sulfide released from plankton in the ocean. This ability to smell helps to locate patchily distributed prey at sea and may also help locate their nests within nesting colonies. In contrast, surface nesting Procellariiformes have increased vision, having six times better spatial resolution than those that nest in burrows. The structure of the bill, which contains seven to nine distinct horny plates, is another unifying feature, although there are differences within the order. Petrels have a plate called the maxillary unguis that forms a hook on the maxilla. The smaller members of the order have a comb-like mandible, made by the tomial plate, for plankton feeding. Most members of the order are unable to walk well on land, and many species visit their remote breeding islands only at night. The exceptions are the huge albatrosses, several of the gadfly petrels and shearwaters and the fulmar-petrels. The latter can disable even large predatory birds with their obnoxious stomach oil, which they can project some distance. This stomach oil, stored in the proventriculus, is a digestive residue created in the foregut of all tubenoses except the diving petrels, and is used mainly for storage of energy-rich food during their long flights. The oil is also fed to their young, as well as being used for defense. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53560 | 639,581 |
593,188 | After the 1980s, detailed genetic evidence analysed by phylogenetic methods became available and while confirming or clarifying some relationships in existing classification systems, it radically changed others. This genetic evidence created a rapid increase in knowledge that led to many proposed changes; stability was "rudely shattered". This posed problems for all users of classification systems (including encyclopaedists). The impetus came from a major molecular study published in 1993 based on 5000 flowering plants and a photosynthesis gene (rbcL). This produced a number of surprising results in terms of the relationships between groupings of plants, for instance the dicotyledons were not supported as a distinct group. At first there was a reluctance to develop a new system based entirely on a single gene. However, subsequent work continued to support these findings. These research studies involved an unprecedented collaboration between a very large number of scientists. Therefore, rather than naming all the individual contributors a decision was made to adopt the name Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification, or APG for short. The first publication under this name was in 1998, and attracted considerable media attention. The intention was to provide a widely accepted and more stable point of reference for angiosperm classification. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=631671 | 592,884 |
1,723,469 | During the late 1980s, and strongly influenced by the thinking on integration but also by a focus on vocational training through a competency approach, the notion of a National Qualification Frameworks (NQF) emerged in the United Kingdom. Its roots lay in the competence approach to vocational education which was broadened by Jessup, as well as the Scottish Action Plan which led to the modularization of vocational education and training in Scotland. The idea developed that all qualifications could be expressed in terms of outcomes without prescribing learning pathways or programmes. Within this politically charged melting pot of factors, and a renewed emphasis on the importance of lifelong learning, the first NQFs were established in Australia, England, Scotland, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa between 1989 and 1995. France, as a country with a different, notably non-Anglo Saxon tradition, was also a member of this group of first-generation NQFs (Bouder, 2003; Keevy et al., 2011). In the case of France, the NQF drew on a hierarchy of qualifications that found official expression at the end of 1960s in a nomenclature which tried to rationalize the number of students leaving the education and training system to correspond with the needs of the labour market. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53715889 | 1,722,499 |
58,318 | Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, vice president of engineering and research at Lockheed's Skunk Works, visited USAF air bases across South Korea in November 1951 to speak with fighter pilots about what they wanted and needed in a fighter aircraft. At the time, the American pilots were confronting the MiG-15 with North American F-86 Sabres, and many felt that the MiGs were superior to the larger and more complex American fighters. The pilots requested a small and simple aircraft with excellent performance, especially high-speed and high-altitude capabilities. Johnson started the design of such an aircraft upon his return to the United States. In March 1952, his team was assembled; they studied over 100 aircraft configurations, ranging from small designs at just , to large ones up to . To achieve the desired performance, Lockheed chose a small and simple aircraft, weighing in at with a single powerful engine. The engine chosen was the new General Electric J79 turbojet, an engine of dramatically improved performance in comparison with contemporary designs. The small design powered by a single J79, issued Temporary Design Number L-246, remained essentially identical to the prototype Starfighter as eventually delivered. Lockheed designated the prototype Model 083. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=82439 | 58,293 |
1,693,293 | The specificity of the proposal's details as it appears in most later sources—even its attribution to Gauss—is called into question in University of Notre Dame Professor Michael J. Crowe's 1986 book, "The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900", in which he surveys the origins of the Gauss proposal and observes that:The history of this proposal ... can be traced through two dozen or more pluralist writings reaching back to the first half of the nineteenth century. When this is done, however, it turns out that the story exists in almost as many forms as its retellings. Furthermore, these versions share one characteristic: Never is reference supplied to where in the writings of Gauss ... the [proposal] appear[s]!Some early sources explored by Crowe for the attribution and form of Gauss's proposal include Austrian astronomer, Joseph Johann Littrow's statement in "Wunder des Himmels" that "one of our most distinguished geometers" proposed that a geometric figure "for example the well known so-called square of the hypotenuse, be laid out on a large scale, say on a particular broad plain of the earth". and Patrick Scott's "Love in the Moon", in which a "learned man" is described as proposing a signal formed by a "great plantation of tree" in the form of "47th Proposition of Euclid" in "the great African desert". In "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal" it was written that a Russian savant had proposed to "communicate with the moon by cutting a large figure of the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid on the plains of Siberia, which, he said, any fool would understand". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34802284 | 1,692,342 |
86,785 | In 2011, Professor Matthew C. Whitaker was accused of plagiarizing material in six books he had written, as well as in a speech he made to local high school students. After watching a video of the speech, a plagiarism analyst said he could read along from a newspaper article as Whitaker spoke. To the consternation of ASU faculty members (the chairman of the tenure committee resigned in protest) an investigating committee concluded there was no pattern of deceit and the copying had been inadvertent. The matter arose again in 2014 with another Whitaker book, "Peace Be Still: Modern Black America From World War II to Barack Obama". A blogger writing under an apparent pseudonym set out side-by-side excerpts from Whitaker's book and material available on the Web at sites like infoplease.com and the Archive of American Television. Whitaker has also been accused of appropriating training materials produced by the Chicago Police Department, which he used as the basis for a lucrative contract with the Phoenix Police Department. Whitaker was to receive $268,800 to provide "cultural-consciousness training" to Phoenix police. The Phoenix Police Department wants the $21,900 it has paid thus far to be repaid. Whitaker was placed on administrative leave on September 17, 2015, while the university investigated allegations that "his behavior has fallen short of expectations as a faculty member and a scholar." In January 2016 ASU announced that he had resigned these positions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1859 | 86,750 |
773,297 | In 1997, scintillation properties of cerium doped lutetium aluminum perovskite (LuAP:Ce) single crystals were reported. The main property of those crystals is a large mass density of 8.4 g/cm, which gives short X- and gamma-ray absorption length. The scintillation light yield and the decay time with Cs radiation source are 11,400 photons/MeV and 17 ns, respectively. Those properties made LUAP:Ce scintillators attractive for commercials and they were used quite often in high energy physics experiments. Until eleven years later, one group in Japan proposed Ruddlesden-Popper solution-based hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite crystals as low-cost scintillators. However, the properties were not so impressive in comparison with LuAP:Ce. Until the next nine years, the solution-based hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite crystals became popular again through a report about their high light yields of more than 100,000 photons/MeV at cryogenic temperatures. Recent demonstration of perovskite nanocrystal scintillators for X-ray imaging screen was reported and it is triggering more research efforts for perovskite scintillators. Layered Ruddlesden-Popper perovskites have shown potential as fast novel scintillators with room temperature light yields up to 40,000 photons/MeV, fast decay times below 5 ns and negligible afterglow. In addition this class of materials have shown capability for wide-range particle detection, including alpha particles and thermal neutrons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=184306 | 772,881 |
355,129 | In 1929, Teller transferred to the University of Leipzig where in 1930, he received his PhD in physics under Heisenberg. Teller's dissertation dealt with one of the first accurate quantum mechanical treatments of the hydrogen molecular ion. That year, he befriended Russian physicists George Gamow and Lev Landau. Teller's lifelong friendship with a Czech physicist, George Placzek, was also very important for his scientific and philosophical development. It was Placzek who arranged a summer stay in Rome with Enrico Fermi in 1932, thus orienting Teller's scientific career in nuclear physics. Also in 1930, Teller moved to the University of Göttingen, then one of the world's great centers of physics due to the presence of Max Born and James Franck, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Germany became unsafe for Jewish people, and he left through the aid of the International Rescue Committee. He went briefly to England, and moved for a year to Copenhagen, where he worked under Niels Bohr. In February 1934 he married his long-time girlfriend Augusta Maria "Mici" (pronounced "Mitzi") Harkanyi, who was the sister of a friend. Since Mici was a Calvinist Christian, Edward and her were married in a Calvinist church. He returned to England in September 1934. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37782 | 354,946 |
256,178 | In 1951, Ralph Baer conceived the idea of an interactive television while building a television set from scratch for Loral in the Bronx, New York. Baer did not pursue the idea, but it returned to him in August 1966 when he was the Chief Engineer and manager of the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates. By December 1966, he and a technician created a prototype that allowed a player to move a line across the screen. After a demonstration to the company's director of research and development, some funding was allotted and the project was made official. Baer spent the next few months designing further prototypes, and in February 1967 assigned technician Bill Harrison to begin building the project. Harrison spent the next few months in between other projects building out successive modifications to the prototype. Baer, meanwhile, collaborated with engineer Bill Rusch on the design of the console, including developing the basis of many games for the system. By May, the first game was developed and by June, multiple games were completed for what was then a second prototype box. This included a game where players controlled dots chasing each other and a light gun shooter game with a plastic rifle. By August 1967, Baer and Harrison had completed a third prototype machine, but Baer felt that he was not proving successful at designing fun games for the system; to make up for this he added Bill Rusch, who had helped him come up with the initial games for the console, to the project. He soon proved his value to the team by coming up with a way to display three dots on the screen at once rather than the previous two, and proposing the development of a ping pong game. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3921614 | 256,044 |
557,362 | Early neuroanatomists, including Santiago Ramón y Cajal, considered the nervous system fixed and incapable of regeneration. The first evidence of adult mammalian neurogenesis in the cerebral cortex was presented by Joseph Altman in 1962, followed by a demonstration of adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus in 1963. In 1969, Joseph Altman discovered and named the rostral migratory stream as the source of adult generated granule cell neurons in the olfactory bulb. Up until the 1980s, the scientific community ignored these findings despite use of the most direct method of demonstrating cell proliferation in the early studies, i.e. 3H-thymidine autoradiography. By that time, Shirley Bayer (and Michael Kaplan) again showed that adult neurogenesis exists in mammals (rats), and Nottebohm showed the same phenomenon in birds sparking renewed interest in the topic. Studies in the 1990s finally put research on adult neurogenesis into a mainstream pursuit. Also in the early 1990s hippocampal neurogenesis was demonstrated in non-human primates and humans. More recently, neurogenesis in the cerebellum of adult rabbits has also been characterized. Further, some authors (particularly Elizabeth Gould) have suggested that adult neurogenesis may also occur in regions within the brain not generally associated with neurogenesis including the neocortex. However, others have questioned the scientific evidence of these findings, arguing that the new cells may be of glial origin. Recent research has elucidated the regulatory effect of GABA on neural stem cells. GABA's well-known inhibitory effects across the brain also affect the local circuitry that triggers a stem cell to become dormant. They found that diazepam (Valium) has a similar effect. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=740746 | 557,073 |
2,150,526 | At Durham he finished, but did not yet publish, his ‘Doctrine of the Sphere,’ begun in Edinburgh. With the signature P.M.D. (presbyterian minister, Durham) he contributed to the "Ladies' Diary", then edited by Thomas Simpson. He left Durham at the beginning of 1762 to become minister at Filby, Norfolk, and assistant to John Whiteside (died 1784) at Great Yarmouth. Here he resumed his intimacy with Manning, now practising as a physician at Norwich. He began his treatise on conic sections, suggested to him by Isaac Newton's "Arithmetica Universalis", 1707. He took pupils in mathematics and navigation. Through Richard Price he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and recommended to William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne for the post of his librarian, afterwards filled by Joseph Priestley, but declined it (1772) owing to his approaching marriage. He accepted in the same year the office of mathematical tutor at Warrington Academy, in succession to John Holt (died 1772). Here he prepared for the press his treatise on the sphere, himself cutting out all the illustrative figures (twenty thousand, for an edition of five hundred copies). It appeared in quarto in 1775, and was reissued in 1777. Joseph Johnson gave him £40 for the copyright, returned by Walker on finding Johnson had lost money. The pay at Warrington did not answer his expectation. He resigned in two years, and in the autumn of 1774 became colleague to John Simpson (1746–1812) at High Pavement Chapel, Nottingham. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25746123 | 2,149,295 |
1,159,314 | Penney had joined the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1944, and had served on the Target Committee that had selected cities to be attacked. He had been in the observation plane "Big Stink" during the bombing of Nagasaki, and had done damage assessment on the ground following Japan's surrender. He had returned to England in November 1945 intending to resume his academic career, but was approached by C. P. Snow, one of the Civil Service Commissioners, and asked to become Chief Superintendent Armament Research (CSAR, pronounced "Caesar"), in charge of the Ministry of Supply's Armaments Research Department (ARD) at Fort Halstead in Kent. His appointment as CSAR was announced on 1 January 1946, but Groves asked him to assist in the American Operation Crossroads nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. Penney left for the United States in March 1946, and did not return to Britain until October 1946. Portal then asked him to draw up a scheme for an Atomic Weapons Section within the Armaments Research Department which would design, develop and construct atomic bombs. In his 1 November 1946 report to Portal, which he had to type himself for security reasons, Penney provided a proposed organisation chart, detailed his staffing requirements, and listed his accommodation requirements, which he felt could be met at Fort Halstead, the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, and Shoeburyness. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52573493 | 1,158,699 |
16,867 | It may be that non-colonizing technologically capable alien civilizations exist, but that they are simply too far apart for meaningful two-way communication. Sebastian von Hoerner estimated the average duration of civilization at 6,500 years and the average distance between civilizations in the Milky Way at 1,000 light years. If two civilizations are separated by several thousand light-years, it is possible that one or both cultures may become extinct before meaningful dialogue can be established. Human searches may be able to detect their existence, but communication will remain impossible because of distance. It has been suggested that this problem might be ameliorated somewhat if contact and communication is made through a Bracewell probe. In this case at least one partner in the exchange may obtain meaningful information. Alternatively, a civilization may simply broadcast its knowledge, and leave it to the receiver to make what they may of it. This is similar to the transmission of information from ancient civilizations to the present, and humanity has undertaken similar activities like the Arecibo message, which could transfer information about Earth's intelligent species, even if it never yields a response or does not yield a response in time for humanity to receive it. It is possible that observational signatures of self-destroyed civilizations could be detected, depending on the destruction scenario and the timing of human observation relative to it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11579 | 16,862 |
239,600 | Herbert A. Simon proposed bounded rationality as an alternative basis for the mathematical modeling of decision-making. It complements "rationality as optimization", which views decision-making as a fully rational process of finding an optimal choice given the information available. Simon used the analogy of a pair of scissors, where one blade represents human cognitive limitations and the other the "structures of the environment", illustrating how minds compensate for limited resources by exploiting known structural regularity in the environment. Bounded rationality implicates the idea that humans take shortcuts that may lead to suboptimal decision-making. Behavioral economists engage in mapping the decision shortcuts that agents use in order to help increase the effectiveness of human decision-making. Bounded rationality finds that actors do not assess all available options appropriately, in order to save on search and deliberation costs. As such decisions are not always made in the sense of greatest self-reward as limited information is available. Instead agents shall choose to settle for an acceptable solution. One treatment of this idea comes from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's "Nudge". Sunstein and Thaler recommend that choice architectures are modified in light of human agents' bounded rationality. A widely cited proposal from Sunstein and Thaler urges that healthier food be placed at sight level in order to increase the likelihood that a person will opt for that choice instead of less healthy option. Some critics of "Nudge" have lodged attacks that modifying choice architectures will lead to people becoming worse decision-makers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=177698 | 239,480 |
637,390 | Regarding resource adequacy, the US market at the start of restructuring had excess generating capacity, confirming the expectation that regulated prices provide an incentive for the generators to overinvest. Initial hope that the revenue stream would be sufficient to continue building up the capacity did not materialize: faced with abuse of market power, all US markets introduced wholesale price caps that in many case were much lower than the value of lost load thus creating the "missing money problem" (capping revenue at the time of relatively infrequent shortages causes the shortage of money to build the infrastructure that is only used during these shortages); the problem of over-investment was replaced by underinvestment, dragging down the grid reliability. In response, major transfer payments for capacity were instituted (in the US in 2018 the payments were getting as high as 47% of the new unit's revenue). EU markets followed the American lead in the 2010s. Schmalensee notes that while the process of determining the amount of compensation for new capacity in the US is in principle similar to the integrated resource planning of the traditional markets, the new version is less transparent and provides less certainty due to frequent rule changes (the traditional scheme guaranteed the cost recovery), so an efficiency improvement in this area is unlikely. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=215909 | 637,051 |
701,127 | Kat Anderson wrote a descriptive, historically based background book, "A Tended Wilderness", about the indigenous peoples of the California coast and their intimate interactions with the environment. California Indians have a rigid and complex harvesting, management and production practice. The practices observed leaned heavily into typical horticultural techniques as well as concentrated forest burning. The applications of preservation and conservation based on the California Indians' practices, she hopes will assist in shattering the hunter-gatherer stereotype so long perpetuated in western literature. In "A Tended Wilderness", Anderson breaks down the concept that California was an untouched civilization that was built into a fertile environment by European explorers. However this is not an accurate depiction; though to Westerners it may not seem modernized, the native peoples have since defined what the population ecology was in that land. For them, Wilderness was land not tended to by humans at all. In "Indigenous Resource Management" Anderson sheds light on the diverse ways native peoples of California purposely harvested and managed the wild. The California Indians had a rich knowledge of ecology and natural techniques to understand burn patterns, plant material, cultivation, pruning, digging; what was edible vs. what was not. This did not just extend to plants but also into wildlife management – how abundant, where the distribution was, and how diverse the large mammal population was. "Restoration" covers how contemporary land uses caused degradation, fragmentation and loss of habitat. The way the United States has counteracted that is through land set aside from all human influence. As for the future, Anderson highly suggests looking to indigenous practices for ecosystem restoration and wildlife management. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1790574 | 700,762 |
521,772 | The calendar featured eleven significant changes from the 2015–16 season. The first two were the introduction of the Hong Kong and Marrakesh races, with the latter taking the championship to its first African city. The third was the return of the Monaco ePrix, held for the first time since the 2014–15 season. The fourth was the Berlin ePrix returning to Tempelhof Airport after the event was held along the Karl-Marx-Allee in 2016. The fifth was the New York City ePrix double header, which brought motor racing back to the city for the first time since 1896. The sixth was FE's first visit to Canada for the season-closing Montreal ePrix. The final four changes saw the Long Beach and Punta del Este rounds discontinued due to financial issues, the London double header was cancelled because of opposition to it being held in a public park and the Beijing and Putrajaya were dropped for undisclosed reasons. There were two new teams: car manufacturer Jaguar returned to motor racing as a works team for the first time in 12 years, and Team Aguri was bought by public entity and venture capital firm China Media Capital and renamed Techeetah. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45532368 | 521,500 |
2,007,888 | The Rasa doctrine of literature is based on two premises – i) that literary works, as verbal compositions, express emotive meanings and ii) that all literature is typically emotive discourse or discourse that has to do with the portrayal of feelings and attitudes rather than with ideas, concepts, statements of universal truth and so forth. The first premise raises philosophical questions with regard to kind of entities of emotions, their objective or ontological status, recognition, modes of expression, etc. The second premise relates to the problem of defining literature. "Rasa", originally propounded by Bharata and which is multifaceted, is the most important concept in Sanskrit criticism and has influenced the theories of dance and the visual arts; this term means – aesthetic relish, and comprehends two ideas – that it denotes the relishable quality inherent in an artistic work and that it refers to the relishable experience occasioned by the work in the reader or the spectator. Every work - poem or play – is supposed to treat an emotive theme and communicate a distinct emotional flavor and mood. But, Bharata does not refer to "Rasa" as a semblance of a mental condition or an experience of an illusion of reality, for to describe it as a copy is to presuppose the existence of the object imitated, and that which appears as a copy of the mood cannot be traced. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43584148 | 2,006,737 |
1,937,371 | MISSE-FF is a continuation of the l MISSE 1 through MISSE 8 flight payloads, but is a completely new design that eliminates the need for Extravehicular Activities (EVA) for MISSE operations. MISSE-FF is a cooperative endeavor between Alpha Space and the ISS Program, and is designed with a base-structure and avionics that reside on the ISS for the duration of ISS. MISSE Sample Carriers (MSCs) are attached, and later retrieved using the ISS Canadarm 2. MSCs are launched up to the facility, and then returned to Earth at the end of the testing period. MISSE-FF is operated robotically from the ground with no planned crew interfaces required for facility operations, except for loading future MISSE Sample Carriers (MSCs) on the transfer tray for transporting the MSC's through the JEM airlock, and subsequently unloading MSCs from the transfer tray and preparing MSCs for return to Earth. The facility is a development of new technology and systems not previously available to the materials science community. A new feature, not available in the past, is the ability of each MSC to take pictures of each sample on a monthly basis (or more often if required) which is provided to each Principal Investigator to monitor the status of their sample/experiment throughout its time on orbit. MISSE MSCs also offers power and data options for experiments that require data collection and/or power for their experiments. MISSE-FF offers four space viewing directions for testing of samples or experiments: Ram (view forward as the ISS moves in its orbit), Wake (viewing behind the ISS similar to the wake of a boat in water), Zenith (viewing away from earth into deep space and toward the sun), and Nadir (viewing down toward the earth). Scientists test for material, or component durability, such as accelerated degradation, space contamination adherence, and mass loss. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15701481 | 1,936,263 |
1,527,157 | The "Allegro de concert" includes certain devices which reflect a more virtuosic technique than that required by most of his other works. Technical difficulties include dense musical textures, complex and light finger work, massive leaps of left hand chords, trills and scales in double notes and difficult octaves. For this reason it is considered one of Chopin's most difficult pieces, but regardless of this challenge, some pianists and critics find it unconvincing. It has received relatively little attention in the concert hall or in recordings, and it is not particularly well known to music lovers. Those who have recorded it include Claudio Arrau, Nikolai Demidenko, Garrick Ohlsson, Nikita Magaloff, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Roger Woodward. However, Chopin himself seems to have been very proud of it. He told Aleksander Hoffmann: "This is the very first piece I shall play in my first concert upon returning home to a free Warsaw". Chopin never returned to Warsaw, and it is perhaps for this reason that there is no record of him ever playing it in public. In fact, there seems to be no record of its first public performance at all. (Claude Debussy played it at the Paris Conservatoire in July 1879.) The work received one of its rare public performances at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the early 1980s as the opening work for a 'quasi orchestral' solo piano recital by British pianist Mark Latimer that ended with only the second London performance of the equally demanding "Concerto for Solo Piano" by Charles-Valentin Alkan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19913639 | 1,526,293 |
307,931 | At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects on the patients of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig inspired him to write the book "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in 1962. The success of the book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California in the mountains west of Stanford University. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in the books "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe, "" by Hunter S. Thompson, and "Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels" by Frank Reynolds. Ken Kesey was also said to have experimented with LSD with Ringo Starr in 1965 and that he influenced the setup for future performances with The Beatles in the UK. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1119225 | 307,766 |
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