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227,820 | By August, it was time for "Constellation" to return to Vietnam for a fifth combat deployment, again with CVW-14. Following an initial 20-day period of supporting strikes in South Vietnam as well as Laos, "Constellation" sailed to Defender Station in the Sea of Japan, which had been created as a result of increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula. On 2 October 1969, there was an accident caused when the tail rotor came off of a helicopter just before landing on the flight deck. Nine men went down with the chopper and were never recovered. A return to Yankee Station on 1 November also produced a major milestone in the carrier's life when the F-4J aircrew of air wing skipper Commander R. K. Billings and Lieutenant (junior grade) Jeff Taylor of VF-143 conducted "Connie"s 100,000th arrested landing. During a mission on 28 March 1970, the VF-142 F-4 crew of Lieutenant Jerome E. Beaulier and Lieutenant Steven J. Barkley downed a North Vietnamese MiG-21 jet fighter. Following a total of 128 days on the line, "Constellation"s nine-month deployment ended in May, with CVW-14 suffering the loss of seven total aircraft, five to enemy action. One member of the aircrew was taken as a POW, but there were no fatalities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=204536 | 227,703 |
683,426 | Some of the supermassive black holes in AGN are known to be rotating, as in the Seyfert galaxy MCG 6-30-15 with time-variability in their inner accretion disks. Black hole spin is a potentially effective agent to drive UHECR production, provided ions are suitably launched to circumvent limiting factors deep within the galactic nucleus, notably curvature radiation and inelastic scattering with radiation from the inner disk. Low-luminosity, intermittent Seyfert galaxies may meet the requirements with the formation of a linear accelerator several light years away from the nucleus, yet within their extended ion tori whose UV radiation ensures a supply of ionic contaminants. The corresponding electric fields are small, on the order of 10 V/cm, whereby the observed UHECRs are indicative for the astronomical size of the source. Improved statistics by the Pierre Auger Observatory will be instrumental in identifying the presently tentative association of UHECRs (from the Local Universe) with Seyferts and LINERs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=474589 | 683,070 |
929,514 | The facility had recently reopened following the passing of Tropical Storm Isaias. It was unclear if the cable failure was caused by Isaias. Former Arecibo Observatory director Robert Kerr stated that prior to the 1997 installation of the Gregorian dome, the main support cables and support towers had been engineered with a safety factor of two, as to be able to sustain twice the weight of the platform. When the dome was added in 1997, the auxiliary cables were intended to retain the safety factor of two once all design factors were considered, but Kerr believed that that was never the case as evenly distributing the loads following that install would be difficult to do. Kerr also stated that there had been periods of neglect at the Observatory, during which the fans that were used to blow dry air along the wire bundles were not operating. The earlier storms would have brought seawater to the cables which could accelerate the rate of corrosion as well, according to Kerr. Engineering firms hired by UCF inspected the socket area where the cable had failed, and found a similar problem that had been observed in the 1980s during a routine cable replacement, in which the use of molten zinc to affix the cable to the socket mount at the tower was not complete, allowing moisture to get into the wire bundle and cause corrosion and leading to the cable slipping from its socket. The firms had developed models of the telescope that showed that the safety factor for Tower 4 had dropped to 1.67, believing that the structure was still safe while repairs could be effected, even if another cable collapsed. Plans were made to replace all six auxiliary cables since their socket welds were all considered suspect at a cost of . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9013135 | 929,023 |
1,297,819 | Collaborations with a number of research and academic organizations inside and outside the country have included the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK; Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre (NERC), Norway; Michigan State University, United States; Rhodes University, South Africa and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia besides fisheries related institutes and academic universities in the country. Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India and all the Fisheries Departments of various coastal states in the country are important partners in the institute's bid to promote marine fisheries sector in the country. To disseminate the technologies developed training programmes for various stakeholders such as fisheries officials, fishermen, fish farmers and entrepreneurs in areas such as fisheries governance, fish stock assessment, mariculture, have been provided including a few specialised programmes for member countries of SAARC, African-Asian Rural Development Programme – Ministry of Rural Development, Govt. of India (AARDO) and BOBP. CMFRI is also providing consultancy services in core areas like Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs), Fish Taxonomy, Fish stock assessment, Hatchery protocols, Mariculture technology, Fish Nutrition, Fish Health Management, Environmental Monitoring etc. in accordance with ICAR guidelines. The institute recently launched a programme to train 5000 fishermen in open sea cage farming technologies under NFDB funding. CMFRI has thus emerged as a platform effectively extend the results emanating from its various research programmes to the fishermen community and other stakeholders. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5116330 | 1,297,107 |
983,111 | Proponents of this brand of policy assert higher level, more specialized learning is a way to capitalize from the growing technology industry. Leading technology research university MIT published an open letter to policymakers advocating for the "reinvention of education", namely a shift "away from rote learning" and towards STEM disciplines. Similar statements released by the U.S President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PACST) have also been used to support this STEM emphasis on enrollment choice in higher learning. Education reform is also a part of the U.K government's "Industrial Strategy", a plan announcing the nation's intent to invest millions into a "technical education system". The proposal includes the establishment of a retraining program for workers who wish to adapt their skill-sets. These suggestions combat the concerns over automation through policy choices aiming to meet the emerging needs of society via updated information. Of the professionals within the academic community who applaud such moves, often noted is a gap between economic security and formal education —a disparity exacerbated by the rising demand for specialized skills—and education's potential to reduce it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32040137 | 982,597 |
1,153,213 | The Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery (LNNB) is a standardized test that identifies neuropsychological deficiencies by measuring functioning on fourteen scales. It evaluates learning, experience, and cognitive skills. The test was created by Charles Golden in 1981 and based on previous work by Alexander Luria that emphasizes a qualitative instead of quantitative approach. The original, adult version is for use with ages fifteen and over, while the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery for Children (LNNB-C) can be used with ages eight to twelve; both tests take two to three hours to administer. The LNNB has 269 items divided among fourteen scales, which are motor, rhythm, tactile, visual, receptive speech, expressive speech, writing, reading, arithmetic, memory, intellectual processes, pathognomonic, left hemisphere, and right hemisphere. The test is graded on scales that are correlated to regions of the brain to help identify which region may be damaged. The Luria-Nebraska has been found to be reliable and valid; it is comparable in this sense to other neuropsychological tests in its ability to differentiate between brain damage and mental illness. The test is used to diagnose and determine the nature of cognitive impairment, including the location of the brain damage, to understand the patient's brain structure and abilities, to pinpoint causes of behavior, and to help plan treatment. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32081140 | 1,152,603 |
1,725,757 | One unexpected aspect of phase locking in the auditory cortex has been observed in the responses elicited by complex acoustic stimuli with spectrograms that exhibit relatively slow envelopes (< 20 Hz), but that are carried by fast modulations that are as high as hundreds of Hertz. Speech and music, as well as various modulated noise stimuli have such temporal structure. For these stimuli, cortical responses phase-lock to "both" the envelope and fine-structure induced by interactions between unresolved harmonics of the sound, thus reflecting the pitch of the sound, and exceeding the typical lower limits of cortical phase-locking to the envelopes of a few 10’s of Hertz. This paradoxical relation between the slow and fast cortical phase-locking to the carrier “fine structure” has been demonstrated both in the auditory and visual cortices. It has also been shown to be amply manifested in measurements of the spectro-temporal receptive fields of the primary auditory cortex giving them unexpectedly fine temporal accuracy and selectivity bordering on a 5-10 ms resolution. The underlying causes of this phenomenon have been attributed to several possible origins, including nonlinear synaptic depression and facilitation, and/or a cortical network of thalamic excitation and cortical inhibition. There are many functionally significant and perceptually relevant reasons for the coexistence of these two complementary dynamic response modes. They include the ability to accurately encode onsets and other rapid ‘events’ in the ENV of complex acoustic and other sensory signals, features that are critical for the perception of consonants (speech) and percussive sounds (music), as well as the texture of complex sounds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56439577 | 1,724,786 |
1,342,669 | The minimal genome is a concept which can be defined as the set of genes sufficient for life to exist and propagate under nutrient-rich and stress-free conditions. Alternatively, it can also be defined as the gene set supporting life on an axenic cell culture in rich media, and it is thought what makes up the minimal genome will depend on the environmental conditions that the organism inhabits. By one early investigation, the minimal genome of a bacterium should include a virtually complete set of proteins for replication and translation, a transcription apparatus including four subunits of RNA polymerase including the sigma factor rudimentary proteins sufficient for recombination and repair, several chaperone proteins, the capacity for anaerobic metabolism through glycolysis and substrate-level phosphorylation, transamination of glutamyl-tRNA to glutaminyl-tRNA, lipid (but no fatty acid) biosynthesis, eight cofactor enzymes, protein export machinery, and a limited metabolite transport network including membrane ATPases. Proteins involved in the minimum bacterial genome tend to be substantially more related to proteins found in archaea and eukaryotes compared to the average gene in the bacterial genome more generally indicating a substantial number of universally (or near universally) conserved proteins. The minimal genomes reconstructed on the basis of existing genes does not preclude simpler systems in more primitive cells, such as an RNA world genome which does not have the need for DNA replication machinery, which is otherwise part of the minimal genome of current cells. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37388686 | 1,341,934 |
438,444 | Hermes was envisaged to be launched using the Ariane 5, replacing the upper stage of the latter during such missions, and would have detached from the launcher towards the latter part of the ascent. Prior to the 1986 redesign, "Hermes" was a single spaceplane containing (from front to back) a crew compartment for six, an airlock, an unpressurized cargo hold similar to Buran's and the Shuttle's, and a service module. After 1986, due to the "Challenger" accident, it was substantially redesigned. The crew cabin was shrunk to only carry three astronauts, with the cargo hold now pressurized and unable to carry or bring back satellites. "Hermes" now consisted of two separate sections: the vehicle itself and a cone-shaped Resource Module, which was to contain a docking mechanism and have been attached to the vehicle's rear, and would have been detached and discarded prior to re-entry. Only the crewed vehicle would re-enter Earth's atmosphere and be re-used; both the Resource Module and the launcher would be expended. When operated in conjunction with Hermes, the Ariane 5 would have had its upper stage entirely replaced to accommodate both the space plane and an adaptor to mate the vehicle with the main cryogenic stage. The equipment bay of the launcher would also be absent while the spaceplane itself would perform all guidance and control functions. The development and configuration of the Ariane 5 was strongly influenced by the requirements of "Hermes", such as the extra aerodynamic loads that it would have imposed along with the elevated reliability factor of 0.9999, while retaining minimal impact on the launcher's commercial competitiveness on non-"Hermes" missions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=272950 | 438,230 |
574,090 | Many of Woodward's syntheses were described as spectacular by his colleagues and before he did them, it was thought by some that it would be impossible to create these substances in the lab. Woodward's syntheses were also described as having an element of art in them, and since then, synthetic chemists have always looked for elegance as well as utility in synthesis. His work also involved the exhaustive use of the then newly developed techniques of infrared spectroscopy and later, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Another important feature of Woodward's syntheses was their attention to stereochemistry or the particular configuration of molecules in three-dimensional space. Most natural products of medicinal importance are effective, for example as drugs, only when they possess a specific stereochemistry. This creates the demand for 'stereoselective synthesis', producing a compound with a defined stereochemistry. While today a typical synthetic route routinely involves such a procedure, Woodward was a pioneer in showing how, with exhaustive and rational planning, one could conduct reactions that were stereoselective. Many of his syntheses involved forcing a molecule into a certain configuration by installing rigid structural elements in it, another tactic that has become standard today. In this regard, especially his syntheses of reserpine and strychnine were landmarks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=261625 | 573,796 |
471,235 | Until October 2006, 80 flight tests were already completed and DRDO was in dialogue with the IAF for user trials and induction. In 2006, Minister of Defence Pranab Mukherjee granted one year extension to Trishul project. Due to project delays, and modification of GSQRs and operational requirements over time, Trishul no longer able to meet the need of the end users. For continuation of the project and funding, it was proposed that the missile will be deployed in certain locations to conduct training, fire control, and air defence practice. As per Ministry of Defence (MoD), Trishul Project met the performance parameters set by the original GSQRs but failed to achieve the perfect three-beam guidance and development of millimeter-wave active radar homing seeker. The team of 200 scientists working on Trishul were reassigned for Barak 8, a joint project between DRDO and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). IAF finally selected SPYDER as an alternative to Trishul. To fulfill IAF requirement, DRDO made another attempt with MBDA on a joint project called Maitri. But it got cancelled due to lack of interest. All the proven technologies and learning from Trishul later helped DRDO in QRSAM and VL-SRSAM. People who worked on Trishul and Barak 8 termed the basic design flaw as one of the many reasons behind the project failure. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1248899 | 470,999 |
460,888 | In the United States, SIPs tend to come in sizes from 4 feet (1.22 m) to 24 feet (7.32 m) in width. Elsewhere, typical product dimensions are 300, 600, or 1,200 mm wide and 2.4, 2.7, and 3 m long, with roof SIPs up to 6 m long. Smaller sections ease transportation and handling, but the use of the largest panel possible will create the best insulated building. At 15−20 kg/m, longer panels can become difficult to handle without the use of a crane to position them, and this is a consideration that must be taken into account due to cost and site limitations. Also of note is that when needed for special circumstances longer spans can often be requested, such as for a long roof span. Typical U.S. height for panels is eight or nine feet (2.44 to 2.75 m). Panels come in widths ranging from 4 to 12 inches thick and a rough cost is $4–$6/ft in the U.S. In 4Q 2010, new methods of forming radius, sine curve, arches and tubular SIPs were commercialized. Due to the custom nature and technical difficulty of forming and curing specialty shapes, pricing is typically three or four times that of standard panels per foot. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=699437 | 460,662 |
364,899 | Monitoring player behavior to assist with detecting the card counters falls into the hands of the on-floor casino personnel ("pit bosses") and casino-surveillance personnel, who may use video surveillance ("the eye in the sky") as well as computer analysis, to try to spot playing behavior indicative of card counting. Early counter-strategies featured the dealers learning to count the cards themselves to recognize the patterns in the players. Many casino chains keep databases of players that they consider undesirable. Casinos can also subscribe to databases of advantage players offered by agencies like Griffin Investigations, Biometrica, and OSN (Oregon Surveillance Network). Griffin Investigations filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2005 after losing a libel lawsuit filed by professional gamblers. In 2008 all Chapter 11 payments were said to be up to date and all requirements met, and information was being supplied using data encryption and secure servers. If a player is found to be in such a database, they will almost certainly be stopped from play and asked to leave regardless of their table play. For successful card counters, therefore, skill at "cover" behavior, to hide counting and avoid "drawing heat" and possibly being barred, may be just as important as playing skill. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=438494 | 364,708 |
1,000,639 | Researchers from the company Colossal confirmed that their primary goal when trying to revive the woolly mammoth is to better the environment and climate change itself. However, some people are skeptical of climate change being reversed due to the comeback of the woolly mammoth or an animal that is scientifically reproduced like a woolly mammoth. Hence, Colossal is planning on putting such animals produced from the modification of genomes back into the Siberian Tundra to help decrease the rise in the area's temperature. It has been proven that throughout the years, the Siberian Tundra has been warming up, and as a result, it has started releasing carbon dioxide into the air. Researchers believe that the Siberian Tundra will entirely vanish within the upcoming years since, over the past fifty years, the tundra has seen a two-celsius degree increase within their average air temperature. All of this is said to be the result of climate change, in which temperatures at places like the Siberian Tundra are increasing at an alarming rate. At the same time, within the Siberian Tundra, the moss population has grown throughout the years due to the absence of the woolly mammoth within such an environment. With this in mind, scientists consider the woolly mammoths as "ecosystem engineers" in which they balance out the environment by preserving the grasslands within certain areas, like the Siberian Tundra, by breaking up the moss while they walk through the site. They also knocked down trees and, at the same time, provided fertilizer to their surrounding areas with their droppings. Hence, it is said that with the woolly mammoths back in the tundras, the soil within that area would be stopped from eroding and melting, which with this, the woolly mammoths can also help lock away the heat-trapping carbon dioxide that is released to the air. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32479098 | 1,000,121 |
117,356 | During the final stages of the war, the U.S. military initiated Operation Paperclip, an effort to capture advanced German weapons research, and keep it out of the hands of advancing Soviet forces. In April 1945, a Horten glider and the Ho 229 V3, which was undergoing final assembly, were captured and subsequently transported by sea to the United States as part of "Operation Seahorse" for evaluation. Along the way, the Ho 229 spent a brief time at RAE Farnborough in the UK, during which it was evaluated as to whether British jet engines could be installed, but the mountings were found to be incompatible with the early British turbojets, which used larger-diameter centrifugal compressors as opposed to the slimmer axial-flow turbojets the Germans had developed. The Americans were just starting to create their own axial-compressor turbojets before the conflict's end, such as the Westinghouse J30, with a thrust level only approaching the BMW 003A's full output. It is uncertain if the aircraft's original Junkers-supplied engines were ever ran, although the American evaluation team at one point had the intention of flying it. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=176778 | 117,311 |
346,067 | Other than Von Hornick, there were no mercantilist writers presenting an overarching scheme for the ideal economy, as Adam Smith would later do for classical economics. Rather, each mercantilist writer tended to focus on a single area of the economy. Only later did non-mercantilist scholars integrate these "diverse" ideas into what they called mercantilism. Some scholars thus reject the idea of mercantilism completely, arguing that it gives "a false unity to disparate events". Smith saw the mercantile system as an enormous conspiracy by manufacturers and merchants against consumers, a view that has led some authors, especially Robert E. Ekelund and Robert D. Tollison, to call mercantilism "a rent-seeking society". To a certain extent, mercantilist doctrine itself made a general theory of economics impossible. Mercantilists viewed the economic system as a zero-sum game, in which any gain by one party required a loss by another. Thus, any system of policies that benefited one group would by definition harm the other, and there was no possibility of economics being used to maximize the commonwealth, or common good. Mercantilists' writings were also generally created to rationalize particular practices rather than as investigations into the best policies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19708 | 345,886 |
1,909,313 | Learning and memory go hand-in-hand, as one cannot occur without the other. Learning involves experiences and how they alter the brain, while memory focuses on how those changes in the brain are stored and recalled. Lower socioeconomic status environments yield lower cognitive and intellectual development in children. Since children cannot choose the environments that they are raised in, parental influence can greatly aid or inhibit a child's cognitive development. Low socioeconomic status due to poverty is a leading cause in hindered cognitive development in growing children. A constant inadequate diet throughout early childhood deprives the brain of the nourishment it requires to develop and function successfully. Also affecting cognitive development is access to health care. Families with a low socioeconomic status cannot always afford necessary or beneficial health care for their children, which can hinder brain development, especially in later years when the brain is less likely to self-correct potential risk factors. A lack of intellectual stimulation can also decrease cognitive development in children, which can occur in households with a low income, that cannot afford supplementary activities or programs for their children's developing minds. One of the most dynamic inhibitors of cognitive development by parental influence however, is parental violence and negativity. Children who live in high-risk environments of parental abuse express fluctuations in their ability of attentional skills due to constant fear or safety concerns. Disturbance in attention can decrease both working memory and retrieval of long-term memories. If concentration is disturbed during recall, the memories that surface may be susceptible to reconsolidation, and the false memories that are created, due to lack of concentration, may solidify into inaccurate long-term memories. In a research model that looked at children living in environments of domestic violence and their relationship with memory, researchers found that children exposed to familial trauma displayed a poorer performance of working memory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44390130 | 1,908,215 |
2,138,907 | Critics of an expansionist policy consider the EU ETS to be too late and to price carbon too low to adequately mitigate the climate change effects of aviation emissions. Instead they advocate addressing these effects by constraining demand for air travel. The study "Predict and Decide – Aviation, climate change and UK policy", noting that a 10 per cent increase in fares generates a 5 to 15 per cent reduction in demand, recommends that the government should seek an alternative aviation policy based on managing demand rather than providing for it. This would be accomplished via a strategy that presumes "… against the expansion of UK airport capacity" and constrains demand by the use of economic instruments to price air travel less attractively. In another study the levying of £9 billion of taxes is calculated to constrain the forecast growth in demand by 2030 to 315 million passengers, reducing the annual rate of growth to 2 per cent. The environmental message is echoed in the ninth report of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Select Committee, published in July 2006, which labels the government strategy a predict and provide model and expresses scepticism about the timescale and efficiency of the EU ETS. It recommends instead that the government rethinks its airport expansion policy and considers ways, particularly via increased taxation, in which future demand can be managed in line with industry performance in achieving fuel efficiencies, so that emissions are not allowed to increase in absolute terms. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14120583 | 2,137,677 |
1,364,358 | Effective teaching methods have to enable the student to move from a lower to a higher level of understanding or abandon less efficient skills for more efficient ones. Therefore, knowledge of change mechanisms can be used as a basis for designing instructional interventions that will be both subject- and age-appropriate. Comparison of past to present knowledge, reflection on actual or mental actions vis-à-vis alternative solutions to problems, tagging new concepts or solutions to symbols that help one recall and mentally manipulate them, are just a few examples of how mechanisms of cognitive development may be used to facilitate learning. For example, to support metarepresentation and facilitate the emergence of general reasoning patterns from domain specific processing, teaching must continually raise awareness in students of what may be abstracted from any particular domain-specific learning. The student must be led to become aware of the underlying relations that surpass content differences and of the very mental processes used while handling them (for instance, elaborate on how particular inference schemas, such as implication, operate in different domains). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25076961 | 1,363,602 |
1,325,952 | In 1962, the Office of University Planning was established with the objective of developing a general plan for the university, which included the construction of a new campus, and the development of the regional university system by the creation of satellite campuses in the intermediate cities of the department. The new campus, located in the southern part of the city was construed on donated land and financed by a loan requested from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the creation of a revenue stamp, and the request for a part of the land value tax revenues of the adjacent neighborhoods. In 1964 the Schools and Faculties were reorganized into Divisions and Departments, which translated into an increased academic activity. At the time, five divisions were established with the reorganization: Architecture, Economy, Engineering, Health, and Sciences; and two more were created: Education and Humanities. By 1968 the university begun its internationalization process and an increment of its postgraduate programs, thanks to several donations made by several foreign foundations. By the end of the 1960s, the university had 5302 students, 453 full-time and 174 part-time professors, of which 9% had a Doctorate, 20% a Masters, and 21% a Specialist degree. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14257781 | 1,325,225 |
909,059 | The scientists use this apparent myth, along with recent discoveries in gravitational research, to develop a theory about the repeated collapse of society. A mathematical analysis of Lagash's orbit around its primary sun reveals irregularities caused by the presence of a previously undiscovered moon that cannot be seen in the light of day. Calculations indicate that this "invisible" moon will soon obscure one of Lagash's suns when it is alone in the sky, resulting in a total eclipse that only occurs once every 2,000 years. Having evolved on a planet with no diurnal cycle, all Lagashians possess an intense, instinctive fear of the dark. Psychological experiments involving darkness have revealed that Lagashians may suffer permanent mental illness or even death after as little as 15 minutes of exposure, and the eclipse is projected to last for over half a day. This, coupled with the fact that the diameter of the umbra is at least as great as that of the planet, ensures that the entire world population will experience an unprecedented period of prolonged, widespread darkness. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=677813 | 908,580 |
1,094,458 | Steelhead are raised in many countries throughout the world. Since the 1950s, production has grown exponentially, particularly in Europe and recently in Chile. Worldwide, in 2007, 604,695 tonnes of farmed steelhead were harvested, with a value of $2.59 billion. The largest producer is Chile. In Chile and Norway, the ocean-cage production of steelhead has expanded to supply export markets. Inland production of rainbow trout to supply domestic markets has increased strongly in countries such as Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, and Spain. Other significant producing countries include the United States, Iran, Germany, and the UK. Rainbow trout, including juvenile steelhead in fresh water, routinely feed on larval, pupal, and adult forms of aquatic insects (typically caddisflies, stoneflies, mayflies, and aquatic dipterana). They also eat fish eggs and adult forms of terrestrial insects (typically ants, beetles, grasshoppers, and crickets) that fall into the water. Other prey include small fish up to one-third of their length, crayfish, shrimp, and other crustaceans. As rainbow trout grow, the proportion of fish consumed increases in most populations. Some lake-dwelling forms may become planktonic feeders. In rivers and streams populated with other salmonid species, rainbow trout eat varied fish eggs, including those of salmon, brown and cutthroat trout, mountain whitefish, and the eggs of other rainbow trout. Rainbows also consume decomposing flesh from carcasses of other fish. Adult steelhead in the ocean feed primarily on other fish, squid, and amphipods. Cultured steelhead are fed a diet formulated to closely resemble their natural diet that includes fish meal, fish oil, vitamins and minerals, and the carotenoid asthaxanthin for pigmentation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=22726521 | 1,093,898 |
1,348,983 | Like numerous other animal groups, "Paramylodon" underwent a marked increase in body size in the course of its phylogeny. The weight of members of the Lower Pleistocene is given as about 915 kg, the late representatives from the Upper Pleistocene, however, probably reached up to 1.39 t body weight. Basis for the respective weight estimates are the femurs, whose corresponding lengths are 48.4 and 54.6 cm, respectively. The earliest forms from the Pliocene, whose position within the genus "Paramylodon", however, is widely discussed, had a total weight of about 310 kg with a femur length of 35.5 cm. Taking these early representatives into account, the weight of "Paramylodon" increased by a factor of 4.5 over the course of a good 2.5 million years. It is particularly striking that especially in the late Pleistocene at the time of the Last Glacial Period with its extremely pronounced climatic fluctuations, there is hardly any variation in size, as studies of the numerous finds from Rancho La Brea dating from 45,000 to 10,000 years before present show. This is explained with a high flexibility of the genus in relation to the environment and thus a high adaptability. However, the assumption ignores the fact that increasingly cooler conditions should lead to an increase in body size according to the Bergmann's rule. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16886646 | 1,348,238 |
843,528 | The extended FAST (eFAST) allows for the examination of both lungs by adding bilateral anterior thoracic sonography to the FAST exam. This allows for the detection of a pneumothorax with the absence of normal ‘lung-sliding’ and ‘comet-tail’ artifact (seen on the ultrasound screen). Compared with supine chest radiography, with CT or clinical course as the gold standard, bedside sonography has superior sensitivity (49–99% versus 27–75%), similar specificity (95–100%), and can be performed in under a minute. Several recent prospective studies have validated its use in the setting of trauma resuscitation, and have also shown that ultrasound can provide an accurate estimation of pneumothorax size. Although radiography or CT scanning is generally feasible, immediate bedside detection of a pneumothorax confirms what are often ambiguous physical findings in unstable patients, and guides immediate chest decompression. In addition, in the patient undergoing positive-pressure ventilation, the detection of an otherwise ‘occult’ pneumothorax prior to CT scanning may hasten treatment and subsequently prevent development of a tension pneumothorax, a deadly complication if not treated immediately, and deterioration in the radiology suite (in the CT scanner). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6545812 | 843,078 |
377,382 | Wireless charging is making an impact in the medical sector by means of being able to charge implants and sensors long-term that is located beneath the skin. Multiple companies offer rechargeable medical implant (e.g. implantable neurostimulators) which use inductive charging. Researchers have been able to print wireless power transmitting antenna on flexible materials that could be placed under the skin of patients. This could mean that under skin devices that could monitor the patient status could have a longer-term life and provide long observation or monitoring periods that could lead to better diagnosis from doctors. These devices may also make charging devices like pacemakers easier on the patient rather than having an exposed portion of the device pushing through the skin to allow corded charging. This technology would allow a completely implanted device making it safer for the patient. It is unclear if this technology will be approved for use – more research is needed on the safety of these devices. While these flexible polymers are safer than ridged sets of diodes they can be more susceptible to tearing during either placement or removal due to the fragile nature of the antenna that is printed on the plastic material. While these medical based applications seem very specific the high-speed power transfer that is achieved with these flexible antennas is being looked at for larger broader applications. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6349042 | 377,187 |
965,950 | Lawrencium is the last actinide. Among those who study the matter, it is generally considered a group 3 element, along with scandium, yttrium, and lutetium, as its filled f-shell is expected to make it resemble the 7th-period transition metals; though there has been some dispute on this point. In the periodic table, it is to the right of the actinide nobelium, to the left of the 6d transition metal rutherfordium, and under the lanthanide lutetium with which it shares many physical and chemical properties. Lawrencium is expected to be a solid under normal conditions and have a hexagonal close-packed crystal structure (/ = 1.58), similar to its lighter congener lutetium, though this is not yet known experimentally. The enthalpy of sublimation of lawrencium is estimated at 352 kJ/mol, close to the value of lutetium and strongly suggesting that metallic lawrencium is trivalent with three electrons delocalized, a prediction also supported by a systematic extrapolation of the values of heat of vaporization, bulk modulus, and atomic volume of neighboring elements to lawrencium: this makes it unlike the immediately preceding late actinides which are known to be (fermium and mendelevium) or expected to be (nobelium) divalent. The estimated enthalpies of vaporization show that lawrencium deviates from the trend of the late actinides and instead matches the trend of the succeeding 6d elements rutherfordium and dubnium, consistent with lawrencium's interpretation as a group 3 element. Some scientists prefer to end the actinides with nobelium and consider lawrencium to be the first transition metal of the seventh period. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17746 | 965,441 |
1,341,879 | "Mymoorapelta," like its relatives, was a low browsing herbivore in its ecosystem that likely fed on the cycads and conifers of the time due to the lack of complex grasses in the Jurassic. Nodosaurids like "Mymoorapelta" had narrow snouts, an adaptation seen today in animals that are selective browsers as opposed to the wide muzzles of grazers. In ankylosaurs, the Jurassic and mid-Cretaceous forms with narrow and pointed muzzles were apparently the most selective feeders like extant mammalian browsers. This is in stark contrast to later ankylosaurs, which were adapted to bulk feeding of less nutritious foods. The preservation of complete hyobranchial apparatuses in taxa like the ankylosaurid "Pinacosaurus" and the nodosaurid "Edmontonia" demonstrate that ankylosaurs had fleshy, muscular tongues that could assist with feeding on plants low to the ground. Tongue protrusion and prehension is not confidently known, but at least in later ankylosaurids, lingual food manipulation could have been used, like in giraffes, to crop food. The preservation of cheek plates in "Edmontonia" and "Panoplosaurus" provide evidence for fleshy cheeks and chewing created a fleshy cheek which covered the tooth rows for defense and to prevent food loss when eating. Tooth occlusion is not directly preserved in "Mymoorapelta" or its close relative "Gargoyleosaurus", but it has been found in Cretaceous nodosaurids. The earliest evidence of nodosaurid occlusion is in "Sauropelta," which had basic occlusion that demonstrate that the power strokes went in a vertical direction. In contrast to later nodosaurids, tooth-tooth contact was incidental or local when present and a biphasial jaw mechanism was lacking in "Mymoorapelta" and "Gargoyleosaurus". In wear patterns overall, ankylosaurs demonstrate more variable wear patterns than the contemporary ceratopsids and hadrosaurids of the Cretaceous. Though ankylosaurs may not have fed on fibrous and woody plants, they may have had a varied diet, including tough leaves and pulpy fruits. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4347315 | 1,341,145 |
1,286,241 | Frank J. Malina began part-time work at the GALCIT ten-foot wind tunnel, the Southern California Cooperative Wind Tunnel. In 1935 he became a Graduate Assistant in the lab. In early 1936, with the aid of a graduate assistant to von Kármán, William Bollay, Malina and two rocket enthusiasts -- Jack Parsons and Edward S. Forman—began the GALCIT Rocket Research Project. They were soon joined by two GALCIT graduate students, Tsien Hsue-shen and A.M.O. Smith. In October they tested for the first time their gaseous oxygen - methyl alcohol rocket motor. They used an area of the Arroyo Seco on the western edge of Pasadena, "a stone’s throw from the present-day Jet Propulsion Laboratory." After a series of tests, they tested the motor in that location for the last time in January 1937; it ran for 44 seconds at a chamber pressure of 75 psi. In March, Weld Arnold, then an assistant in the Astrophysical Laboratory at Caltech, joined the group as a photographer. Tests of a motor that used nitrogen dioxide as the oxidizer were conducted in the GALCIT lab. A misfire of that motor gained the project the nickname, "The Suicide Squad." During 1938 Smith went to work for Douglas Aircraft. Arnold left Caltech for New York. Tsien devoted more of his time to completing his doctorate. Malina, Parsons and Forman continued with the project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10441596 | 1,285,540 |
1,060,425 | The Sentinel Mission program was the cornerstone of the B612 Foundation's earlier efforts, with its preliminary design and system architecture level reviews planned for 2014, and its critical design review to be conducted in 2015. The infrared telescope would be launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, to be placed into a Venus-trailing Heliocentric orbit around the Sun. Orbiting between the Sun and Earth, the Sun's rays would always be behind the telescope's lens and thus never inhibit the space observatory's ability to detect asteroids or other near-Earth objects (NEOs). From the vantage of its inner-solar system orbit around the Sun, Sentinel would be able to "pick up objects that are currently difficult, if not impossible, to see in advance from Earth", such as occurred with the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013 that went undetected until its explosion over Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. The Sentinel Mission was planned to provide an accurate dynamic catalog of asteroids and other NEOs made available to scientists worldwide from the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, the data collected would calculate the risk of impact events with our planet, allowing for asteroid deflection by the use of gravity tractors to divert their trajectories away from Earth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=333633 | 1,059,874 |
529,226 | OpenGL is a portable API specification. Code written with OpenGL is easily ported between platforms with a compatible implementation. For example, "Quake II", which uses OpenGL, was ported from Windows to Linux by a fan of the game. OpenGL is a standard maintained by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB). The ARB meets periodically to update the standard by adding emerging support for features of the latest 3D hardware. Since it is standards based and has been around the longest, OpenGL is used by and taught in colleges and universities around the world. In addition, the development tools provided by the manufacturers of some video game consoles (such as the Nintendo GameCube, the Nintendo DS, and the PSP) use graphic APIs that resemble OpenGL. OpenGL often lags behind on feature updates due to the lack of a permanent development team and the requirement that implementations begin development after the standard has been published. Programmers who choose to use it can access some hardware's latest 3D features, but only through non-standardized extensions. The situation may change in the future as the OpenGL architecture review board (ARB) has passed control of the specification to the Khronos Group in an attempt to counter the problem. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=773853 | 528,952 |
1,806,796 | Apprehensive in case his ideas should again be stolen, he designed and built the machine single-handed from wood in the workshop attached to his printing business. To compensate for the limited precision achievable using wooden components, he constructed the machine on a large scale; it was 6 feet long by 3 feet deep and 1 foot high (1800 x 900 x 300 mm). The use of balanced ternary meant that the machine was not suitable for performing addition and subtraction because of the overhead of the conversion to and from base 10. It was more useful for problems (like those Thomas Fowler needed to solve as Treasurer of the Poor Law union) where there are a large number of intermediate calculations in between the conversions to and from ternary. It could perform both multiplication and division. An improved model, created in 1842 was exhibited in the museum of King's College London for a time. Fowler was advised that he should construct a new machine in metal but he was not able to afford it and the government refused to provide any support. The machine was dismantled and returned to his son some time after Fowler's death. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2744215 | 1,805,777 |
1,574,208 | Fronts are important in many aspects. Some frontal types, such as upwelling and convergence fronts, are sites of pronounced exchange between deep and surface ocean and can catalyse the generation of mesoscale eddies and submesoscale filaments. Upwelling fronts can bring nutrients to the surface and lead to phytoplankton growth. This phytoplankton growth can in turn support other marine organisms in the area. Some fronts create hotspots of marine biodiversity and biogeochemical processes when they inject macronutrients from an adjacent nutrient-rich water mass into a nutrient-limited and physically stable euphotic zone, enhancing new primary production. Indeed, Southern Ocean fronts divided this Ocean into a number of distinct biophysical zones, and hence a number of distinct habitats, which in turn support distinct biota. Because coastal waters are generally more nutrient-rich than offshore waters, the shelf sea fronts often mark stark biogeochemical boundaries. However, strong mixing that occurs at some fronts can provide nutrients to the euphotic zone and enhance productivity. The surplus of carbon biomass produced on fronts may be exported downwards, feeding deeper pelagic and benthic communities. The downwards transport of carbon biomass is an important pathway in the global carbon cycle, particularly in shallow seas where part of the particulate organic carbon fixed by photosynthesis accumulates in bottom sediments. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34989901 | 1,573,319 |
91,837 | After Shepard left NASA, he served on the boards of many corporations. He also served as president of his umbrella company for several business enterprises, Seven Fourteen Enterprises, Inc. (named for his two flights, "Freedom 7" and Apollo 14). He made a fortune in banking and real estate. He was a fellow of the American Astronautical Society and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, a member of Rotary, Kiwanis, the Mayflower Society, the Order of the Cincinnati, and the American Fighter Aces, an honorary member of the board of directors for the Houston School for Deaf Children, and a director of the National Space Institute and the Los Angeles Ear Research Institute. In 1984, together with the other surviving Mercury astronauts, and Betty Grissom, Gus Grissom's widow, Shepard founded the Mercury Seven Foundation, which raises money to provide college scholarships to science and engineering students. It was renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation in 1995. Shepard was elected its first president and chairman, positions he held until October 1997, when he was succeeded by former astronaut Jim Lovell. As of 2022, daughter Laura Churchley leads the foundation's Board of Trustees. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63727 | 91,797 |
1,513,020 | The satellite navigation system GLONASS was conceived in the late 1960s, and formal requirements were completed in 1970. The government of the Soviet Union made a decision to develop the system in 1976. Design work was carried out by specialists led by Vladimir Cheremisin at NPO PM in Krasnoyarsk-26. The first launch took place in 1982. Until its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union launched 43 GLONASS-related satellites. Work on the system was continued by the Russian Federation which brought it its full operational capability in 1995. In the following years, the system fell into disrepair due to the economic crisis in the country and diminished space funding. Starting from 2000, the government under President Vladimir Putin made the restoration of GLONASS a top priority; its funding was doubled and after a lull of several years, launches were restarted again. In 2003, a new satellite design, GLONASS-M, was introduced. By early 2011, GLONASS had 22 operational satellites, two short of the required constellation of 24 to provide global coverage. The latest and significantly improved satellite type, GLONASS-K, was launched in February 2011. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30958981 | 1,512,169 |
755,082 | The success of the raid was tempered by the loss of d'Ornano and a T patrol member. Leclerc assumed overall command and marshalled his forces to take Kufra. A diversionary raid by mounted Meharistes colonial cavalry failed after it was betrayed by local guides, so Leclerc to relegated these men to recon duties only. Intelligence indicated that the oasis had two defensive lines based around the El Tag fort with barbed wire, trenches, machine guns and light AA (anti-aircraft) defences. The garrison was thought to comprise a battalion of Askaris (Colonial Infantry) under Colonel Leo, plus supporting troops. The oasis was also defended by "La Compania Sahariana de Cufra", a specialized mobile force and the forerunner of the famous "Sahariana" companies of the mid-war period. The company was composed of desert veterans crewing various Fiat and Lancia trucks equipped with HMGs and 20 mm AA weapons, together with some armoured cars. The company also had the support of its own air arm to assist in long range reconnaissance and ground attack. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=376965 | 754,679 |
1,080,984 | In June 1835 Airy was appointed Astronomer Royal in succession to John Pond, and began his long career at the national observatory which constitutes his chief title to fame. The condition of the observatory at the time of his appointment was such that Lord Auckland, the first Lord of the Admiralty, considered that "it ought to be cleared out," while Airy admitted that "it was in a queer state." With his usual energy he set to work at once to reorganise the whole management. He remodelled the volumes of observations, put the library on a proper footing, mounted the new (Sheepshanks) equatorial and organised a new magnetic observatory. In 1847 an altazimuth was erected, designed by Airy to enable observations of the moon to be made not only on the meridian, but whenever it might be visible. In 1848 Airy invented the reflex zenith tube to replace the zenith sector previously employed. At the end of 1850 the great transit circle of 203 mm (8 inch) aperture and 3.5 m (11 ft 6 in) focal length was erected, and is still the principal instrument of its class at the observatory. The mounting in 1859 of an equatorial of 330 mm (13 inch) aperture evoked the comment in his journal for that year, "There is not now a single person employed or instrument used in the observatory which was there in Mr Pond's time"; and the transformation was completed by the inauguration of spectroscopic work in 1868 and of the photographic registration of sunspots in 1873. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=205497 | 1,080,428 |
731,499 | In 1920, Sukhoi was finally demobilized from the army because of his health-related problems, and the government of the Russian Soviet Republic issued a resolution to reopen institutions of higher education in Russia. Sukhoi returned to his studies at BMSTU and graduated in 1925 with his thesis titles "Single-engined Pursuit Aircraft of 300 hp" under the direction of aeronautics pioneer Andrei Tupolev. In March 1925, Sukhoi started working as an engineer and designer with the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) and Moscow Factory Number 156 under Tupolev. During the following years, Sukhoi designed and constructed aircraft including the record-setting Tupolev ANT-25 and the TB-1 and TB-3 heavy bombers. In 1932, Sukhoi was appointed head of the engineering and design department of TsAGI, and in 1938 he was promoted to head of the department of design. Sukhoi also developed a multi-purpose light aircraft, the Su-2, which saw service in the early years of the Eastern Front of World War II. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67286 | 731,113 |
789,417 | Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or motor neuron disease (MND) is a progressive condition which leads to weakness and eventual paralysis. Approximately 75% of people with ALS are unable to speak by the time of their death. In a procedure known as voice banking, people with ALS may digitally record words and phrases while still able to do so, for later inclusion in a communication device. AAC systems used typically change over time depending on severity of speech impairment, physical status, and the individual's communication needs. Use of augmentative communication strategies generally begins when speaking rate drops to 100 words per minute. In the early stages, AAC may consist of using an alphabet board to cue the listener to the first letter of the word being spoken, and may be used with those less familiar with the individual. In the later stages, AAC often becomes the main communicative method, although familiar conversation partners may still understand some spoken words. Since cognition and vision are typically unaffected in ALS, writing-based systems are preferred to graphic symbols, as they allow the unlimited expression of all words in a language. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2106968 | 788,993 |
2,116,865 | Metal ions are essential to virtually all biological systems and hence studying their concentrations with effective probes is highly advantageous. Since metal ions are key to the causes of cancer, diabetes, and other diseases, monitoring them with probes that can provide insight into their concentrations with spatial and temporal resolution is of great interest to the scientific community. There are many applications that one can envision for small molecule sensors. It has been shown that one can use them to differentiate effectively between acceptable and harmful concentrations of mercury in fish. Further, since some types of neurons uptake zinc during their operation, these probes can be used as a way to track activity in the brain and could serve as an effective alternative to functional MRI. One can also track and quantify the growth of a cell, such as a fibroblast, that uptakes metal ions as it constructs itself. Numerous other biological processes can be tracked using small molecule sensors as many change metal concentrations as they occur, which can then be monitored. Still, the sensor must be tailored for its specific environment and sensing requirements. Depending on the application, the metal sensor should be selective for a certain type of metal, and especially needs to be able to bind its target metal with greater affinity than metals that naturally exist at high concentrations within the cell . Further, they should provide a response with a strong modulation in fluorescent spectrum and hence provide a high signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, it is essential that a sensor is not toxic to the biological system in which it is used. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45232441 | 2,115,648 |
1,089,461 | Other students such as Joseph Fitzmyer, Frank Moore Cross, Raymond E. Brown, and David Noel Freedman, became international leaders in the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East, including Northwest Semitic epigraphy and paleography. John Bright, Cyrus H. McCormick Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpretation at Union Seminary in Richmond (PhD, Johns Hopkins, 1940), went on to become "the first distinguished American historian of the Old Testament" and "arguably the most influential scholar of the Albright school", owing to his "distinctly American commonsense flavor, similar to that of W[illiam] James". Thus Albright and his students influenced a broad swath of American higher education from the 1940s through the 1970s, after which revisionist scholars such as T. L. Thompson, John Van Seters, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip R. Davies developed and advanced a minimalist critique of Albright's view that archaeology supports the broad outlines of the history of Israel as presented in the Bible. Like other academic polymaths (Edmund Husserl in phenomenology and Max Weber in the fields of sociology and the sociology of religion), Albright created and advanced the discipline of biblical archaeology, which is now taught at universities worldwide and has exponents across national, cultural, and religious lines. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=210162 | 1,088,901 |
1,297,508 | There is an alternate strategy for identifying fit mates which does not rely on one gender having exaggerated sexual ornaments or other handicaps, but is probably generally applicable to most, if not all sexual creatures. It derives from the concept that the change in appearance and functionality caused by a non-silent mutation will generally stand out in a population. This is because that altered appearance and functionality will be unusual, peculiar, and different from the norm within that population. The norm against which these unusual features are judged is made up of fit attributes that have attained their plurality through natural selection, while less well adapted attributes will be in the minority or frankly rare. Since the overwhelming majority of mutant features are maladaptive, and it is impossible to predict evolution's future direction, sexual creatures would be expected to prefer mates with the fewest unusual or minority features. This will have the effect of a sexual population rapidly shedding peripheral phenotypic features, thereby canalizing the entire outward appearance and behavior of all of its members. They will all very quickly begin to look remarkably similar to one another in every detail, as illustrated in the accompanying photograph of the African pygmy kingfisher, "Ispidina picta". Once a population has become as homogeneous in appearance as is typical of most species, its entire repertoire of behaviors will also be rendered evolutionarily stable, including any cooperative, altruistic and social interactions. Thus, in the example above of the selfish individual who hangs back from the rest of the hunting pack, but who nevertheless joins in the spoils, that individual will be recognized as being different from the norm, and will therefore find it difficult to attract a mate (koinophilia). Its genes will therefore have only a very small probability of being passed on to the next generation, thus evolutionarily stabilizing cooperation and social interactions at whatever level of complexity is the norm in that population. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4839105 | 1,296,796 |
632,342 | A 0.02–0.2 M solution of nucleoside phosphoramidite (or a mixture of several phosphoramidites) in acetonitrile is activated by a 0.2–0.7 M solution of an acidic azole catalyst, 1"H"-tetrazole, 5-ethylthio-1H-tetrazole, 2-benzylthiotetrazole, 4,5-dicyanoimidazole, or a number of similar compounds. A more extensive information on the use of various coupling agents in oligonucleotide synthesis can be found in a recent review. The mixing is usually very brief and occurs in fluid lines of oligonucleotide synthesizers (see below) while the components are being delivered to the reactors containing solid support. The activated phosphoramidite in 1.5 – 20-fold excess over the support-bound material is then brought in contact with the starting solid support (first coupling) or a support-bound oligonucleotide precursor (following couplings) whose 5'-hydroxy group reacts with the activated phosphoramidite moiety of the incoming nucleoside phosphoramidite to form a phosphite triester linkage. The coupling of 2'-deoxynucleoside phosphoramidites is very rapid and requires, on small scale, about 20 s for its completion. In contrast, sterically hindered 2'-"O"-protected ribonucleoside phosphoramidites require 5-15 min to be coupled in high yields. The reaction is also highly sensitive to the presence of water, particularly when dilute solutions of phosphoramidites are used, and is commonly carried out in anhydrous acetonitrile. Generally, the larger the scale of the synthesis, the lower the excess and the higher the concentration of the phosphoramidites is used. In contrast, the concentration of the activator is primarily determined by its solubility in acetonitrile and is irrespective of the scale of the synthesis. Upon the completion of the coupling, any unbound reagents and by-products are removed by washing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10663351 | 632,004 |
951,661 | Human craniotomy is usually performed under general anesthesia but can be also done with the patient awake using a local anaesthetic; the procedure, typically, does not involve significant discomfort for the patient. In general, a craniotomy will be preceded by an MRI scan which provides an image of the brain that the surgeon uses to plan the precise location for bone removal and the appropriate angle of access to the relevant brain areas. The amount of skull that needs to be removed depends on the type of surgery being performed. The bone flap is mostly removed with the help of a cranial drill and a craniotome, then replaced using titanium plates and screws or another form of fixation (wire, suture, etc.) after completion of the surgical procedure. In the event the host bone does not accept its replacement an artificial piece of skull, often made of PEEK, is substituted. (The PEEK appliance is routinely modeled by a CNC machine capable of accepting a high resolution MRI computer file in order to provide a very close fit, in an effort to minimize fitment issues, and therefore minimizing the duration of the cranial surgery.) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1214710 | 951,156 |
1,585,110 | After official trials, the "Regia Aeronautica" rejected the Ca.114 in favour of the Fiat CR.32. Nevertheless, Caproni found a buyer in the Peruvian Aviation Corps, which ordered 12 examples in April 1934. These aircraft were delivered in two batches, the first in late November 1934, and the second in January 1935. These were pressed into service with the 2do Escuadron de Caza [2nd Fighter Squadron], part of Primer Escuadrón de Aviación [First Aviation Squadron] based in the newly created "Teniente Coronel Pedro Ruiz Gallo" in Chiclayo. Only a single loss was recorded by 1939, when the fleet was sent to the Caproni Factory in Lima to receive an overhaul. The heavy exhaust collector ring was discarded and replaced by individual exhaust stacks, which probably improved the aircraft maximum speed. Additionally, the original red-black scheme was replaced by a silver dope overall finish. Ten remaining aircraft took part, as part of the 42 and 43 Escuadrillas [flights], of the XXI Escuadrón de Caza [Fighter Squadron], along with six more modern North American NA-50 fighters. After the war the Ca.114s were withdrawn from the front line and four aircraft employed in training duties from Las Palmas airbase in Lima until late 1944 when they were grounded and, shortly after, scrapped. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14529053 | 1,584,219 |
593,108 | Whale watching is carried out on every continent, with an estimated 13 million people participating in 2008. This, when combined with the sustained increase in boat vessel traffic, has likely affected the surface activity of cetaceans. When boats and other whale watching vessels approach, most cetaceans will either avoid or seek interactions. The occasions where no effect is seen is predominantly when the cetaceans are travelling or feeding, but not when they are showing surface activity. In the case of avoidance, the animals may dive rather than staying submerged near the surface or move horizontally away from the vessels. For example, when sperm whales are approached by boats they surface less, shorten the intervals between breathes and do not show their fluke before diving as often. Cetaceans may also reduce their acrobatic surfacing behaviours, such as when humpback whale groups without calves are approached by vessels to within 300 m. Avoidance behaviour is typical of whales, but interactions are more common in whale groups that contain calves and also in the smaller Odontocetes. For example, studies on killer whales in North America have shown that the focal animals increased their tail-slapping behaviour when approached by boats within 100 m, and that 70% of surface active behaviours (SABs) in these orca were seen when a boat was within 225 m. Similarly, dusky dolphins also jump, change direction and form tighter groups more when boats are present, particularly when they do not adhere to the regulations about approach. As an increase in SABs is beneficial to the whale watching tours’ participants, the tours may be encouraged to approach cetaceans closer than recommended by guidelines. There is a lack of understanding about the long-term effects of whale-watching on the behaviour of cetaceans, but it is theorised that it may cause avoidance of popular sites, or a decrease in the energy budget for individuals involved. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=755842 | 592,804 |
785,091 | According to the psychologist Donald W. MacKinnon and his co-author William F. Dukes, American psychologists began to attempt to study repression in the experimental laboratory around 1930. These psychologists were influenced by an exposition of the concept of repression published by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones in the "American Journal of Psychology" in 1911. Like other psychologists who attempted to submit the claims of psychoanalysis to experimental test, they did not immediately try to develop new techniques for that purpose, instead conducting surveys of the psychological literature to see whether "experiments undertaken to test other theoretical assertions" had produced results relevant to assessing psychoanalysis. In 1930, H. Meltzer published a survey of experimental literature on "the relationships between feeling and memory" in an attempt to determine the relevance of laboratory findings to "that aspect of the theory of repression which posits a relationship between hedonic tone and conscious memory." However, according to MacKinnon and Dukes, because Meltzer had an inadequate grasp of psychoanalytic writing he misinterpreted Freud's view that the purpose of repression is to avoid "unpleasure", taking the term to mean simply something unpleasant, whereas for Freud it actually meant deep-rooted anxiety. Nevertheless, Meltzer pointed out shortcomings in the studies he reviewed, and in MacKinnon and Dukes's view he also "recognized that most of the investigations which he reviewed had not been designed specifically to test the Freudian theory of repression." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1674710 | 784,670 |
356,854 | Although there is no cure, most cases of OI do not have a major effect on life expectancy, death during childhood from it is rare, and many adults with OI can achieve a significant degree of autonomy despite disability. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle by exercising, eating a balanced diet sufficient in vitamin D and calcium, and avoiding smoking can help prevent fractures. Genetic counseling may be sought by those with OI to prevent their children from inheriting the disorder from them. Treatment may include acute care of broken bones, pain medication, physical therapy, mobility aids such as leg braces and wheelchairs, vitamin D supplementation, and, especially in childhood, rodding surgery. Rodding is an implantation of metal intramedullary rods along the long bones (such as the femur) in an attempt to strengthen them. Medical research also supports the use of medications of the bisphosphonate class, such as pamidronate, to increase bone density. Bisphosphonates are especially effective in children, however it is unclear if they either increase quality of life or decrease the rate of fracture incidence. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=891521 | 356,668 |
1,447,678 | Multidrug resistance is the most important limitation in anticancer therapy. It can develop in many chemically distinct compounds. Until now, several mechanisms are known to develop the resistance. The most common is production of so-called "efflux pumps". The pumps remove drugs from tumor cells which lead to low drug concentration in the target, below therapeutic level. Efflux is caused by P-glycoprotein called also the multidrug transporter. This protein is a product of multidrug resistance gene MDR1 and a member of family of ATP-dependent transporters (ATP-binding cassette). P-glycoprotein occurs in every organism and serves to protect the body from xenobiotics and is involved in moving nutrients and other biologically important compounds inside one cell or between cells. P-glycoprotein detects substrates when they enter the plasma membrane and bind them which causes activation of one of the ATP-binding domains. The next step is hydrolysis of ATP, which leads to a change in the shape of P-gp and opens a channel through which the drug is pumped out of the cell. Hydrolysis of a second molecule of ATP results in closing of the channel and the cycle is repeated. P-glycoprotein has affinity to hydrophobic drugs with a positive charge or electrically neutral and is often over-expressed in many human cancers. Some tumors, e.g. lung cancer, do not over-express this transporter but also are able to develop the resistance. It was discovered that another transporter MRP1 also work as the efflux pump, but in this case substrates are negatively charged natural compounds or drugs modified by glutathione, conjugation, glycosylation, sulfation and glucuronylation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33071344 | 1,446,862 |
1,805,601 | The studies completed during Apollo, although less than optimal, left no doubt that a decrement in exercise tolerance occurred in the period immediately after landing, although it is believed that such decrements were not present during surface EVA. It seems likely that multiple factors are responsible for the observed decrements. Lack of sufficient exercise and development of muscle disuse atrophy probably contributed. Catabolic tissue processes may have been accentuated by increased cortisol secretion as a consequence of mission stress and individual crew member reaction to such stress. Additional factors associated with the return to Earth's gravity may also be implicated. This, the observed diminished stroke volume (cardiac output) is certainly contributory and, in turn, is a reflection of diminished venous return and contracted effective circulating blood volume induced by spaceflight factors. Skeletal muscle atrophy is mentioned with respect to its possible contribution to exercise intolerance, and in some of the later Apollo flights lower limb girth measurements were completed (data not published) that provided the first evidence for loss of muscle mass in the legs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39377992 | 1,804,586 |
865,651 | "Doom" was first shown to the public during QuakeCon 2014, where it was confirmed it was running on an early version of id Tech 6. The developers' goals when creating the engine were described as being able to drive good looking games running at 1080p on 60 fps but also reintroduce real-time dynamic lighting which was largely removed from id Tech 5. The engine still uses virtual textures (dubbed "MegaTextures" in id Tech 4 and 5) but they are of higher quality and no longer restrict the appearance of realtime lighting and shadows. Physically based rendering has also been confirmed. A technical analysis of "Doom" found that the engine supports motion blur, bokeh depth of field, HDR bloom, shadow mapping, lightmaps, irradiance volumes, image-based lighting, FXAA, volumetric lighting/smoke, destructible environments, Water Physics, Skin sub-surface scattering, SMAA and TSSAA anti-aliasing, directional occlusion, screen space reflections, normal maps, GPU accelerated particles which are correctly lit and shadowed, triple buffer v-sync which acts like fast sync, unified volumetric fog (every light, shadow, indirect lighting affects it, including water caustics / underwater light scattering), tessellated water surface (on the fly without GPU tessellation. Caustics are dynamically generated and derived from water surface), and chromatic aberration. On July 11, 2016, id Software released an update for the game that added support for Vulkan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25666237 | 865,191 |
691,349 | The 1987 "Edwards v. Aguillard" U.S. Supreme Court decision barred the required teaching of creation science from public schools but allowed evolutionary theory on the grounds of scientific validity. After the decision, a later draft of the textbook "Of Pandas and People" (1989) systematically replaced each and every cognate of the word "creation" with the phrase "intelligent design" or similar ID terms. The books of lawyer Phillip E. Johnson on theistic realism dealt directly with criticism of evolutionary theory and its purported biased "materialist" science, and aimed to legitimize the teaching of creationism in schools. In March 1992, a conference at Southern Methodist University brought Behe together with other leading figures into what Johnson later called the "wedge strategy." In 1993, the "Johnson-Behe cadre of scholars" met at Pajaro Dunes, California, and Behe presented for the first time his idea of irreducibly complex molecular machinery. Following a summer 1995 conference, "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture," the group obtained funding through the Discovery Institute. In 1996, Behe became a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture), an organization dedicated to promoting intelligent design. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=186205 | 690,986 |
794,814 | During the year 1976, a new x-y capacitive screen, based on the capacitance touch screens developed in 1972 by Danish electronics engineer Bent Stumpe, was developed at CERN. This technology, allowing an exact location of the different touch points, was used to develop a new type of human machine interface (HMI) for the control room of the Super Proton Synchrotron particle accelerator. In a handwritten note dated 11 March 1972, Stumpe presented his proposed solution – a capacitive touch screen with a fixed number of programmable buttons presented on a display. The screen was to consist of a set of capacitors etched into a film of copper on a sheet of glass, each capacitor being constructed so that a nearby flat conductor, such as the surface of a finger, would increase the capacitance by a significant amount. The capacitors were to consist of fine lines etched in copper on a sheet of glass – fine enough (80 μm) and sufficiently far apart (80 μm) to be invisible. In the final device, a simple lacquer coating prevented the fingers from actually touching the capacitors. In the same year, MIT described a keyboard with variable graphics capable of multi-touch detection. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8859863 | 794,389 |
434,828 | At the start of the 19th century, improvements in the size and quality of telescope optics proved a significant advance in observation capability. Most notable among these enhancements was the two-component achromatic lens of the German optician Joseph von Fraunhofer that essentially eliminated coma—an optical effect that can distort the outer edge of the image. By 1812, Fraunhofer had succeeded in creating an achromatic objective lens in diameter. The size of this primary lens is the main factor in determining the light gathering ability and resolution of a refracting telescope. During the opposition of Mars in 1830, the German astronomers Johann Heinrich Mädler and Wilhelm Beer used a Fraunhofer refracting telescope to launch an extensive study of the planet. They chose a feature located 8° south of the equator as their point of reference. (This was later named the Sinus Meridiani, and it would become the zero meridian of Mars.) During their observations, they established that most of Mars' surface features were permanent, and more precisely determined the planet's rotation period. In 1840, Mädler combined ten years of observations to draw the first map of Mars. Rather than giving names to the various markings, Beer and Mädler simply designated them with letters; thus Meridian Bay (Sinus Meridiani) was feature ""a"". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25998318 | 434,614 |
2,056,034 | Rhoads and Germano (1982) developed a list of parameters taken from SPI in an effort to reduce and quantify specific environmental attributes and make them amenable to traditional statistical analysis. Their list has been modified and qualified throughout the literature, but is summarised in Table 1. A few of these parameters can be calibrated and are reproducible in a variety of habitats. Gross sediment texture is probably the least controvertible and most immediately informative parameter for producing benthic habitat maps and identifying sediment-modifying impacts. The apparent redox potential discontinuity (ARPD) can also be a powerful assessment parameter. For example, one of the reported effects of sustained aquaculture activity on coastal environments is the deposition and accumulation of organic-rich sediments near the production site whether from the faeces and pseudofaeces of shellfish or uneaten food and excretion of fin fish. This can result in an increase in oxygen consumption by the sediment, formation of anoxic sediments, and the production and release of harmful gases such as methane, HS, and CO which can affect the water column, benthic macrofauna (Pocklington et al. 1994), and meiofauna (Mazzola et al. 1999). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14917968 | 2,054,851 |
620,551 | Velodyne's experience with laser distance measurement started in 2005, when David Hall and his brother Bruce (then president of Velodyne) entered a vehicle in a driverless car race called DARPA Grand Challenge sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The experience led them to realize shortcomings both in camera-centric approaches and in existing lidar technology, which only scanned a single, fixed line of sight. Velodyne developed new sensors for the 2007 race. The brothers sold their perception detection system as a steering input to five of the six teams that finished the 2007 race. The system rotated 64 lasers and measured the time of flight to calculate distances to surrounding objects. This created a 360-degree 3D map of the environment. The new system produced one million data points per second, while earlier systems produced 5,000 data points per second. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20227238 | 620,236 |
241,187 | In 1948, Arne Tiselius was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the principle of electrophoresis as the migration of charged and dissolved atoms or molecules in an electric field. The use of a solid matrix (initially paper discs) in a zone electrophoresis improved the separation. The discontinuous electrophoresis of 1964 by L. Ornstein and B. J. Davis made it possible to improve the separation by the stacking effect. The use of cross-linked polyacrylamide hydrogels, in contrast to the previously used paper discs or starch gels, provided a higher stability of the gel and no microbial decomposition. The denaturing effect of SDS in continuous polyacrylamide gels and the consequent improvement in resolution was first described in 1965 by David F. Summers in the working group of James E. Darnell to separate poliovirus proteins. The current variant of the SDS-PAGE was described in 1970 by Ulrich K. Laemmli and initially used to characterise the proteins in the head of bacteriophage T4. This Laemmli paper is widely cited for the invention of modern SDS-PAGE, but the technique was actually invented by Jake Maizel, who was doing a sabbatical in the MRC laboratory when Laemmli joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Maizel shared his prior technology with Laemmli and together they made further improvements. Laemmli and Maizel had planned to follow up with a Methods paper but this never materialized. Maizel recounts the history of development of SDS-PAGE in brief commentary. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56067306 | 241,067 |
976,229 | By 1943 the ultimate development of the new bomber program, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, was flying. The engines remained temperamental, and showed an alarming tendency for the rear cylinders to overheat, partially due to minimal clearance between the cylinder baffles and the cowl. A number of changes were introduced into the Superfortress' production line to provide more cooling at low speeds, with the aircraft rushed into operational use in the Pacific in 1944. This proved unwise, as the early B-29 tactics of maximum weights, when combined with the high temperatures of the tropical airfields where B-29s were based, produced overheating problems that were not completely solved, and the engines having an additional tendency to swallow their own valves. Because of a high magnesium content in the potentially combustible crankcase alloy, the resulting engine fires — sometimes burning with a core temperature approaching 5,600 °F (3,100 °C) — were often so intense the main spar could burn through in seconds, resulting in catastrophic wing failure. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=406689 | 975,718 |
4,969 | As in the earlier games, there is a "Rage" ability, this one called Spartan Rage. Like the previous versions, the Rage ability has a meter that gradually fills during combat. With this ability, Kratos uses powerful bare-handed attacks, as opposed to weapons, to greatly damage enemies. The game also features role-playing video game (RPG) elements. There are crafting resources for the player to find that allow them to create new or upgrade existing armor with better perks. Players also accumulate a currency called Hacksilver, a key component in crafting and purchasing new items. Experience points (XP) are used for learning new combat skills. Throughout the game world, players find chests containing random items, such as enchantments for improving armor and weapons, as well as the Hacksilver currency. There are also two special items, Iðunn's Apples and Horns of Blood Mead, which increase the maximum length of the health and rage meters, respectively. These meters are replenished by green and red orbs dropped by downed foes and found throughout the game world. For the magical runic attacks, instead of collecting blue orbs to replenish the ability (like in the previous games), there is a cool down timer for each ability and once that time is up, the magical runic attacks can be used again. Quick time events have changed from previous games. Enemies display two meters above their heads, one for health (the color of which indicates the enemy's difficulty) and the other for stun. Filling the stun meter helps to defeat more difficult enemies. When the stun meter is full, a grab prompt will appear. Depending on the enemy, Kratos may rip it in half or grab them and throw them into other enemies, among other possible outcomes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50810460 | 4,967 |
641,865 | Modern forensic chemists rely on numerous instruments to identify unknown materials found at a crime scene. The 20th century saw many advancements in technology that allowed chemists to detect smaller amounts of material more accurately. The first major advancement in this century came during the 1930s with the invention of a spectrometer that could measure the signal produced with infrared (IR) light. Early IR spectrometers used a monochromator and could only measure light absorption in a very narrow wavelength band. It was not until the coupling of an interferometer with an IR spectrometer in 1949 by Peter Fellgett that the complete infrared spectrum could be measured at once. Fellgett also used the Fourier transform, a mathematical method that can break down a signal into its individual frequencies, to make sense of the enormous amount of data received from the complete infrared analysis of a material. Since then, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) instruments have become critical in the forensic analysis of unknown material because they are nondestructive and extremely quick to use. Spectroscopy was further advanced in 1955 with the invention of the modern atomic absorption (AA) spectrophotometer by Alan Walsh. AA analysis can detect specific elements that make up a sample along with their concentrations, allowing for the easy detection of heavy metals such as arsenic and cadmium. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2275867 | 641,526 |
557,651 | During the stalking phase of their attack, a sniper will, if time allows, try to identify high-value targets, such as senior officers or senior NCOs. They will do this by closely observing the behavior of the people in front of them. The intention is to identify who is in charge and then prepare to fire at them. It naturally follows that leaders should attempt to blend into the background by avoiding anything that distinguishes them from the most junior soldiers and attracts the interest of a sniper. In order to reduce a sniper's ability to damage the chain of command, doctrine and equipment need to prevent any observable "leadership" behaviors and signs. Insignia, e.g. rank insignia, should be subdued (i.e. dark or black as opposed to bright colors), camouflage colors on battledress, battledress identical for all ranks, military servants and rank-based luxuries (like saluting) avoided in forward areas, and commands and instruction should be given discreetly. Additionally, other acts such as looking at maps, using a radio, pointing authoritatively, abstaining from menial tasks and other forms of body language can betray an officer's rank. However, if a sniper cannot identify an officer or NCO, they may then select any person that they have a good chance of hitting. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3809960 | 557,362 |
1,667,580 | For instance, one author summarized the accepted scientific view of the time with the words: "Stereopsis will never be obtained unless amblyopia is treated, the eyes are aligned, and binocular fusion and function are achieved before the critical period for stereopsis ends. Clinical data suggest that this occurs before 24 months of age,[…] but we do not know exactly when it occurs, because crucial pieces of basic science information are missing." For purposes of illustration, reference is made to a book of doctors' handouts for patients, written for the general public and published in 2002, which summarizes the limitations in the terms in which they, at the time, were fully accepted as medical state of the art as follows: "If an adult has a childhood strabismus that was never treated, it is too late to improve any amblyopia or depth perception, so the goal may be simply cosmetic – to make the eyes appear to be properly aligned – though sometimes treatment does enlarge the extent of side vision." It has only been accepted very recently that the therapeutic approach was based on an unquestioned notion that has, since, been referred to as "myth" or "dogma". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40018674 | 1,666,641 |
645,664 | Through this process, society would be able to focus and evolve past the existing knowledge rather than looping through infinite calculations. We should be able to pass the tedious work of numbers to machines and work on the intricate theory which puts them best to use. If humanity were able to obtain the "privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if proven important" only then "will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistic to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology". To exemplify the importance of this concept, consider the process involved in 'simple' shopping: "Every time a charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and most important, the customer needs to be charged." Due to the convenience of the store's central device which rapidly manage thousands of these transactions, the employees may focus on the essential aspects of the department such as sales and advertising. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18915928 | 645,324 |
732,011 | Data and projections indicate an increasing relevance of buildings that are both low-cost and sustainable, notably that, according to a 2020 UN report, building and construction are responsible for ~38% of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, that, partly due to global warming, migration crises are expected to intensify in the future and that the UN estimates that by 2030, ~3 billion people or ~40% of the world's population will require access to accessible, affordable housing. Disadvantages of printing with clay-mixtures include height-limitations or horizontal space requirements, initial costs and size of the non-mass-produced printer, latencies due to having to let the mixture dry with current processes, and other problems related to the novelty of the product such as their connection to plumbing systems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38673321 | 731,624 |
309,671 | The 1980 Summer Olympics marked another first for the United States, as the nation led by far the largest and most significant boycott in the Olympic history. The boycott was motivated by the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as well as by flagrant human rights violations in the USSR, and the regime's anti-Semitic policies. The Soviet state-run media ridiculed the Americans as sore losers who couldn't get over the fact that they were no longer a perennial Olympic power, and simply didn't want to be embarrassed by the Soviets who would thrash them in the medal count. Indeed, all medal predictions pointed to an inevitable Soviet victory with 55–60 gold medals. East Germans were forecast to win 40–45 gold medals, while the Americans would wind up in third place with 30–35 golds. However, the world would never know what would have happened, as the United States and 65 other countries chose not to attend the Moscow Games, leaving them with the smallest attendance since 1956. Predictably, the great majority of the medals were taken by the host country and East Germany in what was the most skewed medal tally since 1904. The Soviets amassed 80 gold (all-time record) and 195 total (second-best result after the US in 1904) medals in their anticlimactic performance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2112059 | 309,504 |
143,862 | The metallic state has historically been an important building block for studying properties of solids. The first theoretical description of metals was given by Paul Drude in 1900 with the Drude model, which explained electrical and thermal properties by describing a metal as an ideal gas of then-newly discovered electrons. He was able to derive the empirical Wiedemann-Franz law and get results in close agreement with the experiments. This classical model was then improved by Arnold Sommerfeld who incorporated the Fermi–Dirac statistics of electrons and was able to explain the anomalous behavior of the specific heat of metals in the Wiedemann–Franz law. In 1912, The structure of crystalline solids was studied by Max von Laue and Paul Knipping, when they observed the X-ray diffraction pattern of crystals, and concluded that crystals get their structure from periodic lattices of atoms. In 1928, Swiss physicist Felix Bloch provided a wave function solution to the Schrödinger equation with a periodic potential, known as Bloch's theorem. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5387 | 143,804 |
57,156 | Tao has won numerous mathematician honours and awards over the years. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Science (Corresponding Member), the National Academy of Sciences (Foreign member), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Mathematical Society. In 2006 he received the Fields Medal; he was the first Australian, the first UCLA faculty member, and one of the youngest mathematicians to receive the award. He was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship. He has been featured in "The New York Times", CNN, "USA Today", "Popular Science", and many other media outlets. In 2014, Tao received a CTY Distinguished Alumni Honor from Johns Hopkins Center for Gifted and Talented Youth in front of 979 attendees in 8th and 9th grade that are in the same program from which Tao graduated. In 2021, President Joe Biden announced Tao had been selected as one of 30 members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body bringing together America's most distinguished leaders in science and technology. In 2021, Tao was awarded the Riemann Prize Week as recipient of the inaugural Riemann Prize 2019 by the Riemann International School of Mathematics at the University of Insubria. Tao was a finalist to become Australian of the Year in 2007. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1118498 | 57,132 |
1,015,107 | The typical composition of commercial HTS catalyst has been reported as 74.2% FeO, 10.0% CrO, 0.2% MgO (remaining percentage attributed to volatile components). The chromium acts to stabilize the iron oxide and prevents sintering. The operation of HTS catalysts occurs within the temperature range of 310 °C to 450 °C. The temperature increases along the length of the reactor due to the exothermic nature of the reaction. As such, the inlet temperature is maintained at 350 °C to prevent the exit temperature from exceeding 550 °C. Industrial reactors operate at a range from atmospheric pressure to 8375 kPa (82.7 atm). The search for high performance HT WGS catalysts remains an intensive topic of research in fields of chemistry and materials science. Activation energy is a key criteria for the assessment of catalytic performance in WGS reactions. To date, some of the lowest activation energy values have been found for catalysts consisting of copper nanoparticles on ceria support materials, with values as low as Ea = 34 kJ/mol reported relative to hydrogen generation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1715834 | 1,014,586 |
270,687 | In 1935, American Eastman Kodak introduced the first modern "integral tripack" color film and called it Kodachrome, a name recycled from an earlier and completely different two-color process. Its development was led by the improbable team of Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr. (nicknamed "Man" and "God"), two highly regarded classical musicians who had started tinkering with color photographic processes and ended up working with the Kodak Research Laboratories. Kodachrome had three layers of emulsion coated on a single base, each layer recording one of the three additive primaries, red, green, and blue. In keeping with Kodak's old "you press the button, we do the rest" slogan, the film was simply loaded into the camera, exposed in the ordinary way, then mailed to Kodak for processing. The complicated part, if the complexities of manufacturing the film are ignored, was the processing, which involved the controlled penetration of chemicals into the three layers of emulsion. Only a simplified description of the process is appropriate in a short history: as each layer was developed into a black-and-white silver image, a "dye coupler" added during that stage of development caused a cyan, magenta or yellow dye image to be created along with it. The silver was chemically removed, leaving only the three layers of dye images in the finished film. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=444758 | 270,540 |
248,187 | Inulin received no-objection status as generally recognized as safe (GRAS) from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including long-chain inulin as GRAS. In the early 21st century, the use of inulin in processed foods was due in part to its adaptable characteristics for manufacturing. It is approved by the FDA as an ingredient to enhance the dietary fiber value of manufactured foods. Its flavor ranges from bland to subtly sweet (about 10% of the sweetness of sugar/sucrose). It can be used to replace sugar, fat, and flour. This is advantageous because inulin contains 25–35% of the food energy of carbohydrates (starch, sugar). In addition to being a versatile ingredient, inulin provides nutritional advantages by increasing calcium absorption and possibly magnesium absorption, while promoting the growth of intestinal bacteria. Chicory inulin is reported to increase absorption of calcium in young women with lower calcium absorption and in young men. In terms of nutrition, it is considered a form of soluble fiber and is sometimes categorized as a prebiotic. Conversely, it is also considered a FODMAP, a class of carbohydrates which are rapidly fermented in the colon producing gas. Although FODMAPs can cause certain digestive discomfort in some people, they produce potentially favorable alterations in the intestinal flora that contribute to maintaining health of the colon. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=476393 | 248,059 |
1,858,330 | Born on the New Year's Day of 1952 in the Indian state of West Bengal, Arup Kumar Raychaudhuri completed his BSc from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1973 and MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1975 before proceeding to Cornell University from where he secured a PhD in 1980, working under the supervision of Robert O. Pohl. His post-doctoral studies were at Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and on his return to India in 1982, he joined the Indian Institute of Science as a lecturer. He continued at IISc until 1997 during which period, he served as an assistant professor and as an associate professor before becoming a professor in 1997. The same year, he moved to the National Physical Laboratory of India as its director on deputation for a three-year stint and returned to IISc in 2000 to resume his duties as a professor. At IISC, he also chaired the Central Cryogenic Facility from 1993 to 1997 and served as the convener of the "Integrated PhD Programme" from 1994 to 1997. In 2004, he returned to his home state to join S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences as a senior professor and served as its director from 2006 until his superannuation from service. Post retirement, he continues his association with S. N. Bose National Centre by holding the positions of a Distinguished Emeritus Professor and the Nodal Officer of its Technical Research Center project. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55548869 | 1,857,262 |
1,952,052 | Since X-rays are not easily reflected or refracted, imaging in X-rays is difficult. One solution to this problem is to selectively block the X-rays. If the X-rays are blocked in a way that depends on the direction of the incoming photons, then it may be possible to reconstruct an image. The imaging capability of RHESSI was based on a Fourier transform technique using a set of 9 Rotational Modulation Collimators (RMCs) as opposed to mirrors and lenses. Each RMC consisted of two sets of widely spaced, fine-scale linear grids. As the spacecraft rotated, these grids blocked and unblocked any X-rays which may have come from the Sun modulating the photon signal in time. The modulation could be measured with a detector having no spatial resolution placed behind the RMC since the spatial information was now stored in the time domain. The modulation pattern over half a rotation for a single RMC provided the amplitude and phase of many spatial Fourier components over a full range of angular orientations but for a small range of spatial source dimensions. Multiple RMCs, each with different slit widths, provided coverage over a full range of flare source sizes. Images were then reconstructed from the set of measured Fourier components in exact mathematical analogy to multi-baseline radio interferometry. RHESSI provided spatial resolution of 2 arcseconds at X-ray energies from ~4 keV to ~100 keV, 7 arcseconds to ~400 keV, and 36 arcseconds for gamma-ray lines and continuum emission above 1 MeV. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1190663 | 1,950,931 |
474,753 | The 208 applicants were divided into ten groups of about twenty, and called in to the JSC for interviews and medical tests. The latter were conducted under the supervision of Sam L. Pool, the chief of the Medical services Division at JSC. On April 1, 1977, twenty volunteers were run through the medical selection to work out the procedures and logistics of it. The tests involved 24 procedures, including a general examination by a flight surgeon. The candidates medical history was examined, and psychological, psychiatric, ophthalmological, neurological, dental, musculoskeletal and eye, nose and throat examinations were conducted. Tests were conducted using a rotating chair to test susceptibility to motion sickness, on a treadmill to measure heart rate, and with a Personal Rescue Enclosure to test for claustrophobia. The psychiatric process was not free of gender bias; one consultant was later found to have rejected 40 percent of female applicants in the 1978, 1980, 1984 and 1985 selections but only 7 percent of male ones. Applicants were put up at the Kings Inn Ramada in Clear Lake, Texas, where an evening reception and pre-interview briefing was held. The medical tests eliminated 56 applicants, and three more indicated that they did not wish to proceed. That left 149 applicants (74 pilots and 75 mission specialists) who were listed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17881165 | 474,517 |
1,528,160 | When referring to the emancipatory nature of research, CTS is referring not only to the emancipation of previously marginalized peoples' voices in the field of OTS, but the emancipation of ideas, questions and theories that have been marginalized, overlooked, or seen as non-issues in orthodox studies. A simple way to understand CTS's emancipation is to think of it as a process of creating space and discussion that allows the focus to be on experiences, ideas and questions which have been "neglected in most orthodox accounts of security and terrorism". The emancipation of ideas, dialogue, and experience is a powerful "philosophical anchorage" that allows CTS to separate itself and its motives from that of traditional and orthodox terrorism studies. Traditional terrorism studies theorists understand the value behind the idea of emancipatory nature of CTS's research, but many feel such a claim is overstated. CTS's claim of emancipation is seen as simply reinventing the wheel, a wheel that has been working effectively for orthodox scholars for decades. And the claim to be the first in a field as politically charged and somewhat emotionally delicate as terrorism studies to ask hard questions and challenge commonly held beliefs and assumptions is seen as a gross over-simplification and generalization that risks replacing one dominant discourse with another, and in turn, marginalizing the research and voices of traditional terrorism studies. Further, criticism has been levied at this "emancipatory agenda" by virtue of its seeming lack of recourse for the "Heterogeneity of the human experience." Despite traditional terrorism studies' negative response to CTS's emancipatory claim, CTS still strives to keep emancipation as one of its core motivations for continued research. Emancipatory research in terrorism studies can bring to light overlooked perspectives such as the war in Iraq being a form of occupation bringing more violence than peace, the idea that State sponsored research is often biased and unreliable and that any and all valuable research should be conducted free of political bias to truly increase understanding. These few listed ideas are examples of what CTS hopes to bring to the field of terrorism studies through emancipatory research. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19455353 | 1,527,296 |
1,348,978 | Of outstanding global importance, however, are the finds from the tar pits of Rancho La Brea in southern California. From here comes an extensive fossil fauna ranging in age from 45,000 to 14,000 years before present. The first finds were discovered as early as the second half of the 19th century, but the far more significant material is due to focused scientific investigations in the early 20th century, including a total of over 100 documented sites. A striking feature of the faunal spectrum is the unusual dominance of predators over herbivores. Most likely, the predators were attracted in greater numbers by animals stuck in the asphalt and then fell victim to the natural traps themselves. Among the sloths, "Paramylodon", "Megalonyx", and "Nothrotheriops" are three of the four genera recorded in North America, with "Eremotherium" being known only from the eastern part of the United States. However, "Paramylodon" represents by far the most abundant representative with over 70 individuals, and 30 skulls alone are notable among the finds. Another very extensive fossil complex is present with the Diamond Valley Lake Local Fauna in Diamond Valley and Domenigoni Valley in Riverside County also in southern California. Material has been recovered during the construction of Diamond Valley Lake since the mid-1990s and currently includes more than 100,000 specimens from more than 100 taxa, from more than 2600 different localities. In contrast to Rancho La Brea, large herbivores dominate here, while the a proportion of large predators is low. Thus, an undisturbed character of the faunal community can be inferred. "Paramylodon" is documented with about 280 individual finds, which represents about 8% of the total mammalian fauna. The ground sloth thus forms the fifth most abundant representative of mammals in the Diamond Valley Lake Local Fauna after bison, horses, the primitive proboscidean "Mammut pacificus", and the camel "Camelops". In contrast, the two other sloths "Megalonyx" and "Nothrotheriops" that also occur in Rancho La Brea play only a minor role, together accounting for 0.5% of the find record. The age of the Diamond Valley Lake Local Fauna corresponds to that of Rancho La Brea according to radiocarbon datings. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16886646 | 1,348,233 |
138,207 | In 1923 he joined the Society of Aviation and Aerial Navigation of Ukraine and the Crimea (OAVUK). He had his first flying lesson after joining the Odessa hydroplane squadron and had many opportunities to fly as a passenger. In 1924 he personally designed an OAVUK construction project glider called the K-5. He briefly trained in gymnastics until his academic work suffered from this distraction. Korolev hoped to attend the Zhukovsky Academy in Moscow, but his qualifications did not meet the academy's standards. He attended the Kiev Polytechnic Institute's aviation branch in 1924 while living with his uncle Yuri, and earning money to pay for his courses by performing odd jobs. His curriculum was technically oriented, and included various engineering, physics and mathematics classes. He met and became attracted to a classmate, Xenia Vincentini, who would later become his first wife. In 1925 he was accepted into a limited class on glider construction, and suffered two broken ribs flying the training glider they built. He continued courses at Kiev until he was accepted into the Bauman Moscow State Technical University (MVTU, BMSTU) in July 1926, having the famous aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev as his mentor, who was a professor at his University. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=86655 | 138,151 |
2,064,190 | Due to its short history of 15 years, the rarity of occurrence, and a lack of sufficient clinical trials, AG remains elusive on understanding symptoms, treatments, and long-term follow-up. Till now, scientists and researchers have not found the exact etiology, definitive pathological tests for identification, and the effect of radiation or chemotherapy on this rare indolent glioma. Yet, a series of suspected causes are under discussion, including the possible MYB-QKI protein fusion theory on AG etiology. Currently, the standard diagnostic tools are MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and Computed Tomography scan (CT scan). In terms of therapy, patients often undergo subtotal or total resection to remove the problematic lesion and have a relatively high likelihood of curing the disease. However, they still require more extended follow-up periods after surgery for monitoring tumor recurrence and assuring seizure-free. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67269147 | 2,062,999 |
1,304,453 | Patients in coma, vegetative, or minimally conscious state pose ethical challenges. The patients are unable to respond, therefore the assessment of their needs can only be approached by adopting a third person perspective. They are unable to communicate their pain levels, quality of life, or end of life preferences. Neuroscience and brain imaging have allowed us to explore the brain activity of these patients more thoroughly. Recent findings from studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have changed the way we view vegetative patients. The images have shown that aspects emotional processing, language comprehension and even conscious awareness might be retained in patients whose behavior suggests a vegetative state. If this is the case, it is unethical to allow a third party to dictate the life and future of the patient. For example, defining death is an issue that comes with patients with severe traumatic brain injuries. The decision to withdraw life-sustaining care from these patients can be based on uncertain assessments about the individual's conscious awareness. Case reports have shown that these patients in a persistent vegetative state can recover unexpectedly. This raises the ethical question about the premature termination of care by physicians. The hope is that one day, neuroimaging technologies can help us to define these different states of consciousness and enable us to communicate with patients in vegetative states in a way that was never before possible. The clinical translation of these advanced technologies is of vital importance for the medical management of these challenging patients. In this situation, neuroscience has both revealed ethical issues and possible solutions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=703002 | 1,303,737 |
704,319 | DEHP, along with other phthalates, is believed to cause endocrine disruption in males, through its action as an androgen antagonist, and may have lasting effects on reproductive function, for both childhood and adult exposures. Prenatal phthalate exposure has been shown to be associated with lower levels of reproductive function in adolescent males. In another study, airborne concentrations of DEHP at a PVC pellet plant were significantly associated with a reduction in sperm motility and chromatin DNA integrity. Additionally, the authors noted the daily intake estimates for DEHP were comparable to the general population, indicating a "high percentage of men are exposed to levels of DEHP that may affect sperm motility and chromatin DNA integrity". The claims have received support by a study using dogs as a "sentinel species to approximate human exposure to a selection of chemical mixtures present in the environment". The authors analyzed the concentration of DEHP and other common chemicals such as PCBs in testes from dogs from five different world regions. The results showed that regional differences in concentration of the chemicals are reflected in dog testes and that pathologies such as tubule atrophy and germ cells were more prevalent in testes of dogs proveining from regions with higher concentrations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3003614 | 703,951 |
698,338 | Beginning in 2004, Christakis began to study hyper-dyadic network effects, whereby processes of social contagion moved beyond pairs of people. Initially using observational studies with his colleague James H. Fowler, he documented that a variety of phenomena like obesity, smoking, and happiness, rather than being solely individualistic, also arise via social contagion mechanisms over some distance within social networks (see: "three degrees of influence"). Other work by Christakis and Fowler, and by Christakis and other collaborators, used experimental methods and diverse data sets and settings to study social networks, thereby enhancing the robustness of causal inference (e.g., in a 2010 paper that showed that altruistic behavior in college students, or in a 2015 paper that showed that vitamin use in developing-world villages could both be made to be contagious). Indeed, the 2010 experiment demonstrated that cooperative behavior could spread to three degrees of separation. A 2022 paper used another experiment to show how a novel "pair targeting" algorithm could enhance population-level social contagion of the adoption of iron-fortified salt to reduce anemia in mothers and children. In a 2010 TED talk, Christakis summarized the broader implications of the role of networks in human activity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21566523 | 697,974 |
1,620,619 | Capacity building of individual researchers and institutions in Africa is an integral part of all its research and development activities. icipe's Capacity Building Programme aims to promote the development and use of sustainable arthropod management technologies by enhancing the research and training capabilities of countries in Africa. The centre’s efforts are geared towards three major areas of activity which include the training of African nationals for leadership roles in insect science, enhancing national capacities for technology diffusion, adoption and utilisation and facilitating the dissemination and exchange of information. In turn, these objectives are realized through three key programmes: postgraduate training at PhD and MSc levels, the professional development schemes for scientists of any nationality and the non-degree training courses for scientists, community members and extension workers. The ARPPIS programme, a partnership with 32 African universities, with financial support from German Academic Exchange Programme, offers three-year doctoral research fellowships, aimed at preparing young scholars from Africa for regional leadership roles, as well as internationally competitive research careers, in arthropod-related sciences. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2775833 | 1,619,704 |
502,622 | An annotated and illustrated version of the book, edited by Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski, was published in November 2012 by Simon & Schuster in association with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. The new edition coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the award of the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine to Francis Crick, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins. It contains over three hundred annotations on the events and characters portrayed, with facsimile letters and contemporary photographs, many previously unpublished. Their sources include newly discovered correspondence from Crick, the papers of Franklin, Pauling, and Wilkins, and they include a chapter dropped from the original edition that described Watson's holiday in the Italian Alps in 1952. The edition was favorably reviewed in "The New York Times" by Nicholas Wade who commented, "anyone seeking to understand modern biology and genomics could do much worse than start with the discovery of the structure of DNA, on which almost everything else is based. This edition includes several appendices, including letters by Crick and Watson giving the first account of the discovery, a previously unpublished chapter, an account of the controversy surrounding the publication, and the unsympathetic review by the late Erwin Chargaff from the March 29, 1968, issue of "Science", which he previously declined permission to reprint in the 1980 Norton Critical Edition of "The Double Helix" edited by Gunther Stent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=922489 | 502,364 |
1,817,656 | Dr. Anderson's projects are often broad in scope and typically grapple with evolving or novel environmental challenges. Examples of his wide-ranging work include: wetland restoration in Turkey and New Orleans, Cook Islands coral reef monitoring, ecotoxicological and socioeconomic impact of major oil spills such as the 2010 "Deepwater Horizon" and 2015 Refugio spills, and quantification of microplastic pollution across the planet. Anderson frequently leverages bleeding edge technologies including novel environmental sensors, modified commercial hardware, and open-source software in various Remotely Piloted Systems (drones and ROVs) that are effective tools for both conservation and education. This passion for technology-infused field science and conservation birthed a new interdisciplinary research group at CSUCI in 2012. Anderson co-directs this Aerial and Aquatic Robot Research (AARR) team which has now grown into a large group of multidisciplinary faculty and students working on various coastal efforts from over the horizon monitoring of Marine Protected Areas to long-term oil seep impacts from wildfires. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40784200 | 1,816,621 |
7,834 | In October 1961, the world's first "all-electronic desktop" calculator, the British Bell Punch/Sumlock Comptometer ANITA (A New Inspiration To Arithmetic/Accounting) was announced. This machine used vacuum tubes, cold-cathode tubes and Dekatrons in its circuits, with 12 cold-cathode "Nixie" tubes for its display. Two models were displayed, the Mk VII for continental Europe and the Mk VIII for Britain and the rest of the world, both for delivery from early 1962. The Mk VII was a slightly earlier design with a more complicated mode of multiplication, and was soon dropped in favour of the simpler Mark VIII. The ANITA had a full keyboard, similar to mechanical comptometers of the time, a feature that was unique to it and the later Sharp CS-10A among electronic calculators. The ANITA weighed roughly due to its large tube system. Bell Punch had been producing key-driven mechanical calculators of the comptometer type under the names "Plus" and "Sumlock", and had realised in the mid-1950s that the future of calculators lay in electronics. They employed the young graduate Norbert Kitz, who had worked on the early British Pilot ACE computer project, to lead the development. The ANITA sold well since it was the only electronic desktop calculator available, and was silent and quick. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7593 | 7,831 |
708,766 | A fractured cribriform plate (anterior skull trauma) can result in leaking of cerebrospinal fluid into the nose and loss of sense of smell. The tiny apertures of the plate transmitting the olfactory nerve become the route of ascent for a pathogen, "Naegleria fowleri". This amoeba tends to destroy the olfactory bulb and the adjacent inferior surface of the frontal lobe of the brain. This surface initially becomes the site of proliferation of the trophozoites of "Naegleria fowleri" and their subsequent spread to the rest of the brain and CSF. Because of its initial involvement and trophozoite presence in early phases of "Naegleria fowleri" infection, flushing of this region with saline using a device, to obtain "Naegleria fowleri" for diagnostic PCR and microscopic viewing, has been proposed for patients affected by naegleriasis, by (Baig AM., et al.) in a recent publication. Researchers have suggested the same route to administer drugs at an early phase of infection by using a "Transcribrial Device" that has been proposed to kill this pathogen at the place of its maximum proliferation. In 2017 the inventor of this device suggested that after slight modifications this method could be effective in delivery of stem cells to the brain as well. A recent Australian study has shown that the bacterium causing the tropical disease melioidosis, "Burkholderia pseudomallei", can also invade the brain via the olfactory nerve within 24 h by traversing the cribriform plate. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1643145 | 708,397 |
327,724 | Darwin's barnacle studies convinced him that variation arose constantly and not just in response to changed circumstances. In 1854, he completed the last part of his "Beagle"-related writing and began working full-time on evolution. He now realised that the branching pattern of evolutionary divergence was explained by natural selection working constantly to improve adaptation. His thinking changed from the view that species formed in isolated populations only, as on islands, to an emphasis on speciation without isolation; that is, he saw increasing specialisation within large stable populations as continuously exploiting new ecological niches. He conducted empirical research focusing on difficulties with his theory. He studied the developmental and anatomical differences between different breeds of many domestic animals, became actively involved in fancy pigeon breeding, and experimented (with the help of his son Francis) on ways that plant seeds and animals might disperse across oceans to colonise distant islands. By 1856, his theory was much more sophisticated, with a mass of supporting evidence. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29932 | 327,550 |
1,380,346 | Advances in molecular biology techniques and the species-wide genome project have made it possible to map out an individual's entire genome. Whether genetic or environmental factors are primarily responsible for an individual's personality has long been a topic of debate. Thanks to the advances being made in the field of neurogenetics, researchers have begun to tackle this question by beginning to map out genes and correlate them to different personality traits. There is little to no evidence to suggest that the presence of a "single" gene indicates that an individual will express one style of behavior over another; rather, having a specific gene could make one more predisposed to displaying this type of behavior. It is starting to become clear that most genetically influenced behaviors are due to the effects of many variants within "many" genes, in addition to other neurological regulating factors like neurotransmitter levels. Due to fact that many behavioral characteristics have been conserved across species for generations, researchers are able to use animal subjects such as mice and rats, but also fruit flies, worms, and zebrafish, to try to determine specific genes that correlate to behavior and attempt to match these with human genes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18143331 | 1,379,584 |
113,293 | The basics of continuous backpropagation were derived in the context of control theory by Henry J. Kelley in 1960, and by Arthur E. Bryson in 1961. They used principles of dynamic programming. In 1962, Stuart Dreyfus published a simpler derivation based only on the chain rule. Bryson and Ho described it as a multi-stage dynamic system optimization method in 1969. Backpropagation was derived by multiple researchers in the early 60's and implemented to run on computers as early as 1970 by Seppo Linnainmaa. Paul Werbos was first in the US to propose that it could be used for neural nets after analyzing it in depth in his 1974 dissertation. While not applied to neural networks, in 1970 Linnainmaa published the general method for automatic differentiation (AD). Although very controversial, some scientists believe this was actually the first step toward developing a back-propagation algorithm. In 1973 Dreyfus adapts parameters of controllers in proportion to error gradients. In 1974 Werbos mentioned the possibility of applying this principle to artificial neural networks, and in 1982 he applied Linnainmaa's AD method to non-linear functions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1360091 | 113,248 |
1,235,542 | On Selection Sunday, the Spartans squared off with Michigan for the third time in only two weeks, this time for the tournament championship. MSU, who won the previous two games against the Wolverines, started well, jumping out to a 17–11 lead halfway through the first half. However, Spartan guard Kyle Ahrens went down hard on his ankle while coming down with a rebound in the first half and was taken out on a stretcher with an air cast on his leg. Following the injury, Michigan finished the half outscoring the Spartans 10–6, giving them a 31–23 lead at the half. The Wolverines came out hot in the second half, causing the Spartans to fall behind 39–26 in the early going. The Spartans were able to dig deep and complete a 22–9 run, tying the game at 48. MSU trailed the Wolverines by five with just over two minutes remaining, but a Matt McQuaid three pointer and a Cassius Winston assist to Xavier Tillman tied the score at 60 with 1:20 left in the game. A missed Zavier Simpson three-pointer led to a Winston lay up and a Spartans' lead at 62–60 with 29 seconds left. The MSU defense forced Michigan into bad shot attempts and MSU finished by making three of four free throws to give them the 65–60 win. MSU finished the game on a 10–0 run to earn their first Big Ten tournament title since 2016. The win was the school's sixth tournament championship, which leads the Big Ten. The win also completed a three-game season sweep of in-state rival Michigan. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56903804 | 1,234,879 |
582,439 | and "Acmopyle" examining evolutionary trends and geographical distributions. His ability to apply theory to observations and make hypotheses based on observations were especially influential on his students. When examining wood remains from Harappa, he noted that they were of conifers and inferred that the people there must have had trade links with people in mountains where conifers could grow. He recorded foreign pollen in the ovules of living "Ginkgo biloba" and noted in the "New Phytologist" (1915), the problem with assuming that fossil pollen in ovules belonged to a single species. Sahni was among the first to suggest a separate order, the Taxales, within the conifers to contain the genera "Taxus", "Torreya" and "Cephalotaxus". Another major contribution was in the studies on the morphology of the Zygopteridaceae. Sahni identified "Torreyites", a close relative of "Torreya", which extended the range of the Taxales into Gondwanaland. He also described Glossopteris in detail and identified differences between the flora of India and Australia with that of China and Sumatra. He also studied the fossil plants of the Deccan Intertrappean beds. He suggested that the lower Narmada area around Nagpur and Chhindwara was coastal on the basis of fossils that showed a similarity to estuarine palms of the genus "Nipa". Based on the ecology of plants and the altitude of the fossil finds, he also attempted to estimate rates of uplift of the Himalayas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1844265 | 582,141 |
1,498,480 | It was on 14 August 1980 that Conconi submitted a proposal to the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) proposing that selected Italian athletes be assisted by the staff of the University to improve their performance. Conconi proposed that he help athletes in the sports of cycling, canoeing, rowing, long-distance skiing, speed skating, swimming and wrestling. CONI accepted the offer. According to Sandro Donati, a coach of the middle distance running team from 1981 onwards, this method of preparation was blood doping. Professor Conconi approached Donati regarding improving the performances of his athletes with estimations of the improvements at 3 to 5 seconds for 1,500 metre races, 15 to 20 seconds for 5,000 metre races and 30 to 40 seconds for 10,000 metre races. There was a partnership between the Olympic Committee and Professor Conconi's biomedical research centre at the University of Ferrara and the Olympic Committee financed his research. According to Donati, Professor Conconi together with the Italian Athletics Federation and a major Italian Research Institute administered testosterone and anabolic steroids to athletes for events in the 1980s. However, this was later categorically proven to be untrue. Over several years, CONI funded the research of Conconi with over two million euros. The work of Conconi and his many assistants at the Ferrara University produced great results in sport. In the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics, Italy won 34 medals. Many of the athletes had hematocrit levels of over 50%. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11188121 | 1,497,636 |
1,831,201 | In January 1953, the 581st lost one of its B-29s and its entire fourteen-man crew while flying a leaflet drop mission over North Korea near the Chinese border. The aircraft had already dropped leaflets over five North Korean towns and was beginning its last run over the village of Cholson. Some of the leaflets carried war news, but others warned of an impending bombing attack by United Nations forces. Suddenly enemy searchlights lit up the sky, and in a rare night attack, a MiG-15 fighter attacked the B-29, setting its right inboard engine on fire. The bomber shook as the tail gunner responded to the attack. Two more MiGs swept by the bomber, this time hitting the number three and four engines with machine gun and cannon fire. With the plane falling from the sky, the crew bailed out. Three of the crew died in the crash, but the remaining crewmen, including the 581st Wing Commander, were captured and sent to a camp in China. They were imprisoned as war criminals engaged in "espionage” by the Chinese. They were held past the June 1953 Korean Armistice and subjected to an international publicized propaganda trial. Later under growing international pressure, the Chinese released the eleven airmen on 3 August 1955, making them the last Korean War American prisoners to be released by the Chinese communists. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18495171 | 1,830,154 |
1,186,327 | The system was invented in the U.S., but development was carried out by Decca in the UK. It was first deployed by the Royal Navy during World War II for the vital task of clearing the minefields to enable the D-Day landings. The Allied forces needed an accurate system not known to the Germans and thus free of jamming. After the war, it came off the secret list and was commercially developed by the Decca Company and deployed around UK and later used in many areas around the world. At its peak there were about 180 transmitting stations using "chains" of three or four transmitters each to allow position fixing by plotting intersecting electronic lines. Decca's primary use was for ship navigation in coastal waters, offering much better accuracy than the competing LORAN system. Fishing vessels were major post-war users, but it was also used on some aircraft, including a very early (1949) application of moving map displays. The system was deployed extensively in the North Sea and was used by helicopters operating to oil platforms. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8949 | 1,185,698 |
574,161 | When Muller returned to the United States in 1940, he took an untenured research position at Amherst College, in the department of Otto C. Glaser. After the U.S. entry into World War II, his position was extended indefinitely and expanded to include teaching. His "Drosophila" work in this period focused on measuring the rate of spontaneous (as opposed to radiation-induced) mutations. Muller's publication rate decreased greatly in this period, from a combination of lack of lab workers and experimentally challenging projects. However, he also worked as an adviser in the Manhattan Project (though he did not know that was what it was), as well as a study of the mutational effects of radar. Muller's appointment was ended after the 1944–1945 academic year, and despite difficulties stemming from his socialist political activities, he found a position as professor of zoology at Indiana University. Here, he lived in a Dutch Colonial Revival house in Bloomington's Vinegar Hill neighborhood. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=240846 | 573,867 |
154,064 | Because of negative factors during the late 1920s and 1930s—a depressed economy, reduced war budgets under the Popular Front led by Leon Blum, and neglect at high military levels, the French Army was slow to modernize its infantry weapons. For instance, production of the bolt-action MAS-36 rifle began much too late (in 1937) although its prototype had already been approved in 1929. As a result, MAS-36 rifles to equip French infantry were in short supply when World War II broke out in September 1939. Furthermore, a thoroughly tested French semi-automatic rifle was also ready to be placed into production by 1939. But due to the German occupation of France during the Second World War, five more years had to pass before this gas-operated weapon (the MAS-1939 and MAS-40) could be issued as the MAS-44, MAS-49 and MAS 1949-56 series. Another adverse result of all these delays is that Lebel rifles—many of which had since been shortened into a carbine-length version, the Mle 1886 M93R35—were still in the hands of front-line and reserve troops at the outbreak of the war. More than 3 million were available in French arsenals. There are pictures of Italian Social Republic infantrymen armed with M1886s, perhaps resurrected from a shipment provided by the French in World War I to replace the rifles lost by Italy after the Caporetto defeat, or seized later, during Italian occupation of France. Other were seen in the hands of Soviet partisans. Likewise, in 1944 the German Wehrmacht had issued some captured M1886 Lebel rifles, given the German identification code Gewehr 301(f), to some of their occupation troops in France, but in limited numbers. In 1945, during the final months of the war, many Lebel rifles were issued to Volkssturm conscripts along with any other available weapons. Some years later, during the Indochina and Algerian Wars, Lebel rifles were issued to auxiliaries or second-lines units. Functional Lebel rifles have been found in Iraq during the Iraqi insurgency after 2003. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=427222 | 153,994 |
150,876 | The SST was seen as particularly offensive due to its sonic boom and the potential for its engine exhaust to damage the ozone layer. Both problems impacted the thinking of lawmakers, and eventually Congress dropped funding for the US SST program in and all overland commercial supersonic flight was banned over the US. Presidential advisor Russell Train warned that a fleet of 500 SSTs flying at for a period of years could raise stratospheric water content by as much as 50% to 100%. According to Train, this could lead to greater ground-level heat and hamper the formation of ozone. In relation to stratospheric water and its potential to increase ground temperatures, although not mentioning Concorde as the source of the "recent decline in water vapor is unknown", in 2010 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that Stratospheric Water Vapor levels in the 1980s and 1990s were higher than that in the 2000s, by approximately 10%, with Susan Solomon of NOAA calculating that it is this change which is responsible for the slow down in the rise in surface temperatures from global warming by about 25 percent when compared to the warming rate in the 1990s. Russell Train's other, water-ozone concern, was however countered by Fred Singer in a letter to the journal "Nature" in 1971, "which upset those who claimed that supersonic transports might seriously affect stratospheric ozone". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=215930 | 150,808 |
487,858 | A site discovered during road construction near the town of Kupferzell in southern Germany in 1977 provided researchers with important new fossils of "Mastodonsaurus" that included well preserved skulls and disarticulated bones from all parts of the body. Thousands of individual fossils were recovered during a three-month salvage operation before road work resumed, including, in addition to "Mastodonsaurus", remains of the temnospondyl "Gerrothorax" and the archosaur "Batrachotomus", as well as of many fishes. Some of the bones showed evidence of being rolled and transported a long distance. Working from the rich Kupferzell finds, German paleontologist Rainer Schoch published a revised description of "Mastodonsaurus" in 1999 that revealed a longer body and an estimated longer tail, for a larger, more massive animal with a highly aquatic lifestyle. Although no complete and fully articulated skeleton has been found to date, research since 1999 was incorporated into a composite skeletal reconstruction and a fleshed-out model displayed at the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart in Germany that give "Mastodonsaurus" more crocodile-like proportions, with a lengthened tail for swimming, similar to some other capitosaurs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5659359 | 487,608 |
294,536 | Transduction is the process through which energy from environmental stimuli is converted to neural activity. The retina contains three different cell layers: photoreceptor layer, bipolar cell layer and ganglion cell layer. The photoreceptor layer where transduction occurs is farthest from the lens. It contains photoreceptors with different sensitivities called rods and cones. The cones are responsible for color perception and are of three distinct types labelled red, green and blue. Rods are responsible for the perception of objects in low light. Photoreceptors contain within them a special chemical called a photopigment, which is embedded in the membrane of the lamellae; a single human rod contains approximately 10 million of them. The photopigment molecules consist of two parts: an opsin (a protein) and retinal (a lipid). There are 3 specific photopigments (each with their own wavelength sensitivity) that respond across the spectrum of visible light. When the appropriate wavelengths (those that the specific photopigment is sensitive to) hit the photoreceptor, the photopigment splits into two, which sends a signal to the bipolar cell layer, which in turn sends a signal to the ganglion cells, the axons of which form the optic nerve and transmit the information to the brain. If a particular cone type is missing or abnormal, due to a genetic anomaly, a color vision deficiency, sometimes called color blindness will occur. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21280496 | 294,376 |
250,629 | Meanwhile, Germany, which was restricted by the Treaty of Versailles in its development of powered aircraft, developed gliding as a sport, especially at the Wasserkuppe, during the 1920s. In its various forms, in the 21st-century sailplane aviation now has over 400,000 participants. Fritz von Opel was instrumental in popularizing rockets as means of propulsion for vehicles and planes. In the 1920s, he initiated together with Max Valier, co-founder of the "Verein für Raumschiffahrt", the world's first rocket program, Opel-RAK, leading to speed records for automobiles, rail vehicles and the first manned rocket-powered flight in September 1929. To build the world's first rocket glider, Opel and Valier collaborated with Wasserkuppe pioneers Lippisch, Stamer and Hatry. Months earlier in 1928, one of his rocket-powered ground prototypes, the Opel RAK2, reached piloted by von Opel himself at the AVUS speedway in Berlin a record speed of 238 km/h, watched by 3000 spectators and world media, among them Fritz Lang, director of "Metropolis" and "Woman in the Moon", world boxing champion Max Schmeling and many more sports and show business celebrities. A world record for rail vehicles was reached with RAK3 and a top speed of 256 km/h. After these successes on land and successful glider tests at Wasserkuppe, on 30 September 1929, von Opel piloted the world's first public rocket-powered flight using a dedicated Opel RAK.1 rocket plane designed by Julius Hatry. World media reported on these efforts, including UNIVERSAL Newsreel of the US, causing immense global public attention. The Great Depression led to an end of the Opel-RAK program, but Max Valier continued the efforts. After switching from solid-fuel to liquid-fuel rockets, he died while testing and is considered the first fatality of the dawning space age. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=177680 | 250,496 |
327,812 | Even though the book did not explicitly spell out Darwin's beliefs about human origins, it had dropped a number of hints about human's animal ancestry and quickly became central to the debate, as mental and moral qualities were seen as spiritual aspects of the immaterial soul, and it was believed that animals did not have spiritual qualities. This conflict could be reconciled by supposing there was some supernatural intervention on the path leading to humans, or viewing evolution as a purposeful and progressive ascent to mankind's position at the head of nature. While many conservative theologians accepted evolution, Charles Hodge argued in his 1874 critique "What is Darwinism?" that "Darwinism", defined narrowly as including rejection of design, was atheism though he accepted that Asa Gray did not reject design. Asa Gray responded that this charge misrepresented Darwin's text. By the early 20th century, four noted authors of "The Fundamentals" were explicitly open to the possibility that God created through evolution, but fundamentalism inspired the American creation–evolution controversy that began in the 1920s. Some conservative Roman Catholic writers and influential Jesuits opposed evolution in the late 19th and early 20th century, but other Catholic writers, starting with Mivart, pointed out that early Church Fathers had not interpreted Genesis literally in this area. The Vatican stated its official position in a 1950 papal encyclical, which held that evolution was not inconsistent with Catholic teaching. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29932 | 327,638 |
2,124,591 | David Hays graduated from Harvard College in 1951 and received his Ph.D. in 1956 from Harvard's Department of Social Relations. In 1954-1955 he held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and took a job at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica in 1955, where he remained though 1968. In 1969 he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo where he was founding chairman of the newly formed linguistics department and Professor of Linguistics, of Computer Science, and of Information and Library Studies. He remained at Buffalo until 1980 when he retired from the university and moved to New York City, where he worked as a private consultant and pursued independent research in cultural evolution and the arts, especially the ballet. He was on the Editorial Board of the "Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems" and starting in 1989 was a member of Connected Education's online faculty for their MA in Media Studies offered through The New School. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27772536 | 2,123,370 |
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