doc_id int32 18 2.25M | text stringlengths 245 2.96k | source stringlengths 38 44 | __index_level_0__ int64 18 2.25M |
|---|---|---|---|
2,089,988 | The first incumbent, Jacob Bigelow, a physician and botanist, pursued a modernising agenda with moderate success, incorporating practical demonstrations into his lectures over the course of a decade-long tenure. In contrast, his autodidact successor, the inventor Daniel Treadwell, appears to have been a rather less fervent reformer, seemingly believing that the skills necessary for creative practice in science and engineering were not really amenable to being taught. Fortuitously, however, the eventual appointment of the third Rumford Professor, engineer and chemist Eben Norton Horsford, coincided with the foundation of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1847, facilitating the inception of a highly practical curriculum informed by links with local chemical industries. Following the intervening tenure of Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, the appointment of John Trowbridge to the Rumford Chair in 1888 heralded a further shift in emphasis; henceforth, original research would become at least equal in importance alongside practical teaching. All subsequent incumbents have enjoyed highly distinguished research careers, such as Edwin Herbert Hall (discoverer of the Hall Effect) and Nicolaas Bloembergen (Nobel laureate for his work on laser spectroscopy). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60677591 | 2,088,785 |
990,854 | Overall, assistive technology aims to allow disabled people to "participate more fully in all aspects of life (home, school, and community)" and increases their opportunities for "education, social interactions, and potential for meaningful employment". It creates greater independence and control for disabled individuals. For example, in one study of 1,342 infants, toddlers and preschoolers, all with some kind of developmental, physical, sensory, or cognitive disability, the use of assistive technology created improvements in child development. These included improvements in "cognitive, social, communication, literacy, motor, adaptive, and increases in engagement in learning activities". Additionally, it has been found to lighten caregiver load. Both family and professional caregivers benefit from assistive technology. Through its use, the time that a family member or friend would need to care for a patient significantly decreases. However, studies show that care time for a professional caregiver increases when assistive technology is used. Nonetheless, their work load is significantly easier as the assistive technology frees them of having to perform certain tasks. There are several platforms that use machine learning to identify the appropriate assistive device to suggest to patients, making assistive devices more accessible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=653 | 990,337 |
1,209,421 | Additional 1108 hardware instructions included double precision arithmetic, double-word load, store, and comparison instructions. The processor could have up to 16 input/output channels for peripherals. The 1108 CPU was, with the exception of the 128-word (200 octal) ICR (Integrated Control Register) stack, entirely implemented via discrete component logic cards, each with a 55-pin high density connector, which interfaced to a machine wire wrapped backplane. Additional hand applied twisted pair wiring was utilized to implement backplane connections with sensitive timing, connections between machine wire wrapped backplanes, and connections to the I/O channel connector panel in the lower section of the CPU Cabinet. The ICR (Integrated Control Register) stack was implemented with "new" integrated circuit technology, replacing the thin film registers on the 1107. The ICR consisted of 128 38-bits, with a half-word Parity Bit calculated and checked with each access. The ICR was logically the first 128 memory addresses (200 Octal), but was contained in the CPU. The core memory was contained in a one or more separate cabinet(s), and consisted of two separate 32K modules, for a total capacity of 64K 38-bit words (36-bits data and a Parity Bit for each 18-bit half-word). The basic cycle time of the core memory was 750 ns, and the supporting circuitry was implemented with the same circuit card/backplane technology as the 1108 CPU. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=201462 | 1,208,774 |
331,356 | Orally consumed retinoic acid (RA), as "all-trans"-tretinoin or 13-"cis"-isotretinoin has been shown to improve facial skin health by switching on genes and differentiating keratinocytes (immature skin cells) into mature epidermal cells. RA reduces the size and secretion of the sebaceous glands, and by doing so reduces bacterial numbers in both the ducts and skin surface. It reduces inflammation via inhibition of chemotactic responses of monocytes and neutrophils. In the US, isotretinoin was released to the market in 1982 as a revolutionary treatment for severe and refractory acne vulgaris. It was shown that a dose of 0.5‑1.0 mg/kg body weight/day is enough to produce a reduction in sebum excretion by 90% within a month or two, but the recommended treatment duration is 4 to 6 months. Isotretinoin is a known teratogen, with an estimated 20‑35% risk of physical birth defects to infants that are exposed to isotretinoin "in utero", including numerous congenital defects such as craniofacial defects, cardiovascular and neurological malformations or thymic disorders. Neurocognitive impairments in the absence of any physical defects has been established to be 30‑60%. For these reasons, physician- and patient-education programs were initiated, recommending that for women of child-bearing age, contraception be initiated a month before starting oral (or topical) isotretinoin, and continue for a month after treatment ended. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54114 | 331,179 |
800,850 | One type of non-homologous based mechanism is the non-homologous end joining or micro-homology end joining mechanism. These mechanisms are also involved in repairing double stranded breaks but require no homology or limited micro-homology. When these strands are repaired, oftentimes there are small deletions or insertions added into the repaired strand. It is possible that retrotransposons are inserted into the genome through this repair system. If retrotransposons are inserted into a non-allelic position on the chromosome, meiotic recombination can drive the insertion to be recombined into the same strand as an already existing copy of the same region. Another mechanism is the break-fusion-bridge cycle which involves sister chromatids that have both lost its telomeric region due to double stranded breaks. It is proposed that these sister chromatids will fuse together to form one dicentric chromosome, and then segregate into two different nuclei. Because pulling the dicentric chromosome apart causes a double stranded break, the end regions can fuse to other double stranded breaks and repeat the cycle. The fusion of two sister chromatids can cause inverted duplication and when these events are repeated throughout the cycle, the inverted region will be repeated leading to an increase in copy number. The last mechanism that can lead to copy number variations is polymerase slippage, which is also known as template switching. During normal DNA replication, the polymerase on the lagging strand is required to unclamp and re-clamp the replication region continuously. When small scale repeats in the DNA sequence exist already, the polymerase can be 'confused' when it re-clamps to continue replication and instead of clamping to the correct base pairs, it may shift a few base pairs and replicate a portion of the repeated region again. Note that although this has been experimentally observed and is a widely accepted mechanism, the molecular interactions that led to this error remains unknown. In addition, because this type of mechanism requires the polymerase to jump around the DNA strand and it is unlikely that the polymerase can re-clamp at another locus some kilobases apart, therefore this is more applicable to short repeats such as dinucleotide or trinucleotide repeats. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3248511 | 800,423 |
78,745 | In response to President Jimmy Carter's February 1977 directive to curtail arms proliferation by selling only reduced-capability weapons to foreign countries, General Dynamics developed a modified export-oriented version of the F-16A/B designed for use with the outdated General Electric J79 turbojet engine. Northrop competed for this market with its F-20 Tigershark. Accommodating the J79-GE-119 engine required modification of the F-16's inlet, the addition of steel heat shielding, a transfer gearbox (to connect the engine to the existing F-16 gearbox), and an 18-inch (46cm) stretch of the aft fuselage. First flight occurred on 29 October 1980. The total program cost to develop the F-16/J79 was $18 million (1980), and the unit flyaway cost was projected to be about $8 million. South Korea, Pakistan and other nations were offered these fighters but rejected them, resulting in numerous exceptions being made to sell standard F-16s; with the later relaxation of the policy under President Carter in 1980 and its cancellation under President Ronald Reagan, no copies of either the F-16/79 or the F-20 were ultimately sold. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18895385 | 78,712 |
2,034,880 | Fatema Hameed Gerashi was the youngest athlete of any event and of any nationality to compete at the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics at the age of 12. She was also the first Olympic female athlete from a Gulf Arab nation. The IOC gave Gerashi a wild card and she was granted permission by her parents to compete in Sydney. She began swimming at the age of seven and later joined the Bahrain Swimming Association. However, local Muslim customs forbade Hameed from swimming with men until she began training at the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre. On 22 September, Gerash swam in heat one of the women's 50 metre freestyle event and swam against two competitors. She finished second with a time of 51.15 seconds but officials disqualified her because she wobbled on the starting blocks, which was deemed a false start despite her not being the first competitor to enter the water. Although Gerashi was disappointed, she said, "It felt great. But I was very scared on the blocks. My heart was going very fast. I was thinking about all the training I'd done and trying to make my family happy." She received praise from the press for competing in the Games as it was reportedly part of the Bahraini government's stated effort to promote "equality in sport". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3200073 | 2,033,707 |
641,060 | In 1845, Hooker applied for the Chair of Botany at the University of Edinburgh. This position included duties at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Scotland, and so the appointment was influenced by local politicians. An unusually protracted struggle ensued, resulting in the election of the locally born and bred botanist, John Hutton Balfour. The Darwin correspondence, now public, makes clear Darwin's sense of shock at this unexpected outcome. Hooker declined a chair at Glasgow University which became vacant on Balfour's appointment. Instead, he took a position as botanist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain in 1846. He began work on palaeobotany, searching for fossil plants in the coal-beds of Wales, eventually discovering the first coal ball in 1855. He became engaged to Frances Henslow, daughter of Charles Darwin's botany tutor John Stevens Henslow, but he was keen to continue to travel and gain more experience in the field. He wanted to travel to India and the Himalayas. In 1847 his father nominated him to travel to India and collect plants for Kew. In 2011, a collection of glass plate slides of paleontological fossils, some prepared by Darwin, William Nicol and others, which had been lost following Hooker's brief tenure with the Survey, were rediscovered in the Survey vaults in Keyworth in Nottinghamshire, and they shed light on the international breadth of English scientific research in the first half of the nineteenth century. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=364723 | 640,721 |
833,012 | In 1504, Leonardo da Vinci continued his study of the human body with a wax cast of the human ventricle system. In 1536, Nicolo Massa described the effects of different diseases, such as syphilis on the nervous system. He also noticed that the ventricular cavities were filled with cerebrospinal fluid. In 1542, the term physiology was used for the first time by a French physician named Jean Fernel, to explain bodily function in relation to the brain. In 1543, Andreas Vesalius wrote "De humani corporis fabrica", which revolutionized the study of anatomy. In this book, he described the pineal gland and what he believed the function was, and was able to draw the corpus striatum which is made up of the basal ganglia and the internal capsule. In 1549, Jason Pratensis published "De Cerebri Morbis". This book was devoted to neurological diseases, and discussed symptoms, as well as ideas from Galen and other Greek, Roman and Arabic authors. It also looked into the anatomy and specific functions of different areas. In 1550, Andreas Vesalius worked on a case of hydrocephalus, or fluid filling the brain. In the same year, Bartolomeo Eustachi studied the optic nerve, mainly focusing on its origin in the brain. In 1564, Giulio Cesare Aranzio discovered the hippocampus, naming it such due to its shape resemblance to a sea horse. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=374304 | 832,563 |
1,337,304 | Alice Lazzarini "et al" pinpointed a genetic component to PD in 1994. Years earlier, the neurology clinic at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) had located a family of Italian origin that encompassed at least five generations of more than 400 individuals and at least 60 members with PD, and traced their ancestors to the small village of Contursi, Italy. In 1995, the RWJMS team joined with the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health to take advantage of the laboratory resources available from the NIH in an effort to locate the gene causing PD in the Contursi family. The team reported the first Parkinson disease-causing mutation (PARK1) in the brain protein, alpha-synuclein. Within days of the publication of the PARK1 findings, alpha-synuclein was discovered to be the major component of Lewy bodies within brain cells of PD patients; according to the UMDNJ magazine, "This discovery changed the direction of research into PD by providing scientists with an entirely new protein whose manufacture, function or breakdown could be the key to the disease." Synuclein proteins being the main component of Lewy bodies was discovered in 1997 by Spillantini, Trojanowski, Goedert and others. Mutations in the parkin gene in autosomal recessive juvenile parkinsonism were discovered in 1998 and finally, between 2002 and 2005, DJ-1 gene mutations, PINK1 gene mutations and the most common mutations in the LRRK2 gene were identified in Japanese and European families. The pathological staging in Parkinson's disease was described by Heiko Braak in 2003. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31035387 | 1,336,573 |
1,870,168 | In 1999, Agbandje-McKenna joined the faculty at University of Florida within the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She also became a faculty within the Genetics Institute at the University of Florida. In 2005, Agbandje-McKenna was promoted to associate professor, and in 2009, she became a full professor as well as the director of the Center for Structural Biology. Agbandje-McKenna was one of the principal investigators leading the Macromolecular Structure Group at UF alongside her husband, Robert McKenna. Her expertise in structural biology is used to guide her lab in the exploration of the structural topology of adeno-associated viruses (AAVs). Using advanced and high resolution imaging techniques, such as cryogenic electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography, her lab is able to determine the structure of AAV capsids and use this information to understand their life cycle and explore their potential use in gene therapy. Throughout her career at UF, Agbandje-McKenna has made key discoveries about the structure-function relationships of AAV vectors. Her rational capsid design has enabled the development of novel viral capsids with improved transduction and immune evading capabilities for use in gene therapies to treat various diseases. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64209369 | 1,869,091 |
1,902,895 | Just as much as Owen was concerned with the quantity of students at NGC, he was just as concerned with the quality of the student body. Elevating academic standards was a high priority of Owen. He saw a direct positive correlation between the caliber of the faculty and the quality of the students. In the first ten years of Owen's presidency professors' salaries doubled, from $16,866 to $33,200. He also managed to secure funding, from public and private sources, for the purpose of faculty research, which was nonexistent before Owen. Natural science departments were particularly large beneficiaries of this research initiative. In the late 1980s the Natural science departments received roughly $125,000 from the National Science Foundation for new laboratory equipment. The effects of this and other similar financial investment in the school's science programs was evident. At the end of Owen's term, NGC graduates saw a sixty percent acceptance rate to the Medical College of Georgia, compared to the average rate of thirteen percent among other colleges in Georgia. The augmentations made to the natural science departments during the 1980s spilled over into other related areas such as engineering and mathematics. It was in this decade the NGC acquired its first computer lab and a diagnostic and tutorial laboratory. The college gained twenty more computers in the 1990s for its new $80,000 language lab in Dunlap Hall. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38647111 | 1,901,803 |
751,831 | "Archelon" had a leathery carapace instead of the hard shell seen in sea turtles. The carapace may have featured a row of small ridges, each peaking at in height. It had an especially hooked beak and its jaws were adept at crushing, so it probably ate hard-shelled crustaceans, mollusks, and possibly even sponges, while slowly moving over the seafloor. It also potentially consumed other animals, whilst swimming closer to the surface, like jellyfish, squid, or nautiloids. However, its beak may have been better-adapted for shearing flesh, with fish being another possible prey choice. With its large and strong foreflippers, "Archelon" was likely able to produce powerful strokes necessary for open-ocean travel and, if need be, escape from fellow marine predators. It inhabited the northern Western Interior Seaway, a mild to cool temperate area, dominated by plesiosaurs, hesperornithiform seabirds, and mosasaurs. It may have gone extinct due to the shrinking of the seaway, increased infant mortality rates (in the sea), higher instances of egg and hatchling predation (on land), and a rapidly cooling climate. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=933173 | 751,429 |
1,531,134 | By the end of the 1990s, the creation of public scientific computing infrastructure became a major policy issue: "The lack of infrastructure to support release and reuse was acknowledged in some of the earliest policy reports on data sharing." The first wave of web-based scientific projects in the 1990s and the early 2000s revealed critical issues of sustainability. As funding was allocated on a specific time period, critical databases, online tools or publishing platforms could hardly be maintained and project managers were faced with a "valley of death" "between grant funding and ongoing operational funding". After 2010, the consolidation and expansion of commercial scientific infrastructure such as the acquisition of the open repositories Digital Commons and SSRN by Elsevie had further entailed calls to secure "community-controlled infrastructure". In 2015, Cameron Neylon, Geoffrey Bilder and Jenifer Lin defined an influential series of "Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure" that has been endorsed by leading infrastructures such as Crossref, OpenCitations or Data Dryad By 2021, public services and infrastructures for research have largely endorsed open science as an integral part of their activity and identity: "open science is the dominant discourse to which new online services for research refer." According to the 2021 Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), major legacy infrastructures in Europe have embraced open science principles. "Most of the Research Infrastructures on the ESFRI Roadmap are at the forefront of Open Science movement and make important contributions to the digital transformation by transforming the whole research process according to the Open Science paradigm." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31915311 | 1,530,268 |
113,965 | Lie groups are of fundamental importance in modern physics: Noether's theorem links continuous symmetries to conserved quantities. Rotation, as well as translations in space and time, are basic symmetries of the laws of mechanics. They can, for instance, be used to construct simple models—imposing, say, axial symmetry on a situation will typically lead to significant simplification in the equations one needs to solve to provide a physical description. Another example is the group of Lorentz transformations, which relate measurements of time and velocity of two observers in motion relative to each other. They can be deduced in a purely group-theoretical way, by expressing the transformations as a rotational symmetry of Minkowski space. The latter serves—in the absence of significant gravitation—as a model of spacetime in special relativity. The full symmetry group of Minkowski space, i.e., including translations, is known as the Poincaré group. By the above, it plays a pivotal role in special relativity and, by implication, for quantum field theories. Symmetries that vary with location are central to the modern description of physical interactions with the help of gauge theory. An important example of a gauge theory is the Standard Model, which describes three of the four known fundamental forces and classifies all known elementary particles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19447 | 113,920 |
698,704 | Despite the long exposure to degradation under conditions during transport in the water column, and substantially lower concentration of organic matter on the seafloor, there is evidence that planktonic eDNA is preserved in marine sediments and contains exploitable ecological signal. Earlier studies have shown sedaDNA preservation in marine sediments deposited under anoxia with unusually high amounts of organic matter preserved, but later investigations indicate that sedaDNA can also be extracted from normal marine sediments, dominated by clastic or biogenic mineral fractions. In addition, the low temperature of deep-sea water (0–4 °C) ensures a good preservation of sedaDNA. Using planktonic foraminifera as a "Rosetta Stone", allowing benchmarking of sedaDNA signatures by co-occurring fossil tests of these organisms, Morard et al. showed in 2017 that the fingerprint of plankton eDNA arriving on the seafloor preserves the ecological signature of these organisms at a large geographic scale. This indicates that planktonic community eDNA is deposited onto the seafloor below, together with aggregates, skeletons and other sinking planktonic material. If this is true, sedaDNA should be able to record signatures of surface ocean hydrography, affecting the composition of plankton communities, with the same spatial resolution as the skeletal remains of the plankton. In addition, if the plankton eDNA is arriving on the seafloor in association with aggregates or shells, it is possible that it withstands the transport through the water column by fixation onto mineral surfaces. The same mechanism has been proposed to explain the preservation of sedaDNA in sediments, implying that the flux of planktonic eDNA encapsulated in calcite test arriving on the seafloor is conditioned for preservation upon burial. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46925036 | 698,340 |
1,045,529 | The early 20th century inaugurated a period of systematic critical examination, and rejection of unilineal theories of cultural evolution. Cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas, typically regarded as the leader of anthropology's rejection of classical social evolutionism, used sophisticated ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to argue that Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan's theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data. Additionally, they rejected the distinction between "primitive" and "civilized" (or "modern"), pointing out that so-called primitive contemporary societies have just as much history, and were just as evolved, as so-called civilized societies. They therefore argued that any attempt to use this theory to reconstruct the histories of non-literate (i.e. leaving no historical documents) peoples is entirely speculative and unscientific. They observed that the postulated progression, a stage of civilization identical to that of modern Europe, is ethnocentric. They also pointed out that the theory assumes that societies are clearly bounded and distinct, when in fact cultural traits and forms often cross social boundaries and diffuse among many different societies (and is thus an important mechanism of change). Boas in his culture history approach focused on anthropological fieldwork in an attempt to identify factual processes instead of what he criticized as speculative stages of growth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2267847 | 1,044,984 |
601,855 | Congress and industry both agreed that the Navy had deviated significantly from the normal process for developing a new aircraft. For nearly three years, companies developed their candidates with company funds based on assumptions about the Navy's requirements without any guidance from the service. The Navy did not issue any aircraft performance specifications or draft requirements until the spring of 2013, so competitors tried to refit their aircraft for the preliminary design review phase. The lack of feedback was compounded by the shift of mission statements, from a long-range penetrating strike platform to long-duration orbits over permissive airspace. Endurance requirements of over 12 hours were especially hard to meet, as there are limitations of an aircraft's wingspan for holding fuel on the confined space of an aircraft carrier; the UCLASS had to maintain two orbits around the ship, or one orbit at a range of , with the ability to attack lightly-defended targets out to . After pressure from Congress, industry, and the Government Accountability Office, the Navy took another look at the draft requirements for the UCLASS. They were scheduled to be released in October 2013 but were delayed. The main reason behind the internal strife was indecision over the future of the aircraft carrier fleet and their air wings, between better UAV-based ISR coverage integrated on board carriers in the near-future and integrating a new unmanned aircraft into the carrier air wing to make the carrier a more effective strike platform. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39092723 | 601,546 |
742,467 | The Eldredge and Gould paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in 1971. The symposium focused its attention on how modern microevolutionary studies could revitalize various aspects of paleontology and macroevolution. Tom Schopf, who organized that year's meeting, assigned Gould the topic of speciation. Gould recalls that "Eldredge's 1971 publication [on Paleozoic trilobites] had presented the only new and interesting ideas on the paleontological implications of the subject—so I asked Schopf if we could present the paper jointly." According to Gould "the ideas came mostly from Niles, with yours truly acting as a sounding board and eventual scribe. I coined the term "punctuated equilibrium" and wrote most of our 1972 paper, but Niles is the proper first author in our pairing of Eldredge and Gould." In his book "Time Frames" Eldredge recalls that after much discussion the pair "each wrote roughly half. Some of the parts that would seem obviously the work of one of us were actually first penned by the other—I remember for example, writing the section on Gould's snails. Other parts are harder to reconstruct. Gould edited the entire manuscript for better consistency. We sent it in, and Schopf reacted strongly against it—thus signaling the tenor of the reaction it has engendered, though for shifting reasons, down to the present day." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24980 | 742,074 |
230,531 | Initially, most of the faculty and students at Lafayette wanted the U.S. to stay out of the conflict in Europe. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the Pan-American Congress, saying that the US had a duty to protect Americans' science, culture, freedom and civilization, thirty-seven Lafayette faculty members wired the president objecting to his speech. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and declaration of war by the US, the Northampton County Council of Defense organized a College Council of Defense at Lafayette. The college took official action as well. It bolstered its ROTC program and improved facilities to prepare for air raid tests. The college continued its academic programs until the US lowered the draft age from 20 to 18 in November 1942. While more students enlisted, Lafayette College was one of 36 academic institutions selected by the War Department to train engineering and aviation cadets. After the war, the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 (known as the GI Bill) resulted in a new wave of enrollment at Lafayette by veterans: in 1949 the college had approximately 2000 students. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=573763 | 230,413 |
60,041 | The Two Medicine Formation is typified by a warm semiarid climate. Its layers were deposed on the east coast of the Laramidia island continent (which consisted of western North America). The high cordillera in the west, combined with predominantly western winds, would have caused a rain shadow, limiting annual rainfall. Rain would mainly have fallen during the summer, when convection storms flooded the landscape. The climate would thus also have been very seasonal, with a long dry season and a short wet season. Vegetation would have been sparse and a little varied. In such conditions, horned dinosaurs would have been dependent on oxbow lakes for a continuous supply of water and food – the main river channels tending to run dry earlier – and perished in them during severe droughts when the animals concentrated around the last watering holes, causing bone beds to form. The brown paleosol in which the horned dinosaurs were found – a mixture of clay and coalified wood fragments – resembles that of modern seasonally dry swamps. The surrounding vegetation might have consisted of about high conifer trees. "Achelousaurus" ate much smaller plants, though: a 2013 study determined that ceratopsid herbivores on Laramidia were restricted to feeding on vegetation with a height of or lower. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1792493 | 60,016 |
856,276 | Without informing his family, Boelcke applied for a transfer to aviation duty. On 29 May 1914, he was accepted for pilot's training. On 2 June, he began a six-week course of instruction at the (Halberstadt Flying School). He passed his final pilot's exam on 15 August. His first assignment was training 50 neophyte pilots on an Aviatik B.I. World War I having begun, Boelcke was anxious to see action. On 31 August, he connived his way into joining his older brother Wilhelm at (Field Flyer Detachment 13). On 1 September, the aircrew of Boelcke and Boelcke flew the first of many missions together. On 8 September, during reconnaissance of a French aerodrome, Wilhelm avoided a challenge by French aircraft because he feared they had machine guns aboard. The brothers soon compiled a record of flying longer missions at more frequent intervals than the other aircrews, causing some resentment within the unit. The two Boelckes continued to fly as the weather worsened and the opposing armies' activities began to stagnate into trench warfare. By year's end, Oswald, who had been last to join the section, had flown 42 sorties beyond the front line and Wilhelm had flown 61; the next most active airman had 27 sorties. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=193002 | 855,821 |
4,412 | Armstrong met Janet Elizabeth Shearon, who was majoring in home economics, at a party hosted by Alpha Chi Omega. According to the couple, there was no real courtship, and neither could remember the exact circumstances of their engagement. They were married on January 28, 1956, at the Congregational Church in Wilmette, Illinois. When he moved to Edwards Air Force Base, he lived in the bachelor quarters of the base, while Janet lived in the Westwood district of Los Angeles. After one semester, they moved into a house in Antelope Valley, near Edwards AFB. Janet did not finish her degree, a fact she regretted later in life. The couple had three children: Eric, Karen, and Mark. In June 1961, Karen was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, a malignant tumor of the middle part of her brain stem. X-ray treatment slowed its growth, but her health deteriorated to the point where she could no longer walk or talk. She died of pneumonia, related to her weakened health, on January 28, 1962, aged two. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21247 | 4,410 |
241,246 | The stability of nuclei quickly decreases with the increase in atomic number after curium, element 96, whose half-life is four orders of magnitude longer than that of any subsequent element. All isotopes with an atomic number above 101 undergo radioactive decay with half-lives of less than 30 hours. No elements with atomic numbers above 82 (after lead) have stable isotopes. This is because of the ever-increasing Coulomb repulsion of protons, so that the strong nuclear force cannot hold the nucleus together against spontaneous fission for long. Calculations suggest that in the absence of other stabilizing factors, elements with more than 104 protons should not exist. However, researchers in the 1960s suggested that the closed nuclear shells around 114 protons and 184 neutrons should counteract this instability, creating an "island of stability" where nuclides could have half-lives reaching thousands or millions of years. While scientists have still not reached the island, the mere existence of the superheavy elements (including tennessine) confirms that this stabilizing effect is real, and in general the known superheavy nuclides become exponentially longer-lived as they approach the predicted location of the island. Tennessine is the second-heaviest element created so far, and all its known isotopes have half-lives of less than one second. Nevertheless, this is longer than the values predicted prior to their discovery: the predicted lifetimes for Ts and Ts used in the discovery paper were 10 ms and 45 ms respectively, while the observed lifetimes were 21 ms and 112 ms respectively. The Dubna team believes that the synthesis of the element is direct experimental proof of the existence of the island of stability. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67611 | 241,126 |
1,953,706 | Gerhard Damköhler was born on 16 March 1908 in Klingenmunster in West Central Germany, the son of a physician. Following the usual primary and gymnasium education, he enrolled in the summer of 1926 at the University of Munich to study chemistry with A. Sommerfeld, graduating five years later summa cum laude with a doctor of philosophy for a dissertation entitled "Individuality of the Osmotic Behavior of Alkalihalogenides." He remained at the university for three more years as a grant supported research fellow, during which time he began to display a marked ability for developing and applying analytical methods to practical problems in chemical engineering. This work attracted the notice of Arnold Eucken, the director of Göttingen University's Institute of Physical Chemistry, who offered Damköhler a position as an assistant that he took up in December 1934. Damköhler took his own life on 30 March 1944. Part of the reason was the political pressure put on him to contribute to the Luftwaffe's jet engine development program. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40970876 | 1,952,585 |
1,113,988 | ST models include a non-contact optical sensing system, featuring continuous grayscale shutters for each key and optical window style shutters on each hammer. Optical sensors are also used for the damper, soft and sostenuto pedals. This sensor system allows the user to natively capture their own performance in standard MIDI format, without the need for external or special software. In addition, a “Silent System” that does not require special installation or instrument modification is added to allow for headphone connectivity and access to the instrument's digital sounds, which include a special binaurally captured CFX Concert Grand sample. Because piano components and solenoids can be affected by environmental changes, a patented DSP servo drive system that monitors and controls key and pedal movement to ensure accurate performance reproduction is active during playback. This DSP system provides feedback to the instrument's processor effectively making the system a “closed-loop”. If the system detects any physical movement that does not correlate with the provided performance data, it will automatically adjust itself to correct any deviation in real-time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17188506 | 1,113,422 |
615,722 | The most common fuel electrode material is a Ni doped YSZ. However, high steam partial pressures and low hydrogen partial pressures at the Ni-YSZ interface causes oxidation of the nickel which results in catalyst degradation. Perovskite-type lanthanum strontium manganese (LSM) is also commonly used as a cathode material. Recent studies have found that doping LSM with scandium to form LSMS promotes mobility of oxide ions in the cathode, increasing reduction kinetics at the interface with the electrolyte and thus leading to higher performance at low temperatures than traditional LSM cells. However, further development of the sintering process parameters is required to prevent precipitation of scandium oxide into the LSM lattice. These precipitate particles are problematic because they can impede electron and ion conduction. In particular, the processing temperature and concentration of scandium in the LSM lattice are being researched to optimize the properties of the LSMS cathode. New materials are being researched such as lanthanum strontium manganese chromate (LSCM), which has proven to be more stable under electrolysis conditions. LSCM has high redox stability, which is crucial especially at the interface with the electrolyte. Scandium-doped LCSM (LSCMS) is also being researched as a cathode material due to its high ionic conductivity. However, the rare-earth element introduces a significant materials cost and was found to cause a slight decrease in overall mixed conductivity. Nonetheless, LCSMS materials have demonstrated high efficiency at temperatures as low as 700 °C. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20594810 | 615,408 |
1,083,136 | Z'EV and Einstürzende Neubauten made several percussion instruments out of trash. No Wave artist Glenn Branca began building 3rd bridge zithers with an additional movable bridge positioned on the just intoned knotted positions of the harmonic series. Hans Reichel (born 1949) is a German improvisational guitarist, luthier, and inventor. Reichel has constructed and built several variations of guitars and basses, most of them featuring multiple fretboards and unique positioning of pickups as well as the same indirect playing technique as Branca's instruments. The resulting sounds exceed the range of conventional tuning and add effects from odd overtones to metallic tones. He later invented the daxophone which he is most famous for. It consists of a single wooden blade or "tongue" fixed in a block containing a contact microphone. Normally played by bowing the free end, it can also be struck or plucked. The location along the tongue where it is played will determine the frequency of its vibration, similarly to a wooden ruler held against the edge of a table. These vibrations continue to the wooden-block base, which in turn is amplified by the contact microphone(s). A wide range of voice-like timbres can be produced, depending on the shape of the tongue, the type of wood, where it is played, and where along its length it is stopped with a separate block of wood (fretted on one side) called the "dax." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6890038 | 1,082,579 |
1,683,170 | There is little doubt, however, that the community of cross-cultural researchers have been remiss in ignoring Galton's problem. Expert investigation of this question shows results that "strongly suggest that the extensive reporting of naïve chi-square independence tests using cross-cultural data sets over the past several decades has led to incorrect rejection of null hypotheses at levels much higher than the expected 5% rate." The investigator concludes that "Incorrect theories that have been 'saved' by naïve chi-square tests with comparative data may yet be more rigorously tested another day." Once again, the adjusted variance of a cluster sample is given as one multiplied by 1 + "d" ("k" + 1) where "k" is the average size of a cluster, and a more complicated correction is given for the variance of contingency table correlations with "r" rows and "c" columns. Since this critique was published in 1993, and others like it, more authors have begun to adopt corrections for Galton's problem, but the majority in the cross-cultural field have not. Consequently, a large proportion of published results that rely on naive significance tests and that adopt the "P" < 0.05 rather than a "P" < 0.005 standard are likely to be in error because they are more susceptible to type I error, which is to reject the null hypothesis when it is true. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6298644 | 1,682,227 |
411,304 | Traits are physical, behavioral or adhered human characteristics that have been derived from the way human beings normally distinguish their peers (e.g. height, gender, hair color). They are used to complement the identity information provided by the primary biometric identifiers. Although soft biometric characteristics lack the distinctiveness and permanence to recognize an individual uniquely and reliably, and can be easily faked, they provide some evidence about the users identity that could be beneficial. In other words, despite the fact they are unable to individualize a subject, they are effective in distinguishing between people. Combinations of personal attributes like gender, race, eye color, height and other visible identification marks can be used to improve the performance of traditional biometric systems. Most soft biometrics can be easily collected and are actually collected during enrollment. Two main ethical issues are raised by soft biometrics. First, some of soft biometric traits are strongly cultural based; e.g., skin colors for determining ethnicity risk to support racist approaches, biometric sex recognition at the best recognizes gender from tertiary sexual characters, being unable to determine genetic and chromosomal sexes; soft biometrics for aging recognition are often deeply influenced by ageist stereotypes, etc. Second, soft biometrics have strong potential for categorizing and profiling people, so risking of supporting processes of stigmatization and exclusion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=290622 | 411,102 |
763,047 | Some 3,500 papers were received from countries including Canada, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and the United States, of which 1,700 were from students aged between 5 and 18. The winners were chosen on the basis of the quality and creativity of the work, the appropriateness of the name for a Martian rover, and the competitor's knowledge of the heroine and the probe mission. The winning paper was written by 12-year-old Valerie Ambroise of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who suggested dedicating the rover to Sojourner Truth, a Civil War era African-American abolitionist and women's rights advocate. The second place went to Deepti Rohatgi, 18, of Rockville, Maryland, who proposed Marie Curie, a Nobel Prize-winning Franco-Polish chemist. Third place went to Adam Sheedy, 16, of Round Rock, Texas, who chose Judith Resnik, a United States astronaut and Space Shuttle crew member who died in the 1986 "Challenger" disaster. The rover was also known as "Microrover Flight Experiment" abbreviated MFEX. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36694809 | 762,639 |
730,884 | The strictly scientific criticism of Davis's zombie project has focused on the claims about the chemical composition of the "zombie powder". Several samples of the powder were analyzed for TTX levels by experts in 1986. They reported that only "insignificant traces of tetrodotoxin [were found] in the samples of 'zombie powder' which were supplied for analysis by Davis" and that "it can be concluded that the widely circulated claim in the lay press to the effect that tetrodotoxin is the causal agent in the initial zombification process is without factual foundation". Davis's claims were subsequently defended by other scientists doing further analyses, and these findings were criticized in turn for poor methodology and technique by the original skeptics. Aside from the question of whether or not "zombie powder" contains significant amounts of TTX, the underlying concept of "tetrodotoxin zombification" has also been questioned more directly on a physiological basis. TTX, which blocks sodium channels on the neural membrane, produces numbness, slurred speech, and possibly, paralysis or even respiratory failure and death in severe cases. As an isolated pharmacological agent, it is not known to produce the trance-like or "mental slave" state typical of the zombies of Haitian mythology, or of Davis's descriptions. This criticism can be countered by pointing to the datura mentioned in Davis's research. In and of itself, datura can produce these trance-like symptoms, and if a part of regular meals, could cause (or contribute to) the maintained stupor. Datura ingestions may present with prolonged toxic effects lasting hours to days. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1508286 | 730,499 |
810,073 | While there were difficult years for the school after 1939, in the long run Cornish did much more than "tread water". With support from local arts organizations and a core of dedicated faculty and staff, the school ultimately "reinvented" itself many times, and in 1977 earned full accreditation as a degree granting college from the Northwest Commission on Colleges. That was one year after the establishment of the Theatre Department as the fifth fully fledged academic department. In 1982, the college received a large Title III grant which was instrumental in establishing the Video Art program in the Art department, and in the genesis of the Performance Production Department, which was granted full departmental status with the graduation of its first class in 1986. The BFA in Performance Production added concentrations in Costume, Lighting, Scenic and Sound Design, Stage Management and Technical Direction. Performance Production was established as an independent department so that it would be able to provide support to major productions of the Theatre, Dance and Music departments and provide its students with experience in all three. Recognizing the vital importance of liberal arts studies as a part of the education of an artist, Cornish established its seventh department, Humanities and Sciences, some years later. Humanities and Sciences had been an important part of the Cornish education even before the accreditation process of the 1970s, but the important step of granting department status reaffirmed the commitment to "whole person" education. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=205960 | 809,642 |
1,918,185 | Early on as an independent investigator, Mrksich developed and executed the concept of "dynamic substrates" for cell culture. Here, self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) present cell adhesive ligands with perfect control over density and orientation against a non-adhesive, inert background, such as ethylene glycol. These monolayers can be further modified with electroactive groups that selectively release immobilized ligand when stimulated with an electric potential. Several strategies using this approach were studied in the context of cell signaling, migration, and co-culture. Subsequent cell-based work focused on developing methods to pattern cells on the aforementioned SAMs. The work has mostly utilized microcontact printing to confine adherent cells into defined positions, shapes, and sizes. Ultimately, his group's work has revealed examples of how cellular mechanics and cytoskeletal structure influence phenotype. A primary example of this involved investigating how cell shape exerts control over the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells. Further work utilized these patterned monolayers to investigate the relationship between various cytoskeletal elements and to observe complex phenotypic differences in patient-derived neuroprogenitor cells. Recent work in the group investigating cell patterning has utilized "photo"active adhesive peptides, allowing for local, spatiotemporal control of cell adhesion to study gap junction formation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60816692 | 1,917,085 |
459,797 | formula_2 is a degree three field extension of formula_3, so the points of the Fano plane may be identified with formula_4. The symmetry group may be written formula_5. Similarly, formula_6. There is a relation between the underlying objects, formula_7 and formula_8 called the Cat's Cradle map. Color the seven lines of the Fano plane ROYGBIV, place your fingers into the two dimensional projective space in ambient 3-space, and stretch your fingers out like the children's game Cat's Cradle. You will obtain a complete graph on seven vertices with seven colored triangles (projective lines). The missing origin of formula_2 will be at the center of the septagon inside. Now label this point as formula_10, and pull it backwards to the origin. One can write down a bijection from formula_11 to formula_2. Set formula_13 and send the slope formula_14 where now formula_15 labels the vertices of formula_16 with edge coloring, noting that formula_17 is a cyclic group of order 7. The symmetries of formula_8 are Möbius transformations, and the basic transformations are reflections (order 2, formula_19), translations (order 7, formula_20), and doubling (order 3 since formula_21, formula_22). The corresponding symmetries on the Fano plane are respectively swapping vertices, rotating the graph, and rotating triangles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=390404 | 459,572 |
114,128 | Former NASA astronaut Terry W. Virts, who was a pilot of STS-130 aboard and commander of the ISS on Expedition 43, wrote in an Op-ed on "Ars Technica" that the Gateway would "shackle human exploration, not enable it". He also said, "If we don't have the goal [of Gateway], we are putting the proverbial chicken before the egg by developing "Gemini" before we know what "Apollo" will look like. Regardless of a future destination, as someone who lived on the ISS for 200 days, I cannot envision a new technology that would be developed or validated by building another modular space station. Without a specific goal, we're unlikely to ever identify one". Terry further criticized NASA for abandoning its planned goal of separating crew from cargo, which was put in place following the Space Shuttle "Columbia" disaster in 2003. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin stated that he is "quite opposed to the Gateway" and that "using the Gateway as a staging area for robotic or human missions to the lunar surface is absurd". Aldrin also questioned the benefit of the idea of sending "a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down". On the other hand, Aldrin expressed support for Robert Zubrin's Moon Direct concept which involves lunar landers traveling from Earth orbit to the lunar surface and back. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53648310 | 114,083 |
398,416 | Following the loss of "Challenger", in 1986 NASA was authorized to begin the procurement process for a replacement orbiter. A major refit of the prototype orbiter "Enterprise" was looked at and rejected on cost grounds, with instead the cache of structural spares that were produced as part of the construction of "Discovery" and "Atlantis" earmarked for assembly into the new orbiter. Assembly was completed in July 1990, and the new orbiter was rolled out in April 1991. As part of the process, NASA ran a national competition for schools to name the new orbiter—the criteria included a requirement that it be named after an exploratory or research vessel, with a name "easily understood in the context of space"; entries included an essay about the name, the story behind it and why it was appropriate for a NASA shuttle, and the project that supported the name. Amongst the entries, "Endeavour" was suggested by one-third of the participating schools, with President George H.W. Bush eventually selecting it on the advice of the NASA Administrator, Richard Truly. The national winners were Senatobia Middle School in Senatobia, Mississippi, in the elementary division and Tallulah Falls School in Tallulah Falls, Georgia, in the upper school division. They were honored at several ceremonies in Washington, D.C., including a White House ceremony where President Bush presented awards to each school. "Endeavour" was delivered by Rockwell International Space Transportation Systems Division in May 1991 and first launched a year later, in May 1992, on STS-49. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28240 | 398,220 |
724,436 | Critics have doubted both the feasibility of self-replicating nanorobots and the feasibility of control if self-replicating nanorobots could be achieved: they cite the possibility of mutations removing any control and favoring reproduction of mutant pathogenic variations. Advocates address the first doubt by pointing out that the first macroscale autonomous machine replicator, made of Lego blocks, was built and operated experimentally in 2002. While there are sensory advantages present at the macroscale compared to the limited sensorium available at the nanoscale, proposals for positionally controlled nanoscale mechanosynthetic fabrication systems employ dead reckoning of tooltips combined with reliable reaction sequence design to ensure reliable results, hence a limited sensorium is no handicap; similar considerations apply to the positional assembly of small nanoparts. Advocates address the second doubt by arguing that bacteria are (of necessity) evolved to evolve, while nanorobot mutation could be actively prevented by common error-correcting techniques. Similar ideas are advocated in the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology, and a map of the 137-dimensional replicator design space recently published by Freitas and Merkle provides numerous proposed methods by which replicators could, in principle, be safely controlled by good design. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19637 | 724,056 |
942,408 | One study followed 89 patients with PD who were treated with unilateral subthalamotomy. Sixty-eight patients were available for evaluations after 12 months, 36 after 24 months, and 25 after 36 months. The Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale motor scores improved significantly and levodopa daily doses were significantly reduced by 45, 36, and 28% at 12, 24 and 36 months after surgery. Unilateral subthalamotomy was associated with significant motor benefit contralateral to the lesion. Further work is needed to ascertain what factors led to severe, persistent chorea-ballism in a subset of patients. In an earlier study, 18 advanced PD patients received staged or simultaneous bilateral one or more subthalamotomy. One patient subsequently developed multiple system atrophy signs and was excluded from further analysis. Motor improvements compared to baseline were 58% in the off state and 63% in the on state. Daily levodopa dose was reduced by a mean of 72%, with five patients receiving none. Three patients developed severe chorea postoperatively, which improved spontaneously at 3–6 months. In a third study, microelectrode mapping (guided stereotactic surgery on the subthalamic nucleus) was performed in eight patients with PD, and the findings indicated that subthalamotomy can ameliorate the cardinal symptoms of PD, reduce the dosage of levodopa, diminish complications of the drug therapy, and improve the quality of life. Havana’s International Center for Neurological Restoration reported at the American Neurological Association meeting in October 2002 that two years after undergoing a bilateral dorsal subthalamotomy, 17 Cuban patients improved by an average of 50% on movement tests, and they could dramatically reduce their daily ingestion of levodopa. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1874888 | 941,906 |
836,466 | In June 1908, the scientific journal "Nature" published a letter in which Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, fellow of the Royal Society (UK), discussed how a fully electronic television system could be realized by using cathode ray tubes (or "Braun" tubes, after their inventor, Karl Braun) as both imaging and display devices. He noted that the "real difficulties lie in devising an efficient transmitter", and that it was possible that "no photoelectric phenomenon at present known will provide what is required". A cathode ray tube was successfully demonstrated as a displaying device by the German Professor Max Dieckmann in 1906; his experimental results were published by the journal "Scientific American" in 1909. Campbell-Swinton later expanded on his vision in a presidential address given to the Röntgen Society in November 1911. The photoelectric screen in the proposed transmitting device was a mosaic of isolated rubidium cubes. His concept for a fully electronic television system was later popularized as the ""Campbell-Swinton Electronic Scanning System"" by Hugo Gernsback and H. Winfield Secor in the August 1915 issue of the popular magazine "Electrical Experimenter" and by Marcus J. Martin in the 1921 book "The electrical transmission of photographs". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=516757 | 836,017 |
1,931,734 | Clack is best known for her extensive body of work on early tetrapods, much of which redefined how paleontologists conceived of the evolution of limbs and other features associated with tetrapods' transition from other lobe-finned fishes. She began her career working primarily on the ear of early tetrapods and later expanded to more broadly addressing the osteology and evolution of tetrapods. Together with Michael Coates (University of Chicago), Clack defined what is known as "Romer's Gap", a major gap in the fossil record of early tetrapods and one that she subsequently began to fill in collaboration with other paleontologists. Clack also undertook extensive fieldwork expeditions in order to search for further remains of early tetrapods. In 1987, during an expedition to East Greenland, Clack and her team discovered the remains of the Devonian tetrapods "Acanthostega" and "Ichthyostega," following up on field notes of researchers who had collected material of "Acanthostega" in 1970. Additional surveys in 1998 led to the collection of substantial new material, including what is now recognized as "Ymeria." Most recently, she led a major consortium project (TW:eed) investigating some exciting new fossils from Northumberland and the Borders Region of Scotland which date from the Tournaisian stage of the earliest Carboniferous period; this project has produced numerous publications furthering the understanding of early tetrapod evolution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=371584 | 1,930,626 |
1,304,456 | Neuroscience has led to a deeper understanding of the chemical imbalances present in a disordered brain. In turn, this has resulted in the creation of new treatments and medications to treat these disorders. When these new treatments are first being tested, the experiments prompt ethical questions. First, because the treatment is affecting the brain, the side effects can be unique and sometimes severe. A special kind of side effect that many subjects have claimed to experience in neurological treatment tests is changes in "personal identity". Although this is a difficult ethical dilemma because there are no clear and undisputed definitions of personality, self, and identity, neurological treatments can result in patients losing parts of "themselves" such as memories or moods. Yet another ethical dispute in neurological treatment research is the choice of patients. From a perspective of justice, priority should be given to those who are most seriously impaired and who will benefit most from the intervention. However, in a test group, scientists must select patients to secure a favorable risk-benefit ratio. Setting priority becomes more difficult when a patient's chance to benefit and the seriousness of their impairment do not go together. For example, many times an older patient will be excluded despite the seriousness of their disorder simply because they are not as strong or as likely to benefit from the treatment. The main ethical issue at the heart of neurological treatment research on human subjects is promoting high-quality scientific research in the interest of future patients, while at the same time respecting and guarding the rights and interests of the research subjects. This is particularly difficult in the field of neurology because damage to the brain is often permanent and will change a patient's way of life forever. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=703002 | 1,303,740 |
788,624 | In 1939, West Virginia State College became the first of six historically black colleges to be authorized by the Civil Aeronautics Authority to establish an aviation program. Benefiting from the presence of the Wertz Field airport adjacent to campus, the program prepared many African-American pilots for the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. Several college aviators joined the famed 99th Fighter Squadron and 332nd Fighter Group (the Tuskegee Airmen) that served with distinction in the European Theater. One of the original graduates of the aviation program, Rose Agnes Rolls Cousins, was the first African-American woman to become a solo pilot in the Civilian Pilot Training Program. During World War II, West Virginia State College was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a Navy commission. In 1942, a college ROTC program was established as an artillery unit. The ROTC tradition continues today, and the school has claimed 15 general officers who have graduated from West Virginia State, including Major General Charles C. Rogers and Major General Harvey D. Williams. In 1951 the Drain-Jordan Library opened, named in honor of librarian Leaonead Pack Drain-Bailey and Lawrence Victor Jordan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1245250 | 788,200 |
1,322,651 | Drilling Waste Land Farm Example: In 1995, HS Resources, an oil and gas company operating in Colorado, obtained a permit for a noncommercial land farm to treat and recycle the company's nonhazardous oil field wastes, including drilling muds. At the land farm, wastes mixed with soil contaminated with hydrocarbons from other facilities are spread in a layer one foot thick or less. Natural bacterial action is enhanced through occasional addition of commercial fertilizers, monthly tilling (to add oxygen), and watering (to maintain 10–15% moisture content). Treatment is considered complete when hydrocarbon levels reach concentrations specified by regulatory agencies; not all agencies employ the same acceptability standards. Water and soil are monitored periodically to confirm that no adverse soil or groundwater impacts have occurred, and records of the source and disposition of the remediated soil are maintained. Estimated treatment costs, which include transportation, spreading, amendments, and monitoring, are about $4–5 per cubic yard. When the treated material is recycled as backfill, net costs are about $1 per cubic yard. Capital costs (not included in the treatment cost estimates) were recovered within the first eight months of operation (Cole and Mark 2000). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5124364 | 1,321,925 |
1,497,784 | The mechanism of action of the cytostatic effects of EMP is complex and only partially understood. EMP is considered to mainly be a mitotic inhibitor, inhibiting mechanisms involved in the mitosis phase of the cell cycle. Specifically, it binds to microtubule-associated proteins and/or to tubulin and produces depolymerization of microtubules (K = 10–20 μM for estramustine), resulting in the arrest of cell division in the G/M phase (specifically metaphase). EMP was originally thought to mediate its cytostatic effects as a prodrug of normustine, a nitrogen mustard, and hence was thought to be an alkylating antineoplastic agent. However, subsequent research has found that EMP is devoid of alkylating actions, and that the influence of EMP on microtubules is mediated by intact estramustine and estromustine, with normustine or estradiol alone having only minor or negligible effects. As such, the unique properties of the estramustine and estromustine structures, containing a carbamate-ester bond, appear to be responsible for the cytostatic effects of EMP. In addition to its antimitotic actions, EMP has also been found to produce other cytostatic effects, including induction of apoptosis, interference with DNA synthesis, nuclear matrix interaction, cell membrane alterations, induction of reactive oxygen species (free oxygen radicals), and possibly additional mechanisms. EMP has been found to have a radiosensitizing effect in prostate cancer and glioma cells, improving sensitivity to radiation therapy as well. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4498159 | 1,496,941 |
26,492 | In September 1941, the United States Army Air Forces' plans for war against Germany and Japan proposed basing the B-29 in Egypt for operations against Germany, as British airbases were likely to be overcrowded. Air Force planning throughout 1942 and early 1943 continued to have the B-29 deployed initially against Germany, only transferring to the Pacific after the end of the war in Europe. By the end of 1943, plans had changed, partly due to production delays, and the B-29 was dedicated to the Pacific Theater. A new plan implemented at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a promise to China, called Operation Matterhorn, deployed the B-29 units to attack Japan from four forward bases in southern China, with five main bases in India, and to attack other targets in the region from China and India as needed. The Chengdu region was eventually chosen over the Guilin region to avoid having to raise, equip, and train 50 Chinese divisions to protect the advanced bases from Japanese ground attack. The XX Bomber Command, initially intended to be two combat wings of four groups each, was reduced to a single wing of four groups because of the lack of availability of aircraft, automatically limiting the effectiveness of any attacks from China. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53179 | 26,482 |
2,167,247 | As a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Lengyel and his research team began to investigate the role of the fallopian tube in ovarian cancer as the cells more closely resemble those in the fallopian tube rather than the ovary. They described a new treatment using stroma which could prevent the rapid spread of high-grade serous carcinoma. He also served on the editorial board for the "Gynecologic Oncology" journal. In 2019, Lengyel and his research team described a new treatment using stroma which could prevent the rapid spread of high-grade serous carcinoma. To reach this conclusion, the researchers profiled the expression of more than 5,000 proteins in both normal and cancerous tissues derived from minute amounts of patient biobank material. They also discovered nicotinamide N-methyltransferase was highly expressed in the stroma surrounding metastatic cancer cells. Following this discovery, Lengyel was the recipient of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant to define every cell type in the female reproductive tract. He was later elected a Member of the National Academy of Medicine for his outstanding scientific and professional achievement in biology, medicine and related fields. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66691443 | 2,166,010 |
2,705 | In 1936, Oppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor and a student at Stanford University School of Medicine. The two had similar political views; she wrote for the "Western Worker", a Communist Party newspaper. In 1939, after a tempestuous relationship, Tatlock broke up with Oppenheimer. In August of that year, he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Kitty had been married before. Her first marriage lasted only a few months. Her second, common-law marriage husband was Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist Party, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Kitty returned to the United States where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania. There she married Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher, in 1938. In June 1939 Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California, where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Oppenheimer and Kitty created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. In the summer of 1940, she stayed with Oppenheimer at his ranch in New Mexico. She finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada, and took Oppenheimer as her fourth husband on November 1, 1940. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39034 | 2,705 |
2,079,336 | Perhaps the best-developed evolution of the IDEF model beyond Toyota was at Boeing. Their project life-cycle process has grown into a rigorous software system that links people, tasks, tools, materials, and the environmental impact of any newly planned project, before any building is allowed to begin. Routinely, more than half of the time for any given project is spent building the precedence diagrams, or three-dimensional process maps, integrating with outside suppliers, and designing the implementation plan-all on the computer. Once real activity is initiated, an action tracker is used to monitor inputs and outputs versus the schedule and delivery metrics in real time throughout the organization. When the execution of a new airplane design begins, it is so well organized that it consistently cuts both costs and build time in half for each successive generation of airframe. And, of course, it is paperless. Boeing created a complex lean management process called 'define and control airplane configuration/manufacturing resource management' (DCAC/MRM). The process was built with the help of the operations research and computer sciences departments of the University of Pittsburgh. The manufacture of the Boeing 777 was ultimately a success, and it became the precursor to succeeding generations of CALM at Boeing. Boeing is four generations beyond that airplane now, and they have succeeded in cutting the time and cost for each new generation of airplane. Boeing’s successes in conversion from inefficient silos of manufacturing to a lean and efficient operation have become legendary. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20341886 | 2,078,137 |
540,642 | Since the end of the GDR the University of Greifswald has undergone major construction efforts. Between 1991 and 2007, more than 417 million euros were spent on the careful renovation of historic buildings, as well as on the construction of new sites. For instance, 19th century lecture hall ("auditorium maximum") has been carefully restored, just like the university's main administrative building and many other buildings in the historic center of town. A new campus for natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biochemistry), medicine, IT and mathematics is under construction in the eastern part of the city. The new domiciles of Greifswald University Library, the departments of physics, biology and biochemistry have already been completed. The university hospital, which is thought to be completed in 2009, will be the most up-to-date full-scale hospital in Germany, adding to the appeal of the Greifswald Medical School. As a consequence of the construction of the new Greifswald University Hospital building, all historic 19th and early 20th century buildings that were formerly used by the hospital will be transferred to house other disciplines, thus creating an old-town campus for such departments as law and economics, the humanities and social sciences, and improving research and teaching considerably. As one of only 17 out of a total of 52 proposed building projects of "national significance" across Germany, the national government has agreed to subsidise the construction of a new pharmacology research lab (in Germany, education is usually cared for by the German states and not by the national government, which only supports a few projects of national and international importance). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=614579 | 540,362 |
2,037,247 | In 1823, he produced a proposed layout for the gardens on the Kemp Town estate, a high-class speculative residential development being built east of Brighton by Thomas Read Kemp. This scheme was not implemented, and Read Kemp decided to put iron railings round the open space instead. Five years later, though, Phillips' revised scheme was put in place. The Kemp Town Enclosures, as the gardens became known, covered and had paths around the edges surrounded by informally laid out flowers and small shrubs which were planted on small mounds to protect them from the windy weather on the exposed clifftop. Planting began early in 1828: the "Brighton Herald" of 8 February 1828 reported that "the plants possess great novelty and beauty of style ... 20,000 plants have been selected to embellish the grounds". The "Brighton Guardian" stated that "from the size and beauty of the trees, we should have taken it for a grove of seven years' standing, rather than ... a few weeks only". Phillips charged Read Kemp £371.10s.8d (), which was paid when he went to the first meeting of the Kemp Town Enclosures Management Committee on 3 June 1828. The original layout (since altered) consisted of three linked sections, one of which featured a "rustic wooden summer-house" which was used until 1935 when it became too dilapidated to keep. The flowerbed which surrounded it was removed at the same time in favour of grass. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36818458 | 2,036,072 |
1,576,754 | The origins of the NB program are obscure, but design work began during the winter of 1941–42 with the OKB designation of aircraft T. The NB was a high-winged, twin-engined, twin tail monoplane of mixed construction. The fuselage was built of 'shpon', molded birch plywood, thick and was reinforced with a welded steel tube framework and a network of bracing wires in the midsection around the aperture for the wing and the capacious bomb bay. The single-spar wing was built from a mix of steel and duralumin. The center section had a duralumin skin, but the outer panels were skinned in 'shpon'. The duralumin slotted flaps were electrically powered and ran the length of the wing center section, divided by the engine nacelles. Automatic leading edge slats were mounted on the outer panels. All control surfaces were built from wood and covered in fabric. The tailplane had 7° dihedral with twin fins. It had a duralumin structure and was covered in 'shpon'. The main gears of the conventional undercarriage retracted aft into the rear of the engine nacelles and the tail wheel retracted into the rear fuselage. Six protected fuel tanks were in the wing center section, plus four more in the outer wings. They had a total capacity of (including oil). Two air-cooled Shvetsov ASh-82 radial engines were slung underneath the wings. Alternative engines considered were the Mikulin AM-39 V-12 and the Shvetsov M-71 radial, but development problems with both engines dropped them from consideration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25125104 | 1,575,865 |
1,831,206 | Two Air Commando H-19 pilots received the Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Crosses from an attempted rescue mission described in their citations as "the deepest helicopter penetration of the Korean War". Taking off from Cho-do Island in the early morning hours, Captain Frank J. Westerman and Lieutenant Robert Sullivan flew low-level through darkness for two hours, guided north by an Air Rescue SA-16 pathfinder aircraft flying overhead at an altitude of 100 feet. At first light, the helicopter was 16 miles south of the Chinese border and within ten minutes flying time of the Chinese MiG fighter base at Antung, the largest Chinese fighter base in North Korea. Racing inland they discovered the valley the downed pilot was reported to be in, which turned out to be a massive camouflage supply and troop depot. The valley contained at least a regiment of troops, all armed and firing as fast as they could. The hills looked like a large warehouse, piles of equipment and supplies under camouflage nets. It was quickly evident that no evading American was walking around in the area. The Air Commandos fled for their lives, informing the SA-16 offshore to do the same. It was likely that the rescue attempt was bait for a Chinese trap. All of the Air Commandos returned to Cho-do successfully. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18495171 | 1,830,159 |
594,418 | [What is needed] is the scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind—all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems.Nehru wrote that the scientific temper goes beyond the domains to which science is conventionally understood to be limited to, and deals also with the consideration of ultimate purposes, beauty, goodness and truth. He contended that the scientific temper is the opposite of the method of religion, which relies on emotion and intuition and is (mis)applied "to everything in life, even to those things which are capable of intellectual inquiry and observation." While religion tends to close the mind and produce "intolerance, credulity and superstition, emotionalism and irrationalism", and "a temper of a dependent, unfree person", a scientific temper "is the temper of a free man." He also indicated that the scientific temper goes beyond objectivity and fosters creativity and progress. He envisioned that the spread of scientific temper would be accompanied by a shrinking of the domain of religion, and "the exciting adventure of fresh and never ceasing discoveries, of new panoramas opening out and new ways of living, adding to [life's] fullness and ever making it richer and more complete." He also stated, "It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13433031 | 594,113 |
91,084 | From the late 15th century onward, factorials became the subject of study by western mathematicians. In a 1494 treatise, Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli calculated factorials up to 11!, in connection with a problem of dining table arrangements. Christopher Clavius discussed factorials in a 1603 commentary on the work of Johannes de Sacrobosco, and in the 1640s, French polymath Marin Mersenne published large (but not entirely correct) tables of factorials, up to 64!, based on the work of Clavius. The power series for the exponential function, with the reciprocals of factorials for its coefficients, was first formulated in 1676 by Isaac Newton in a letter to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Other important works of early European mathematics on factorials include extensive coverage in a 1685 treatise by John Wallis, a study of their approximate values for large values of formula_1 by Abraham de Moivre in 1721, a 1729 letter from James Stirling to de Moivre stating what became known as Stirling's approximation, and work at the same time by Daniel Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler formulating the continuous extension of the factorial function to the gamma function. Adrien-Marie Legendre included Legendre's formula, describing the exponents in the factorization of factorials into prime powers, in an 1808 text on number theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10606 | 91,044 |
691,113 | Joshua Lederberg was the leading exception in emphasizing, as he had for years, the potential benefits. At Asilomar, in an atmosphere favoring control and regulation, he circulated a paper countering the pessimism and fears of misuses with the benefits conferred by successful use. He described "an early chance for a technology of untold importance for diagnostic and therapeutic medicine: the ready production of an unlimited variety of human proteins. Analogous applications may be foreseen in fermentation process for cheaply manufacturing essential nutrients, and in the improvement of microbes for the production of antibiotics and of special industrial chemicals." In June 1976, the 16-month moratorium on research expired with the Director's Advisory Committee (DAC) publication of the NIH guidelines of good practice. They defined the risks of certain kinds of experiments and the appropriate physical conditions for their pursuit, as well as a list of things too dangerous to perform at all. Moreover, modified organisms were not to be tested outside the confines of a laboratory or allowed into the environment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6012335 | 690,750 |
914,525 | In 1953, the first experimental examples were found of rotational bands in nuclei, with their energy levels following the same J(J+1) pattern of energies as in rotating molecules. Quantum mechanically, it is impossible to have a collective rotation of a sphere, so this implied that the shape of these nuclei was nonspherical. In principle, these rotational states could have been described as coherent superpositions of particle-hole excitations in the basis consisting of single-particle states of the spherical potential. But in reality, the description of these states in this manner is intractable, due to a large number of valence particles—and this intractability was even greater in the 1950s when computing power was extremely rudimentary. For these reasons, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Sven Gösta Nilsson constructed models in which the potential was deformed into an ellipsoidal shape. The first successful model of this type is the one now known as the Nilsson model. It is essentially the harmonic oscillator model described in this article, but with anisotropy added, so that the oscillator frequencies along the three Cartesian axes are not all the same. Typically the shape is a prolate ellipsoid, with the axis of symmetry taken to be z. Because the potential is not spherically symmetric, the single-particle states are not states of good angular momentum J. However, a Lagrange multiplier formula_10, known as a "cranking" term, can be added to the Hamiltonian. Usually the angular frequency vector ω is taken to be perpendicular to the symmetry axis, although tilted-axis cranking can also be considered. Filling the single-particle states up to the Fermi level then produces states whose expected angular momentum along the cranking axis formula_11 is the desired value. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50609 | 914,046 |
49,124 | A new volume for the Fantastic Four was released in August 2018, written by Dan Slott, as part of Marvel's Fresh Start event. The first issue of the new series was met with strong sales, and a positive critical reaction. When the Future Foundation is threatened by the Griever at the End of All Things, Mister Fantastic plays on her ego to convince her to provide him with equipment that will allow him to summon his teammates. When Human Torch and Thing are reunited with Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman, the other superheroes that were part of the Fantastic Four at some point in their lives also arrived, including, unexpectedly, X-Men's Iceman. With the gathered heroes assisted the Fantastic Four into causing so much damage to the Griever's equipment, she is forced to retreat in her final telepod or be trapped in that universe. This left the heroes to salvage components from the broken ship to create their own teleport system to return to their universe. The Fantastic Four and their extended family returned to Earth where they find that Liberteens members Ms. America, 2-D, Hope, and Iceberg have come together as the Fantastix with Ms. America taking the codename of Ms. Fantastix. Following the staged bank robbery that the Wrecking Crew committed and their involvement of being hired to humiliate the Fantastix in public, the Fantastic Four gave the Fantastix their blessing to continue using the Baxter Building while the FF operate in a house on Yancy Street with a dimensionally-transcendental interior. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11664 | 49,104 |
597,763 | Snow cover is an extremely important storage component in the water balance, especially seasonal snowpacks in mountainous areas of the world. Though limited in extent, seasonal snowpacks in the Earth’s mountain ranges account for the major source of the runoff for stream flow and groundwater recharge over wide areas of the midlatitudes. For example, over 85% of the annual runoff from the Colorado River basin originates as snowmelt. Snowmelt runoff from the Earth's mountains fills the rivers and recharges the aquifers that over a billion people depend on for their water resources. Furthermore, over 40% of the world's protected areas are in mountains, attesting to their value both as unique ecosystems needing protection and as recreation areas for humans. Climate warming is expected to result in major changes to the partitioning of snow and rainfall, and to the timing of snowmelt, which will have important implications for water use and management. These changes also involve potentially important decadal and longer time-scale feedbacks to the climate system through temporal and spatial changes in soil moisture and runoff to the oceans.(Walsh 1995). Freshwater fluxes from the snow cover into the marine environment may be important, as the total flux is probably of the same magnitude as desalinated ridging and rubble areas of sea ice. In addition, there is an associated pulse of precipitated pollutants which accumulate over the Arctic winter in snowfall and are released into the ocean upon ablation of the sea ice . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47527 | 597,458 |
932,986 | In cars with double wishbone suspensions, camber angle may be fixed or adjustable, but in MacPherson strut suspensions, it is normally fixed. The elimination of an available camber adjustment may reduce maintenance requirements, but if the car is lowered by use of shortened springs, the camber angle will change. Excessive camber angle can lead to increased tire wear and impaired handling. Significant suspension modifications may correspondingly require that the upper control arm or strut mounting points be altered to allow for some inward or outward movement, relative to the longitudinal centerline of the vehicle, for camber adjustment. With aftermarket plates containing slots for strut mounts instead of merely holes, this allows the entire shock absorber to be able to move back and forth, allowing for fine-tuning the camber of a vehicle. These plates are available for most of the commonly modified models of cars. Some aftermarket coilovers come with built-in camber plates already in place, and there are certain other aftermarket solutions which allow the modification of the camber angle of the wheels. Camber bolts with eccentrics allow adjustable camber on some vehicles. These bolts feature large washers that are either eccentric or offset. If the original-equipment bolts are replaced with eccentric ones, then the adjustment will engender a change of up to two degrees. Control arms (or A-arms) with adjustable ball joints represent another avenue for allowing side-by-side adjustability. With these control arms installed, tire camber can effectively be changed by simply moving the tires. After that, one tightens the bolts in order to lock the ball joint in the desired position. Yet another aftermarket solution for changing the camber angle is via control rods of adjustable length. However, this solution is only amenable to vehicles which employ control rods, not A-arms. Because control rods (in vehicles so equipped) are responsible for locating the suspension points and keeping them in place, changing the overall length of the rods influences the camber angle. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=234685 | 932,494 |
758,654 | From 1910 to 1940, high schools grew in number and size, reaching out to a broader clientele. In 1910, for example, 9% of Americans had a high school diploma; in 1935, the rate was 40%. By 1940, the number had increased to 50%. This phenomenon was uniquely American; no other nation attempted such widespread coverage. The fastest growth came in states with greater wealth, more homogeneity of wealth, and less manufacturing activity than others. The high schools provided necessary skill sets for youth planning to teach school, and essential skills for those planning careers in white collar work and some high-paying blue collar jobs. Claudia Goldin argues this rapid growth was facilitated by public funding, openness, gender neutrality, local (and also state) control, separation of church and state, and an academic curriculum. The wealthiest European nations, such as Germany and Britain, had far more exclusivity in their education system; few youth attended past age 14. Apart from technical training schools, European secondary schooling was dominated by children of the wealthy and the social elites. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9083795 | 758,248 |
792,714 | In 1960, specifications for barrier-free design were published. It was a compendium of over 11 years of disability ergonomic research. In 1961, the specifications became the first Barrier Free Design standard called the American National Standard, A1171.1 was published. It was the first standard to present the criteria for designing facilities and programs for the use of disabled individuals. The research started in 1949 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and continues to this day. The principal investigator is Dr. Timothy Nugent (his name is listed in the front of the 1961, 1971, 1980 standard). In 1949 Dr. Nugent also started the National Wheelchair Basketball Association. This ANSI A117.1 standard was adopted by the US federal government General Services Administration under 35 FR 4814 - 3/20/70, 39 FR 23214 - 6/27/74, 43 FR 16478 ABA- 4/19/78, 44 FR 39393 7/6/79, 46 FR 39436 8/3/81, in 1984 for UFAS and then in 1990 for ADA. The archived research documents are at the International Code Council (ICC) - ANSI A117.1 division. Dr. Nugent made presentations around the globe in the late 1950s and 1960s presenting the concept of independent functional participation for individuals with disabilities through program options and architectural design. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1158081 | 792,289 |
870,456 | Given the platform's presence in education, various educational word processing and publishing applications were available. Longman Logotron supplied a "cost-effective introduction to DTP" in the form of FirstPage, retailing at £49 plus VAT with "unlimited" educational site licences costing up to £190. Targeting machines with only 1 MB of RAM, various traditional word processing features such as a spelling checker and integrated help were omitted, but as a frame-based document processor it was considered "excellent value for money" when compared to the pricing and capabilities of some of its competitors, even appealing to the home market. Similarly, Softease's "object-based" document processor, Textease, also had potential appeal beyond the educational market, freeing the user from having to design page layouts using frames, instead permitting them to click and type at the desired position or to drag and drop graphical objects directly into the page, providing a user interface paradigm reminiscent of the Draw application provided with RISC OS. Document layout capabilities were nevertheless available, supporting multiple column layouts, as were the traditional features such as spellchecking and integrated help absent from FirstPage. Pricing was even more competitive at around £30, or £40 with spellchecking support. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63145 | 869,996 |
1,092,914 | The Molecular Kink Paradigm proceeds from the intuitive notion that molecular chains that make up a natural rubber (polyisoprene) network are constrained by surrounding chains to remain within a ‘tube’. Elastic forces produced in a chain, as a result of some applied strain, are propagated along the chain contour within this tube. Fig. 2 shows a representation of a four-carbon isoprene backbone unit with an extra carbon atom at each end to indicate its connections to adjacent units on a chain. It has three single C-C bonds and one double bond. It is principally by rotating about the C-C single bonds that a polyisoprene chain randomly explores its possible conformations. Sections of chain containing between two and three isoprene units have sufficient flexibility that they may be considered statistically de-correlated from one another. That is, there is no directional correlation along the chain for distances greater than this distance, referred to as a Kuhn length. These non-straight regions evoke the concept of ‘kinks’ and are in fact a manifestation of the random-walk nature of the chain. Since a kink is composed of several isoprene units, each having three carbon-carbon single bonds, there are many possible conformations available to a kink, each with a distinct energy and end-to-end distance. Over time scales of seconds to minutes, only these relatively short sections of the chain, i.e. kinks, have sufficient volume to move freely amongst their possible rotational conformations. The thermal interactions tend to keep the kinks in a state of constant flux, as they make transitions between all of their possible rotational conformations. Because the kinks are in thermal equilibrium, the probability that a kink resides in any rotational conformation is given by a Boltzmann distribution and we may associate an entropy with its end-to-end distance. The probability distribution for the end-to-end distance of a Kuhn length is approximately Gaussian and is determined by the Boltzmann probability factors for each state (rotational conformation). As a rubber network is stretched, some kinks are forced into a restricted number of more extended conformations having a greater end-to-end distance and it is the resulting decrease in entropy that produces an elastic force along the chain. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7623862 | 1,092,354 |
67,806 | Syria is a state party to the NPT since 1969 and has a limited civil nuclear program. Before the advent of the Syrian Civil War it was known to operate only one small Chinese-built research reactor, SRR-1. Despite being a proponent of a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone in the Middle East the country was accused of pursuing a military nuclear program with a reported nuclear facility in a desert Deir ez-Zor Governorate. The reactor's components had likely been designed and manufactured in North Korea, with the reactor's striking similarity in shape and size to the North Korean Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center. That information alarmed Israeli military and intelligence to such a degree that the idea of a targeted airstrike was conceived. It resulted in Operation Orchard, that took place on 6 September 2007 and saw as many as eight Israeli Air Force aircraft taking part. The Israeli government is said to have bounced the idea of the operation off of the US Bush administration, although the latter declined to participate. The nuclear reactor was destroyed in the attack, which also killed about ten North Korean workers. The attack did not cause an international outcry or any serious Syrian retaliatory moves as both parties tried to keep it secret: Despite a half-century state of war declared by surrounding states, Israel did not want publicity as regards its breach of the ceasefire, while Syria was not willing to acknowledge its clandestine nuclear program. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22107 | 67,780 |
808,284 | Air pressure, with normal partial pressures of oxygen (21%), carbon dioxide and nitrogen (78%), is a basic requirement of any space habitat. Basically, most space habitat designs concepts envision large, thin-walled pressure vessels. The required oxygen could be obtained from lunar rock. Nitrogen is most easily available from the Earth, but is also recycled nearly perfectly. Also, nitrogen in the form of ammonia () may be obtainable from comets and the moons of outer planets. Nitrogen may also be available in unknown quantities on certain other bodies in the outer Solar System. The air of a habitat could be recycled in a number of ways. One concept is to use photosynthetic gardens, possibly via hydroponics, or forest gardening. However, these do not remove certain industrial pollutants, such as volatile oils, and excess simple molecular gases. The standard method used on nuclear submarines, a similar form of closed environment, is to use a catalytic burner, which effectively decomposes most organics. Further protection might be provided by a small cryogenic distillation system which would gradually remove impurities such as mercury vapor, and noble gases that cannot be catalytically burned. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=140282 | 807,854 |
1,296,364 | Limitations in the ability of humans to vigilantly monitor video surveillance live footage led to the demand for artificial intelligence that could better serve the task. Humans watching a single video monitor for more than twenty minutes lose 95% of their ability to maintain attention sufficient to discern significant events. With two monitors this is cut in half again. Given that many facilities have dozens or even hundreds of cameras, the task is clearly beyond human ability. In general, the camera views of empty hallways, storage facilities, parking lots or structures are exceedingly boring and thus attention is quickly attenuated. When multiple cameras are monitored, typically employing a wall monitor or bank of monitors with split screen views and rotating every several seconds between one set of cameras and the next, the visual tedium is quickly overwhelming. While video surveillance cameras proliferated with great adoption by users ranging from car dealerships and shopping plazas to schools and businesses to highly secured facilities such as nuclear plants, it was recognized in hindsight that video surveillance by human officers (also called "operators") was impractical and ineffective. Extensive video surveillance systems were relegated to merely recording for possible forensic use to identify someone, after the fact of a theft, arson, attack or incident. Where wide angle camera views were employed, particularly for large outdoor areas, severe limitations were discovered even for this purpose due to insufficient resolution. In these cases it is impossible to identify the trespasser or perpetrator because their image is too tiny on the monitor. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48653319 | 1,295,653 |
377,018 | Classified within the arthropods, isopods have a chitinous exoskeleton and jointed limbs. Isopods are typically flattened dorsoventrally (broader than they are deep), although many species deviate from this rule, particularly parasitic forms, and those living in the deep sea or in ground water habitats. Their colour may vary, from grey to white, or in some cases red, green, or brown. Isopods vary in size, ranging from some Microcerberidae species of just to the deep sea giant isopod "Bathynomus" spp. of nearly . Giant isopods lack an obvious carapace (shell), which is reduced to a "cephalic shield" covering only the head. This means that the gill-like structures, which in other related groups are protected by the carapace, are instead found on specialised limbs on the abdomen. The dorsal (upper) surface of the animal is covered by a series of overlapping, articulated plates which give protection while also providing flexibility. The isopod body plan consists of a head (cephalon), a thorax (pereon) with seven segments (pereonites), and an abdomen (pleon) with six segments (pleonites), some of which may be fused. The head is fused with the first segment of the thorax to form the cephalon. There are two pairs of unbranched antennae, the first pair being vestigial in land-dwelling species. The eyes are compound and unstalked and the mouthparts include a pair of maxillipeds and a pair of mandibles (jaws) with palps (segmented appendages with sensory functions) and lacinia mobilis (spine-like movable appendages). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=724161 | 376,823 |
803,816 | Why have metazoan replication origins diverged from the DNA sequence-specific recognition paradigm that determines replication start sites in prokaryotes and budding yeast? Observations that metazoan origins often co-localize with promoter regions in "Drosophila" and mammalian cells and that replication-transcription conflicts due to collisions of the underlying molecular machineries can lead to DNA damage suggest that proper coordination of transcription and replication is important for maintaining genome stability. Recent findings also point to a more direct role of transcription in influencing the location of origins, either by inhibiting Mcm2-7 loading or by repositioning of loaded Mcm2-7 on chromosomes. Sequence-independent (but not necessarily random) initiator binding to DNA additionally allows for flexibility in specifying helicase loading sites and, together with transcriptional interference and the variability in activation efficiencies of licensed origins, likely determines origin location and contributes to the co-regulation of DNA replication and transcriptional programs during development and cell fate transitions. Computational modeling of initiation events in "S. pombe", as well as the identification of cell-type specific and developmentally-regulated origins in metazoans, are in agreement with this notion. However, a large degree of flexibility in origin choice also exists among different cells within a single population, albeit the molecular mechanisms that lead to the heterogeneity in origin usage remain ill-defined. Mapping origins in single cells in metazoan systems and correlating these initiation events with single-cell gene expression and chromatin status will be important to elucidate whether origin choice is purely stochastic or controlled in a defined manner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=619137 | 803,387 |
576,836 | In parallel to these developments, a similar approach was designed for a linear particle accelerator or Linac. Installation of the first 4 MeV clinical linear accelerator began in June 1952 in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Radiotherapeutic Research Unit at the Hammersmith Hospital, London. The system was handed over for physics and other testing in February 1953 and began to treat patients on 7 September that year. Meanwhile, work at the Stanford Microwave Laboratory led to the development of a 6 MeV accelerator, which was installed at Stanford University Hospital, California, in 1956. Linac units quickly became favored devices for conventional fractionated radiotherapy but it lasted until the 1980s before dedicated Linac radiosurgery became a reality. In 1982, the Spanish neurosurgeon J. Barcia-Salorio began to evaluate the role of cobalt-generated and then Linac-based photon radiosurgery for the treatment of AVMs and epilepsy. In 1984, Betti and Derechinsky described a Linac-based radiosurgical system. Winston and Lutz further advanced Linac-based radiosurgical prototype technologies by incorporating an improved stereotactic positioning device and a method to measure the accuracy of various components. Using a modified Linac, the first patient in the United States was treated in Boston Brigham and Women's Hospital in February 1986. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1172094 | 576,540 |
399,511 | In late 2008, an all-new seven-speed longitudinal S tronic version of the DSG transaxle went into series production (Volkswagen Group internal code: DL501, parts code prefix: 0B5). Initially, from early 2009, it is only used in certain Audi cars, and only with longitudinally mounted engines. Like the original six-speed DSG, it features a concentric dual wet multi-plate clutch. However, this particular variant uses notably more plates – the larger outer clutch (for the odd-numbered gears) uses 10 plates, whereas the smaller inner clutch (driving even-numbered gears and reverse) uses 12 plates. Another notable change over the original transverse DSGs is the lubrication system – Audi now utilise two totally separate oil circuits. One oil circuit, consisting of , lubricates the hydraulic clutches and mechatronics with fully synthetic specialist automatic transmission fluid (ATF), whilst the other oil circuit lubricates the gear trains and front and centre differentials with of conventional hypoid gear oil. This dual circuit lubrication is aimed at increasing overall reliability, due to eliminating cross-contamination of debris and wear particles. It has a torque handling limit of up to , and engine power outputs of up to . It has a total mass, including all lubricants and the dual-mass flywheel of . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1549949 | 399,313 |
1,623,284 | Emulation has been researched in a diverse range of species, including humans. The methodology most often applied is the so-called ghost-condition – put forward by Cecilia Heyes and colleagues in 1994. Ghost condition demonstrations do not involve any information on body movements. Instead, the parts of the apparatus move as if a ghost moves them (for this purpose often very thin fishing line is attached to the moving parts and which transmits the necessary forces). While the use of this method (and subsequently the interpretation of findings) has been criticized on the basis of it lacking ecological validity (it is a strange thing for non-animate objects to move on their own accord), it succeeded in showing that environmental information can be enough for observational learning to occur (work on pigeons). Thus, the general validity of the ghost condition is now established. Chimpanzees tested with this methodology have sometimes failed to copy, but copied in another study – as did dogs. Recently it was shown that in human children, emulation learning enables children to copy in a constructive task solutions that they themselves were unable to produce on their own, an important stepping stone for cumulative culture. This study therefore showed, empirically, that imitation is not a necessary requirement for cumulative culture (contra to some previous claims). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19356049 | 1,622,368 |
19,645 | While many recent studies have concluded that psilocybin can cause mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance, not all the medical community agree. Paul R. McHugh, formerly director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Johns Hopkins, responded as follows in a book review: "The unmentioned fact in "The Harvard Psychedelic Club" is that LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and the like produce not a "higher consciousness" but rather a particular kind of "lower consciousness" known well to psychiatrists and neurologists—namely, "toxic delirium."" In response to Dr. McHugh's denial that the mystical experience leads to insight, Michael Pollan points to Roland Griffiths, Johns Hopkins researcher and author of many studies finding that the experiences of many of the participants have actually involved substantial and sustained personal meaning bringing enduring positive changes in psychological functioning. According to Pollan, Griffiths admits that those taking psilocybin may be encountering a temporary psychosis, but notes that the patients McHugh describes are unlikely to report years later of their experience: "Wow, that was one of the greatest and most meaningful experiences of my life". Such responses argue that it is not appropriate to automatically equate a psilocybin-induced experience of profound insight with superficially similar experiences of psychiatric patients (characterized as mere toxic delirium), when it is only the "insight" reached in the psilocybin experience that is reported to often result in profound, beneficial and enduring life changes for the person. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38468 | 19,637 |
326,301 | Despite these similarities, there are a number of important differences from medieval Europe. One obvious difference is that the Zhou ruled from walled cities rather than castles. Another was China's distinct class system, which lacked an organized clergy but saw Shang-descent yeomen become masters of ritual and ceremony, as well as astronomy, state affairs and ancient canons, known as "ru" (儒). When a dukedom was centralized, these people would find employment as government officials or officers. These hereditary classes were similar to Western knights in status and breeding, but unlike the European equivalent, they were expected to be something of a scholar instead of a warrior. Being appointed, they could move from one state to another. Some would travel from state to state peddling schemes of administrative or military reform. Those who could not find employment would often end up teaching young men who aspired to official status. The most famous of these was Confucius, who taught a system of mutual duty between superiors and inferiors. In contrast, the Legalists had no time for Confucian virtue and advocated a system of strict laws and harsh punishments. The wars of the Warring States were finally ended by the most legalist state of all, Qin. When the Qin dynasty fell and was replaced by the Han dynasty, many Chinese were relieved to return to the more humane virtues of Confucius. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43464 | 326,127 |
1,010,732 | MicroProse UK graphics artists John Reitze and Martin Smillie provided what MicroProse described as "popular 'manga' look and feel" visuals. Julian Gollop credited Reitze with "a distinctive comic book style" and Smillie with "very detailed environment graphics". John Broomhall composed the music while Andrew Parton handled the sound effects. There were also major contributors who were not acknowledged in the game's credits, such as the designer Steve Hand, a "Laser Squad" fan who helped the project get signed, put input into the "big game" concept, actually came up with the name "X-COM" (derived from Mike Brunton's initial idea of "X-CON", where "CON" originally stood for "contact"), and helped to define the comic book-like art style. Hand thought the original design document was poorly written, especially regarding the initial, more interactive and action-oriented UFO interception system; nevertheless, the final game turned out to be very close to it. Certain creature types deemed "boring" were removed during the development, as were the Men in Black, who were unused due to a perceived conflict with MicroProse's abortive project to make an MIB-themed standalone game. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=668164 | 1,010,211 |
460,301 | Shortly after the end of World War II a new concept of turbojet fighters would emerge. The F-84 Thunderjet which Kartveli had already developed in 1944, was going into serial production in 1946. Soon he would also add the swept-wing variant Republic F-84F Thunderstreak. A total of 10,000 of these new generation aircraft would be constructed. Then later on, he would lead the team that developed the F-105 Thunderchief. He was also heavily involved with a 1960s-era Air Force project called "Aerospaceplane", to design and build an orbital logistics vehicle a decade before NASA attempted a similar concept, known as the Space Shuttle. The radical turboramjet-powered XF-103 was another stillborn Kartveli design, a victim of the propulsion community not being able to produce a suitable engine to power the Mach 3 interceptor. Kartveli contributed significantly to the science of flight and the readiness of the US military, and was involved in designing and leading of various projects. He was also consultant at Fairchild Republic and involved in the development of the A-10 Thunderbolt II. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=442516 | 460,075 |
1,487,011 | Understanding genetic and phenotypic divergence across populations of varying species is important in elucidating ecological and evolutionary differences among populations. One such study where genetic structure among human individuals is investigated is by Relethford and Brennan, (1982) where pedigree and marriage data from Sanday, Orkney Islands in Scotland were used to evaluate temporal patterns in isolation by distance. The data considered were for three time periods, 1855-1884, 1885-1924, and 1925-1964. These time periods were categorized by birth year for married males. Average inbreeding coefficient of all potential spouses (chosen within the known demographic and genealogical limits of the population's structure) of each married male was calculated to determine random kinship values. Over time, the isolation by distance model reveals a decline in local isolation and a rise in short and long range migration and the Sandy population experienced an isolate breakdown over time. Distance plays a role in determining kinship, but becomes less significant over time as the measures of the fit of the model decline. Overall inbreeding decreased and mean marital distance increased. Additionally consanguinity avoidance occurred over all distances, but avoidance was more prominent at closer distances. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24629030 | 1,486,173 |
612,551 | Fire behavior is different in every ecosystem and the organisms in those ecosystems have adapted accordingly. One sweeping generality is that in all ecosystems, fire creates a mosaic of different habitat patches, with areas ranging from those having just been burned to those that have been untouched by fire for many years. This is a form of ecological succession in which a freshly burned site will progress through continuous and directional phases of colonization following the destruction caused by the fire. Ecologists usually characterize succession through the changes in vegetation that successively arise. After a fire, the first species to re-colonize will be those with seeds are already present in the soil, or those with seeds are able to travel into the burned area quickly. These are generally fast-growing herbaceous plants that require light and are intolerant of shading. As time passes, more slowly growing, shade-tolerant woody species will suppress some of the herbaceous plants. Conifers are often early successional species, while broad leaf trees frequently replace them in the absence of fire. Hence, many conifer forests are themselves dependent upon recurring fire. Both natural and human fires affect all ecosystems from peatlands to shrublands to forests and tropical landscapes. This impacts the way that the ecosystem is structured and functions. Though there have always been wildfires naturally, the frequency of wildfires has increased at a rapid rate in recent years. This is largely due to decreases in precipitation, increases in temperature, and increases in human ignitions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1924100 | 612,240 |
985,486 | Bivalve shellfish recycle nutrients that enter waterways from human and agricultural sources. Nutrient bioextraction is "an environmental management strategy by which nutrients are removed from an aquatic ecosystem through the harvest of enhanced biological production, including the aquaculture of suspension-feeding shellfish or algae". Nutrient removal by shellfish, which are then harvested from the system, has the potential to help address environmental issues including excess inputs of nutrients (eutrophication), low dissolved oxygen, reduced light availability and impacts on eelgrass, harmful algal blooms, and increases in incidence of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP). For example, the average harvested mussel contains: 0.8–1.2% nitrogen and 0.06–0.08% phosphorus Removal of enhanced biomass can not only combat eutrophication and also support the local economy by providing product for animal feed or compost. In Sweden, environmental agencies utilize mussel farming as a management tool in improving water quality conditions, where mussel bioextraction efforts have been evaluated and shown to be a highly effective source of fertilizer and animal feed In the U.S., researchers are investigating potential to model the use of shellfish and seaweed for nutrient mitigation in certain areas of Long Island Sound. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=377720 | 984,972 |
1,428,116 | At the same time that Brown was campaigning against alternating current a New York state bill replacing hanging with electrocution was signed into law (June 4, 1888) and set to go into effect on January 1, 1889. A Buffalo, New York dentist named Alfred P. Southwick had been developing a method using a device similar to a dental chair, an execution device referred to as the electric chair. The law did not specify the type of current to use, or the means, so the New York Medico-Legal Society, an informal society composed of doctors and lawyers, was given the task of working out the details. Committee head Frederick Peterson, a neurologist who had assisted in the dog electrocutions at Columbia College, enlisted Brown's services as a consultant. Brown set up an experiment at Edison's West Orange laboratory on December 5, 1888 with members of the press, members of the Medico-Legal Society, the chairman of the death penalty commission, and Thomas Edison looking on. Brown used alternating current for all of his tests on animals larger than a human, including 4 calves and a lame horse, all dispatched with 750 volts of AC. Based on these results the Medico-Legal Society recommended the use of 1,000-1,500 volts of alternating current for executions and newspapers noted the AC used was half the voltage used in the power lines over the streets of American cities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=301985 | 1,427,312 |
1,097,998 | From the perspective of evolutionary psychology the experiences and behaviors associated with love can be investigated in terms of how they have been shaped by human evolution. For example, it has been suggested that human language has been selected during evolution as a type of "mating signal" that allows potential mates to judge reproductive fitness. Miller described evolutionary psychology as a starting place for further research: "Cognitive neuroscience could try to localize courtship adaptations in the brain. Most importantly, we need much better observations concerning real-life human courtship, including the measurable aspects of courtship that influence mate choice, the reproductive (or at least sexual) consequences of individual variation in those aspects, and the social-cognitive and emotional mechanisms of falling in love." Since Darwin's time there have been similar speculations about the evolution of human interest in music also as a potential signaling system for attracting and judging the fitness of potential mates. It has been suggested that the human capacity to experience love has been evolved as a signal to potential mates that the partner will be a good parent and be likely to help pass genes to future generations. Biologist Jeremy Griffith defines love as 'unconditional selflessness', suggesting utterly cooperative instincts developed in modern humans' ancestor, "Australopithecus". Studies of bonobos (a great ape previously referred to as a pygmy chimpanzee) are frequently cited in support of a cooperative past in humans. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4318932 | 1,097,438 |
1,500,039 | Although other reflectivity techniques (in particular optical reflectivity, x-ray reflectometry) operate using the same general principles, neutron measurements are advantageous in a few significant ways. Most notably, since the technique probes nuclear contrast, rather than electron density, it is more sensitive for measuring some elements, especially lighter elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.). Sensitivity to isotopes also allows contrast to be greatly (and selectively) enhanced for some systems of interest using isotopic substitution, and multiple experiments that differ only by isotopic substitution can be used to resolve the phase problem that is general to scattering techniques. Finally, neutrons are highly penetrating and typically non-perturbing: which allows for great flexibility in sample environments, and the use of delicate sample materials (e.g., biological specimens). By contrast x-ray exposure may damage some materials, and laser light can modify some materials (e.g. photoresists). Also, optical techniques may include ambiguity due to optical anisotropy (birefringence), which complementary neutron measurements can resolve. Dual polarisation interferometry is one optical method which provides analogous results to neutron reflectometry at comparable resolution although the underpinning mathematical model is somewhat simpler, i.e. it can only derive a thickness (or birefringence) for a uniform layer density. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6093957 | 1,499,194 |
337,039 | Su-30MKI aerodynamic configuration is a longitudinal triplane with relaxed stability. The canard increases the aircraft lift ability and deflects automatically to allow high angle of attack (AoA) flights allowing it to perform Pugachev's Cobra. The integral aerodynamic configuration combined with thrust vectoring results in extremely capable manoeuvrability, taking off and landing characteristics. This high agility allows rapid deployment of weapons in any direction as desired by the crew. The canard notably assists in controlling the aircraft at large angles-of-attack and bringing it to a level flight condition. The aircraft has a fly-by-wire (FBW) with quadruple redundancy. Dependent on flight conditions, signals from the control stick position transmitter or the FCS may be coupled to remote control amplifiers and combined with feedback signals from acceleration sensors and rate gyros. The resultant control signals are coupled to the high-speed electro-hydraulic actuators of the elevators, rudders and the canard. The output signals are compared and, if the difference is significant, the faulty channel is disconnected. FBW is based on a stall warning and barrier mechanism which prevents stalls through dramatic increases of control stick pressure, allowing a pilot to effectively control the aircraft without exceeding the angle of attack and acceleration limitations. Although the maximum angle of attack is limited by the canards, the FBW acts as an additional safety mechanism. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3793034 | 336,860 |
954,165 | Another example, the potentiometric biosensor, (potential produced at zero current) gives a logarithmic response with a high dynamic range. Such biosensors are often made by screen printing the electrode patterns on a plastic substrate, coated with a conducting polymer and then some protein (enzyme or antibody) is attached. They have only two electrodes and are extremely sensitive and robust. They enable the detection of analytes at levels previously only achievable by HPLC and LC/MS and without rigorous sample preparation. All biosensors usually involve minimal sample preparation as the biological sensing component is highly selective for the analyte concerned. The signal is produced by electrochemical and physical changes in the conducting polymer layer due to changes occurring at the surface of the sensor. Such changes can be attributed to ionic strength, pH, hydration and redox reactions, the latter due to the enzyme label turning over a substrate. Field effect transistors, in which the gate region has been modified with an enzyme or antibody, can also detect very low concentrations of various analytes as the binding of the analyte to the gate region of the FET cause a change in the drain-source current. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=480700 | 953,660 |
279,685 | Nevertheless, Goddard had some influence on European rocketry pioneers like Hermann Oberth and his student Max Valier, at least as proponent of the idea of space rocketry and source of inspiration, although each side developed their technology and its scientific basis independently. In Europe the rocketeers were mainly theorists and visionaries. Goddard was the foremost experimenter, and his report was responsible for encouraging many to build their own rockets. Eventually Fritz von Opel, an automobile manufacturer in Germany, was instrumental in popularizing solid fuel rockets as a means of propulsion for vehicles. In the 1920s, he initiated together with Max Valier, co-founder of the "Verein für Raumschiffahrt", the world's first rocket program, Opel-RAK, leading to speed records for automobiles, rail vehicles and the first manned rocket-powered flight in September of 1929. Months earlier in 1928, one of his rocket-powered prototypes, the Opel RAK2, reached piloted by von Opel himself at the AVUS speedway in Berlin a record speed of 238 km/h, watched by 3000 spectators and world media, among them Fritz Lang, director of "Metropolis" and "Woman in the Moon." A world record for rail vehicles was reached with RAK3 and a top speed of 256 km/h. After these successes, von Opel piloted the world's first public rocket-powered flight using Opel RAK.1, a rocket plane designed by Julius Hatry. World media reported on these efforts, including UNIVERSAL Newsreel of the US, causing as "Raketen-Rummel" or "Rocket Rumble" immense global public excitement, and in particular in Germany, where among others Wernher von Braun was highly influenced. The Great Depression led to an end of the Opel-RAK program, but Max Valier continued the efforts. After switching from solid-fuel to liquid-fuel rockets, he died in May 1930 in an explosion while testing and is considered the first fatality of the dawning space age. As an 18-year-old von Braun also became a student of Oberth and eventually the head of the Nazi era rocket program. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=210597 | 279,535 |
516,511 | DRDO is working on a slew of directed energy weapons (DEWs). LASTEC has identified DEWs, along with space security, cyber-security and hypersonic vehicles as focus areas in the next 15 years. The aim is to develop laser-based weapons, deployed on airborne as well as seaborne platforms, which can intercept missiles soon after they are launched towards India in the boost phase itself. These will be part of the ballistic missile defence system being currently developed by DRDO. LASTEC is developing a 25-kilowatt laser system to hit a missile during its terminal phase at a distance of 5–7 km. LASTEC is also working on a vehicle-mounted gas dynamic laser-based DEW system, under project Aditya, which should be ready in three years. Project Aditya is a technology demonstrator to prove beam control technology. Ultimately, solid-state lasers would be used. For US President Donald Trump visit to India in 2020, DRDO deployed the LASTEC developed vehicle-mounted gas dynamic laser-based DEW system for counter-drone operations in Ahmedabad after completion of successful trial on 21 February 2020. It can detect, identify and destroy low flying objects of smaller size carrying explosives or arms and ammunitions. The Aditya directed energy weapon system was first deployed during the visit of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro on Indian Republic Day 2020. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=70364617 | 516,242 |
1,780,573 | On Selection Sunday, Gonzaga received a one seed in the 2013 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament for the first time in school history and was set to play Southern on March 21 at EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Jaguars previously played against the Bulldogs in an opening game for the 2010–11 season, where Gonzaga routed Southern 117–72. Despite being routed a couple of seasons before, the Jaguars were only behind 34–31 at halftime. Olynyk scored 17 of his 21 points in the second half to help Gonzaga pull ahead. Despite this, Southern managed to tie the game at 56 with 3:45 left, but Gary Bell, Jr. would hit a three-pointer to make it 59–56. On the ensuing possession, Southern guard Derick Beltran hit two free throws to cut the deficit to one. However, Kevin Pangos would respond with a three-pointer to put the Zags ahead by four. YonDarius Johnson and Malcolm Miller had open looks on the next possession, but neither was able to convert. Pangos finished with 16 points and hit two free throws with 14.3 seconds left to seal the victory for Gonzaga. The team managed to avoid the upset and hold on for the 64–58 victory to advance to the Round of 32. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36171940 | 1,779,569 |
94,391 | The abundances of the noble gases in the universe decrease as their atomic numbers increase. Helium is the most common element in the universe after hydrogen, with a mass fraction of about 24%. Most of the helium in the universe was formed during Big Bang nucleosynthesis, but the amount of helium is steadily increasing due to the fusion of hydrogen in stellar nucleosynthesis (and, to a very slight degree, the alpha decay of heavy elements). Abundances on Earth follow different trends; for example, helium is only the third most abundant noble gas in the atmosphere. The reason is that there is no primordial helium in the atmosphere; due to the small mass of the atom, helium cannot be retained by the Earth's gravitational field. Helium on Earth comes from the alpha decay of heavy elements such as uranium and thorium found in the Earth's crust, and tends to accumulate in natural gas deposits. The abundance of argon, on the other hand, is increased as a result of the beta decay of potassium-40, also found in the Earth's crust, to form argon-40, which is the most abundant isotope of argon on Earth despite being relatively rare in the Solar System. This process is the basis for the potassium-argon dating method. Xenon has an unexpectedly low abundance in the atmosphere, in what has been called the "missing xenon problem"; one theory is that the missing xenon may be trapped in minerals inside the Earth's crust. After the discovery of xenon dioxide, research showed that Xe can substitute for Si in quartz. Radon is formed in the lithosphere by the alpha decay of radium. It can seep into buildings through cracks in their foundation and accumulate in areas that are not well ventilated. Due to its high radioactivity, radon presents a significant health hazard; it is implicated in an estimated 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States alone. Oganesson does not occur in nature and is instead created manually by scientists. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21140 | 94,350 |
472,172 | The "Wizardry" series was created for the Apple II at roughly the same time, in 1981. "Wizardry" featured a 3D, first-person view, an intuitive interface, party-based combat, and pre-constructed levels that encouraged players to draw their own maps. It allowed players to import characters from previous games, albeit with reduced experience levels, and introduced a moral alignment feature that limited the areas players could visit. The series was extremely difficult when compared to other RPGs of the time, possibly because they were modeled after pen-and-paper role-playing games of similar difficulty. "" (1986) in particular is considered one of the most difficult CRPGs ever created. It is unique in that the player controls the villain of the first game in an attempt to escape his prison dungeon and gain freedom in the above world. Unlike "Ultima", which evolved with each installment, the "Wizardry" series retained and refined the same style and core mechanics over time, and improved only its graphics and level design as the years progressed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32408640 | 471,936 |
1,484,234 | Tyr-Recombinases are reversible, while the Ser-Integrase is unidirectional. Of note is the way reversible Flp (a Tyr recombinase) integration/resolution is modulated by 48 bp (in place of 34 bp minimal) "FRT" versions: the extra 13 bp arm serves as a Flp "landing path" contributing to the formation of the synaptic complex, both in the context of Flp-INT and Flp-RMCE functions (see the respective equilibrium situations). While it is barely possible to prevent the (entropy-driven) reversion of integration in section A for Cre and hard to achieve for Flp, RMCE can be completed if the donor plasmid is provided at an excess due to the bimolecular character of both the forward- and the reverse reaction. Posing both "FRT" sites in an inverse manner will lead to an equilibrium of both orientations for the insert (green arrow). In contrast to Flp, the Ser integrase PhiC31 (bottom representations) leads to unidirectional integration, at least in the absence of an recombinase-directionality (RDF-)factor. Relative to Flp-RMCE, which requires two different ("heterospecific") "FRT"-spacer mutants, the reaction partner ("att"B) of the first reacting "att"P site is hit arbitrarily, such that there is no control over the direction the donor cassette enters the target (cf. the alternative products). Also different from Flp-RMCE, several distinct RMCE targets cannot be mounted in parallel, owing to the lack of heterospecific (non-crossinteracting) "att"P/"att"B combinations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4385154 | 1,483,397 |
1,293,078 | Kernel Flow is a wearable time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (TD-fNIRS) system which Kernel started demoing in spring 2021. fNIRs uses infrared light to measure changes in the oxygenation of blood, which is a proxy for neural activity. Kernel Flow is capable of achieving a 200 Hz sampling rate which is much faster than existing TD-fNIRS systems. The spatial resolution of f-NIRS is strongly limited by scattering, with most existing f-NIRS systems having resolutions > 2 cm. According to statements from the company, the Kernel flow achieves approximately 1 cm resolution. The helmet contains 52 modules which can be arranged in different configurations depending on the application. Each module contains a dual bandwidth (690 nm and 850 nm) laser source surrounded by 6 hexagonally arranged detectors. Each laser diode is built into an integrated circuit and surrounded by specialized circuitry that generates laser pulses that are less than 150 ps in duration. Laser power is limited to 5 mW and typical average power is below 1mW during normal operation. The system includes a subassembly with a microcontroller, amplifier, and 9-axis inertial measurement device. The system connects to a computer through a single USB-C cable that also is responsible for powering the device. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53691837 | 1,292,367 |
518,690 | The utricle contains mechanoreceptors called hair cells that distinguish between degrees of tilting of the head, thanks to their apical stereocilia set-up. These are covered by otoliths which, due to gravity, pull on the stereocilia and tilt them. Depending on whether the tilt is in the direction of the kinocilium or not, the resulting hair cell polarisation is excitatory (depolarising) or inhibitory (hyperpolarisation), respectively. Any orientation of the head causes a combination of stimulation to the utricles and saccules of the two ears. The brain interprets head orientation by comparing these inputs to each other and to other input from the eyes and stretch receptors in the neck, thereby detecting whether only the head is tilted or the entire body is tipping. The inertia of the otolithic membranes is especially important in detecting linear acceleration. Suppose you are sitting in a car at a stoplight and then begin to move. The otolithic membrane of the macula utriculi briefly lags behind the rest of the tissues, bends the stereocilia backward, and stimulates the cells. When you stop at the next light, the macula stops but the otolithic membrane keeps going for a moment, bending the stereocilia forward. The hair cells convert this pattern of stimulation to nerve signals, and the brain is thus advised of changes in your linear velocity. This signal to the vestibular nerve (which takes it to the brainstem) does not adapt with time. The effect of this is that, for example, an individual lying down to sleep will continue to detect that they are lying down hours later when they awaken. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=534487 | 518,421 |
257,251 | Within the virtual galaxy, the player can explore some 400 billion star systems complete with planets and moons that rotate and orbit in real time, reflecting dynamic day-night cycles. Around 150,000 of the game's star systems are taken from real astronomical data, while a few partially fictional planetary systems, which were created in "Frontier" and "First Encounters" before a significant number of exoplanets were discovered, are carried over. For example, none of the gas giants of the Fomalhaut system correspond with the detected properties of Fomalhaut b. A handful of entirely fictional systems named in the original "Elite", and also featured in later games, are included (e.g. the original starting system Lave). The remainder are procedurally generated according to scientific models. Players can dock their ships at space stations and outposts located throughout the galaxy in star systems to trade goods, purchase new spacecraft, re-arm their ship, effect repairs and do missions from Mission Boards. Players may also find lost cargo or encounter other ships while in flight by investigating Unidentified Signal Sources. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1895977 | 257,117 |
185,874 | Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic debilitating demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, caused by an autoimmune attack resulting in the progressive loss of myelin sheath on neuronal axons. The resultant decrease in the speed of signal transduction leads to a loss of functionality that includes both cognitive and motor impairment depending on the location of the lesion. The progression of MS occurs due to episodes of increasing inflammation, which is proposed to be due to the release of antigens such as myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein, myelin basic protein, and proteolipid protein, causing an autoimmune response. This sets off a cascade of signaling molecules that result in T cells, B cells, and Macrophages to cross the blood-brain barrier and attack myelin on neuronal axons leading to inflammation. Further release of antigens drives subsequent degeneration causing increased inflammation. Multiple sclerosis presents itself as a spectrum based on the degree of inflammation, a majority of patients experience early relapsing and remitting episodes of neuronal deterioration following a period of recovery. Some of these individuals may transition to a more linear progression of the disease, while about 15% of others begin with a progressive course on the onset of Multiple sclerosis. The inflammatory response contributes to the loss of the grey matter, and as a result current literature devotes itself to combatting the auto-inflammatory aspect of the disease. While there are several proposed causal links between EBV and the "HLA-DRB1*15:01" allele to the onset of MS – they may contribute to the degree of autoimmune attack and the resultant inflammation – they do not determine the onset of MS. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4464817 | 185,777 |
1,500,596 | The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology has its origins in a 1983 meeting in which chancellor John E. Cribbet, Theodore L. Brown, Mort Weir, Lewis Barron and Ned Goldwasser strategized about approaching private sources to fund new large-scale science projects and centers on the University of Illinois campus. Two committees were formed, chaired by William T. Greenough (psychology) and Greg Stillman (electrical and computer engineering) (later Karl Hess) to develop ideas for a broadly multidisciplinary research facility. Thomas Eugene Everhart, who succeeded Cribbet as chancellor in 1984, and Sarah Wasserman, assistant vice-chancellor for research, helped Brown and Weir to review and develop the final proposal. The committee reports were combined to propose an institute with two main divisions, a center for biology, behavior, and cognition, and another center for materials science, computers and computation. The institution's research program would explore intelligence in the broadest possible sense, extending "from artificial systems invented by man to natural systems found in the biological world". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1268483 | 1,499,751 |
1,881,411 | CO gases are only one of the most common gases to enter the atmosphere and circulate within several natural cycles essential to the preservation of life on a daily basis; however, there are a plethora of other harmful emissions that can be produced by industrial activity. These gaseous molecules negatively affect the phosphorus cycle, carbon cycle, water cycle, nitrogen cycle, and many others that keep ecosystems in check. Mycorrhizal fungi can be affected most heavily by the absorption of unnatural chemicals that can be found in the soils near man-made facilities such as factories, which give off many pollutants that can enter the ecosystem through many means, one of the worst being acid rain, which can precipitate sulfur and nitrogen oxides into the soils and harm or kill plants in its path. This is just one example of how extreme the harsh side effects of pollution can affect the environment, there is evidence that agricultural activities are also heavily affected by negative human influences. The advantage of having a mycorrhizal community in an agricultural setting is that the plants survive and obtain nutrients from their environment more easily. These mycorrhizae are indirectly and directly exposed to the same effects that human activity stresses upon their respective plants; the most common fungi being arbuscular mycorrhizae – specifically, the pollutants of the Earth's atmosphere. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=59393212 | 1,880,330 |
899,548 | Among the most prominent New College graduates are William Dudley, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Ambassador Nancy McEldowney, National Security Advisor to Vice President Harris; University of Pennsylvania law professor and vice provost Anita L. Allen, named to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues; the late mathematician and Fields medalist William Thurston; Margee Ensign, current president of Dickinson College and former president of American University of Nigeria; Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the ACLU and former civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; bestselling author of "Getting Things Done" David Allen (author); national MSNBC, NBC and Telemundo anchor José Díaz-Balart; founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies Rick Doblin; Emmy Award-winning TV writer/producer Carol Flint; former U.S. representative Lincoln Díaz-Balart; David M. Smolin, professor of law and director for Cumberland School of Law's Center for Biotechnology, Law, and Ethics; "Mother of Sharks" Melissa Cristina Márquez, a marine biologist and science communicator; academic and poet who was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry, Jackie Wang; and attorney Robert Bilott, whose work is the subject of the 2019 movie "Dark Waters". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=415907 | 899,073 |
259,199 | The first F-101A was delivered on 2 May 1957 to the 27th Strategic Fighter Wing, which transferred to TAC in July that year, replacing their F-84F Thunderstreak. The F-101A was powered by two Pratt & Whitney J57-P-13 turbojets, allowing good acceleration, climb-performance, ease in penetrating the sound barrier in level flight, and a maximum performance of Mach 1.52. The F-101's large internal fuel capacity allowed a range of approximately nonstop. The aircraft was fitted with an MA-7 fire-control radar for both air-to-air and air-to-ground use, augmented by a Low Altitude Bombing System (LABS) for delivering nuclear weapons, and was designed to carry a Mk 28 nuclear bomb. The original intended payload for the F-101A was the McDonnell Model 96 store, a large fuel/weapons pod similar in concept to that of the Convair B-58 Hustler, but was cancelled in March 1956 before the F-101 entered service. Other operational nuclear payloads included the Mk 7, Mk 43, and Mk 57 weapons. While theoretically capable of carrying conventional bombs, rockets, or Falcon air-to-air missiles, the Voodoo never used such weapons operationally. It was fitted with four 20mm M39 cannon, with one cannon often removed in service to make room for a TACAN beacon-receiver. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=222857 | 259,065 |
1,346,215 | The successful test of an atomic bomb represented an extraordinary scientific and technological achievement. Britain became the world's third nuclear power, reaffirming its status as a great power, but hopes that the United States would be sufficiently impressed to restore the Special Relationship were soon dashed. On 1 November 1952, the United States conducted Ivy Mike, the first successful test of a true thermonuclear device (also known as a hydrogen bomb). Due to its physical size and use of cryogenic liquid deuterium, it was not suitable for use as a deliverable weapon, but the Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 used a much smaller device with solid lithium deuteride. Boosted by the nuclear fusion reaction in lithium-7, the yield of was more than twice what had been expected, and indeed was the largest detonation the Americans would ever carry out. This resulted in widespread radioactive fallout that affected 236 Marshall Islanders, 28 Americans, and the 23 crewmen of a Japanese fishing boat, the "Daigo Fukuryū Maru" ("Lucky Dragon No. 5"). Meanwhile, the Soviet Union tested Joe 4, a boosted fission weapon with a yield of on 12 August 1953. This was followed by Joe 19, a true two-stage thermonuclear weapon on 20 November 1954. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52018264 | 1,345,474 |
148,656 | "Spacewar!" was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time before migrating to early microcomputer systems in the 1970s. Just as it was during development, the game was public domain and the code was available to anyone with access to it or who contacted Russell; no attempt was made to sell it commercially, as the programming community was too small to support any commercial industry. It spread initially both by people bringing copies of the code to other installations as well as by programmers recreating the game with their own code. Early installations included the PDP-1 at Bolt, Beranek, & Newman, which also recreated the gamepads; an installation by Russell on a PDP-1 at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Stanford University in 1963; and the University of Minnesota, where MIT graduate Albert Kuhfield in 1967–68 recreated the game for the CDC 3100, and submitted a description to "Analog Science Fiction and Fact", published in 1971. The Stanford installation was so popular that in 1966 the researchers created a special "Spacewar mode" for time-sharing computer resources on their PDP-6 so that games could be played on it while research programs were also being run. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of "Spacewar!" blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer", and Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5482854 | 148,595 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.