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1,636,516 | In October 2014, a post was made on the game's Facebook page that stated "Eight years ago, we first announced "Edge of Twilight"... When we first generated the idea for "Edge of Twilight", the video game industry was in a time of transition from the existing generation (PlayStation 2 and Xbox) consoles to the so-called next-gen consoles that occupy the market today (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360). And now, the video game world is moving from current the next-gen consoles to Xbox One and PlayStation 4." And went on to state that the "Australian team had to disband due to legal issues in 2009, heaving the title over an Asian company." It was a huge disappointment to the team since many of them "had to sacrifice their time, breaking up with their lovers, getting committed to mental hospitals, taking drugs, placed under arrest by the police, falling from balcony, getting deported and even getting divorced - all resulting from the stress from the game’s development." Toward the end of 2010, they were able to partner with an outstanding investment company. The team wanted to start working on the title right away, but the board wanted something small first which led to the creation of "Edge of Twilight - Athyr Above". Fuzzyeyes stated "We have started building technologies for clients and government parties. However, "Edge of Twilight" is, and always will be, our biggest goal... and we are still doing everything we can to bring this title out. Every day, we are hoping to share the progress of development to everyone. However we are not allowed to talk about it until publishers give us permission. All we can say for now is we are at the final count down." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38054782 | 1,635,591 |
1,248,618 | Implants that aim to delay spinal fusion and to allow more spinal growth in young children is the gold standard for surgical treatment of early onset scoliosis. Surgery without fusion can be divided into three principles: distraction of the entire spine, compression of the short segment of spine, and guided-growth techniques. Distraction-based systems include Vertical, Expandable Prosthetic Titanium Ribs (VEPTR) & growing rods. The concept uses distraction to create additional soft-tissue space in-between the vertebrae, for the bone to later grow into. Its universal application was thrusted through the use of traditional growth rods which required repeated invasive surgeries every 6–12 months for the sustenance of growth, via distraction. Nowadays developed countries only use MAGEC (MAGnetic Expansion Control) rods to non-invasively lengthen the spine. In contrast, developing and under-developed countries still use traditional growing rods, which require invasive surgery every 6–12 months, because of high initial cost associated with procurement of MAGEC rods. Compression-based system include tethering using a flexible rope-like implant and are relatively new to receive FDA approval. Guided-growth technique include SHILLA (named after a hotel in Korea, where the concept was initiated). SHILLA has the advantage of being one-time surgery and is technologically less demanding compared with MAGEC rod. However, there are still two major disadvantages of using SHILLA: loss of correction and need for osteotomies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51305509 | 1,247,942 |
169,907 | The threat of the Soviet Navy building hundreds of Type XXI-derived submarines (eventually the 215-strong and dozens of others) in the Atlantic led the U.S. Navy to adapt submarines to specifically hunt other submarines, a radically new role for the 1950s. Concluding that this role did not require a fast or deep-diving submarine (this line of thought would quickly change with the advent of nuclear power), seven "Gato"s were converted to SSKs (hunter-killer submarines) between 1951 and 1953, joining three purpose-built "K-1"-class SSKs entering service at that time. The "Gato" class was chosen because large numbers were available in the reserve fleet should rapid mobilization become necessary, and the deeper-diving classes were more suitable for GUPPY rather than SSK conversions. A streamlined GUPPY-style sail was installed, a large sonar array was wrapped around the bow (losing two torpedo tubes in the process), the boats were extensively silenced including the removal of the two forward diesel engines, and they received a snorkel. was converted under project SCB 58 as the test boat for the concept, having her sonar array at the forward end of the sail instead of the better position at the bow. The other boats in the program included , , , , , and . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=170579 | 169,817 |
385,317 | The development of microwave technology during World War II, such as the klystron and magnetron tubes and parabolic antennas, made radiative (far-field) methods practical for the first time, and the first long-distance wireless power transmission was achieved in the 1960s by William C. Brown. In 1964, Brown invented the rectenna which could efficiently convert microwaves to DC power, and in 1964 demonstrated it with the first wireless-powered aircraft, a model helicopter powered by microwaves beamed from the ground. A major motivation for microwave research in the 1970s and 1980s was to develop a solar power satellite. Conceived in 1968 by Peter Glaser, this would harvest energy from sunlight using solar cells and beam it down to Earth as microwaves to huge rectennas, which would convert it to electrical energy on the electric power grid. In landmark 1975 experiments as technical director of a JPL/Raytheon program, Brown demonstrated long-range transmission by beaming 475 W of microwave power to a rectenna a mile away, with a microwave to DC conversion efficiency of 54%. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he and Robert Dickinson transmitted 30 kW DC output power across 1.5 km with 2.38 GHz microwaves from a 26 m dish to a 7.3 x 3.5 m rectenna array. The incident-RF to DC conversion efficiency of the rectenna was 80%. In 1983 Japan launched Microwave Ionosphere Nonlinear Interaction Experiment (MINIX), a rocket experiment to test transmission of high power microwaves through the ionosphere. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=570662 | 385,122 |
1,583,231 | Astrocytes form gap junctions and are closely associated with the vasculature and its basal lamina in the adult SVZ and subsequently in the RMS. They may serve as an interface to modulate influences of endothelial and circulation-derived factors as well as the availability of cytokines and growth factors in this system. In addition, astrocytes derived from the neurogenic hippocampus and SVZ, but not from the non-neurogenic spinal cord, promote proliferation and neuronal fate commitment of multipotent adult neural stem cells in culture, suggesting a role in the RMS. Astrocytes express a number of secreted and membrane-attached factors both "in vitro" and "in vivo" that are known to regulate proliferation and fate specification of adult neural precursors as well as neuronal migration, maturation, and synapse formation. In the adult SVZ, astrocytes express Robo receptors and regulate the rapid migration of SLIT1-expressing neuroblasts through the RMS. Additionally, it has been proposed that the neuroblasts themselves play a role in modulating the astrocytes through Slit-Robo interactions. In the absence of Slit, astrocytic processes do not align correctly, or create the "tubes", instead running across the migrating neurons. Adult SVZ astrocytes also appear to release glutamate to regulate the survival of neuroblasts. Unique to the adult SVZ, ependymal cells lining the ventricular wall are in close association with neural precursors and their progeny, acting like a shield to protect the "neurogenic niche", a zone in which stem cells are retained after embryonic development for the production of new cells of the nervous system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2904663 | 1,582,341 |
850,212 | Many of the criticisms directed towards military simulations derive from an incorrect application of them as a predictive and analytical tool. The outcome supplied by a model relies to a greater or lesser extent on human interpretation and therefore should not be regarded as providing a 'gospel' truth. However, whilst this is generally understood by most game theorists and analysts, it can be tempting for a layman—for example, a politician who needs to present a 'black and white' situation to his electorate—to settle on an interpretation that supports his preconceived position. Tom Clancy, in his novel "Red Storm Rising", illustrated this problem when one of his characters, attempting to persuade the Soviet Politburo that the political risks were acceptable as NATO would not be in a position to react in the face of political uncertainty caused by a division of opinion between the Allies, used a political wargame result as evidence the results of a simulation carried out to model just such an event. It is revealed in the text that there were in fact three sets of results from the simulation; a best-, intermediate- and worst-case outcome. The advocate of war chose to present only the best-case outcome, thus distorting the results to support his case. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10280894 | 849,760 |
470,086 | More than just the events were changed during the 1998–99 season—the style of study required of students changed. Prior to that season, students had performed their own research for each event, and test writers did not have to base their questions on material USAD published. However, after a policy change at the beginning of the 1999–2000 competition year, test writers were required to base the tests on official USAD materials. After the change in policy, scores vastly increased across the country. That year at Nationals, James E. Taylor High School had the highest team score yet seen at the competition. The following season, USAD once again altered their testing policies; 50% of test questions were to come from USAD published "Resource Guides" and 50% were to come from unspecified sources. Economics focused on business organizations and profiles in individual enterprise rather than macroeconomics and microeconomics as it had for the previous 19 years. A decrease in scores followed these changes; the national winner that year, El Camino Real High School, scored 5,923 fewer points than James E. Taylor High School had the previous year. The following year, USAD settled on an organization of test materials that it would use for almost a full decade, with a mixture of questions from the provided material and independent research. A number of curriculum changes were reversed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=562034 | 469,850 |
721,182 | The first commercially practical scuba rebreather was designed and built by the diving engineer Henry Fleuss in 1878, while working for Siebe Gorman in London. His self contained breathing apparatus consisted of a rubber mask connected to a breathing bag, with an estimated 50–60% oxygen supplied from a copper tank and carbon dioxide scrubbed by passing it through a bundle of rope yarn soaked in a solution of caustic potash, the system giving a dive duration of up to about three hours. Fleuss tested his device in 1879 by spending an hour submerged in a water tank, then one week later by diving to a depth of in open water, on which occasion he was slightly injured when his assistants abruptly pulled him to the surface. This apparatus was first used under operational conditions in 1880 by Alexander Lambert, the lead diver on the Severn Tunnel construction project, who was able to travel in the darkness to close several submerged sluice doors in the tunnel; this had defeated the best efforts of standard divers due to extremely long distance, along which their air supply hoses became fouled on submerged debris, and the strong water currents in the workings. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39194607 | 720,802 |
2,147,850 | The existence (or potential existence) of such large numbers of molecular species is a combinatorial phenomenon: It arises from a relatively small set of features or modifications (such as post-translational modification or complex formation) that combine to dictate the state of the entire molecule or complex, in the same way that the existence of just a few choices in a coffee shop (small, medium or large, with or without milk, decaf or not, extra shot of espresso) quickly leads to a large number of possible beverages (24 in this case; each additional binary choice will double that number). Although it is difficult for us to grasp the total numbers of possible combinations, it is usually not conceptually difficult to understand the (much smaller) set of features or modifications and the effect each of them has on the function of the biomolecule. The rate at which a molecule undergoes a particular reaction will usually depend mainly on a single feature or a small subset of features. It is the presence or absence of those features that dictates the reaction rate. The reaction rate is the same for two molecules that differ only in features which do not affect this reaction. Thus, the number of parameters will be much smaller than the number of reactions. (In the coffee shop example, adding an extra shot of espresso will cost 40 cent, no matter what size the beverage is and whether or not it has milk in it). It is such "local rules" that are usually discovered in laboratory experiments. Thus, a multi-state model can be conceptualised in terms of combinations of modular features and local rules. This means that even a model that can account for a vast number of molecular species and reactions is not necessarily conceptually complex. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43966823 | 2,146,619 |
162,110 | By 1850 Britain had a well integrated, well engineered system that provided fast, on-time, inexpensive movement of freight and people to every city and most rural districts. Freight rates had plunged to a penny a ton mile for coal. The system directly or indirectly employed tens of thousands of engineers, conductors, mechanics, repairmen, accountants, station agents and managers, bringing a new level of business sophistication that could be applied to many other industries, and helping many small and large businesses to expand their role in the industrial revolution. Thus railways had a tremendous impact on industrialization. By lowering transportation costs, they reduced costs for all industries moving supplies and finished goods, and they increased demand for the production of all the inputs needed for the railway system itself. The system kept growing; by 1880, there were 13,500 locomotives which each carried 97,800 passengers a year, or 31,500 tons of freight. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33643110 | 162,025 |
54,576 | When designing the Mercury spacecraft, NASA had considered using a nitrogen/oxygen mixture to reduce the fire risk near launch, but rejected it based on a number of considerations. First, a pure oxygen atmosphere is comfortably breathable by humans at , greatly reducing the pressure load on the spacecraft in the vacuum of space. Second, nitrogen used with the in-flight pressure reduction carried the risk of decompression sickness (known as "the bends"). But the decision to eliminate the use of any gas but oxygen was crystalized when a serious accident occurred on April 21, 1960, in which McDonnell Aircraft test pilot G. B. North passed out and was seriously injured when testing a Mercury cabin / spacesuit atmosphere system in a vacuum chamber. The problem was found to be nitrogen-rich (oxygen-poor) air leaking from the cabin into his spacesuit feed. North American Aviation had suggested using an oxygen/nitrogen mixture for Apollo, but NASA overruled this. The pure oxygen design was judged to be safer, less complicated, and lighter in weight. In his monograph "Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions", Deputy Administrator Seamans wrote that NASA's worst mistake in engineering judgment was not running a fire test on the command module before the plugs-out test. In the first episode of the 2009 BBC documentary series "NASA: Triumph and Tragedy", Jim McDivitt said that NASA had no idea how a 100% oxygen atmosphere would influence burning. Similar remarks by other astronauts were expressed in the 2007 documentary film "In the Shadow of the Moon". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1965 | 54,553 |
1,583,681 | The plan to set up a medical school on the Gold Coast was drawn up after the establishment of the Korle Bu Hospital in 1919 at the time, Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg. The idea was abandoned after Guggisberg left office. There was renewed interest in this venture in 1951. At the behest of the Gold Coast colonial administration and the University College of the Gold Coast, a technical team from the University of London visited the Gold Coast to assess the scheme and specifications for staffing and facilities that would be required fully operationalise a medical school. In 1952, a government-approved commission recommended the postponement of the establishment of medical school indefinitely. In 1955, the issue was revisited and the colonial government invited the University College of the Gold Coast and the Kumasi College of Technology to examine the options to start a medical school. It was decided medical courses would be introduced in a step-by-step fashion, as originally espoused by the University of London delegation in 1951. In 1956, the University Council Committee under the leadership of the institution's first principal, David Balme, was formed to suggest other avenues for founding the school. The recommendations of this committee included an annual enrollment of 20 to 25 students, establishment of four pre-clinical departments at the University College of the Gold Coast, Legon and the upgrade of the Korle Bu Hospital to a teaching hospital with its autonomous management board. By 1960, the year Ghana became a republic, there was still no pathway for implementation as Korle Bu was not equipped for clinical training and funds were unavailable for its expansion. The Nkrumah government sought technical and financial assistance from the Kennedy administration. The US government appointed a team led by physician, Paul Connerlly to review all previous assessments. This team suggested the establishment of a "National Medical and Health Training Centre" under which the medical school would function. The government accepted these recommendations. In 1962, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) recommended that the National Medical and Health Training Centre should have these subsidiaries: a medical school, a school of nursing; a dental school; a school of medical technology; a post graduate school; a research facilities centre. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44117210 | 1,582,791 |
744,611 | When multiple assays measure the same target their results and utility may or may not be comparable depending on the natures of the assay and their methodology, reliability etc. Such comparisons are possible through study of general quality attributes of the assays e.g. principles of measurement (including identification, amplification and detection), dynamic range of detection (usually the range of linearity of the "standard curve"), analytic sensitivity, functional sensitivity, analytic specificity, positive, negative predictive values, turn around time i.e. time taken to finish a whole cycle from the preanalytic steps till the end of the last post analytic step (report dispatch/transmission), throughput i.e. number of assays done per unit time (usually expressed as per hour) etc. Organizations or laboratories that perform Assays for professional purposes e.g. medical diagnosis and prognostics, environmental analysis, forensic proceeding, pharmaceutical research and development must undergo well regulated quality assurance procedures including method validation, regular calibration, analytical quality control, proficiency testing, test accreditation, test licensing and must document appropriate certifications from the relevant regulating bodies in order to establish the reliability of their assays, especially to remain legally acceptable and accountable for the quality of the assay results and also to convince customers to use their assay commercially/professionally. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=496309 | 744,217 |
117,147 | In 1966, Pitt was designated by Pennsylvania as a state-related university. As such, Pitt receives public funds ($154.3 million in fiscal year 2016) covering about 7% of its operating budget, and offers reduced tuition to Pennsylvania residents. Pitt retains independent control, but is typically categorized as a public university. Upon affiliation with the state, subsidized tuition led to a massive influx of new students and rapid expansion of Pitt's size and scope. In the 1970s, Pitt's football team returned to greatness with a national championship season in 1976 led by Hall of Fame running back Tony Dorsett and continued success in the 1980s with players such as Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino. In the 1980s, significant medical research in the field of organ transplantation was conducted by Thomas Starzl, establishing Pitt as the world leader in the field of organ transplantation. In 1991, chancellor Wesley Posvar retired after 24 years in office. His administration is best known for elimination of the university's debt from its 1960s financial crisis and for increasing the school's prestige and endowment. Under Posvar, Pitt's operating budget grew sevenfold to $630 million and its endowment tripled to $257 million. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=239870 | 117,102 |
467,510 | Telemetry indicated that Agena staging had taken place on schedule at T+300 seconds. The Agena continued transmitting signals until T+436 seconds, when all telemetry ceased. Hidden behind clouds, the Atlas's B-2 engine gimbaled hard to right starting at T+120 seconds and remained fixed in that position, flipping the launch vehicle 216° around and sending it back towards Cape Kennedy. This rotation had made it impossible for ground guidance to lock on. Radar stations in the Bahamas tracked it heading north and descending. Vehicle stability was gradually regained following BECO, however it had pitched approximately 231° from its intended flight path. Both vehicles plunged into the Atlantic Ocean downrange. The Agena's engine did not activate since the proper altitude and velocity had not been attained, preventing the guidance system from sending the start command. While the exact cause of the engine gimbal control loss was not found, telemetry indicated that a short-to-ground occurred in the circuit for the servoamplifier output command signal, which may have been caused by cryogenic leakage in the thrust section. Substantiating this theory were abnormally low thrust section temperatures starting at T+65 seconds. The source of the cryogenic leakage was not identified. The loss of the lock on the ground prevented normal engine cutoff signals from being transmitted to the Atlas; BECO was generated by the staging backup accelerometer, SECO at T+273 seconds due to LOX depletion, and VECO and Agena staging from a backup command generated by the missile programmer. Aside from the flight control system, all Atlas systems functioned properly. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=299033 | 467,275 |
1,825,519 | The campaign began in 1990 with a donation of $50,000 by Vector Magnetics, Inc., an Ithaca technology firm. In October 1990, the board, under chair Bruce Thompson, hired registered professional engineer and geologist, Dr. Charles Trautmann, as executive director. The project was announced in February 1991 at a party at Rock Stream Studios, then at 235 Cherry St. in Ithaca, that was attended by 500 individuals and highlighted by presentations by Mayor Benjamin Nichols, Assemblyman Marty Luster, State Senator Jim Seward, Congressman Matt McHugh, Cornell President Emeritus Dale Corson, Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, and Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan. Trautmann and Thompson were able to secure pledges from several donors for $250,000 to move the project forward. Under their leadership, the Sciencenter board, staff, and volunteers developed refined architectural plans, formulated a business plan, and laid the groundwork for a $1 million fundraising campaign. The proposed building would be about in area and would have an adjacent outdoor science park. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17460553 | 1,824,481 |
2,196,089 | Observations of the solar eclipse of September 21, 1941, in Kazakhstan were carried out by seven expeditions, which included astronomers, physicists and geophysicists from Moscow and Leningrad. In light of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, it was decided to stay in Kazakhstan and join the evacuated scientists in Alma-Ata. So the team of the Research Institute of Astronomy and Physics was formed, created a few weeks later at the suggestion of Vasily Fesenkov. The building of the institute was built after the war by Japanese prisoners. The first searches for a site for the construction of a large observatory with a good astroclimate began in 1943. In the same year, several scientists studying the city found an ideal place for observation near Almaty - the Stone Plateau, which was 1450 meters above sea level. Agrophysicist Vasily Fesenkov and founder Gavriil Tikhov played the roles of the chief project managers. Assistance to scientists and support was provided by Kanysh Satpayev. Today, the Institute of Astrophysics conducts research in 12 areas of astronomy. Temporary expeditions worked on the Kamensk plateau, in Butakovka and in the vicinity of Talgar. In the second half of 1945, the site ( from Alma-Ata at an altitude of above sea level) and the project of the observatory were chosen, and in March 1946 a government decree on the construction was adopted. The construction itself on the Kamenskoe plateau began in 1947. Until 1950 the observatory was called "Mountain Astrophysical Observatory", and since 1950 the name "Astrophysical Institute" has become official, now bearing the name of its founder - Academician V.G. Fesenkov. Now the observatory has four telescopes, which are used to observe galaxies, stars, planets and geostationary satellites. The observatory is located on the territory of the institute, located on the Kamenskoye plateau, within the city. Periodically in the literature there is the name "Alma-Ata Observatory", and the bus stop is called "Observatory". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=68777865 | 2,194,838 |
11,902 | In the future, the Internet of things may be a non-deterministic and open network in which auto-organized or intelligent entities (web services, SOA components) and virtual objects (avatars) will be interoperable and able to act independently (pursuing their own objectives or shared ones) depending on the context, circumstances or environments. Autonomous behavior through the collection and reasoning of context information as well as the object's ability to detect changes in the environment (faults affecting sensors) and introduce suitable mitigation measures constitutes a major research trend, clearly needed to provide credibility to the IoT technology. Modern IoT products and solutions in the marketplace use a variety of different technologies to support such context-aware automation, but more sophisticated forms of intelligence are requested to permit sensor units and intelligent cyber-physical systems to be deployed in real environments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12057519 | 11,897 |
533,898 | The idea for an automated external defibrillator was first advanced in the 1970s by Archibald Diack (1907 – 1993), a surgeon in Portland, Oregon. Diack and his team developed a portable unit that could diagnose an abnormal heart rhythm and deliver either a defibrillatory current or a pacing pulse, as indicated by the internal logic circuit. The device was produced by the Cardiac Resuscitator Corporation and marketed as the "Heart-Aid". It was designed for temporary use by laypeople in emergency situations before professional care could be administered. The Heart-Aid utilized a plastic airway with an embedded electrode. An electrical current was transmitted from the capacitor, through the plastic airway device, to an electrode placed over the sternum. There was also a breath detector, which was a safeguard to prevent shocking people who were breathing. It included printed instructions and diagrams for the rescuer to properly apply the electrodes, as well as a speech synthesis chip to give verbal instructions to the rescuer. By the late 1980s, the small company had been purchased by Emerson Radio Corporation, and other manufacturers soon entered the field. Current models use electrode pads attached to the chest. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9543863 | 533,619 |
791,005 | In 2008, Peyer "et al.", described a new species of "Postosuchus", "P. alisonae" that was discovered by two UNC undergrad students, Brian Coffey and Marco Brewer in 1992 in Triangle Brick Co. Quarry, Durham County, North Carolina. The remains were prepared and reconstructed between 1994 and 1998 by the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of North Carolina. The specific name is in reference to Alison L. Chambers, who worked to popularize paleontology in North Carolina. The skeleton of "P. alisonae" consists of a few cranial bones, seven neck, one back, and four tail vertebrae, ribs, gastralia ("belly ribs"), chevrons, bony scutes, much of the shoulder girdles, most of the forelimbs except the left wrist and hand, most of the hindlimbs except for the thigh bones, and pieces from the hip. Moreover, the well-preserved remains of "P. alisonae" shed new light on parts of "Postosuchus" anatomy, which were previously not well known. Specifically, the differences between the manus bones of "P. kirkpatricki" and "P. alisonae" confirm the chimera theory (associated fossils belonging to different animals) suggested by Long and Murry. The holotype specimen of "P. alisonae" (UNC 15575) is also unusual in its preservation of gut contents: bones from at least four other animals, including a partial skeleton of an aetosaur, a snout, coracoid, and humerus of the traversodontid cynodont "Plinthogomphodon", two phalanges from a dicynodont, and a possible temnospondyl bone. Furthermore, the "Postosuchus" was positioned on top of a skeleton of the sphenosuchian "Dromicosuchus", which included tooth marks on the skull and neck. "P. alisonae" represents the largest suchian reptile recovered from the quarry and the first articulated specimen of 'rauisuchian' archosaur found in eastern North America. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2322181 | 790,580 |
875,104 | In his history of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, Christopher Bellamy argues that if either side was going to break the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of gas and bacteriological warfare, then 1942 was the most likely year. This conclusion is not surprising, since it was precisely at this moment, that both the fate of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich hung precariously in the balance during the build-up to, and the outcome of, the Battle of Stalingrad. In his account of the Soviet BW programme, Alibek, a former senior manager of "Biopreparat", raises the intriguing possibility that in the late summer of 1942 the Red Army engaged in the deliberate aerosol dissemination of "Francisella tularensis" (the causative agent of tularaemia) against German panzer troops near Stalingrad. However, a number of prominent scholars have disputed Alibek's version of events. Chief among these is Erhardt Geissler who notes that tularaemia is endemic in the region and in any case a large outbreak occurred during the winter of 1941-1942. He points to evidence that infected rodents were the key to the large-scale outbreaks and that inhalationary tularaemia may have resulted from inhalation of dust from contaminated straw in matresses. Crucially, Geissler notes that there are no contemporary accounts by the German army or intelligence services regarding the use of "F. tularensis" as a biological weapon at Stalingrad. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11564525 | 874,642 |
1,287,191 | Potential injuries to the brain include but are not limited to stroke, oxygen deprivation, blunt force trauma, and surgical injuries. When patients have lesions on their brain that develop as a result of injury or illness, such as multiple sclerosis or epilepsy, it is possible that they may have impaired object recognition which can manifest in the form of many different agnosias. Similar deficits have also been observed adults that have suffered blunt force trauma, strokes, severe carbon monoxide poisoning as well as in adults that have surgical damage following removal of tumors. Deficits have also been observed in children with types of epilepsy that do not lead to the formation of lesions. It is believed that in these cases the seizures cause a functional disruption that is capable of interfering with the processing of objects. Regions that specifically lead to deficits in object recognition when a lesion is present include the right lateral fusiform gyrus and the ventrolateral or ventromedial occipito-temporal cortex. These structures have all been identified as being crucial to the processing of shape and contour information, which is the basis for object recognition. Although people with damage to these structures are not able to properly recognize objects, they are still capable of discerning the movement of objects. Only lesions in the parietal lobe have been associated with deficits in identifying the location of an object. Although there is strong evidence to support that damage to the above-mentioned areas leads to deficits in object recognition it is important to note that brain damage, regardless of the cause, is typically extensive and present on both halves of the brain, complicating the identification of key structures. Although most damage cannot be undone, there is evidence of reorganization in the unaffected areas of the affected hemisphere, making it possible for patients to regain some function. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32197396 | 1,286,490 |
836,972 | Other groups began requesting subleases on the newly accessible mountaintop. By 1970, two telescopes had been constructed by the United States Air Force and Lowell Observatory. In 1973, Canada and France agreed to build the 3.6 m CFHT on Mauna Kea. However, local organizations started to raise concerns about the environmental impact of the observatory. This led the Department of Land and Natural Resources to prepare an initial management plan, drafted in 1977 and supplemented in 1980. In January 1982, the University of Hawaiʻi Board of Regents approved a plan to support the continued development of scientific facilities at the site. In 1998, were transferred from the observatory lease to supplement the Mauna Kea Ice Age Reserve. The 1982 plan was replaced in 2000 by an extension designed to serve until 2020: it instituted an Office of Mauna Kea Management, designated for astronomy, and shifted the remaining to "natural and cultural preservation". This plan was further revised to address concern expressed in the Hawaiian community that a lack of respect was being shown toward the cultural value the mountain embodied to the region's indigenous people. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=267376 | 836,523 |
230,270 | Most dust in the Solar System is highly processed dust, recycled from the material out of which the Solar System formed and subsequently collected in the planetesimals, and leftover solid material such as comets and asteroids, and reformed in each of those bodies' collisional lifetimes. During the Solar System's formation history, the most abundant element was (and still is) H. The metallic elements: magnesium, silicon, and iron, which are the principal ingredients of rocky planets, condensed into solids at the highest temperatures of the planetary disk. Some molecules such as CO, N, NH, and free oxygen, existed in a gas phase. Some molecules, for example, graphite (C) and SiC would condense into solid grains in the planetary disk; but carbon and SiC grains found in meteorites are presolar based on their isotopic compositions, rather than from the planetary disk formation. Some molecules also formed complex organic compounds and some molecules formed frozen ice mantles, of which either could coat the "refractory" (Mg, Si, Fe) grain cores. Stardust once more provides an exception to the general trend, as it appears to be totally unprocessed since its thermal condensation within stars as refractory crystalline minerals. The condensation of graphite occurs within supernova interiors as they expand and cool, and do so even in gas containing more oxygen than carbon, a surprising carbon chemistry made possible by the intense radioactive environment of supernovae. This special example of dust formation has merited specific review. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2178570 | 230,153 |
310,502 | An important advance in analog computing was the development of the first fire-control systems for long range ship gunlaying. When gunnery ranges increased dramatically in the late 19th century it was no longer a simple matter of calculating the proper aim point, given the flight times of the shells. Various spotters on board the ship would relay distance measures and observations to a central plotting station. There the fire direction teams fed in the location, speed and direction of the ship and its target, as well as various adjustments for Coriolis effect, weather effects on the air, and other adjustments; the computer would then output a firing solution, which would be fed to the turrets for laying. In 1912, British engineer Arthur Pollen developed the first electrically powered mechanical analogue computer (called at the time the Argo Clock). It was used by the Imperial Russian Navy in World War I. The alternative Dreyer Table fire control system was fitted to British capital ships by mid-1916. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13636 | 310,334 |
958,983 | In general after any CNS insult, gliosis begins after the blood brain barrier is disrupted, allowing non-CNS molecules, such as blood and serum components, to enter the brain. These components, along with activated macrophages they carry, are known to have a role in beginning the formation of the glial scar by inducing the disconnection of axons, also called secondary axotomy, and the upregulation of fibrous extracellular matrix components which eventually form the scar tissue. The specific molecular triggers responsible for this action, however, remain unknown. One potential trigger is transforming growth factor β (TGF-β). TGF-β2, whose expression is gradually increased as gliosis occurs, has been shown to increase astrocyte production of scar-forming proteoglycans. Experimental reduction of both TGF-β2 and TGF-β1, which is expressed immediately after injury, has resulted in reduced glial scarring. The interleukins are another potential molecular trigger of gliosis. These molecules, notably IL-1, initiate an inflammatory response in various cells including astrocytes that contributes to the gliosis reaction. Finally, interactions between the inflammatory cytokines interferon-γ (IFN-γ) and fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) may also be responsible for the induction of gliosis. In culture, both molecules act as mitogens, prompting the proliferation of astrocytes. Moreover, addition of IFN-γ to brain lesion sites has resulted in an increase in glial scarring. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4694311 | 958,477 |
554,178 | Blade element momentum theory is widely used due to its simplicity and overall accuracy, but its originating assumptions limit its use when the rotor disk is yawed, or when other non-axisymmetric effects (like the rotor wake) influence the flow. Limited success at improving predictive accuracy has been made using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers based on Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations and other similar three-dimensional models such as free vortex methods. These are very computationally intensive simulations to perform for several reasons. First, the solver must accurately model the far-field flow conditions, which can extend several rotor diameters up- and down-stream and include atmospheric boundary layer turbulence, while at the same time resolving the small-scale boundary-layer flow conditions at the blades' surface (necessary to capture blade stall). In addition, many CFD solvers have difficulty meshing parts that move and deform, such as the rotor blades. Finally, there are many dynamic flow phenomena that are not easily modelled by Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations, such as dynamic stall and tower shadow. Due to the computational complexity, it is not currently practical to use these advanced methods for wind turbine design, though research continues in these and other areas related to helicopter and wind turbine aerodynamics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20876989 | 553,889 |
1,662,411 | The font Kepatihan was developed by Carter Scholz. The font KepatihanPro , now the most widely used computer font for gamelan notation, evolved in two stages: it was designed by Matthew Arciniega around 1994 taking inspiration from Scholz' work, and later spread as PostScript font to be used on the Mac. Around the year of 2000 Raymond Weisling regenerated it as TrueType font (working both on Apple- and Windows-computers), made some adjustments and renamed it to "KepatihanPro". At the time Apple computers were rare in Indonesia, but the adoption of Windows-based computers for word-processing was spreading rapidly. Therefore the availability of the font for Windows strongly boosted adoption. On 24 July 2020, the Kraton Yogyakarta announced a new font: Kridhamardawa; based on KepatihanPro, it has darker ciphers, a lot of typographical enhancements, and reduces the line-height required to display all diacritical symbols vertically significantly. The codepoints are still compatible with KepatihanPro and follow - like in Scholz' and Arciniega's fonts - a "keyboard-logic": the fonts should/can be used with a US-American keyboard-driver, and symbols are found at keys that make sense by the typical layout of keyboards. For example the "lower-octave"-ciphers with "dot-below" can be accessed by the keys q-w-e-r-t-y-u because those are the keys one line "below" the number-keys. During the early 2000s multiple simplified offsprings of the Kepatihan-font were widely used for cipher-notation of church hymns all over Indonesia, and reportedly even spread to China. Likely in an attempt to standardise these developments and switch to a Unicode- rather than keyboard-based logic of code-point assignment, SIL International published the font Doulos SIL Cipher in 2014. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4828753 | 1,661,476 |
305,193 | After embracing anarchism, Albert Parsons turned his activity to the growing movement to establish the 8-hour day. In January 1880, the Eight-Hour League of Chicago sent Parsons to a national conference in Washington, D.C., a gathering which launched a national lobbying movement aimed at coordinating efforts of labour organisations to win and enforce the 8-hour workday. In the fall of 1884, Parsons launched a weekly anarchist newspaper in Chicago, "The Alarm." The first issue was dated October 4, 1884, and was produced in a press run of 15,000 copies. The publication was a 4-page broadsheet with a cover price of 5 cents. "The Alarm" listed the International Working People's Association as its publisher and touted itself as "A Socialistic Weekly" on its page 2 masthead. On May 1, 1886, Parsons, with his wife Lucy Parsons and two children, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, in what is regarded as the first-ever May Day Parade, in support of the eight-hour work day. Over the next few days 340,000 laborers joined the strike. Parsons, amidst the May Day Strike, found himself called to Cincinnati, where 300,000 workers had struck that Saturday afternoon. On that Sunday he addressed the rally in Cincinnati of the news from the "storm center" of the strike and participated in a second huge parade, led by 200 members of The Cincinnati Rifle Union, with certainty that victory was at hand. In 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) of the United States and Canada unanimously set 1 May 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard. In response, unions across the United States prepared a general strike in support of the event. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47246185 | 305,031 |
1,327,575 | The goals of CCN are to provide a more secure, flexible, and scalable network, thereby addressing the Internet's modern-day requirements for secure content distribution on a massive scale to a diverse set of end devices. CCN embodies a security model that explicitly secures individual pieces of content rather than securing the connection or "pipe". It provides additional flexibility by using data names instead of host names (IP addresses). Additionally, named and secured content resides in distributed caches automatically populated on demand or selectively pre-populated. When requested by name, CCN delivers named content to the user from the nearest cache, traversing fewer network hops, eliminating redundant requests, and consuming fewer resources overall. CCN began as a research project at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 2007. The first software release (CCNx 0.1) was made available in 2009. CCN is the ancestor of related approaches, including named data networking. CCN technology and its open-source code base were acquired by Cisco in February 2017. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31590539 | 1,326,848 |
1,855,648 | The last important criteria for a particular material is its safety. Engineers have a responsibility to ensure the safety of those who handle equipment or utilize a building or road for example, by minimizing the risks of injuries or casualties. Other considerations include strength, resistance to sudden failure from either mechanical or thermal shock, corrosion resistance, and cost, to name a few. To compare different materials to each other, it may prove useful to consult an ASHBY diagram and the ASME Pressure Vessel Codes. The material choice would be ideally drawn from known data as well as experience. Having a deeper understanding of the component requirements and the corrosion and degradation behavior will aid in materials selection. Additionally, knowing the performance of past systems, whether they be good or bad, will benefit the user in deciding on alternative alloys or using a coated system; if previous information is not available, then performing tests is recommended. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50759262 | 1,854,581 |
101,792 | With effect from 1 June 1948, the Advisory Board for Research in Atomic Energy, together with its parent organisation the CSIR, was folded into the new Department of Scientific Research and placed directly under the Prime Minister. On 3 August 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission of India (AEC) was established and made separate from the Department of Scientific Research, with Bhabha as its first chairman. In January 1949, the AEC met to formulate a uniform under- and post-graduate university syllabus for theoretical and fundamental physics and chemistry, to guarantee sufficient numbers of nuclear scientists and to ensure they would receive consistent levels of training and education. In the same year, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research was designated by the CSIR as the hub for all major nuclear science research projects. In 1950, the government announced it would purchase all available stocks of uranium and beryllium minerals and ores, and declared large rewards for any significant discoveries of the same. On 3 January 1954, the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) was established by the Atomic Energy Commission to consolidate all nuclear reactor research and technology-related developments; on 3 August, the Atomic Energy Commission and all its subordinate agencies, including the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the nuclear research institute at Calcutta University, were transferred to the new Department of Atomic Energy and placed under the direct charge of the Prime Minister's Office. In May 1956, construction on a uranium metal plant and a fuel element fabrication facility for the research reactors began at Trombay; the uranium plant came into operation in January 1959, followed by the fuel element facility in February 1960. The AEET (renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1967, after Bhabha's death) was formally inaugurated by Nehru in January 1957. With the expanding scope of Indian nuclear research, the 1948 Atomic Energy Act was amended in 1961, and was passed as the new Atomic Energy Act, coming into force in September 1962. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12902516 | 101,747 |
1,159,333 | Key staff recruited to work at Fort Halstead included John Challens, who commenced on 1 January 1948. By mid-1948, it became clear that Penney's initial estimate that he would require 220 staff was wide of the mark, and that he would need nearly 500. This meant not only taking personnel from other projects, but scrapping some entirely. In October 1948, Penney submitted a request for developing a new, separate site for HER on grounds of safety, security and economy. This was approved, but it took another six months to locate a suitable site. An airbase, RAF South Cerney in Gloucestershire was chosen, but the RAF refused to relinquish the site. A former airbase, RAF Aldermaston, was then selected. At the same time, it was decided to separate HER from the Armaments Research Establishment (ARE). This resulted in a painful bureaucratic battle over personnel like Challens, whose expertise was wanted for research on both nuclear weapons and guided missiles. In the end, HER kept 25 of the 30 key personnel that ARE wanted, including Challens. The site was taken over on 1 April 1950. Penney became Chief Superintendent High Explosive Research (CSHER). The first stage of work at Aldermaston was completed in December 1951, but the plutonium processing building was only handed over in April 1952, the month that the first plutonium was due to arrive from Windscale. At the peak of construction in 1953, over 4,000 personnel were working on the site. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52573493 | 1,158,718 |
666,385 | Environmental effects have been suggested to trigger conditions under which a transport of larger molecules, such as DNA and RNA, across the membranes of protocells is possible. For example, it has been proposed that electroporation resulting from lightning strikes could enable such transport. Electroporation is the rapid increase in bilayer permeability induced by the application of a large artificial electric field across the membrane. During electroporation, the lipid molecules in the membrane shift position, opening up a pore (hole) that acts as a conductive pathway through which hydrophobic molecules like nucleic acids can pass the lipid bilayer. A similar transfer of content across protocells and with the surrounding solution can be caused by freezing and subsequent thawing. This could, for instance, occur in an environment in which day and night cycles cause recurrent freezing. Laboratory experiments have shown that such conditions allow an exchange of genetic information between populations of protocells. This can be explained by the fact that membranes are highly permeable at temperatures slightly below their phase transition temperature. If this point is reached during the freeze-thaw cycle, even large and highly charged molecules can temporarily pass the protocell membrane. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19179678 | 666,037 |
1,786,210 | After earning her master's she chaired the Mathematics department at Paul Quinn College for seven years and then at Bishop College for one year before deciding to take further graduate mathematics course. She was refused admission at Baylor University due to segregation and instead attend summer courses at the University of Texas. After another year of teaching she decided to attend the University of Texas full-time as a graduate student. She was the only African American and only woman in the class, and at first her classmates ignored her. She was not allowed to teach, was unable to attend professor Robert Lee Moore's lectures, and could not join off-campus meetings because they were held in a coffee shop which could not, under Texas law, serve African Americans. She wrote, "My mathematical isolation was complete", and that "it took a faith in scholarship almost beyond measure to endure the stress of earning a Ph.D. degree as a Black, female graduate student". She participated in civil rights demonstrations, and her friends and colleagues Etta Falconer and Lee Lorch wrote on her death that "With skill, integrity, steadfastness and love she fought racism and sexism her entire life, never yielding to the pressures or problems which beset her path". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40351523 | 1,785,205 |
852,043 | Prayer appears to have health implications. Empirical studies suggest that mindfully reading and reciting the Psalms (from scripture) can help a person calm down and focus. Prayer is also positively correlated with happiness and religious satisfaction. A study conducted by Francis, Robbins, Lewis, and Barnes investigated the relationship between self-reported prayer frequency and measures of psychoticism and neuroticism according to the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQR-A). The study included a sample size of 2306 students attending Protestant and Catholic schools in the highly religious culture of Northern Ireland. The data shows a negative correlation between prayer frequency and psychoticism. The data also shows that, in Catholic students, frequent prayer has a positive correlation to neuroticism scores. Ladd and McIntosh suggest that prayer-related behaviors, such as bowing the head and clasping the hands together in an almost fetal position, are suggestive of "social touch" actions. Prayer in this manner may prepare an individual to carry out positive pro-social behavior after praying, due to factors such as increased blood flow to the head and nasal breathing. Overall, slight health benefits have been found fairly consistently across studies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=507197 | 851,589 |
1,834,357 | Rothenberg describes her upbringing as "sex-blind". She credits her parents with giving her "this heroic sense of one's potential" and says her father "taught [her] advanced math and logic to the point that [she] got in trouble with [her] teachers". As a child, Rothenberg originally wanted to become a physicist, but her high school biology classes inspired her to pursue biochemistry. Her high school teachers taught her about protein structure and how their structures confer biological function. While Rothenberg was an undergraduate student at Harvard University, her tutor, Boris Magasanik, inspired her to work on gene regulation. After earning her bachelor's degree, Rothenberg started a MD–PhD program offered jointly by Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She eventually dropped the MD but continued, at MIT, her PhD research with David Baltimore. She was the first to synthesise "in vitro" the genome of a retrovirus. She completed her doctoral research in the Department of Biology and Center for Cancer Research in 1977. Rothenberg was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow with Edward Boyse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67606361 | 1,833,308 |
655,009 | Strepsipterans are a unique group of insects with major sexual dimorphism. The females spend their entire lives in a grub-like state, parasitizing larger insects. The only time they ever come out of their host insect is to extend their fused heads and thoraces for males to notice. The males are also parasites, but they eventually will leave their host to seek their female counterparts. Because of this, they still retain the ability to fly. Male strepsipterans uniquely possess two hindwings, while their forewings have taken on the club-like form of halteres. Though strepsipterans are very difficult to locate and are additionally rather short-lived, Pix "et al." (1993) confirmed that the specialized forewings that male Strepsiptera possess perform the same function as dipteran halteres. Rotational movements of the body combined with the oscillating halteres produce Coriolis forces that can be detected by fields of mechanosensors (campaniform sensilla) located at the base of the halteres. Using functional morphology and behavior studies, Pix "et al." showed that these sensors then transmit body position information to the head and abdomen to produce compensatory movements. For simplicity, the remainder of this article will refer only to dipteran halteres. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46080 | 654,665 |
2,024,927 | This section was established in 1970 with the aim to conduct basic research on physiology and nutrition of cotton crop. Since its establishment, the main focus of research scientists has been on the screening of cotton strains/varieties for thermal and water stress tolerance, integrated nutrient management, fertilizer application strategies to improve nutrient use efficiency and fertilizer use economics, soil health improvement, amino acids and growth regulators, biosafety studies of Bt cotton and seed physiology. The scientists of the section try their best to increase cotton production by managing the soil, plant and seed related problems through a coordinated approach. Apart from the allocated experimental area for field trials, the Physiology/Chemistry Section has well equipped laboratories for qualitative and quantitative studies such as pH and EC meters, flame photometers, double beam spectrophotometer, atomic absorption spectrophotometer, ICP, HPLC, GC’s, pressure chamber for leaf water potential, Osmometer, Photosynthesis measuring system, Micro Kjeldahl apparatus, centrifuges, water baths, hot plate, Soxhlet’s apparatus, Muffle furnace and sample grinding machines etc. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14192720 | 2,023,762 |
547,586 | Oxford Nanopore Technologies' MinION sequencer is based on evolving nanopore sequencing technology to nucleic acid analyses. The device is four inches long and gets power from a USB port. MinION decodes DNA directly as the molecule is drawn at the rate of 450 bases/second through a nanopore suspended in a membrane. Changes in electric current indicate which base is present. Initially, the device was 60 to 85 percent accurate, compared with 99.9 percent in conventional machines. Even inaccurate results may prove useful because it produces long read lengths. In early 2021, researchers from University of British Columbia has used special molecular tags and able to reduce the five-to-15 per cent error rate of the device to less than 0.005 per cent even when sequencing many long stretches of DNA at a time. There are two more product iterations based on MinION; the first one is the GridION which is a slightly larger sequencer that processes up to five MinION flow cells at once. And, the second one is the PromethION which uses as many as 100,000 pores in parallel, more suitable for high volume sequencing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=127511 | 547,299 |
49,441 | Migratory patterns and behaviors also influence sexual dimorphisms. This aspect also stems back to the size dimorphism in species. It has been shown that the larger males are better at coping with the difficulties of migration and thus are more successful in reproducing when reaching the breeding destination. When viewing this in an evolutionary standpoint many theories and explanations come to consideration. If these are the result for every migration and breeding season the expected results should be a shift towards a larger male population through sexual selection. Sexual selection is strong when the factor of environmental selection is also introduced. The environmental selection may support a smaller chick size if those chicks were born in an area that allowed them to grow to a larger size, even though under normal conditions they would not be able to reach this optimal size for migration. When the environment gives advantages and disadvantages of this sort, the strength of selection is weakened and the environmental forces are given greater morphological weight. The sexual dimorphism could also produce a change in timing of migration leading to differences in mating success within the bird population. When the dimorphism produces that large of a variation between the sexes and between the members of the sexes multiple evolutionary effects can take place. This timing could even lead to a speciation phenomenon if the variation becomes strongly drastic and favorable towards two different outcomes. Sexual dimorphism is maintained by the counteracting pressures of natural selection and sexual selection. For example, sexual dimorphism in coloration increases the vulnerability of bird species to predation by European sparrowhawks in Denmark. Presumably, increased sexual dimorphism means males are brighter and more conspicuous, leading to increased predation. Moreover, the production of more exaggerated ornaments in males may come at the cost of suppressed immune function. So long as the reproductive benefits of the trait due to sexual selection are greater than the costs imposed by natural selection, then the trait will propagate throughout the population. Reproductive benefits arise in the form of a larger number of offspring, while natural selection imposes costs in the form of reduced survival. This means that even if the trait causes males to die earlier, the trait is still beneficial so long as males with the trait produce more offspring than males lacking the trait. This balance keeps the dimorphism alive in these species and ensures that the next generation of successful males will also display these traits that are attractive to the females. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=197179 | 49,421 |
1,932,181 | Diseases of abnormal polymerization are said to undergo “replication”, or rather that the number of proteins that are polymerized is shown to generally increase much like in a natural course of infection. Since the functional “pathogens” of DAPs are protein units the diseases are almost entirely independent from the use of nucleic acids. Multiple models illustrating this recruitment function exist, including the PrP protein in prion disease. The PrP protein is the major agent in spongiform encephalopathies and undergoes a clear process of polymerization based upon the natural balancing of thermodynamic states and kinetic summation. Like most proteins PrP can exist in two forms, one major and one minor, an alpha helix structure and a beta-pleated sheet structure respectively, that are balanced during nearly all conditions, but with dominance granted to the stable helix form. In certain instances, it may be possible for two beta forms to contact each other at the same time, and in this case the pair can form bonds that successfully stabilize the beta forms thermodynamically and allowing these structures to remain. This is termed the “seed” of polymerization as from this point the continued interaction, or recruitment, amongst the beta forms is increased perpetually, since there is a constant presence of stable beta forms, as well as the fact that beta forms, or beta-pleated sheets, have a greater number of reactive nucleation sites. This progression forms extended fibrils slowly over time that will then cause localized cytopathology, resulting in the characteristic sites of cell degradation or “sponginess”. This general template of recruitment is also characteristic in the condition sickle cell anemia in which the red blood cells are misshapen because of the formation of extended polymer fibrils. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53510000 | 1,931,073 |
20,123 | New software update known as PDB 5 (PDB standing for "Post Deployment Build") was released in 1999 with initial support for Configuration-3 ground units and PAC-3 missiles. The system itself saw another upgrade of its WCC and the communication setup was given a complete overhaul. Due to this upgrade, PAC-3 operators can now see, transmit, and receive tracks on the Link 16 Command and Control (C2) network using a Class 2M Terminal or MIDS LVT Radio. This capability greatly increases the situational awareness of Patriot crews and other participants on the Link 16 network that are able to receive the Patriot local air picture. The software can now conduct a tailored TBM search, optimizing radar resources for search in a particular sector known to have ballistic missile activity, and can also support a "keepout altitude" to ensure ballistic missiles with chemical warheads or early release submunitions (ERS) are destroyed at a certain altitude. For Configuration 3 units, the Patriot radar was completely redesigned, adding another traveling wave tube (TWT) that increased the radar's search, detection, tracking, and discrimination abilities. The new radar is designated AN/MPQ-65; it is capable, among other things, of discriminating whether an aircraft is manned and which of multiple reentering ballistic objects are carrying ordnance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52024 | 20,115 |
489,267 | Roth is one of the early pioneers of experimental economics and has made several fundamental contributions to the field starting from the early 1970s. Roth's approach to experiments expanded the possibilities of economic experiments could be and ushered in an approach open to influence by other social sciences as well as game theory. Unlike earlier experimental work by Vernon Smith, Charles Plott, and others, Roth and his coauthors appealed to sociological and psychological concepts to explain how subjects deviated from rationally predicted outcomes right from the start. His early work "was rigorous in its specification of what economic models predicted and was rooted in formal economic theories, yet provided accurate and insightful descriptions of actual behavior based on psychology and sociology." The Scientific Background document for the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics states: Besides contributing to some laboratory game designs that has become standard (for example, along with his early collaborator the psychologist J. Keith Murnighan, Roth designed a repeated-game experiment in which there was a fixed probability that each period of play would be the last, providing researchers with a tool to study infinitely repeated games in the laboratory). Roth has also outlined methodological issues that both producers and consumers of experimental research must consider in interpreting experimental results and published the full datasets of his experiments while the field was still in its nascency, laying the groundwork for much of the metascience debates regarding experiments in economics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18166140 | 489,014 |
1,610,801 | The last of the historical studies to appear in Willis's lifetime was the work on the monastic buildings at Canterbury. It was published in 1868, although based on examination of the buildings 20 years earlier. Christ Church Canterbury was the largest monastery in England, with around 150 monks. Monastic buildings raised a rather different set of problems from churches. While there have been changes in the way churches have been used over the centuries, the main functions continued, and the various parts of a church are easily identified. The monasteries were suppressed in the 16th century, which involved considerable destruction. What remained was adapted to new functions often with much structural change. Thus identifying the various parts of the monastic complex was an important task. For Canterbury, again, the documentation was unusually full. In particular the famous "waterworks plan" shows the system of pipes and cisterns installed in the 12th century. But equally important for the historian, it also shows the buildings that existed at the time. Willis reproduces a 17th-Century engraving of the plan, and also his own version which aligns the plan to the positions of known existing structures. He shows his usual skill in explicating the various stages of the buildings he examines, but also pays more attention to aspects of everyday life. For example in discussing the building known as the necessarium, i.e. latrine, he cites the instructions give by Archbishop Lanfrance to the watchman to examine all the sedilia at night in case any of the monks have fallen asleep. Willis suggests that this might have been the origin of the other name for this facility, the "Third Dormitory". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11572848 | 1,609,896 |
702,161 | In 1991, Nihon Falcom's "Brandish" was an early overhead action RPG to use mouse controls, where the player could move forward, backward, turn, strafe and attack by clicking on boxes surrounding the player character. The 1991 "Dragon Slayer" title "Lord Monarch" departed from the action RPG gameplay of its predecessors, instead using an early form of real-time strategy gameplay. The erotic adult RPG "Dragon Knight III", released in 1991 for the PC-8801 and as "Knights of Xentar" for MS-DOS, introduced a unique pausable real-time battle system, where characters automatically attack based on a list of different AI scripts, though this meant the player had no control over the characters during battle other than to give commands for spells, item use, and AI routines. That same year, "Arcus Odyssey" by Wolf Team (now Namco Tales Studio) was an action RPG that featured an isometric perspective and co-operative multiplayer gameplay. The sequel to the first-person shooter role-playing game "Star Cruiser", simply called "Star Cruiser 2", was released in 1992, for the PC-9821 and FM Towns computers. T&E Soft released the PC-98 game "Sword World PC" in 1992 and a console version "Sword World SFC" for the Super Famicom in 1993. It was officially based on "Sword World RPG", a popular Japanese table-top role-playing game. The video game versions were multiplayer titles and early attempts at recreating an open-ended, table-top role-playing experience on video game platforms, being set in the same world as "Sword World" and implementing the same rules and scenarios. Wolf Team's "Dark Kingdom", released for the PC-98 in 1992 and ported to the SNES console in 1994, featured a unique storyline that revolved around the players conquering the world as a villain instead of saving the world. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32408675 | 701,796 |
153,035 | The extracellular fluid is constantly "stirred" by the circulatory system, which ensures that the watery environment which bathes the body's cells is virtually identical throughout the body. This means that nutrients can be secreted into the ECF in one place (e.g. the gut, liver, or fat cells) and will, within about a minute, be evenly distributed throughout the body. Hormones are similarly rapidly and evenly spread to every cell in the body, regardless of where they are secreted into the blood. Oxygen taken up by the lungs from the alveolar air is also evenly distributed at the correct partial pressure to all the cells of the body. Waste products are also uniformly spread to the whole of the ECF, and are removed from this general circulation at specific points (or organs), once again ensuring that there is generally no localized accumulation of unwanted compounds or excesses of otherwise essential substances (e.g. sodium ions, or any of the other constituents of the ECF). The only significant exception to this general principle is the plasma in the veins, where the concentrations of dissolved substances in individual veins differ, to varying degrees, from those in the rest of the ECF. However, this plasma is confined within the waterproof walls of the venous tubes, and therefore does not affect the interstitial fluid in which the body's cells live. When the blood from all the veins in the body mixes in the heart and lungs, the differing compositions cancel out (e.g. acidic blood from active muscles is neutralized by the alkaline blood homeostatically produced by the kidneys). From the left atrium onward, to every organ in the body, the normal, homeostatically regulated values of all of the ECF's components are therefore restored. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=479385 | 152,965 |
1,859,371 | For flies and other metamorphosing insects, high burdens of Se, PCB, metals, synthetic nanoparticles, and other contaminants can decrease body and reproductive fitness, leading to reduced amounts of larvae metamorphosing and emerging from the water column as terrestrial adults. When contaminant exposure does not impact metamorphosis or emergence, emerging insects may carry high concentrations of contaminants that are readily bioavailable to the terrestrial food web. Consuming these contaminated prey items can result in severe histological, circulatory, digestive, and reproductive issues in terrestrial predators like spiders, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. The large number of insects that some predators need to consume in proportion to body mass for survival raises the risk of contaminant bioaccumulation, increasing the likelihood of developmental deformities and mortalities. This also can result in the biomagnification of organic and element subsidies like PCBs, selenium, and mercury by higher trophic levels that consume contaminated aquatic insects and their primary consumers like arthropods and fish. Contaminant levels in prey can be so highly concentrated that, for example, small-bodied songbird chicks can experience adverse physiological effects from feeding on a single spider containing high levels of PCB (at less than 6,000 parts per billion). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41384413 | 1,858,303 |
957,482 | Conquered Greece was divided into three zones of control by the occupying powers, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. The Germans controlled Athens, Central Macedonia, Western Crete, Milos, Amorgos and the islands of the Northern Aegean. Bulgaria annexed Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia, while Italy occupied approximately two thirds of the country. The Italians were thus responsible for the greater part of Greece, especially the countryside, where any armed Resistance might take place. Italian forces in Greece comprised 11 infantry divisions, grouped in the 11th Army under General Carlo Geloso, with a further division in the Italian colony of the Dodecanese Islands. Until the summer of 1942, as the Resistance movement was in its infancy, they faced little opposition and considered the situation normalized. The Germans limited themselves during the first period of the Occupation to the strategically important areas, and their forces were limited. The German troops in southeastern Europe came under the 12th Army headed initially by Field Marshal Wilhelm List and later by General Alexander Löhr. In Greece, two separate commands were created: the Salonica-Aegean Military Command at Thessalonica and the Southern Greece Military Command at Athens, for the entire duration of the war under Luftwaffe General Hellmuth Felmy. Crete was organized as a fortress ("Festung Kreta") garrisoned by the Fortress Division "Kreta", and after August garrisoned by the crack 22nd Air Landing Division. The Bulgarians occupied their own zone with an Army Corps and, faced with active resistance from the local population, engaged from the outset in a policy of Bulgarization of the area. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2150988 | 956,976 |
2,205,002 | The Sustainable Technology Optimization Research Center (STORC) is a research facility located on the California State University Sacramento campus. There are several players included in operations at the STORC including Sacramento State's Risk Management, the College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS), and two professors in the Environmental Studies department Brook Murphy and Dudley Burton. The STORC facility is primarily maintained by California State University, Sacramento student interns and volunteers who use applied science and technology to address real world policy, food, health, and energy issues of present-day society. Research at the STORC encompasses engineering and science to test and evaluate new ideas and approaches of sustainable technology to solve environmental problems. Faculty and students address sustainability with an interdisciplinary studies approach. The STORC Vision is to become "an international resource for practical, scalable, and financially viable solutions in the area of sustainable technologies that are suitable for private and/or public sector operations related to the management of energy, food, water, and waste". The STORC Mission is "to demonstrate the operation of innovative commercially viable physical systems that are underpinned by sustainable technologies, and to disseminate the associated plans, public policy discourse, and scientific findings". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49432636 | 2,203,747 |
1,900,098 | Toward the end of his life, when he was chairman of the Municipal Arts and Town Planning Committee of the Illinois Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Maher became the driving force behind the restoration of the former Palace of Fine Arts, then a crumbling ruin which was by then the only major building that remained from the World's Columbian Exposition. In an article that appeared in "The American Architect" in 1921, Maher made the following observation, which indicates a predilection for classical architecture despite the conclusion one might otherwise come to upon examining his existing body of work: "For slightly over a million and a half dollars, Chicago could have, in perpetuity, one of the most beautiful specimens of architecture in the world ... It is universally agreed among architects, artists and critics, that the building is unequalled as a pure example of classical architecture. It is the last remaining memorial of one of Chicago's greatest achievements, the Columbian exposition." Maher didn't live to see what he had begun come to fruition, but during the Century of Progress in 1933 the Museum of Science and Industry opened in the newly restored building, a project which was funded largely with a $5 million gift from the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932), who was president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24940492 | 1,899,010 |
1,930,985 | Besides CAD/CAM/CAE and PLM sector, DesignTech also offers services for the Healthcare IT segment. The Asclepius Clinic, a hospital information management software produced by the company helps in workflow management and configurations in hospitals. It is widely used by medical practitioners and doctors, helping them do affordable healthcare management. The DesignTech CAD academy, a training vertical of the company is the authorized training and education partner of Siemens India Inc. and Altair Engineering, providing training on all their CAD/CAM/CAE and PLM suites of solutions. It has branches in Pune, Nashik and Hyderabad. Along with their partner Siemens PLM Software, DesignTech has signed an agreement with the Gujarat Government to set up 'Centers of Excellence for Skill Development' in higher education across the state. The company was also a part of Mahindra Scorpio's development team where they worked on complex component development and vehicle integration. Nissan Techno signed DesignTech Systems as their certified implementation partner in 2014 to bring Indian supplier at par with global engineering standard. In 2015, the company was selected as the 10 most promising PLM companies by Silicon India magazine. They also entered into a joint venture with Integrity Tool and Mold, the largest automotive mold, tool and die manufacturing companies in North America in the same year. DesignTech also partnered with Solidscape to launch 3D Printers in India in 2017. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34932586 | 1,929,877 |
51,879 | There are a number of individuals whose extraordinary memory has been labeled "eidetic", but it is not established conclusively whether they use mnemonics and other, non-eidetic memory-enhancement. 'Nadia', who began drawing realistically at the age of three, is autistic and has been closely studied. During her childhood she produced highly precocious, repetitive drawings from memory, remarkable for being in perspective (which children tend not to achieve until at least adolescence) at the age of three, which showed different perspectives on an image she was looking at. For example, when at the age of three she was obsessed with horses after seeing a horse in a story book she generated numbers of images of what a horse should look like in any posture. She could draw other animals, objects, and parts of human bodies accurately, but represented human faces as jumbled forms. Others have not been thoroughly tested, though savant Stephen Wiltshire can look at a subject once and then produce, often before an audience, an accurate and detailed drawing of it, and has drawn entire cities from memory, based on single, brief helicopter rides; his six-metre drawing of 305 square miles of New York City is based on a single twenty-minute helicopter ride. Another less thoroughly investigated instance is the art of Winnie Bamara, an Australian indigenous artist of the 1950s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21402573 | 51,859 |
870,387 | The demise of the Acorn Business Computer left Acorn purely with a range of 8-bit microcomputer products, leaving the company vulnerable to competitors introducing 16-bit and 32-bit machines. The increasing dominance of MS-DOS in the business market and advocacy for the use of such software in the education sector left Acorn at risk of potential exclusion from its core market. Meanwhile, competing machines attempted to offer a degree of compatibility with the BBC Micro, enticing schools to upgrade to newer, more powerful non-Acorn machines while retaining access to software developed and purchased for Acorn's "aging machine". Acorn's ability to respond convincingly to these competitive threats was evidently constrained: the BBC Model B+ was merely a redesigned BBC Model B (with some heritage in the ABC endeavour) providing some extra memory but costing more than its predecessor, being labelled as a "stop gap" by Acorn User's technical editor, expressing frustration at opportunities not taken for cost reduction and at a general lack of technological innovation in that "Acorn has never shown interest in anything as exciting as the 68000". Disillusionment was sufficient for some software producers to signal a withdrawal from the Acorn market. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63145 | 869,927 |
1,683,947 | The book was originally written in the period immediately following the publication of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers and several years following the early work of Max Planck; it was a transitional period for physics, where special relativity and old quantum theory were gaining traction. The book serves to document the developments of electricity and magnetism before the quantum revolution and the birth of quantum mechanics. Whittaker was an established mathematician by the publication of this book, and he brought unique qualifications to its authorship. As a teacher at Trinity College, beginning after his election as a fellow in 1896, Whittaker gave advanced lectures in spectroscopy, astrophysics, and electro-optics. His first book, "Modern Analysis", was initially published in 1902 and remained a standard reference for applied mathematicians. His second major release, "Analytical Dynamics", a mathematical physics textbook, was published in 1906 and was, according to Victor Lenzen in 1952, "still the best exposition of the subject on the highest possible level." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65293114 | 1,683,004 |
208,445 | As a result of the Iran hostage crisis, US President Jimmy Carter ordered a rescue mission, code named Operation Eagle Claw, to retrieve the 52 diplomats held captive at the embassy of the United States, Tehran. Three weeks prior to the operation, Air Force CCT Major John T. Carney Jr. was flown in by Twin Otter to Desert One, a staging area in the South Khorasan Province of Iran, near Tabas for a clandestine survey of an airstrip. Despite his two CIA pilots' casual approach to the mission, Carney successfully surveyed the airstrip, installed remotely operated infrared lights and a strobe to outline a landing pattern for pilots, and took soil samples to determine the load-bearing properties of the desert surface. At that time, the floor was hard-packed sand, but in the ensuing three weeks, an ankle-deep layer of powdery sand was deposited by sandstorms. Operation Eagle Claw commenced on 24 April 1980 but encountered many obstacles due to technical issues and weather which led to an accident that killed 8 service members. As a result, the mission aborted. Its failure, and the humiliating public debacle that ensued, damaged US prestige worldwide. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17549821 | 208,338 |
37,816 | Japan was deprived of any military capability after being defeated by the Allies in World War II and was forced to sign a surrender agreement presented by General Douglas MacArthur in 1945. It was occupied by U.S. forces and only had a minor domestic police force on which to rely for domestic security and crime. Rising tensions in Europe and Asia due to the Cold War, coupled with leftist-inspired strikes and demonstrations in Japan, prompted some conservative leaders to question the unilateral renunciation of all military capabilities. These sentiments were intensified in 1950 as occupation troops began to be moved to the Korean War (1950–53) theater. This left Japan mostly defenseless, vulnerable, and very much aware of the need to enter a mutual defense relationship with the United States to guarantee the nation's external security. Encouraged by the American occupation authorities, the Japanese government in July 1950 authorized the establishment of a , consisting of 75,000 men equipped with light infantry weapons. In 1952, the , the waterborne counterpart of NPR, was also founded. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2785204 | 37,803 |
593,115 | The Project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, has produced one standard chronology for oxygen isotope records, although there are others. This high resolution chronology was derived from several isotopic records, the composite curve was then smoothed, filtered and tuned to the known cycles of the astronomical variables. The use of a number of isotopic profiles was designed to eliminate 'noise' errors, that could have been contained within a single isotopic record. Another large research project funded by the US government in the 1970s and 1980s was (CLIMAP), which to a large degree succeeded in its aim of producing a map of the global climate at the Last Glacial Maximum, some 18,000 years ago, with some of the research also directed at the climate some 120,000 years ago, during the last interglacial. The theoretical advances and greatly improved data available by the 1970s enabled a "grand synthesis" to be made, best known from the 1976 paper "Variations in the earth’s orbit: pacemaker of the ice ages" (in "Science"), by J.D. Hays, Shackleton and John Imbrie, which is still very widely accepted today, and covers the MIS timescale and the causal effect of the orbital theory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2289787 | 592,811 |
1,804,023 | Nonetheless, progress on the second type of machine, one that would more fully automate the law, remained relatively inert. Research into machines that could answer questions in the way that Mehl's consultation machine would picked up somewhat in the late 1970s and 1980s. A 1979 convention in Swansea, Wales marked the first international effort solely to focus upon applying artificial intelligence research to legal problems in order to "consider how computers can be used to discover and apply the legal norms embedded within the written sources of the law". That said, little substantial progress seems to have been made in the following decade of the 1980s. In a 1988 review of Anne Gardner's book "An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning "(1987), the Harvard academic legal scholar and computer scientist Edwina Rissland wrote that "She plays, in part, the role of pioneer; artificial intelligence ("AI") techniques have not yet been widely applied to perform legal tasks. Therefore, Gardner, and this review, first describe and define the field, then demonstrate a working model in the domain of contract offer and acceptance." Eight years after the Swansea conference had passed, and still AI and law researchers merely trying to delineate the field could be described by their own kind as "pioneer[s]". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38358886 | 1,803,009 |
973,944 | The St. Lawrence University Saints are a member of the Liberty League Athletic Conference, has ECACHL Division I Hockey teams and fields 32 varsity teams (15 for men, 17 for women) and includes over 40% of the student body. The Skating Saints men's team has twice played for Division I national championships (1961, 1988). The men's soccer program went undefeated at 22-0 to capture the 1999 Division III soccer championship, and women's basketball narrowly was defeated in the 2002 NCAA Women's Division III Basketball Championship. The Men's Squash team has had consistent success nationally. In December of 2014, the men's squash team rose to the rank of the #1 in the College Squash Association national rankings after beating then #1 Harvard University on December 6, 2014. That same season, the Men's Squash team advanced to the College Squash Association's Potter Cup Men's national championship match, which was the first and only time the St. Lawrence Men's Squash team has reached the national championship. They were defeated in the final by Trinity College (CT), securing a #2 final national ranking for the 2014-15 season, the highest in school history. The men's swim team won the 1976 D-3 National Championship. The St. Lawrence equestrian team was national champion in 1973, 1976, 1977 and national champion runner-up in 2001 and 2008. In addition, the SLU Equestrian Team was regional champion in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2011. The St. Lawrence University wrestling team won the Division III NCAA championship in 1988. The wrestling team was discontinued in 1995. In 2009 women's cross country team placed second at nationals, and in 2010, the women's track and field team placed third at Indoor nationals, bringing home two individual national titles as well. The university sponsors teams for men's football and baseball, women's field hockey, volleyball and softball, and men's and women's basketball, men and women's lacrosse, cross country, golf, crew, ice hockey, riding, Alpine and Nordic skiing, soccer, squash, swimming, tennis and track and field. The University has a strong active rivalry (especially in Hockey) with nearby Clarkson University only away in Potsdam, NY. Other notable rivalries include Hobart and William Smith, also from the Liberty League. The Nordic and Alpine ski teams are also one of tradition. They compete in EISA with Division-I and Division-III schools. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=561696 | 973,433 |
140,646 | The relationship between animals, humans, and disease is part of our globalized economic and social condition. Statistically higher probabilities of zoonosis (infectious disease that cross from non-human animals to humans) occur in human-modified areas; particularly agricultural lands. Human and animal relationships are mutually important to health and well-being and should be factored into any approach of control for Foot and Mouth Disease. In modern western animal production, where epidemics result in the mass slaughter of livestock, the psychological impact for those whose animals contract FMD is immense, and often results in financial devastation for the farmer with no ability to honor existing contractual arrangements, thus facing the prospective loss of farm, equipment, and future earning potential. This is not restricted to individual farms, but rather, spreads to wider farming communities causing emotional, psychological, and environmental concerns on a macro scale and can threaten food security at an international level. Due to the widespread devastation for those working and living within the agriculture sector, the human social and psychological cost should always be considered within the biopolitical framework used to manage FMD and other zoonotic diseases. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21438755 | 140,589 |
1,210,649 | The Expedition reached the Princess Martha Coast on January 19, 1939, and was active along the Queen Maud Land coast from 19 January to 15 February 1939. In seven survey flights between January 20 and February 5, 1939, an area of approx. was photogrammetrically mapped. Previously unknown ice-free mountain ranges, several small ice-free lakes were discovered in the hinterland. The ice-free Schirmacher Oasis, which now hosts the Maitri and Novolazarevskaya research stations, was spotted from the air by Richard Schirmacher (who named it after himself). At the turning points of the flight polygons, long aluminum arrows, with steel cones and three upper stabilizer wings embossed with swastikas were dropped in order to establish German claims to ownership (which, however, was never raised). During an additional eight special flights, in which Ritscher also took part, particularly interesting regions were filmed and taken with color photos. The team flew over an area of about . Around 11,600 aerial photographs were taken. Biological investigations were carried out on board the Schwabenland and on the sea ice on the coast. However, the insufficient equipment did not allow sled expeditions to the ice shelf or landings of the flying boats in the mountains. All explorations were carried out without a single member of the expedition having entered the inner territory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67163228 | 1,210,002 |
444,685 | This book consists of the arguments used against the art and Agricola's counter arguments. He explains that mining and prospecting are not just a matter of luck and hard work; there is specialized knowledge that must be learned. A miner should have knowledge of philosophy, medicine, astronomy, surveying, arithmetic, architecture, drawing and law, though few are masters of the whole craft and most are specialists. This section is full of classical references and shows Agricola's classical education to its fullest. The arguments range from philosophical objections to gold and silver as being intrinsically worthless, to the danger of mining to its workers and its destruction of the areas in which it is carried out. He argues that without metals, no other activity such as architecture or agriculture are possible. The dangers to miners are dismissed, noting that most deaths and injuries are caused by carelessness, and other occupations are hazardous too. Clearing forests for timber is advantageous as the land can be farmed. Mines tend to be in mountains and gloomy valleys with little economic value. The loss of food from the forests destroyed can be replaced by purchase from profits, and metals have been placed underground by God and man is right to extract and use them. Finally, Agricola argues that mining is an honorable and profitable occupation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4484806 | 444,470 |
85,521 | On 24 April 1972, the U.S. "1st Combat Aerial TOW Team" arrived in South Vietnam; the team's mission was to test the new anti-armor missile under combat conditions. The team consisted of three crews, technical representatives from Bell Helicopter and Hughes Aircraft, members of the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command, and two UH-1B helicopters; each mounting the XM26 TOW weapons system, which had been taken from storage. After displacing to the Central Highlands for aerial gunnery, the unit commenced daily searches for enemy armor. On 2 May 1972, U.S. Army UH-1 Huey helicopters firing TOWs destroyed North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) tanks near An Loc. This was heralded as the first time a U.S. unit neutralized enemy armour using American-designed and built guided missiles (in this case, against a captured American-made M41 operated by the PAVN). On 9 May, elements of the PAVN's 203rd Armored Regiment assaulted Ben Het Camp held by Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Rangers. The Rangers destroyed the first three PT-76 amphibious light tanks of the 203rd, thereby breaking up the attack. During the battle for the city of Kontum, the TOW missile had proven to be a significant weapon in disrupting PAVN tank attacks within the region. By the end of May, BGM-71 TOW missiles had accumulated 24 confirmed kills of both PT-76 light and T-54 main battle tanks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=338060 | 85,487 |
155,702 | The fight sequence between Asuka's Eva-02 and the nine Eva Series present in "End" was an inspiration for animators such as Yoshimichi Kameda and Yokota Takumi, character designers of "Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club". The design of the Digimon Argomon bears similarities to Eva-01, particularly its color scheme. "The Edge of Spider-Geddon" also introduces mechas called SP//dr and Ven#m, which are visually similar to an Evangelion unit. Possible homages to the series' mecha have also been traced in "Heroes of the Storm"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s Genji and D.Va's mecha from "Overwatch", the Sentinels from the Marvel comic book "Mystique", an episode of the US cartoon "Invader Zim", the final form of Carnage Kabuto from "One-Punch Man" and Alexandrite from "Steven Universe". According to USgamer, there is also a mention of Type D equipment in the Gold Saucer in "Final Fantasy VII". "Pacific Rim" has also been compared to "Evangelion" by critics; giant robots with aesthetic similarities to Evangelion units appear in the film, piloted via a neural connection aided by a special liquid that is similar to LCL. Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham, director and screenwriter of the feature film, respectively, have stated that they were not directly influenced by "Neon Genesis Evangelion", saying that they only saw the series after they had already conceived "Pacific Rim". In 2016, actress Ayame Goriki cosplayed as Eva-01 in a preview of the first episode of "Rental no koi", a Japanese televsion drama that aired in January 2017. A group of researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University in 2021 published a study on a liquid capable of delivering oxygen to mice and pigs through the anus; the technique was dubbed by Takanori Takebe, author of the study, as the "EVA method" ("enteral ventilation via anus") after the Eva units. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=577372 | 155,631 |
68,475 | Mearsheimer presented a fuller statement of his views on China's rise in his 2014 updated edition of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics", arguing that "if China continues its striking economic growth over the next few decades, it is likely to act in accordance with the logic of offensive realism... Specifically, it will try to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere." In accordance with the theory's structural logic, China will pursue regional hegemony not because its domestic politics or ideology inclines it toward aggression but because "domination offers the best way to survive under international anarchy" (p. 368). Mearsheimer stressed that China was simply following America's example in that regard:These ambitious goals make good strategic sense for China (although this is not to say China will necessarily be able to achieve them). Beijing should want a militarily weak and isolated India, Japan, and Russia as its neighbors, just as the United States prefers a militarily weak Canada and Mexico on its borders. What state in its right mind would want other powerful countries located in its region? All Chinese surely remember what happened over the last century when Japan was powerful and China was weak... [They also] surely remember what happened in the hundred years between the First Opium War (1832–42) and the end of World War II (1945), when the United States and the European great powers took advantage of a weak China and not only violated its sovereignty but also imposed unfair treaties on it and exploited it economically. Why should we expect China to act differently than the United States? Are the Chinese more principled than we are? More ethical? Are they less nationalistic? Less concerned about their survival? They are none of these things, of course, which is why China is likely to follow basic realist logic and attempt to become a regional hegemon in Asia (pp. 374-375). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=980934 | 68,448 |
78,758 | Korean Aerospace Industries (KAI) produced 140 KF-16C/D Block 52 fighters under license from Lockheed Martin in the 1990s. The F/A-18 Hornet had originally won the Korea Fighter Program (KFP) competition, but disputes over costs and accusations of bribery led the Korean government to withdraw the award and select the F-16 instead. Designated the KF-16 the first 12 aircraft were delivered to Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF) in December 1994. Almost 2,500 parts are changed from the original F-16C/D. Originally, the KF-16 was equipped with the F100-PW-229 Improved Performance Engine, ASPJ internal ECM, APG-68(V)7 radar, LANTIRN targeting and navigation system, AMRAAM, HARM, and SLAM anti-ship missile capabilities, and advanced IFF. JDAMs capability was added by ROKAF later on; ROKAF developed the software, successfully carried out 3 tests, and finished pilot training at the end of January 2011. The South Korean JDAMs are equipped with wing kits, which are absent from normal JDAMs, but not from the 2,000-pound JDAM Extended Range kit, which is being developed by Boeing and South Korea. The South Korean F-16s can also employ LIG Nex1's ALQ-200K radar jammer and other locally developed tactical ELINT and EO/IR targeting pods. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18895385 | 78,725 |
1,554,614 | The G-BOSS provides the command operations center with a round-the-clock display and tracking of items of interest through the use of high resolution night and day cameras. The cameras are integrated with enhanced target recognition and radar systems used to increase the ability to detect moving targets. The G-BOSS allows personnel to counter insurgent activities with an emphasis of disrupting placement of improvised explosive devices. The G-BOSS enhances situational awareness by allowing personnel to monitor activities in the vicinity of the military installation. Common places of surveillance include the gates, along the roads, borders, rivers, pipelines, and chokepoints, among other areas of responsibility and interest. The multiple towers of cameras and surveillance systems allows for 360-degree security with easily understood computer displays. Included on the computer displays are alarms and assessment data through overlay and window pop-ups, with 24/7 network running capability, allowing reduced manpower and hours in relation to personnel on guard. The multiple camera systems have the capability of routing all into a single remote ground system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42226989 | 1,553,733 |
976,129 | The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory located in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, ~ west of Socorro. The VLA comprises twenty-eight 25-meter radio telescopes (twenty-seven of which are operational while one is always rotating through maintenance) deployed in a Y-shaped array and all the equipment, instrumentation, and computing power to function as an interferometer. Each of the massive telescopes is mounted on double parallel railroad tracks, so the radius and density of the array can be transformed to adjust the balance between its angular resolution and its surface brightness sensitivity. Astronomers using the VLA have made key observations of black holes and protoplanetary disks around young stars, discovered magnetic filaments and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way's center, probed the Universe's cosmological parameters, and provided new knowledge about the physical mechanisms that produce radio emission. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=227969 | 975,618 |
795,075 | In earlier astronaut groups, the senior astronaut had assumed the role of command module pilot (CMP) while the more junior was the lunar module pilot (LMP), but the Nineteen were divided into Command/Service Module (CSM) and Lunar Module (LM) specialists. Slayton asked each of the Nineteen which speciality he preferred, but made the final decision himself. This early division of assignments would have a profound effect on their subsequent careers. Evans became a CSM specialist. He was chosen as a member of the support crew for Apollo 1, the first crewed Project Apollo mission, along with Ed Givens and Jack Swigert, two fellow members of his astronaut group. The astronauts assigned to this duty regarded it as the lowest rung on the ladder. Usually low in seniority, they assembled the mission's rules, flight plan, and checklists, and kept them updated, and worked in the simulators developing procedures, especially those for emergency situations. They also stood by during spacecraft tests on the launch pad, and set up the cockpit, ensuring that all the switches were in the right positions. In this role, Evans worked inside the Apollo spacecraft for a couple of hours on January 26, 1967. The support crew then flew back to Houston. On landing at Ellington Air Force Base they were informed that the prime crew had died in a fire inside the spacecraft. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=598426 | 794,650 |
1,730,433 | After Wilson's death in 1860, there was a contest between Monier Williams and Max Müller to succeed him. Williams was an Oxford-educated Englishman who had spent 14 years teaching Sanskrit to those preparing to work in British India for the East India Company. Müller was a German-born lecturer at Oxford specialising in comparative philology, the science of language. Williams laid great stress in his campaign on Boden's intention that the holder should assist in converting India through dissemination of the Christian scriptures. Müller's view was that his work was of great value to missionaries, and published testimonials accordingly, but was also a worthy end in itself. The rival campaigns took out newspaper advertisements and circulated manifestos, and different newspapers backed each man. The election came at a time of public debate about Britain's role in India particularly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, in particular whether greater efforts should be made to convert India or whether to remain sensitive to local culture and traditions. Although generally regarded as superior to Williams in scholarship, Müller had the double disadvantage (in the eyes of some) of being German and having liberal Christian views. Some of the newspaper pronouncements in favour of Williams were based on a claimed national interest of having an Englishman as Boden professor to assist with the work of governing and converting India. As the religious historian Gwilym Beckerlegge has stated, "voting for the Boden Chair was increasingly taking on the appearance of being a test of patriotism." At the end of the hard-fought campaign, Williams won by a majority of over 220 votes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35743477 | 1,729,458 |
383,009 | Current estimates predict that upwards of 40% of all pheochromocytomas are related to an inherited germline susceptibility mutation. Of the remaining 60% of tumors, more than 30% are associated with a somatic mutation. Given the high association with genetic inheritance, the United States Endocrine Society recommends that all patients diagnosed with a pheochromocytoma undergo an evaluation with a genetic counselor to consider genetic testing. The most recent data indicates that there are 25 pheochromocytoma susceptibility genes; however, just 12 are recognized as part of a well-known syndrome. Determining the genetic status of a pheochromocytoma patient is crucial – each gene is inherited in a different pattern, associated with specific disease characteristics, and may respond more favorably to certain treatment options. Furthermore, early identification can guide physicians on screening recommendations for first degree relatives of patients with pheochromocytoma. There is no current consensus for how and when asymptomatic carriers (individual who has a genetic variant associated with pheochromocytoma, but no current evidence of disease) should be evaluated. Conversations should occur at an individual level with the patient and their provider to develop a personalized screening plan that alternates between a biochemical (blood work) evaluation and whole-body imaging to monitor disease progression. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=277088 | 382,814 |
2,101,354 | Under the activity of Ugo Amaldi, in the 2000s the first National Center for Oncological Hadrotherapy was created in Italy and fourth in the world, which houses a synchrotron of 25 meters in diameter, capable of accelerating both protons and ions of carbon. In 1995 Marco Bersanelli, who returned to Italy from the Berkeley laboratories after having studied and collaborated with the Nobel laureate George Smoot, creates an observational cosmology group for the study of the cosmic microwave background at the University of Milan, which becomes one of the main executive and scientific managers of the space missions of ESA Planck, launched in 2009, and of the Euclid space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021. In the same period Giuseppe Bertin won a chair at the University of Milan where he focuses on studies on the growth dynamics of galaxies; earned him the "National Prize of the President of the Republic" of the Accademia dei Lincei. He is the third professor of the physics department of the University of Milan to receive him, after Giuseppe Occhialini (in '49) and Piero Caldirola (in '56). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67431894 | 2,100,142 |
784,866 | The original telesurgery robotic system that the da Vinci was based on was developed at Stanford Research Institute International in Menlo Park with grant support from DARPA and NASA. A demonstration of an open bowel anastomosis was given to the Association of Military Surgeons of the US. Although the telesurgical robot was originally intended to facilitate remotely performed surgery in the battlefield and other remote environments, it turned out to be more useful for minimally invasive on-site surgery. The patents for the early prototype were sold to Intuitive Surgical in Mountain View, California. The da Vinci senses the surgeon's hand movements and translates them electronically into scaled-down micro-movements to manipulate the tiny proprietary instruments. It also detects and filters out any tremors in the surgeon's hand movements, so that they are not duplicated robotically. The camera used in the system provides a true stereoscopic picture transmitted to a surgeon's console. Compared to the ZEUS, the da Vinci robot is attached to trocars to the surgical table, and can imitate the human wrist. In 2000, the da Vinci obtained FDA approval for general laparoscopic procedures and became the first operative surgical robot in the US. Examples of using the da Vinci system include the first robotically assisted heart bypass (performed in Germany) in May 1998, and the first performed in the United States in September 1999; and the first all-robotic-assisted kidney transplant, performed in January 2009. The da Vinci Si was released in April 2009 and initially sold for $1.75 million. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2629669 | 784,446 |
1,916,309 | In 1996, John Scholes of Dyalog Limited invented direct functions (dfns). The ideas originated in 1989 when he read a special issue of "The Computer Journal" on functional programming. He then proceeded to study functional programming and became strongly motivated ("sick with desire", like Yeats) to bring these ideas to APL. He initially operated in stealth because he was concerned the changes might be judged too radical and an unnecessary complication of the language; other observers say that he operated in stealth because Dyalog colleagues were not so enamored and thought he was wasting his time and causing trouble for people. Dfns were first presented in the Dyalog Vendor Forum at the APL '96 Conference and released in Dyalog APL in early 1997. Acceptance and recognition were slow in coming. As late as 2008, in "Dyalog at 25", a publication celebrating the 25th anniversary of Dyalog Limited, dfns were barely mentioned (mentioned twice as "dynamic functions" and without elaboration). As of 2019, dfns are implemented in Dyalog APL, NARS2000, and ngn/apl. They also play a key role in efforts to exploit the computing abilities of a graphics processing unit (GPU). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61949595 | 1,915,210 |
1,104,074 | Experimental techniques such as direct electrophysiological recording, fluorescence imaging using calcium indicators and optogenetic techniques have shed light on the nature and function of these early bursts of activity. They have distinct spatial and temporal patterns during development and their ablation during development has been known to result in deficits in network refinement in the visual system. In the immature retina, waves of spontaneous action potentials arise from the retinal ganglion cells and sweep across the retinal surface in the first few postnatal weeks. These waves are mediated by neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the initial phase and later on by glutamate. They are thought to instruct the formation of two sensory maps- the retinotopic map and eye-specific segregation. Retinotopic map refinement occurs in downstream visual targets in the brain-the superior colliculus (SC) and dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Pharmacological disruption and mouse models lacking the β2 subunit of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor has shown that the lack of spontaneous activity leads to marked defects in retinotopy and eye-specific segregation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=189701 | 1,103,511 |
423,221 | The ultrashort pulses generated by Ti:sapphire lasers in the time domain corresponds to mode-locked optical frequency combs in the spectral domain. Both the temporal and spectral properties of these lasers make them highly desirable for frequency metrology, spectroscopy, or for pumping nonlinear optical processes. One half of the Nobel prize for physics in 2005 was awarded to the development of the optical frequency comb technique, which heavily relied on the Ti:sapphire laser and its self-modelocking properties. The continuous wave versions of these lasers can be designed to have nearly quantum limited performance, resulting in a low noise and a narrow linewidth, making them attractive for quantum optics experiments. The reduced amplified spontaneous emission noise in the radiation of Ti:sapphire lasers lends great strength in their application as optical lattices for the operation of state-of-the-art atomic clocks. Apart from fundamental science applications in the laboratory, this laser has found biological applications such as deep-tissue multiphoton imaging and industrial applications cold micromachining. When operated in the chirped pulse amplification mode, they can be used to generate extremely high peak powers in the terawatt range, which finds use in nuclear fusion research. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=495725 | 423,014 |
91,306 | Babylonian mathematics were written using a sexagesimal (base-60) numeral system. From this derives the modern-day usage of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 (60 × 6) degrees in a circle, as well as the use of seconds and minutes of arc to denote fractions of a degree. It is likely the sexagesimal system was chosen because 60 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. Also, unlike the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, the Babylonians had a place-value system, where digits written in the left column represented larger values, much as in the decimal system. The power of the Babylonian notational system lay in that it could be used to represent fractions as easily as whole numbers; thus multiplying two numbers that contained fractions was no different from multiplying integers, similar to modern notation. The notational system of the Babylonians was the best of any civilization until the Renaissance, and its power allowed it to achieve remarkable computational accuracy; for example, the Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 gives an approximation of accurate to five decimal places. The Babylonians lacked, however, an equivalent of the decimal point, and so the place value of a symbol often had to be inferred from the context. By the Seleucid period, the Babylonians had developed a zero symbol as a placeholder for empty positions; however it was only used for intermediate positions. This zero sign does not appear in terminal positions, thus the Babylonians came close but did not develop a true place value system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14220 | 91,266 |
985,954 | The resulting annual competition is now known as the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). The ILSVRC uses a "trimmed" list of only 1000 image categories or "classes", including 90 of the 120 dog breeds classified by the full ImageNet schema. The 2010s saw dramatic progress in image processing. Around 2011, a good ILSVRC classification top-5 error rate was 25%. In 2012, a deep convolutional neural net called AlexNet achieved 16%; in the next couple of years, top-5 error rates fell to a few percent. While the 2012 breakthrough "combined pieces that were all there before", the dramatic quantitative improvement marked the start of an industry-wide artificial intelligence boom. By 2015, researchers at Microsoft reported that their CNNs exceeded human ability at the narrow ILSVRC tasks. However, as one of the challenge's organizers, Olga Russakovsky, pointed out in 2015, the programs only have to identify images as belonging to one of a thousand categories; humans can recognize a larger number of categories, and also (unlike the programs) can judge the context of an image. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50896194 | 985,439 |
1,551,849 | Beginning at the end of 1945, a search began for a location for a secret facility, which would later be named KB-11. According to the memoirs of the academician Yulii Khariton, the place for the future institute was researched carefully: it had to be located at a distance from the cities, since it was required to test various explosive structures so that active plutonium could be compressed and when combined, would exceed critical mass. Having reviewed many locations, physicists came across a completely satisfying place in the former Sarov Monastery (a famous saint that lived in the monastery, the Saint Seraphim of Sarov, later became a patron saint of Russia's nuclear weapons) not far from Arzamas (hence the names Arzamas-75 and Arzamas-16), on the border with the Mordovian reserve. On the territory of the monastery, there was plant number 550 (hence the names Site 550 etc.), which produced mortar shells, guns, rockets for BM-13 "Katyusha" rocket launchers, and other types of weapons. Behind the wall of the monastery there was a protected forest (the nature reserve is still very near to the Sarov closed city) for hundreds of square kilometers, where test explosions could be carried out unnoticed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54619545 | 1,550,968 |
1,971,670 | Cornell University had built a series of synchrotrons since the 1940s. The 10 GeV synchrotron in operation during the 1970s had conducted a number of experiments, but it ran at much lower energy than the 20 GeV linear accelerator at SLAC. As late as October 1974, Cornell planned to upgrade the synchrotron to reach energies of 25 GeV and build a new synchrotron to reach 40 GeV. After the discovery of the J/Ψ in November 1974 demonstrated that interesting physics could be done with an electron-positron collider, Cornell submitted a proposal in 1975 for an electron-positron collider operating up to center-of-mass energies of 16 GeV using the existing synchrotron tunnel. An accelerator at 16 GeV would explore the energy region between that of the SPEAR accelerator and the PEP and PETRA accelerators. CESR and CLEO were approved in 1977 and mostly finished by 1979. CLEO was built in the large experimental hall at the south end of CESR; a smaller detector named CUSB (for Columbia University-Stony Brook) was built at the north interaction region. Between the proposal for and construction of CESR and CLEO, Fermilab discovered the Υ resonances and suggested that as many as three states existed. The Υ(1S) and Υ(2S) were confirmed at the DORIS accelerator. The first order of business once CESR was running was to find the Υs. CLEO and CUSB found the Υ(1S) shortly after beginning to collect data, and used the mass difference from DORIS to quickly find the Υ(2S). CESR's higher beam energies allowed CLEO and CUSB to find the more massive Υ(3S) and discover the Υ(4S). Furthermore, the presence of an excess of electrons and muons at the Υ(4S) indicated that it decayed to B mesons. CLEO proceeded to publish over sixty papers using the original CLEO I configuration of the detector. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5478160 | 1,970,536 |
863,886 | Particles in UPW have always presented a major problem for semiconductor manufacture, as any particle landing on a silicon wafer can bridge the gap between the electrical pathways in the semiconductor circuitry. When a pathway is short-circuited the semiconductor device will not work properly; such a failure is called a yield loss, one of the most closely watched parameters in the semiconductor industry. The technique of choice to detect these single particles has been to shine a light beam (a laser) through a small volume of UPW and detect the light scattered by any particles (instruments based on this technique are called laser particle counters or LPCs). As semiconductor manufacturers pack more and more transistors into the same physical space, the circuitry line-width has become narrow and narrower. As a result, LPC manufacturers have had to use more and more powerful lasers and very sophisticated scattered light detectors to keep pace. As line-width approaches 10 nm (a human hair is approximately 100,000 nm in diameter) LPC technology is becoming limited by secondary optical effects, and new particle measurement techniques will be required. Recently, one such novel analysis method named NDLS has successfully been brought into use at Electrum Laboratory (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm, Sweden. NDLS is based on Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) instrumentation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31050418 | 863,426 |
1,419,516 | In October 2016, The European Space Agency (ESA) selected PLD Space as the prime contractor for the "Liquid Propulsion Stage Recovery" project (LPSR) as part of the agency's Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP). The goal of this project is to study a strategy to recover the first stage of a launcher, making it partially reusable, with a prospected funding of $800,000. In a second investment round, closed in January 2017, the company secured $7.1 million, $3.2 million of that contributed by GMV. GMV also took the role to develop the complete avionics of Miura 1 and Miura 5, including guidance, navigation and control (GNC), telemetry and onboard software for both launchers. PLD Space received further $2.34 million in January 2018 through the European Commissions Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) Instrument Phase 2, as part of the European Union's Horizon 2020 program for research and innovation, a grant to support to the development of a pair of launchers designed for small satellites. In February 2018 PLD Space was one of the five companies chosen by ESA to perform a feasibility study proposing an economically viable, commercially self-sustaining microlauncher. For this, the company received a funding of $368,000. In September 2020, PLD Space secured €7 million Series B funding from Arcano partners. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50238586 | 1,418,717 |
1,604,898 | Today, CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute (CSIR-4PI) is a young and vibrant organization committed to promoting mathematical modelling and data-driven research culture across CSIR and accelerating the pace of discovery in the areas of interest to CSIR. CSIR-4PI played a pivotal role in shaping up the computational research capability in CSIR over the past 30 years and has the same potential to impact the emerging data science research to solve problems of societal and strategic importance. The current mandate is to develop reliable knowledge products for decision support in Earth, Engineering and Information sciences as well as to host a centralised supercomputing facility for CSIR. Long term vision is to synergize the strong expertise in various disciplines across CSIR and build a unified platform that embodies a rich set of big data enabling technologies and services with optimized performance to facilitate research collaboration and scientific discovery. Structurally CSIR-4PI is divided into two distinct scientific divisions with the scope of interdisciplinary research viz., Data Science and Supercomputing Division (DSSD) and the Earth & Engineering Sciences Division (EESD). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32288518 | 1,603,997 |
970,800 | The precursor sol can be either deposited on a substrate to form a film (e.g., by dip-coating or spin coating), cast into a suitable container with the desired shape (e.g., to obtain monolithic ceramics, glasses, fibers, membranes, aerogels), or used to synthesize powders (e.g., microspheres, nanospheres). The sol–gel approach is a cheap and low-temperature technique that allows the fine control of the product's chemical composition. Even small quantities of dopants, such as organic dyes and rare-earth elements, can be introduced in the sol and end up uniformly dispersed in the final product. It can be used in ceramics processing and manufacturing as an investment casting material, or as a means of producing very thin films of metal oxides for various purposes. Sol–gel derived materials have diverse applications in optics, electronics, energy, space, (bio)sensors, medicine (e.g., controlled drug release), reactive material, and separation (e.g., chromatography) technology. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1701055 | 970,290 |
1,812,663 | The record-breaking attempt was scheduled for the morning of 9 December 1931 on the Bucharest-Fetesti-Bucharest route. With the Capitan aviator Romeo Popescu at its controls, the C.V. 11 took off from Pipera-Bucharest military airfield at 11.30 a.m. The first 370 km were flown without any trouble at an encouraging average speed. Close to Lehliu railway station, however, the overheated Hispano-Suiza engine suddenly stalled, forcing the pilot to try an improvised forced landing with the now vicious airplane. Cpt. Popescu approached a nearby open field, but at contact with the thick snow cover one of the main wheels collapsed and the fighter turned over, crushing the pilot under the fuselage. Romeo Popescu, an experienced test pilot and holder of three Romanian national aviation records, died instantly. The investigation following the incident concluded that the lubrication of the overstressed engine, working at maximum power, was insufficient, causing seizure. Until that fatal moment, during an hour and thirty-four minutes of flight, an average speed of 319 km/h had been recorded by the onboard instruments, thus a good chance had existed of achieving the goal set by the temerarious pilot. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18631734 | 1,811,630 |
1,622,746 | The cycle was first patented by Vuilleumier in 1918 with patent US1275507, and again in Leiden by KW Taconis in 1951. In March 2014, the Vuilleumier Cycle was tested in application with updating conventional HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) systems by utilizing the cycle's proposed thermodynamic process of moving heat energy, and having results of increased output efficiencies coupled with a reduced carbon footprint. This work was completed by ThermoLift (http://www.tm-lift.com/), a company based out of the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center at Stony Brook University, with collaboration from the US Department of Energy and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). This work culminated in the demonstration of the ThermoLift system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in August, 2018. The demonstration showed that the ThermoLift technology (TCHP), is able to achieve coefficients of performance (COP) for the cycle that well exceeded the DOE’s target COPs for cold-climate heat pumps (although not at all exceeding Geothermal heat pump efficiencies). Furthermore, due to the nature of the TCHP, there is no significant capacity decrease as the inlet temperature to the cold HX decreases. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28465562 | 1,621,830 |
598,074 | Looking Glass, Nightwatch, and TACAMO are US airborne nuclear command posts and represent survivable communication links with US nuclear forces. In the event of significant political-military tensions between the nuclear powers, they would take to the skies and provide survivable communications in the event of enemy attack. They are capable of the full exercise of all available MAOs (Major Attack Options), as well as the full SIOP, in the event of a first strike or the destruction of the NCA. They can directly initiate launch of all American ICBMs via radio and satellite communication, signal SLBMs to launch and send bombers on their strike missions. In addition to those airborne assets, the US government has several command and control bunkers, the most famous of which is that of NORAD, which is tunneled a few thousand feet into the granite of Cheyenne Mountain Complex, outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is believed to be able to withstand and to continue to operate after a nuclear direct hit. Other US CISTAR bunkers include an installation called Site R, located at Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, which is believed to be the Pentagon's relocation site if Washington, DC, is destroyed, as well as Mount Weather, located in Virginia, which is believed to be the relocation site for top executive branch officials. The Greenbrier, located in West Virginia, was once the site of the Supreme Court of the United States and Congress's relocation bunker, but it is no longer a secret but is now a tourist attraction. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45876 | 597,769 |
1,801,688 | The success of the Royal Air Force using Barnes Wallace's bouncing bombs in the dam busting missions of Operation Chastise on 16–17 May 1943, led the USAAF to investigate using similar tactics. After initial testing with a modified A-26 in January 1945 which was adapted at the Vickers experimental facility at Foxwarren, near Esher, Surrey, to drop the RAF spherical Highball casing, with [an overall weight] of , twenty-five Speedee bomb casings (the American nomenclature for the Highball) were sent to the U.S. On 28 April 1945, A-26C-25-DT Invader, "43-22644", assigned to the 611 Base Unit at Wright Field, Ohio, departed Eglin for a low-level test drop on Water Range No. 60 in the Choctawhatchee Bay S of Lake Lorraine. Dropped at low altitude (~10 feet), the weapon skipped back into the aircraft, completely knocking off the tail unit causing the bomber to nose over instantly and crash into the bay NE of Fort Walton, Florida. Following this accident, the Army Air Force dropped its interest into this attack method. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33714574 | 1,800,679 |
1,488,454 | Natural selection in an environment produces reproductive success, which benefits the species. Speciation is a process of evolution through which new biological species are formed. Dobzhansky studied the specifics of sexual, physiological, and behavioral isolating mechanisms in "Drosophila pseudoobscura" and "Drosophila paulistrorum." Like many of his other studies, Dobzhansky's work on reproductive isolation was aimed at studying the process of evolution in action. Bringing samples from each population back into the laboratory, Dobzhansky showed that he could vary environmental conditions so as to produce the same changes in frequency of inversion patterns that were observed with changing seasons in the field. Dobzhansky concluded that such seasonal fluctuations were the result of natural selection at work, with temperature acting as the selecting agent. These masterful studies provided concrete support for the theory of natural selection, at the same time illustrating the fruitfulness of combining field and laboratory work in the study of evolution. Adaptive evolution occurs through the dominance and survival of competing genes within a species. This is caused by increasing the frequency of those alleles whose phenotypic effects selfishly promote their own reproduction. He also believed new species could not arise from single mutations and must be isolated from others of its species by time, geography, habitat, or breeding season. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1111991 | 1,487,615 |
605,088 | The first announcement of a planet around the star was Gliese 581b discovered by astronomers at the Observatory of Geneva in Switzerland and Grenoble University in France. Detected in August 2005 and using extensive data from the ESO/HARPS spectrometer it was the fifth planet to be discovered around a red dwarf. Further observations by the same group resulted in the detection of two more planets, Gliese 581c and Gliese 581d. The orbital period of Gliese 581d was originally thought to be 83 days but was later revised to a lower value of 67 days. The revised orbital distance would place it at the outer limits of the habitable zone, the distance at which it is believed possible for liquid water to exist on the surface of a planetary body, given favourable atmospheric conditions. Gliese 581d was estimated to receive about 30% of the intensity of light the Earth receives from the Sun. By comparison, sunlight on Mars has about 40% of the intensity of that on Earth, though if high levels of carbon dioxide are present in the planetary atmosphere, the greenhouse effect could keep temperatures above freezing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2758531 | 604,778 |
1,379,103 | The emergence of ultramicroelectrodes (UMEs) around 1980 was pivotal to the development of sensitive electroanalytical techniques like SECM. UMEs employed as probes enabled the study of quick or localized electrochemical reactions. The first SECM-like experiment was performed in 1986 by Engstrom to yield direct observation of reaction profiles and short-lived intermediates. Simultaneous experiments by Allen J. Bard using an Electrochemical Scanning Tunneling Microscope (ESTM) demonstrated current at large tip-to-sample distances that was inconsistent with electron tunneling. This phenomenon was attributed to Faradaic current, compelling a more thorough analysis of electrochemical microscopy. The theoretical basis was presented in 1989 by Bard, where he also coined the term Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy. In addition to the simple collection modes used at the time, Bard illustrated the widespread utility of SECM through the implementation of various feedback modes. As the theoretical foundation developed, annual SECM-related publications steadily rose from 10 to around 80 in 1999, when the first commercial SECM became available. SECM continues to increase in popularity due to theoretical and technological advances that expand experimental modes while broadening substrate scope and enhancing sensitivity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33179399 | 1,378,341 |
1,627,688 | Proteogenomics emerged as an independent field in 2004, based on the integration of technological advancements in next-generation sequencing genomics, and mass spectrometry proteomics. The term itself came into use that year, with the publication of a paper by George Church’s research group describing their discovery of a proteogenomic mapping technique that utilized proteomics data to better annotate the genome of the bacteria "M. pneumoniae." By using a modern protein database, the lab mapped peptides detected in a whole cell onto a genetic scaffold using tandem mass spectrometry, then used the generated "hits" in order to create a "proteogenomic map" based on traditional genetic signals. The resulting map proved extremely accurate, with over 81% of predicted genomic reading frames being detected in the bacterial cells studied. In addition, the lab discovered several new frames not predicted via purely genetic methods, as well as some evidence supporting the idea that several predictions based genetic models could be false, proving the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of the hybrid technique. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28722065 | 1,626,770 |
957,526 | The aircraft was given the service designation of MiG-9 (internal OKB designations of I-301 and "izdeliye" FS) and a small batch of ten aircraft, equipped with original German engines, was ordered during 1946 from Factory No. 1 in Kazan before flight testing was completed. They were intended to be used in the parade, but bad weather forced the cancellation of their flypast. Two of them were assigned to participate in the state acceptance trials while others were used as testbeds for various programs. The trials were concluded in June and the MiG-9 generally met the performance goals set by the Council of People's Commissars. The test pilots found the fighter easy and simple to fly. Defects noted during testing were that the engines flamed out when firing the cannon at high altitudes due to gun gas ingestion, no ejection seat was fitted, nor were air brakes or a fire suppression system. The fuel tanks were not self-sealing and no armor was provided for the pilot. Despite these drawbacks, the MiG-9 was ordered into production at Factory No. 1 before the acceptance tests were completed as the Soviet leadership believed that its shortcomings could be rectified during production. A batch of 50 aircraft, 40 single-seat fighters and 10 two-seat trainers, were ordered in late 1946 to participate in the 1947 May Day parade. In recognition of their accomplishment Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich were awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=304224 | 957,020 |
918,383 | With speakers, the opposite is true. A flat low-frequency response is hard to obtain—except in free space high above ground, or in a very large and anechoic chamber that is free from reflections down to 20 Hz. Until recently, it was not possible to achieve high levels at frequencies down to 20 Hz without high levels of harmonic distortion. Even today, the best speakers are likely to generate around 1 to 3% of total harmonic distortion, corresponding to 30 to 40 dB below fundamental. This is not good enough, given the steep rise in loudness (rising to as much as 24 dB per octave) with frequency revealed by the equal-loudness curves below about 100 Hz. A good experimenter must ensure that trial subjects really hear the fundamental and not harmonics—especially the third harmonic, which is especially strong as a speaker cone's travel becomes limited as its suspension reaches the limit of compliance. A possible way around the problem is to use acoustic filtering, such as by resonant cavity, in the speaker setup. A flat free-field high-frequency response up to 20 kHz, on the other hand, is comparatively easy to achieve with modern speakers on-axis. These effects must be considered when comparing results of various attempts to measure equal-loudness contours. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1046687 | 917,900 |
167,145 | When the undescended testis is in the inguinal canal, hormonal therapy is sometimes attempted and very occasionally successful. The most commonly used hormone therapy is human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). A series of hCG injections (10 injections over five weeks is common) is given and the status of the testis/testes is reassessed at the end. Although many trials have been published, the reported success rates range widely, from roughly 5% to 50%, probably reflecting the varying criteria for distinguishing retractile testes from low inguinal testes. Hormone treatment does have the occasional incidental benefits of allowing confirmation of Leydig cell responsiveness (proven by a rise of the testosterone by the end of the injections) or inducing additional growth of a small penis (via the testosterone rise). Some surgeons have reported facilitation of surgery, perhaps by enhancing the size, vascularity, or healing of the tissue. A newer hormonal intervention used in Europe is the use of GnRH analogs such as nafarelin or buserelin; the success rates and putative mechanism of action are similar to hCG, but some surgeons have combined the two treatments and reported higher descent rates. Limited evidence suggests that germ cell count is slightly better after hormone treatment; whether this translates into better sperm counts and fertility rates at maturity has not been established. The cost of either type of hormone treatment is less than that of surgery and the chance of complications at appropriate doses is minimal. Nevertheless, despite the potential advantages of a trial of hormonal therapy, many surgeons do not consider the success rates high enough to be worth the trouble, since the surgery itself is usually simple and uncomplicated. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=415293 | 167,058 |
654,833 | There is a natural soundscape to the ocean that organisms have evolved around for tens of thousands of years. However, human activity has disrupted this soundscape, largely drowning out sounds organisms depend on for mating, warding off predators, and travel. Ship and boat propellers and engines, industrial fishing, coastal construction, oil drilling, seismic surveys, warfare, sea-bed mining and sonar-based navigation have all introduced noise pollution to ocean environments. Shipping alone has contributed an estimated 32-fold increase of low-frequency noise along major shipping routes in the past 50 years, driving marine animals away from vital breeding and feeding grounds. Sound is the sensory cue that travels the farthest through the ocean, and anthropogenic noise pollution disrupts organisms' ability to utilize sound. This creates stress for the organisms that can affect their overall health, disrupting their behavior, physiology, and reproduction, and even causing mortality. Sound blasts from seismic surveys can damage the ears of marine animals and cause serious injury. Noise pollution is especially damaging for marine mammals that rely on echolocation, such as whales and dolphins. These animals use echolocation to communicate, navigate, feed, and find mates, but excess sound interferes with their ability to use echolocation and, therefore, perform these vital tasks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61622385 | 654,489 |
2,064,312 | The ICME cyberinfrastructure provides storage, access, and computational capabilities for an extensive network of manufacturing, design, and life-cycle simulation software. Within this software framework, data is archived, searchable and interactive, offering engineers and scientists a vast database of materials-related information for use in research, multiscale modeling, simulation implementation, and an array of other activities in support of more efficient, less costly product development. Furthermore, the ICME cyberinfrastructure is expected to provide the capability to access and link application codes, including the development of protocols necessary to integrate hierarchical modeling approaches. With an emphasis on computational efficiency, experimental validation of models, and protecting intellectual property, the cyberinfrastructure assimilates 1) process-microstructure-property relations, 2) development of constitutive materials models that accurately predict multiscale material behaviors admitting microstructure/inclusions and history effects, 3) access to shared databases of analytical and experimental data, and 4) material models. As such, it is also crucial to identifying gaps in materials knowledge, which, in turn, guides the development of new materials theories, models, and simulation tools. Such a community-based knowledge foundation ultimately enables materials informatics systems that fuse high fidelity experimental databases with models of physical processes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31541804 | 2,063,121 |
1,356,808 | Climbing is an especially difficult task because mistakes made by the climber may cause the climber to lose its grip and fall. Most robots have been built around a single functionality observed in their biological counterparts. Geckobots typically use van der waals forces that work only on smooth surfaces. Being inspired from geckos, scientists from Stanford university have artificially created recreated the adhesive property of a gecko. Similar to seta in a gecko's leg, millions of microfibers were placed and attached to a spring. The tip of the microfiber will be sharp and pointed in usual circumstances, but upon actuation, the movement of spring will create a stress which bends these microfibers and increase their contact area to the surfce of a glass or wall. Using the same technology, gecko grippers were invented by NASA scientists for different applications in space. Stickybots, and use directional dry adhesives that works best on smooth surfaces. Spinybot and the RiSE robot are among the insect-like robots that use spines instead. Legged climbing robots have several limitations. They cannot handle large obstacles since they are not flexible and they require a wide space for moving. They usually cannot climb both smooth and rough surfaces or handle vertical to horizontal transitions as well. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35439884 | 1,356,058 |
1,240,746 | One way in which cephalograms can be utilized is for accurate age estimation but not for sex estimation. One study confirmed that the mandibular ramus length is strongly related to chronological age and can be utilized to predict whether an individual is older than 18 years or older with a highly significant degree of accuracy (95% confidence interval). If the ramus length is 7.0 cm or more, then the individual has an 81.25% probability of being 18 years or older. Further, the study confirmed that there is not a strong degree of sexual dimorphism between mandibular ramus length until an individual reaches 16 years of age. The accuracy of predicting sex with mandibular ramus length is only 54% making it an unreliable indicator of sex in forensic contexts. The study also has impacts for providing age estimation of living people. This could be applicable in immigration, criminal and civil investigations, adoption of children, or old-age pension requests. The study utilized scanned cephalometric radiographs to conduct the study. Cephalometry remains to be the most popular and useful method for investigating the craniofacial skeletal morphology. Skull measurements are also important for facial reconstruction in cases of disputed identity. In the Punjab study, the mesocephalic was the most common craniotype followed by dolicocephalic in the tropical regions. The brachycephalic was more common in the temperate regions. Genetic and environmental factors have been suggested for the presence of variations in cephalic indices among population groups. Dietary habits have also been shown to modulate the craniofacial form of people. The data this study gathered is only valid for the adult population and may be useful in future forensic contexts. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11131663 | 1,240,075 |
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