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1,687,822 | Since methanogenesis requires anaerobic environments, it is frequently associated with Arctic lakes, where the emergence of bubbles of methane can be observed. Lakes produced by the thaw of particularly ice-rich permafrost are known as thermokarst lakes. Not all of the methane produced in the sediment of a lake reaches the atmosphere, as it can get oxidized in the water column or even within the sediment itself: However, 2022 observations indicate that at least half of the methane produced within thermokarst lakes reaches the atmosphere. Another process which frequently results in substantial methane emissions is the erosion of permafrost-stabilized hillsides and their ultimate collapse. Altogether, these two processes - hillside collapse (also known as retrogressive thaw slump, or RTS) and thermokarst lake formation - are collectively described as abrupt thaw, as they can rapidly expose substantial volumes of soil to microbial respiration in a matter of days, as opposed to the gradual, cm by cm, thaw of formerly frozen soil which dominates across most permafrost environments. This rapidity was illustrated in 2019, when three permafrost sites which would have been safe from thawing under the "intermediate" Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 for 70 more years had undergone abrupt thaw. Another example occurred in the wake of a 2020 Siberian heatwave, which was found to have increased RTS numbers 17-fold across the northern Taymyr Peninsula - from 82 to 1404, while the resultant soil carbon mobilization increased 28-fold, to an average of 11 grams of carbon per square meter per year across the peninsula (with a range between 5 and 38 grams). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27167234 | 1,686,876 |
704,205 | For current energy systems, many lessons can be learned from history. The need for large amounts of firewood in early industrial processes in combination with prohibitive costs for overland transportation led to a scarcity of accessible (e.g. affordable) wood and it has been found that eighteenth century glass-works "operated like a forest clearing enterprise". When Britain had to resort to coal after largely having run out of wood, the resulting fuel crisis triggered a chain of events that two centuries later culminated in the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, increased use of peat and coal were vital elements paving the way for the Dutch Golden Age, roughly spanning the entire 17th century. Another example where resource depletion triggered technological innovation and a shift to new energy sources in 19th Century whaling and how whale oil eventually became replaced by kerosene and other petroleum-derived products. With the success of a rapid energy transition it is also conceivable that there will be government buyouts or bailouts of coal mining regions. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39208945 | 703,837 |
244,193 | The search for patterns in the variations of birds was attempted by many. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), his student Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826), and several others believed that a hidden and innate mathematical order existed in the forms of birds. They believed that a "natural" classification was available and superior to "artificial" ones. A particularly popular idea was the Quinarian system popularised by Nicholas Aylward Vigors (1785–1840), William Sharp Macleay (1792–1865), William Swainson, and others. The idea was that nature followed a "rule of five" with five groups nested hierarchically. Some had attempted a rule of four, but Johann Jakob Kaup (1803–1873) insisted that the number five was special, noting that other natural entities such as the senses also came in fives. He followed this idea and demonstrated his view of the order within the crow family. Where he failed to find five genera, he left a blank insisting that a new genus would be found to fill these gaps. These ideas were replaced by more complex "maps" of affinities in works by Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alfred Russel Wallace. A major advance was made by Max Fürbringer in 1888, who established a comprehensive phylogeny of birds based on anatomy, morphology, distribution, and biology. This was developed further by Hans Gadow and others. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42967 | 244,066 |
2,242,477 | In the summer of 2005, the Texas Maritime Academy took delivery of the USNS "Sirius". Built in 1966 as a replenishment ship for the Royal Navy and purchased by the U.S. Navy as a logistics ship, it supported two carrier battle groups in the Indian Ocean during the Iranian hostage crisis and continued its career in the Navy serving across the world, notably in the Persian Gulf. It was retired and given to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration, then assigned to TAMUG under an agreement that it can be activated by MARAD at any time. During the fall of 2005, the "Sirius" served in New Orleans for Katrina relief, from September 10 until November 29 and at Lake Charles, LA for Rita relief until March 2. Because of its extended relief effort, "Sirius" was unable to undergo a refit in 2006 to adapt its new role as a training vessel and comply with U.S. Coast Guard safety standards. Because "Sirius" had not undergone a refit, it could not be formally commissioned as the USTS "Texas Clipper" nor could it be used for summer training cruises. This is forcing the university to look to the other state maritime academies (California Maritime Academy from 2006–present) to help fulfill the summer cruise requirements until the work on the "Sirius" was completed. In the winter of 2009, the US Coast Guard ruled that "Sirius" was unfit for training and was prepared for decommissioning while the school looked for a new training ship. On June 25, 2009, "Sirius" was returned to the U.S. Maritime Administration. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1373604 | 2,241,206 |
199,951 | During the classical period in Greece (6th, 5th and 4th centuries BCE) and in Hellenistic times, natural philosophy slowly developed into an exciting and contentious field of study. Aristotle (, "Aristotélēs") (384 – 322 BCE), a student of Plato, promoted the concept that observation of physical phenomena could ultimately lead to the discovery of the natural laws governing them. Aristotle's writings cover physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology. He wrote the first work which refers to that line of study as "Physics" – in the 4th century BCE, Aristotle founded the system known as Aristotelian physics. He attempted to explain ideas such as motion (and gravity) with the theory of four elements. Aristotle believed that all matter was made up of aether, or some combination of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. According to Aristotle, these four terrestrial elements are capable of inter-transformation and move toward their natural place, so a stone falls downward toward the center of the cosmos, but flames rise upward toward the circumference. Eventually, Aristotelian physics became enormously popular for many centuries in Europe, informing the scientific and scholastic developments of the Middle Ages. It remained the mainstream scientific paradigm in Europe until the time of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13758 | 199,848 |
98,363 | On returning to Paramount, the art department had to recreate parts of Yellowstone in a large "B tank", long. The tank was designed to be flooded with millions of gallons of water to represent large bodies of water. Minor set up miniatures on the tank's floor before construction and made sure that the shadows that fell on Spock at Yellowstone could be properly recreated. A plywood base was built on metal platforms to create stone silhouettes, reinforced with chicken wire. Polyurethane foam was sprayed over the framework under the supervision of the Los Angeles Fire Department. The bottom part of the statue miniature was represented by a fiberglass foot. Weldon matched the effects filmed at Yellowstone using dry ice and steam machines. To recreate the appearance of the swirling eddies of water in the real Yellowstone, a combination of evaporated milk, white poster paint, and water was poured into the set's pools. The pressure of the steam channeled into the pools through hidden tubing causes enough movement in the whirlpools to duplicate the location footage. Due to the requirement that the sun be in a specific location for filming and that the environment be bright enough, production fell behind schedule when it was unseasonably cloudy for three days straight. Any further scenes to recreate Vulcan would be impossible, as the set was immediately torn down to serve as a parking lot for the remainder of the summer. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=277006 | 98,321 |
2,064,991 | McDonald took a couple of years to research the contents and improve the technology to rework the formula and return in 2006 with the modern day Polishing of Metal. Now centering purely on the life and times of Heavy Metal, "Polishing of Metal" managed to impress both the industry and music fans alike. Except for the graphic arts, music & video conversions, the entire Polishing of Metal project was written and conceived by Derek McDonald. The elements that made Recorded History a true interactive multimedia experience were still there but they were augmented with the glitz of entertainment. This time featuring some 19 music videos, 5 and a half hours of music in both MP3 and standard audio format allowing the disc promotion on radio, some 5000 pages of PDF & HTML encoded text, Internet links and 1304 artist biographies with some 900 album reviews. The cover art was updated to feature a new rendition of long-time mascot "Skel" (Skel has appeared on the cover of all of McDonald’s projects) and was drawn by Barry Waddell of Florida, USA act Seasons Of The Wolf. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13093858 | 2,063,800 |
1,763,572 | The patient subsequently developed a temperature of 37.5 °C, expressed rigors, and night sweats. He returned to the ED the next day and on further history admitted to 3 weeks of "snorting 6–8 lines of coke a day" and smoking marijuana every evening to "come down". He was hospitalized and treated with cefepime, doxycycline, and fluconazole empirically. The next day erythematous painful papules appeared on his trunk, arms, face, and ears. Blood cultures were negative. There was prominent necrosis of the cheek region, nose, and lips with complete sparing of the back. Skin biopsy revealed extensive small vessel thrombosis throughout the superficial and deep dermal plexuses with perivascular mononuclear inflammatory infiltrate and a few neutrophils surrounding the vessels. Erythrocyte sedimentation rate was elevated at 35 mm/hour; cardiolipin IgM was weakly positive at 16.3; C4 was decreased at 10 mg/dl; antinuclear antibodies were negative and p-ANCA was reactive. Coagulation studies were within normal limits. There was an elevated d-dimer of 17.54 mg/mL and platelets were slightly decreased. The patient's urine drug screen was positive for cannabis but not cocaine. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36611269 | 1,762,579 |
1,712,315 | Although European military art on land can be argued not to have reached its developed stage until the 19th century in the attempt to defeat linear tactics that led to the First World War, and ultimate sophistication during the Second World War and the Cold War, great increases in the firepower of the European firearms and artillery were usually able to negate greater number and mobility of the Asian field forces, no-where more illustrated than during the French Invasion of Egypt in 1798. The defining application of firepower and manoeuvre in military art became expressed during the conduct of strategic operations of the Red Army in World War II that sought to combine the shock of armoured warfare with mobility, and the traditional reliance on infantry in strengthened positions to first stop the German advances and during counter-attacks to achieve breakthrough of the enemy position, and in conducting deep operations to destroy the logistic support, literally starving German troops of supplies and ammunition, and forcing them to surrender. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19100297 | 1,711,350 |
679,655 | The uniqueness of Iizasa's Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū is still evident today, in the particular aspects of weapon-wielding, posture, stance, and foot and body movements which make allowance for the fact that the bushi (classical samurai warriors) of his era would be wearing 'yoroi' (armour) weighing around 35 kg, and fighting on uneven terrain. These factors tend to keep the wearer's feet firmly and flat on the ground, and slow down mobility considerably. The distinctive techniques and tactics of this ryū also acknowledge the design of classical Japanese armour, which, although protecting the wearer well, had many 'suki' (openings). The main attacking areas included: under the wrists; inside and behind the legs; the hip area; the space between the 'kabuto' (helmet) and 'dō' (chest protector) where the neck arteries and veins could be easily severed. The signature, 'omote' (basic-battlefield) sword technique of the ryū, 'makiuchi-jodan', was created by Iizasa because the bushi could not raise the sword above the head due to the obstruction of the kabuto, and secondly, notwithstanding that restriction, a very powerful 'chopping' blow from above was still needed to be generated in order to produce the maximum destructive force for when circumstances dictated attacking areas of the 'yoroi' other than the 'suki'. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=234251 | 679,301 |
1,197,218 | One Italian research group discovered through digital screening that commercially available thiadiazole derivatives displayed moderate inhibitory action on both Abl and Src kinases. Using a 1,3,4 thiadiazol core and trying different groups or molecules on the benzene rings, several different substances with inhibitory properties were produced. The flexibility of the core allowed a number of conformations of the substances to bind to the ATP site of the Abl kinase, though all of them bound to the kinase's active form. Further study of the binding showed that the position of the sulfur that binds to the toluene structure played an important role in regard to Abl binding and also that only one of the nitrogen's one thiadiazole formed a hydrogen bond. Furthermore, computer analysis of the structure showed the amide connected benzene-ketone could be substituted for a more favorable thiophene ring. Though it has to be noted this analysis was done with comparing the crystal structure of Abl and dasatinib, which is the inactive conformation of Abl, the knowledge gathered from the docking and structure analysis led to identification of a compound, referred to as substance 14, with a high affinity to Abl. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29482568 | 1,196,577 |
994,267 | It is generally true, however, that bonds depicted this way are polar covalent, sometimes strongly so, and some authors claim that there are genuine differences in the properties of a dative bond and electron-sharing bond and suggest that showing a dative bond is more appropriate in particular situations. As far back as 1989, Haaland characterized dative bonds as bonds that are (i) weak and long; (ii) with only a small degree of charge-transfer taking place during bond formation; and (iii) whose preferred mode of dissociation in the gas phase (or low ε inert solvent) is heterolytic rather than homolytic. The ammonia-borane adduct (HN → BH) is given as a classic example: the bond is weak, with a dissociation energy of 31 kcal/mol (cf. 90 kcal/mol for ethane), and long, at 166 pm (cf. 153 pm for ethane), and the molecule possesses a dipole moment of 5.2 D that implies a transfer of only 0.2 "e" from nitrogen to boron. The heterolytic dissociation of HN → BH is estimated to require 27 kcal/mol, confirming that heterolysis into ammonia and borane is more favorable than homolysis into radical cation and radical anion. However, aside from clear-cut examples, there is considerable dispute as to when a particular compound qualifies and, thus, the overall prevalence of dative bonding (with respect to an author's preferred definition). Computational chemists have suggested quantitative criteria to distinguish between the two "types" of bonding. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45708 | 993,750 |
630,130 | On 12 February 1935, Watson-Watt sent the secret memo of the proposed system to the Air Ministry, "Detection and location of aircraft by radio methods". Although not as exciting as a death-ray, the concept clearly had potential, but the Air Ministry, before giving funding, asked for a demonstration proving that radio waves could be reflected by an aircraft. This was ready by 26 February and consisted of two receiving antennae located about away from one of the BBC's shortwave broadcast stations at Daventry. The two antennae were phased such that signals travelling directly from the station cancelled themselves out, but signals arriving from other angles were admitted, thereby deflecting the trace on a CRT indicator (passive radar). Such was the secrecy of this test that only three people witnessed it: Watson-Watt, his colleague Arnold Wilkins, and a single member of the committee, A. P. Rowe. The demonstration was a success: on several occasions, the receiver showed a clear return signal from a Handley Page Heyford bomber flown around the site. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was kept quietly informed of radar progress. On 2 April 1935, Watson-Watt received a patent on a radio device for detecting and locating an aircraft. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37206 | 629,792 |
1,431,885 | PuO, along with UO, is used in MOX fuels for nuclear reactors. Plutonium-238 dioxide is used as fuel for several deep-space spacecraft such as the Cassini, Voyager, Galileo and New Horizons probes as well as in the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars. The isotope decays by emitting α-particles, which then generate heat (see radioisotope thermoelectric generator). There have been concerns that an accidental re-entry into Earth's atmosphere from orbit might lead to the break-up and/or burn-up of a spacecraft, resulting in the dispersal of the plutonium, either over a large tract of the planetary surface or within the upper atmosphere. However, although at least two spacecraft carrying PuO RTGs have reentered the Earth's atmosphere and burned up (Nimbus B-1 in May 1968 and the Apollo 13 Lunar Module in April 1970), the RTGs from both spacecraft survived reentry and impact intact, and no environmental contamination was noted in either instance; in fact, the Nimbus RTG was recovered intact from the Pacific Ocean seafloor and launched aboard Nimbus 3 one year later. In any case, RTGs since the mid-1960s have been designed to remain intact in the event of reentry and impact, following the 1964 launch failure of Transit 5-BN-3 (the early-generation plutonium RTG on board disintegrated upon reentry and dispersed radioactive material into the atmosphere north of Madagascar, prompting a redesign of all U.S. RTGs then in use or under development). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2451775 | 1,431,081 |
419,019 | There is one version of the caloric theory that was introduced by Antoine Lavoisier. Prior to Lavoisier's caloric theory, published references concerning heat and its existence, outside of being an agent for chemical reactions, were sparse only having been offered by Joseph Black in Rozier's Journal (1772) citing the melting temperature of ice. In response to Black, Lavoisier's private manuscripts revealed that he had encountered the same phenomena of a fixed melting point for ice and mentioned that he had already formulated an explanation which he had not published as of yet. Lavoisier developed the explanation of combustion in terms of oxygen in the 1770s. In his paper "Réflexions sur le phlogistique" (1783), Lavoisier argued that phlogiston theory was inconsistent with his experimental results, and proposed a 'subtle fluid' called caloric as the "substance of heat". According to this theory, the quantity of this substance is constant throughout the universe, and it flows from warmer to colder bodies. Indeed, Lavoisier was one of the first to use a calorimeter to measure the heat released during chemical reaction. Lavoisier presented the idea that caloric was a subtle fluid, obeying the common laws of matter, but attenuated to such a degree that it is capable of passing through dense matter without restraint; caloric's own material nature is evident when it is in abundance such as in the case of an explosion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=226412 | 418,814 |
620,646 | The tawny owl is thought to be a close relative of the Ural owl. Authors have hypothesized that the origin of the species divide followed Pleistocene continental glaciations segregated a southwest or southern group in temperate forest (i.e. the tawny) from an eastern one inhabiting cold, boreal ranges (i.e. the Ural). The species pattern is mirrored in other bird species, i.e. the European green woodpecker ("Picus viridus") from the more northern transcontinental grey-headed woodpecker ("Picus canus"). After retreat of the continental ice masses, the ranges more recently penetrated each other. While the life history details of the tawny and Ural owls are largely corresponding, nonetheless the species have a number of morphological differences and are largely adapted to different climates, times of activity and habitats. Based on "Strix" fossil species from Middle Pleistocene (given the name "Strix intermedia") in variously the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary show from leg and wing bones indicate an animal of intermediate form and size between Ural and tawny owls. However, fossils of a larger and differently proportioned "Strix" owl than a tawny owl, identified as "Strix brevis", from Germany and Hungary from before the Pleistocene (i.e. Piacenzian) and as well as diagnosed Ural owl fossils from disparate southerly deposits in Sardinia from the Early Pleistocene and in Middle Pleistocene deposits in the Pannonian Basin as well as much later during the early Holocene from far to the west in Belgium, France and Switzerland suggest a more complicated evolutionary and distributional history. A hybrid was recorded in captivity between a male Ural and a female tawny owl, which managed to produce two offspring that were intermediate in size and had a more complex song that was also shared some characteristics with both species’ vocalizations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=815909 | 620,331 |
1,332,939 | Three Mariner probes were constructed for the mission, with two intended to fly and one as a spare in the event of a mission failure. The spacecraft was shipped to Cape Canaveral with their Atlas-Centaur boosters in December 1968 – January 1969 to begin pre-launch checkouts and testing. On February 14, Mariner 6 was undergoing a simulated countdown on LC-36A, electrical power running, but no propellant loaded in the booster. During the test run, an electrical relay in the Atlas malfunctioned and opened two valves in the pneumatic system which allowed helium pressure gas to escape from the booster's balloon skin. The Atlas began to crumple over, however two pad technicians quickly activated a manual override switch to close the valves and pump helium back in. Although Mariner 6 and its Centaur stage had been saved, the Atlas had sustained structural damage and could not be reused, so they were removed from the booster and placed atop Mariner 7's launch vehicle on the adjacent LC-36B, while a different Atlas was used for Mariner 7. NASA awarded the quick-thinking technicians, Bill McClure and Charles (Jack) Beverlin, an Exceptional Medal of Bravery for their courage in risking being crushed underneath the 124-foot rocket. In 2014, an escarpment on Mars which NASA'S "Opportunity" rover had recently visited was named the McClure-Beverlin Ridge in honor of the pair, who had since died. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38782 | 1,332,210 |
4,398 | Armstrong was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio. A graduate of Purdue University, he studied aeronautical engineering; his college tuition was paid for by the U.S. Navy under the Holloway Plan. He became a midshipman in 1949 and a naval aviator the following year. He saw action in the Korean War, flying the Grumman F9F Panther from the aircraft carrier . In September 1951, while making a low bombing run, Armstrong's aircraft was damaged when it collided with an anti-aircraft cable, strung across a valley, which cut off a large portion of one wing. Armstrong was forced to bail out. After the war, he completed his bachelor's degree at Purdue and became a test pilot at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was the project pilot on Century Series fighters and flew the North American X-15 seven times. He was also a participant in the U.S. Air Force's Man in Space Soonest and X-20 Dyna-Soar human spaceflight programs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21247 | 4,396 |
1,634,911 | In 1865, Joseph Leidy described a single poorly preserved tooth of a Late Cretaceous theropod from the greensand at Mullica Hill. He called the animal who left the tooth "Diplotomodon horrificus". In 1866, dinosaur remains were discovered in a marl pit near Barnsboro, New Jersey, owned by the Wet Jersey Marl Company. The discovery included partial lower jaws with teeth, both humeri, the left femur, tibia, and fibula, and a large number of vertebrae. He called it "Laelaps aquilunguis". Two years later, in 1868, several significant paleontological events occurred. The first was Leidy's work with artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to mount "Hadrosaurus foulkii" for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. This became both the first mounted dinosaur skeleton ever mounted for public display but also one of the most popular exhibits in the history of the Academy. Estimates have the "Hadrosaurus" exhibit as increasing the number of visitors by up to 50%. Also that year, Cope gave Othniel Charles Marsh a tour of the marl pit where "Laelaps" was found. While there, Marsh secretly made arrangements with some of the workers for them to send any fossils they found to him at the Yale Peabody Museum instead of to Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. This may have been the "first shot" of the Bone Wars. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37798985 | 1,633,988 |
94,869 | The strongest upper limit on the masses of neutrinos comes from cosmology: the Big Bang model predicts that there is a fixed ratio between the number of neutrinos and the number of photons in the cosmic microwave background. If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse. This limit can be circumvented by assuming that the neutrino is unstable, but there are limits within the Standard Model that make this difficult. A much more stringent constraint comes from a careful analysis of cosmological data, such as the cosmic microwave background radiation, galaxy surveys, and the Lyman-alpha forest. Analysis of data from the WMAP microwave space telescope found that the sum of the masses of the three neutrino species must be less than . In 2018, the Planck collaboration published a stronger bound of , which was derived by combining their CMB total intensity, polarization and gravitational lensing observations with Baryon-Acoustic oscillation measurements from galaxy surveys and supernova measurements from Pantheon. A 2021 reanalysis that adds redshift space distortion measurements from the SDSS-IV eBOSS survey gets an even tighter upper limit of . However, several ground-based telescopes with similarly sized error bars as Planck prefer higher values for the neutrino mass sum, indicating some tension in the data sets. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21485 | 94,828 |
743,895 | The cosmic microwave background is radiation left over from decoupling after the epoch of recombination when neutral atoms first formed. At this point, radiation produced in the Big Bang stopped Thomson scattering from charged ions. The radiation, first observed in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, has a perfect thermal black-body spectrum. It has a temperature of 2.7 kelvins today and is isotropic to one part in 10. Cosmological perturbation theory, which describes the evolution of slight inhomogeneities in the early universe, has allowed cosmologists to precisely calculate the angular power spectrum of the radiation, and it has been measured by the recent satellite experiments (COBE and WMAP) and many ground and balloon-based experiments (such as Degree Angular Scale Interferometer, Cosmic Background Imager, and Boomerang). One of the goals of these efforts is to measure the basic parameters of the Lambda-CDM model with increasing accuracy, as well as to test the predictions of the Big Bang model and look for new physics. The results of measurements made by WMAP, for example, have placed limits on the neutrino masses. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5378 | 743,501 |
1,592,020 | Many variations on the original task retrieval experiment have been conducted using three-year-old and two-and-a-half-year-old children, yielding very different results between the two groups. Though only six months apart, three-year-olds consistently perform very well whereas two-and-a-half-year-olds perform very poorly, with a retrieval success rate of 75-90% and 15-20% respectively. Due to their limited experience with symbols and lack of maturity, younger children struggle to see an object as more than the object itself. They cannot achieve dual representation. The model becomes a very interesting object to the child, making it more difficult to see past its physicality. Some studies have found some symbolic objects allow dual representation to be achieved more easily. Pictures are found to be less interesting and, therefore, better allow for dual representation. It was found that, though babies struggle with pictures, two-and-a-half-year-old children were more successful at the retrieval task when shown the correct location in a picture of the room, finding the hidden toy in 80% of trials. This is very interesting as it contradicts current literature that shows pictures to be less effective than 3D models in cognitive activities such as learning and memory. These results show that, for young children, dual representation is more easily achieved using 2D pictures than 3D models. This observation led researchers to believe it was the simplicity of the pictures in relation to the model room that contributed to the success of children in completing the retrieval task. This hypothesis was tested using only a few pieces of furniture from the model room rather than the entire model to give the children fewer items to focus on. The furniture was arranged in a similar orientation to the corresponding furniture in the life-sized room. The two-and-a-half-year-old children then watched an experimenter hide a miniature toy under one of the model-sized pieces of furniture and were then asked to find the larger version in the life-sized room. The children were very unsuccessful in the retrieval task, demonstrating that the success found in the picture tasks was not a result of simpler models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40624750 | 1,591,124 |
1,292,793 | During this period contracts were awarded to Hughes Aircraft (Ground Systems Group) to develop a terminal suitable for operational use in AWACS and ground command and control systems and to Singer Kearfott Corporation, now BAE Systems, to develop a terminal suitable for fighter aircraft installation. The Hughes effort was led by Bob Kramp and the Singer effort by John Sputz. In concert with contractor efforts a MITRE team led by Myron Leiter and consisting of communications and digital signal processing engineers refined the JTIDS design to optimize interference rejection and link performance. The results of these efforts were incorporated into performance specifications and provided guidance to the contractors. Operational considerations were provided by experienced Air Force combat pilots Col. Ken Kronlund and Col. Cliff Miller as well as valuable inputs from the Air Force Tactical Fighter Weapons Center. A pair of jet instrument trainers were equipped with F-15 like displays and were used to evaluate display techniques and understand pilot work load and benefits. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=106295 | 1,292,082 |
1,513,608 | Ferrocene, , was first synthesised in 1951 during an attempt to prepare the fulvalene () by oxidative dimerization of cyclopentadiene; the resultant product was found to have molecular formula and reported to exhibit "remarkable stability". The discovery sparked substantial interest in the field of organometallic chemistry, in part because the structure proposed by Pauson and Kealy was inconsistent with then-existing bonding models and did not explain its unexpected stability. Consequently, the initial challenge was to definitively determine the structure of ferrocene in the hope that its bonding and properties would then be understood. The sandwich structure was deduced and reported independently by three groups in 1952: Robert Burns Woodward and Geoffrey Wilkinson investigated the reactivity in order to determine the structure and demonstrated that ferrocene undergoes similar reactions to a typical aromatic molecule (such as benzene), Ernst Otto Fischer deduced the sandwich structure and also began synthesising other metallocenes including cobaltocene; Eiland and Pepinsky provided X-ray crystallographic confirmation of the sandwich structure. Applying valence bond theory to ferrocene by considering an centre and two cyclopentadienide anions (CH), which are known to be aromatic according to Hückel's rule and hence highly stable, allowed correct prediction of the geometry of the molecule. Once molecular orbital theory was successfully applied, the reasons for ferrocene's remarkable stability became clear. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28223827 | 1,512,757 |
636,311 | Common data protocols involved in entertainment and architectural systems are Digital Multiplexing (or DMX512-A), Remote Device Management (or RDM), Art-Net, ACN or sACN (Streaming Architecture for Control Networks), Analog, and various proprietary control software from a variety of manufacturers. Systems Integrators design many distributed nodes in traditional star or ring topologies, or customize system layout for specific installations. The network will have a hierarchy of main and sub-control stations with varying degrees of access. The network can be designed such that the controls for this system can be on an established timeline, or controlled in real time by astronomical clocks, audio/motion/IR sensors, or various means of user interface (buttons, touch-pads, consoles). This system might utilize a primary controller that can access the entire system, and satellite control interfaces linked via a network backbone that would determine functionality based on access codes. For example, a casino might use a networked system that interfaces with architectural lighting, stage lighting, special effects (such as fog machines or fountains), and media content routed to a media server. The primary controller would have access to all devices on the network, while individual control stations could have varying levels of functionality. A ballroom might have a multi-button panel that would adjust lighting only in that ballroom, while a cabaret space with a stage would require an access code that would give employees access to the stage lighting, while the IT manager could use the same panel to access the main controls for the networks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2354785 | 635,972 |
1,316,597 | On May 17, 1998, a 55-year-old patient named Audrey LaRue Jones died of acute liver failure after taking troglitazone. Importantly, she had been monitored closely by physicians at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a participant in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) diabetes prevention study. This called into question the efficacy of the monitoring strategy. The NIH responded on June 4 by dropping troglitazone from the study. Dr. David J. Graham, an FDA epidemiologist charged with evaluating the drug, warned on March 26, 1999 of the dangers of using it and concluded that patient monitoring was not effective in protecting against liver failure. He estimated that the drug could be linked to over 430 liver failures and that patients incurred 1,200 times greater risk of liver failure when taking Rezulin. Dr. Janet B. McGill, an endocrinologist who had assisted in the Warner–Lambert's early clinical testing of Rezulin, wrote in a March 1, 2000 letter to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.): "I believe that the company... deliberately omitted reports of liver toxicity and misrepresented serious adverse events experienced by patients in their clinical studies." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=597793 | 1,315,872 |
1,939,854 | Due to the presence of intrinsic microporosity these polymers have high-free volume, high internal surface area, and have a high affinity for gases. A novel property of PIMs is that they do not possess a network structure and are often freely soluble in organic solvents. This allows PIMs to be precipitated or cast from solution to give microporous powders or self-standing films that are useful for a variety of applications. For example the first commercial application of PIMs was in a sensor developed by 3M. Additionally, due to PIMs affinity for small gases and ability to form self-standing films they are actively being investigated as a membrane material and adsorbent for industrial separation processes such as gas separation and carbon dioxide capture. PIM membranes are also heavily investigated due to their contribution in the revision of the 2008 upper bounds of performance by Robeson, an important parameter in membrane gas separation stating that the permeability must be sacrificed for selectivity. Specifically active areas of PIM membrane research include, enhancing permeability, decreasing aging, and tailoring selectivity. PIMs are also used to create mixed matrix membranes with a variety of material such as inorganic materials, metal-organic frameworks, and carbons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62577114 | 1,938,744 |
179,402 | From the west of Calgary, the other two main all-purpose venues were built at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. First, the Canmore Nordic Centre was 90% funded by the province of Alberta, for C$17.3 million. It is located beside the town of Canmore and it hosted cross-country skiing, plus its men's portion of the Nordic combined, and the men's biathlon events. After the Games were over, there was the intention that it would become a year-round destination for Albertans, by facilitating Canmore's economic transition away from coal mining to tourist attractions. However, the Nakiska ("Cree" meaning "to meet") ski resort was the most controversial venue built for these Winter Olympics. It is located on Mount Allan (inside Kananaskis Country) and it hosted the alpine skiing events for C$25 million by the Alberta government. The venue site drew criticism because of the various environmental concerns, the building of adequate ski slopes, and the need to use artificial snow, a result of the lower snow quantity that fell that season. Also, the International Ski Federation (FIS) officials noted the venue's lack of technical difficulties needed for the Olympic competition. Therefore, these FIS officials proposed some major changes in the paths and that caused great and greater difficulties. These modifications were met with praise from Olympic alpine skiing competitors. Like at Canada Olympic Park, this venue also hosted some freestyle skiing events as a demonstration sport. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=187504 | 179,309 |
932,955 | According to Romila Thapar, Ashoka's Dhamma is a superb document of his essential humanity and an answer to the socio-political needs of the contemporaneous situation. It was not anti-Brahmanical because respect for the Brahmans and Sarmanas is an integral part of his Dhamma. His emphasis on non-violence did not blind him to the needs of the state. In fact, he envisioned bureaucrats as doing the work of ensuring ethical progress on the part of his subjects. Also, Ashoka warned the forest tribes that although he hates to use coercion, he may be required to resort to force if they continued to create trouble. By the time Ashoka stopped war, the entire Indian sub-continent was under his control. In the south he was on friendly terms with the Cholas and Pandyas. Sri Lanka was an admiring ally. Thus, Ashoka's decline of war came when his empire had reached its natural boundaries. The plea for tolerance was a wise course of action in an ethnically diverse, religiously varied, and class divided society. Ashoka's empire was a conglomerate of diverse groups; farmers, pastoral nomads and hunter-gatherers, there were Greeks, Kambojas, and Bhojas and hundreds of groups with different traditions. In this situation a plea for tolerance was needed. Ashoka tried to transcend the parochial cultural traditions with a board set of ethical principles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40513032 | 932,463 |
1,910,180 | For current metallization technologies for high-performance and low-power microelectronics, copper is the material of choice due to its higher electromigration (EM) stability (resulting from the higher melting point) and conductivity to aluminium. For downscaled logic and memory applications up to 14 nm node the increased current density and reliability requirements per interconnect line still have known material and integration solutions. Thinner barrier and adhesion layers, doping of secondary metals to enhance grain boundary electromigration resistance, and integration concepts of selective cappings will be some of the adopted solutions. However, for dimensions below 7 to 10 nm nodes, the decreased volume of available conducting metal will force innovative material and integration approaches towards novel interconnect architectures. Also for power and high-performance applications the most critical challenges are high ampacity, thermal conductivity and electromigration resistance. Far away from bulk, copper conductors that would already melt at 10 A/cm, current copper metallization lines can withstand 10 A/cm due to good heat dissipation into thermal contact to the surrounding material, optimized liner and capping as well as plating and CMP processes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51056408 | 1,909,082 |
932,178 | Zuse designed the Z1 in 1935 to 1936 and built it from 1936 to 1938. The Z1 was wholly mechanical and only worked for a few minutes at a time at most. Helmut Schreyer advised Zuse to use a different technology. As a doctoral student at the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1937 he worked on the implementation of Boolean operations and (in today's terminology) flip-flops on the basis of vacuum tubes. In 1938, Schreyer demonstrated a circuit on this basis to a small audience, and explained his vision of an electronic computing machine – but since the largest operational electronic devices contained far fewer tubes this was considered practically infeasible. In that year when presenting the plan for a computer with 2,000 electron tubes, Zuse and Schreyer, who was an assistant at Telecommunication Institute at the Technical University of Berlin, were discouraged by members of the institute who knew about the problems with electron tube technology. Zuse later recalled: "They smiled at us in 1939, when we wanted to build electronic machines ... We said: The electronic machine is great, but first the components have to be developed." In 1940, Zuse and Schreyer managed to arrange a meeting at the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) to discuss a potential project for developing an electronic computer, but when they estimated a duration of two or three years, the proposal was rejected. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=152671 | 931,686 |
130,268 | Following the 2013 release of the APT 1 report from Mandiant, the industry has seen a shift towards signature-less approaches to the problem capable of detecting and mitigating zero-day attacks. Numerous approaches to address these new forms of threats have appeared, including behavioral detection, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud-based file detonation. According to Gartner, it is expected the rise of new entrants, such Carbon Black, Cylance and Crowdstrike will force EPP incumbents into a new phase of innovation and acquisition. One method from Bromium involves micro-virtualization to protect desktops from malicious code execution initiated by the end user. Another approach from SentinelOne and Carbon Black focuses on behavioral detection by building a full context around every process execution path in real time, while Cylance leverages an artificial intelligence model based on machine learning. Increasingly, these signature-less approaches have been defined by the media and analyst firms as "next-generation" antivirus and are seeing rapid market adoption as certified antivirus replacement technologies by firms such as Coalfire and DirectDefense. In response, traditional antivirus vendors such as Trend Micro, Symantec and Sophos have responded by incorporating "next-gen" offerings into their portfolios as analyst firms such as Forrester and Gartner have called traditional signature-based antivirus "ineffective" and "outdated". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=268622 | 130,216 |
366,694 | The plans propose the installation of a latest generation ABM system with a radar site in the Czech Republic and the launch site in Poland. The system was announced to be aimed against ICBMs from Iran and North Korea. This caused harsh comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) security conference during spring 2007 in Munich. Other European ministers commented that any change of strategic weapons should be negotiated on NATO level and not 'unilaterally' [sic, actually bilaterally] between the U.S. and other states (although most strategic arms reduction treaties were between the Soviet Union and U.S., not NATO). The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, expressed severe concerns about the way in which the U.S. had conveyed its plans to its European partners and criticised the U.S. administration for not having consulted Russia prior to announcing its endeavours to deploy a new missile defence system in Central Europe. According to a July 2007 survey, a majority of Poles were opposed to hosting a component of the system in Poland. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1791 | 366,502 |
2,195,592 | Throughout the programme rapid publication of results was effected through "The BRIDGE Newsletter". In style this was an academic journal (but without peer review) comprising BRIDGE science results together with conference announcements, meeting reports, cruise reports, updates from the mid-ocean ridge programmes of other nations and general news items of relevance to this field of research. It was published twice a year in spring and autumn. The first issue of eight stapled sheets appeared in August 1991 but after NERC funding commenced it was commercially printed and bound. By issue 10, in April 1996, it had grown to 100 pages and was being distributed to more than 600 researchers and interested parties in 20 countries. The last newsletter, No. 17, was produced in autumn 1999 as a magazine called "The Fiery Deep, Exploring a New Earth" summarising the programme and its results to that time. On 16 November 1999 at the Natural History Museum, London these results were presented to invited guests at a formal end of programme meeting. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48231632 | 2,194,341 |
719,463 | Muzychuk continued to excel in 2012, reaching a career-best rating of 2606 in the middle of the year. She produced her career-best result at the European Individual Women's Championship, scoring 8½/11 and earning a bronze medal. She had an opportunity to win the tournament with a last-round draw, but lost to Valentina Gunina. As a result, she only finished in joint first and lost to Gunina and Tatiana Kosintseva on the head-to-head tiebreak criteria. Muzychuk continued to perform well in the Grand Prix, finishing in joint first with Koneru Humpy at the Kazan event. During the event, she became the fourth woman to reach a rating of 2600 after Judit Polgár, Koneru, and Hou Yifan. Following the tournament, she reached a career-best ranking of No. 197 in the world in August and also became the second-highest-rated woman for the first time, only behind Polgár. Nonetheless in the final standings for the overall Grand Prix, Muzychuk finished in third place behind Koneru and the winner Hou, losing out on the winner's right to challenge for the Women's World Championship. Later in the year, Muzychuk took part in the unrated ACP Golden Classic classical tournament in Amsterdam that followed an unusual format where games were adjourned if not completed in 40 moves. She finished with an even score, and notably defeated Krishnan Sasikiran, a Grandmaster rated 2707 at the time. At the end of the year, Muzychuk was the 3rd seed at the Women's World Chess Championship, but was upset in the second round by the 30th seed and eventual winner Anna Ushenina in rapid tiebreaks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1076780 | 719,083 |
1,838,669 | Furthermore, over the past years obesity rates have dramatically increased worldwide. Statistics from across the globe demonstrate that approximately 22 million children under the age of five are classified as obese. Some health risks associated with childhood obesity include high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. These factors may eventually lead to further complications such as heart attack, stroke, a variety of cardiovascular conditions and if not treated properly and in a timely manner may ultimately result in death. Data concluded from the Bogalusa Heart Study demonstrates that approximately 60 percent of overweight children five to ten years of age had at least one cardiovascular risk factor. A few examples of other health risks include Blount's disease, skin fungal infections, Acanthosis Nigracans, Hepatic Steatosis, in addition to both psychological and behavioral problems. Overweight children often struggle to maintain high self-esteem and experience both depression and anxiety. Social stigma of obesity may also be a contributing factor to some of these negative health outcomes, as many fat children experience bullying related to their size. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34081870 | 1,837,620 |
285,454 | The imperial examinations influenced traditional Chinese religion as well as contemporary literary tradition. The examination system ostensibly represented the Confucian system in its most rationalist expression and was designed to achieve a society ruled by men of merit, as determined by an objective measure of the candidates' knowledge and intelligence. In practice, the examinations also included various religious and superstitious beliefs that extend the examinations beyond Confucian idealism. Traditional beliefs about fate, that cosmic forces predestine certain human affairs, and particularly that individual success or failure was subject to the will of Heaven and the influence and intervention by various deities, played into the interpretation of results when taking the tests. Zhong Kui, also known as Chung-kuei, was a deity associated with the examination system. The story is that he was a scholar who took the tests, and, despite his most excellent performance, he was unfairly deprived of the first-place prize by a corrupt system: in response, he killed himself, the act of suicide condemning him to be a ghost. Many people afraid of traveling on roads and paths that may be haunted by evil spirits have worshiped Zhong Kui as a protective deity. Also known as "Kechang Yiwen Lu", the "Strange Stories from the Examination Halls" was a collection of stories popular among Confucian scholars of the Qing dynasty. The theme of many of the stories is that good deeds are rewarded by success in the examination halls, often by Heaven-inspired deities acting on karmic principles; and evil deeds result in failure, often under the influence of the ghosts of victims. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=244479 | 285,300 |
2,146,651 | From 1955-57 he did his National Service in the army, learning Russian at Bodmin and Crail and serving in the Intelligence Corps. In 1957-59 he worked at the University of Birmingham as research fellow, there meeting and becoming influenced by the adult education tutor Graham Webster. In 1960 Dobson began working as a lecturer in archaeology in the Department of Extra Mural Studies, teaching in the adult education department - a post in which he remained until retirement in 1990. In this capacity Dobson organized a series of tours of Hadrian's Wall sites every four years in the 1960s. During these he introduced his students (and others) to many little-known (to the amateur) sites on the wall. He worked closely with David Breeze (chief inspector of ancient monuments for historic Scotland and visiting professor at Durham University since 1994) on their joint studies in aspects of Hadrian's Wall and produced one of the most influential texts on the subject, still in print today. He undertook a series of excavations in Corbridge in the 1960s and 1970s, and provided an eyewitness account of the discovery of the Corbridge Hoard. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38959130 | 2,145,420 |
1,390,618 | These same mortars, using high-explosive shells, came to be acknowledged by U.S. Army commanders and personnel as being one of the most effective means of quickly striking at stationary targets, such as machine gun nests, prepared strongpoints, pillboxes and even German artillery positions. Other advantages chemical mortars offered compared to full-sized artillery pieces were their maneuverability, along with easy assembly, disassembly and reassembly. The mortars, due to their relatively small size, were able to fire high explosive shells from concealed positions, such as natural escarpments on hillsides, or from woods. The rifled barrel gave the mortar remarkable accuracy; fire was often called on targets within fifty yards of friendly positions. The low-velocity shells were totally silent in transit and gave no warning of their powerful explosions (the M2 mortar's M3 high explosive shell contained 3.64 kilograms of explosives, placing it midway between the 2.18 kilograms of the 105 mm howitzer M2A1's M1 shell and the 6.88 kilograms of the 155 mm howitzer M1's M102 shell), which tended to create panic among enemy forces who were unexpectedly subjected to their firepower. The mortar was called the "grass-cutter" by German troops because its high explosive shell exploded and fragmented just a few inches above ground level. The mortars often fired white phosphorus munitions (WP) shells to block enemy observation with smoke; white phosphorus also caused casualties and fires, being especially effective against dug-in troops because the burning particles arced upward and fell directly down into foxholes. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=396691 | 1,389,847 |
157,453 | Gestational age was positively correlated with volumes of the temporal and fusiform gyri and sensorimotor cortex bilaterally, left inferior parietal lobule, brain stem, and various white matter tracts, as well as specific positive associations with the cerebellum and thalamus. Several structural brain alterations have been linked back to cognitive and behavioural outcome measures. For example, total brain tissue volume explained between 20 and 40% of the IQ and educational outcome differences between extremely preterm born adolescents and control adolescents. In another study, a 25% quartile decrease in white matter values in middle temporal gyrus was associated with a 60% increase in the risk of cognitive impairment. Nosarti and colleagues previously hypothesised that maturational patterns in preterm brains were consistent with the age-related stages typically observed in younger subjects. Their most recent study suggests, however, that their trajectory may not only be delayed but also fundamentally distinctive. Since both smaller and larger regional volumes were found in very preterm individuals compared to controls. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=429542 | 157,381 |
86,483 | Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins employs the typing monkey concept in his book "The Blind Watchmaker" to demonstrate the ability of natural selection to produce biological complexity out of random mutations. In a simulation experiment Dawkins has his weasel program produce the Hamlet phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL", starting from a randomly typed parent, by "breeding" subsequent generations and always choosing the closest match from progeny that are copies of the parent, with random mutations. The chance of the target phrase appearing in a single step is extremely small, yet Dawkins showed that it could be produced rapidly (in about 40 generations) using cumulative selection of phrases. The random choices furnish raw material, while cumulative selection imparts information. As Dawkins acknowledges, however, the weasel program is an imperfect analogy for evolution, as "offspring" phrases were selected "according to the criterion of resemblance to a "distant ideal" target." In contrast, Dawkins affirms, evolution has no long-term plans and does not progress toward some distant goal (such as humans). The weasel program is instead meant to illustrate the difference between non-random cumulative selection, and random single-step selection. In terms of the typing monkey analogy, this means that "Romeo and Juliet" could be produced relatively quickly if placed under the constraints of a nonrandom, Darwinian-type selection because the fitness function will tend to preserve in place any letters that happen to match the target text, improving each successive generation of typing monkeys. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42515 | 86,449 |
1,678,646 | The LLOV life cycle is hypothesized to begin with virion attachment to specific cell-surface receptors, followed by internalization, fusion of the virion envelope with endosomal membranes and the concomitant release of the virus nucleocapsid into the cytosol. LLOV glycoprotein (GP) is cleaved by endosomal cysteine proteases (cathepsins) and the cleaved glycoprotein interacts with the intracellular entry receptor, Niemann-Pick C1 (NPC1). The virus RdRp would partially uncoat the nucleocapsid and transcribe the genes into positive-stranded mRNAs, which would then be translated into structural and nonstructural proteins. LLOV L would bind to a single promoter located at the 3' end of the genome. Transcription would either terminate after a gene or continue to the next gene downstream. This means that genes close to the 3' end of the genome would be transcribed in the greatest abundance, whereas those toward the 5' end would be least likely to be transcribed. The gene order would therefore be a simple but effective form of transcriptional regulation. The most abundant protein produced would be the nucleoprotein, whose concentration in the cell would determine when L switches from gene transcription to genome replication. Replication would result in full-length, positive-stranded antigenomes that would in turn be transcribed into negative-stranded virus progeny genome copies. Newly synthesized structural proteins and genomes would self-assemble and accumulate near the inside of the cell membrane. Virions would bud off from the cell, gaining their envelopes from the cellular membrane they bud from. The mature progeny particles would then infect other cells to repeat the cycle. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33017626 | 1,677,703 |
83,860 | The development of radar, mainly in secrecy, before and during World War II, resulted in the technological advances which made microwaves practical. Wavelengths in the centimeter range were required to give the small radar antennas which were compact enough to fit on aircraft a narrow enough beamwidth to localize enemy aircraft. It was found that conventional transmission lines used to carry radio waves had excessive power losses at microwave frequencies, and George Southworth at Bell Labs and Wilmer Barrow at MIT independently invented waveguide in 1936. Barrow invented the horn antenna in 1938 as a means to efficiently radiate microwaves into or out of a waveguide. In a microwave receiver, a nonlinear component was needed that would act as a detector and mixer at these frequencies, as vacuum tubes had too much capacitance. To fill this need researchers resurrected an obsolete technology, the point contact crystal detector (cat whisker detector) which was used as a demodulator in crystal radios around the turn of the century before vacuum tube receivers. The low capacitance of semiconductor junctions allowed them to function at microwave frequencies. The first modern silicon and germanium diodes were developed as microwave detectors in the 1930s, and the principles of semiconductor physics learned during their development led to semiconductor electronics after the war. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20097 | 83,826 |
1,692,249 | In recognition of the increasing importance of global resource use mediated by international trade for environmental accounting and policy, new perspectives have been and are currently being developed within environmental accounting. The most prominent among these are consumption-based accounts compiled using environmentally extended input-output analysis. Consumption-based indicators of material use are commonly referred to as “material footprints” (comparable to carbon footprints and water footprints) or as raw material equivalents (RME) for imported and exported goods. Raw material equivalents or material footprints of traded goods comprise the material inputs required along the entire supply chain associated with their production. This includes both direct and indirect flows: For example, the ore mined to extract the metal contained in a mobile phone as well as the coal needed to generate the electricity needed to produce the metal concentrates would be included. In order to allocate domestic extraction to exported goods, information on the production and trade structure of an economy is required. In monetary terms, information on the production structure is contained in commonly available economy-wide input-output tables (IOT) which recently have been combined with trade statistics to form multi-regional IO (MRIO) tables. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42831222 | 1,691,298 |
64,736 | Brazil's Atlantic Forest is considered one such hotspot, containing roughly 20,000 plant species, 1,350 vertebrates and millions of insects, about half of which occur nowhere else. The island of Madagascar and India are also particularly notable. Colombia is characterized by high biodiversity, with the highest rate of species by area unit worldwide and it has the largest number of endemics (species that are not found naturally anywhere else) of any country. About 10% of the species of the Earth can be found in Colombia, including over 1,900 species of bird, more than in Europe and North America combined, Colombia has 10% of the world's mammals species, 14% of the amphibian species and 18% of the bird species of the world. Madagascar dry deciduous forests and lowland rainforests possess a high ratio of endemism. Since the island separated from mainland Africa 66 million years ago, many species and ecosystems have evolved independently. Indonesia's 17,000 islands cover and contain 10% of the world's flowering plants, 12% of mammals and 17% of reptiles, amphibians and birds—along with nearly 240 million people. Many regions of high biodiversity and/or endemism arise from specialized habitats which require unusual adaptations, for example, alpine environments in high mountains, or Northern European peat bogs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45086 | 64,711 |
1,940,573 | For example, conservator and material analyst Kristen Moffitt (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Conservation, Conservator & Materials Analyst) tells how Patrick Baty used soot laminated between layers of a sample to determine the point at which the pre- and post-industrial eras diverged, as regulations were introduced into London, England. Likewise, she notes that the color of paint samples can also serve as socio-economic indicators and tell us a lot about the lived-experience of those who inhabited the structure. Mat Webster, executive director for Granger Department of Architectural Preservation and Research at Colonial Williamsburg joins Moffit in noting that samples collected of a deeper, more intense hue are derived from costly pigments imported from England (and initially globally sourced). Therefore, they are used sparingly and appear in only the most public rooms of the house. These data not only inform Material Culture Studies that help the architectural historian and archaeologist model historic economic-trade networks, but help us hypothesize about historic social hierarchies at work as well. These data are critical to our understanding of the conditions under which occupants lived, adding richness and texture to the historical record. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14104519 | 1,939,462 |
1,008,557 | After the fall of France a number of S 35s (297 were captured according to some sources) were taken into service with the Wehrmacht as the "Panzerkampfwagen 35-S 739(f)". The Germans modified the cupola by cutting its top off and installing a simple hatch. On 10 December 1940 the first German tank unit equipped with French "Beutepanzer" was formed: "201. Panzerregiment" with 118 tanks; 36 of these were S 35s, the rest "38Hs". On 10 February 1941, "202. Panzerregiment" was established; both regiments were united into "Panzerbrigade 100". On 27 January the independent "301. Panzerabteilung" was formed with French vehicles; total S 35 organic strength in the "Wehrmacht" was thus ninety. On 22 March this independent battalion replaced the Second Battalion of "201. Panzerregiment", which battalion was renamed Panzer-Abteilung 211 and sent to Finland in June, the only major German unit with S 35s that would fight on the Eastern Front; some were deployed by "22. Panzerdivision" near Sevastopol in 1942. The 21st and "25. Panzerdivision" in 1943 used some S 35s when reforming after having been largely destroyed. Some vehicles had their superstructure removed and were used for driver-training, while others were used for security duties. Some of these units fought in Normandy in 1944, such as "100. Panzer Ersatz und Ausbildungs-Abteilung" and "206. Panzer-Abteilung", while others were used in Yugoslavia for anti-partisan duties ("7. SS-Freiwilligen-Gebirgs-Division "Prinz Eugen"", "12. Panzer-Kompanie z.b.V." and "I./Panzer-Regiment 202"). There were still twelve S 35s listed as in German service on 30 December 1944. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2838334 | 1,008,036 |
293,407 | Solanine poisoning symptoms may occur when immature green fruit (looks similar to green peas) or mature leaves are ingested raw. They are typically delayed for 6 to 12 hours after ingestion. Initial symptoms of toxicity include fever, sweating, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, confusion, and drowsiness. Death from ingesting large amounts of the plant results from cardiac arrhythmias and respiratory failure. Livestock have also been poisoned from nitrate toxicity by grazing the mature leaves and green berries of "S. nigrum". However, in central Spain, the great bustard ("Otis tarda") may act as a seed disperser of European black nightshade ("Solanum nigrum"). Black nightshade is highly variable, and some advise to avoid eating the berries unless they are a known edible strain. The toxin levels may also be affected by the plant's growing conditions. The toxins in "S. nigrum" are most concentrated in the unripe green berries, and immature fruit should be treated as toxic. Most cases of suspected poisoning are due to consumption of leaves or unripe fruit. There are ethnobotanical accounts of "S. nigrum" young leaves and shoots being boiled as a vegetable with the cooking water being discarded and replaced several times to remove toxins. Solanine is water-soluble and is destroyed by boiling. "S. nigrum" leaves may be different from this perspective. Young cooked leaves of Solanum complex sp. are a source many useful nutrients similar to levels found in spinach. Solanum complex berries have been consumed on every continent since ancient times. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2187425 | 293,249 |
63,878 | The United States military have expressed interest in pursuing research in electric gun technology throughout the late 20th century, since electromagnetic guns don't require propellants to fire a shot as conventional gun systems do, significantly increasing crew safety and reducing logistics costs, as well as provide a greater range. In addition, railgun systems have shown to potentially provide higher velocity of projectiles, which would increase accuracy for anti-tank, artillery, and air defense by decreasing the time it takes for the projectile to reach its target destination. During the early 1990s, the U.S. Army dedicated more than $150 million into electric gun research. At the University of Texas at Austin Center for Electromechanics, military railguns capable of delivering tungsten armor-piercing bullets with kinetic energies of nine megajoules (9 MJ) have been developed. Nine megajoules is enough energy to deliver of projectile at —at that velocity, a sufficiently long rod of tungsten or another dense metal could easily penetrate a tank, and potentially pass through it, (see APFSDS). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=218930 | 63,853 |
1,189,538 | By 1954, all U.S. networks had regained control of their programming, with higher advertising revenues: ABC's revenue increased by 67% (earning $26 million), NBC's went up by 30% ($100 million) and CBS's rose by 44% ($117 million). However that year, ABC had only 14 primary affiliates compared to the 74 that carried the majority of CBS programs and the 71 that were primarily affiliated with NBC. Most markets outside the largest ones were not large enough to support three full-time network affiliates. In some markets that were large enough for a third full-time affiliate, the only available commercial allocation was on the less-desirable UHF band. Until the All-Channel Receiver Act (passed by Congress in 1961) mandated the inclusion of UHF tuning, most viewers needed to purchase a converter to be able to watch UHF stations and the signal quality was marginal at best. Additionally, during the analog television era, UHF stations were not adequately receivable in markets that either covered large areas or had rugged terrain . These factors made many prospective station owners skittish about investing in a UHF station, especially one that would have had to take on an affiliation with a weaker network. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64765894 | 1,188,906 |
1,709,748 | A process related to the sol-gel route is the Pechini, or liquid mix, process (named after its American inventor, Maggio Pechini). An aqueous solution of suitable oxides or salts is mixed with an alpha-hydroxycarboxylic acid such as citric acid. Chelation, or the formation of complex ring-shaped compounds around the metal cations, takes place in the solution. A polyhydroxy alcohol is then added, and the liquid is heated to 150–250 °C (300–480 °F) to allow the chelates to polymerize, or form large, cross-linked networks. As excess water is removed by heating, a solid polymeric resin results. Eventually, at still higher temperatures of 500–900 °C (930–1,650 °F), the resin is decomposed or charred, and ultimately a mixed oxide is obtained. Particle size is extremely small, typically 20 to 50 nanometres (although there is agglomeration of these particles into larger clusters), with intimate mixing taking place on the atomic scale. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66580770 | 1,708,789 |
801,246 | Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or as undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=238560 | 800,818 |
1,313,556 | During the early Anglo-Saxon period (c. 450–650), archaeological evidence for subsistence-level wool production using warp-weighted looms is extensive. Tools and technologies of spinning and weaving were similar to those of the Roman period; it is likely that fine, white wool continued to be produced from sheep introduced from the Mediterranean region alongside coarser local wools. Dyes included woad for blue and less frequently madder and lichens for reds and purples. Some high-status woollen cloth is found, including gold brocade. New textile types appeared around the tenth century, prominently including diamond twills whose use continued into the thirteenth century.> There is little evidence for long-distance trade, but there seems to have been some, presumably of especially rare wools or cloths: the silence of the sources is punctuated by a famous mention of the slipping standards of English cloaks exported to Francia in a letter from Charlemagne to Offa of Mercia. By the eleventh century, however, sheep were numerous in England, and at least some export of their wool by low German merchants was taking place; Peter Sawyer argued that wool was already a major source of wealth and an important export commodity in England at this time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45342882 | 1,312,836 |
742,022 | The earliest EDA tools were produced academically. One of the most famous was the "Berkeley VLSI Tools Tarball", a set of UNIX utilities used to design early VLSI systems. Still widely used are the Espresso heuristic logic minimizer, responsible for circuit complexity reductions and Magic, a computer-aided design platform. Another crucial development was the formation of MOSIS, a consortium of universities and fabricators that developed an inexpensive way to train student chip designers by producing real integrated circuits. The basic concept was to use reliable, low-cost, relatively low-technology IC processes and pack a large number of projects per wafer, with several copies of chips from each project remaining preserved. Cooperating fabricators either donated the processed wafers or sold them at cost, as they saw the program helpful to their own long-term growth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=216881 | 741,630 |
100,745 | The Computer Science department's webcam provides a live feed of the campus as seen from the top of the Gould-Simpson building (the tallest classroom building on campus at 10 stories). The Berger Memorial Fountain at the west entrance of Old Main honors the UA students who lost their lives in World War I, and dates back to 1919. The University of Arizona generates renewable energy with solar panels (photo voltaic) that have been installed on campus buildings. In 2011, the "Sustainable Endowments Institute" gave the university a College Sustainability Report Card grade of "B." In 2015, the university opened the ENR2, housing the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment set to be one of its "greenest" buildings on campus with features like a cutting edge air conditioning system and 55,000-gallon water-harvesting tank. Designed to resemble a slot canyon in the Sonoran Desert, the 150,000 sq. ft. building focuses on adaptation and reducing our carbon footprint. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32015 | 100,700 |
961,610 | Thorndike's Educational psychology began a trend toward behavioral psychology that sought to use empirical evidence and a scientific approach to problem solving. Thorndike was among some of the first psychologists to combine learning theory, psychometrics, and applied research for school-related subjects to form psychology of education. One of his influences on education is seen by his ideas on mass marketing of tests and textbooks at that time. Thorndike opposed the idea that learning should reflect nature, which was the main thought of developmental scientists at that time. He instead thought that schooling should improve upon nature. Unlike many other psychologist of his time, Thorndike took a statistical approach to education in his later years by collecting qualitative information intended to help teachers and educators deal with practical educational problems. Thorndike's theory was an association theory, as many were in that time. He believed that the association between stimulus and response was solidified by a reward or confirmation. He also thought that motivation was an important factor in learning. The Law of Effect introduced the relation between reinforcers and punishers. Although Thorndike's description of the relation between reinforcers and punishers was incomplete, his work in this area would later become a catalyst in further research, such as that of B.F. Skinner. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=84864 | 961,101 |
1,048,997 | The Part C (originally Part H) program mandates a statewide, comprehensive, multidisciplinary service system to address the needs of infants and toddlers who are experiencing developmental delays or a diagnosed physical or mental condition with a high probability of an associated developmental disability in one or more of the following areas: cognitive development, physical development, language and speech development, psychosocial development, and self-help skills. In addition, states may opt to define and serve at-risk children. The therapies provided by IDEA can be found in the home, child care, early head start, and community settings such as the county. Commonly cited factors that may put an infant or toddler at risk of developmental delay include low birth weight, respiratory distress as a newborn, lack of oxygen, brain hemorrhage, infection, and prenatal exposure to toxins through maternal substance abuse. Other factors, not commonly cited but often experienced are language delays due to factors such as deafness, Autism, learning disabilities, or severe psychosocial issues (ie severe neglect). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4739983 | 1,048,452 |
1,359,079 | "Rickettsia typhi" is a small, gram-negative intracellular bacterium that establishes the murine typhus infection in mammals and fleas. Murine typhus was once one of the most prevalent rickettsial diseases in the world, having isolated the "R. typhi" causative agent from nearly every continent around the globe except for Antarctica. In addition to the widespread distribution, the bacterium is particularly concentrated in regions that boast warmer climates year-round and hug the coasts. This predilection is due to these regions' favourable climatic conditions for the survival of flea and wildlife hosts, leading to their greater abundance and ability to maintain the rickettsial organism as reservoirs in the environment. Seaports are exceptional foci for "R. typhi" as infected rodents and their ectoparasites could be introduced through the international movement of ships. These ports can subsequently transfer the pathogen to nearby cities that line the main routes of trade. Spikes in "R. typhi" infections are also reported from late Spring to early Autumn when flea populations are especially high. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20321247 | 1,358,328 |
1,802,968 | The benefit of using interference lithography is the quick generation of dense features over a wide area without loss of focus. Seamless diffraction gratings on areas of more than one square meter have been originated by interference lithography. Hence, it is commonly used for the origination of master structures for subsequent micro or nano replication processes (e.g. nanoimprint lithography) or for testing photoresist processes for lithography techniques based on new wavelengths (e.g., EUV or 193 nm immersion). In addition, interfering laser beams of high-power pulsed lasers provides the opportunity of applying a direct treatment of the material's surface (including metals, ceramics and polymers) based on photothermal and/or photochemical mechanisms. Due to the above-mentioned characteristics, this method has been called in this case "Direct Laser Interference Patterning" (DLIP). Using DLIP, the substrates can be structured directly in one-step obtaining a periodic array on large areas in a few seconds. Such patterned surfaces can be used for different applications including tribology (wear and friction reduction), photovoltaics (increased photocurrent), or biotechnology. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4432469 | 1,801,955 |
1,350,840 | Advances in cartographic production technology in the 20th century, especially the advent and widespread availability of color Offset printing, then a multitude of advances spurred on by World War II, such as Photolithography, gave cartographers a larger palette of design options, and made it easier to creatively innovate. This was synchronized with the widespread expansion of higher education, during which most cartography training transitioned from an apprenticeship to a college degree (typically using Raisz's textbook in America). The new generation of cartography professionals and professors began to reflect on why some maps seemed to be better (in beauty and function) than others, and to think of ways to improve design. Perhaps chief among them was Arthur H. Robinson, whose short but seminal work "The Look of Maps" (1952) set the stage for the future of cartographic design, both for his early theorizing about map design, and for his honest acknowledgment of what was not yet known, soon spawning dozens of PhD dissertations. His subsequent textbook, "Elements of Cartography" (1953), was a marked departure from the past, with a major focus on design, claiming to "present cartography as an intellectual art and science rather than as a sterile system of drafting and drawing procedures." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=64920852 | 1,350,094 |
1,652,934 | At the time, the property only had three buildings: a log chapel built by Stephen Badin (the original burned down in 1856 but a replica was built in 1906), a small two-story clapboard building that was the home of the Potawatomi interpreter Charon, and a small shed. Of the 524 acres, only 10 was cleared and ready for cultivation, but Sorin stated that the soil was suitable for raising wheat and corn. While the land had two small lakes, the snow and marshy area might have given to Sorin the appearance of a single larger lake, hence why named the fledgling mission “Notre Dame du Lac” (Our Lady of the Lake). The most immediate concern were suitable and warm lodgings for the Sorin and the seven brothers present and for those in St. Peter's who were yet to come north. To build a second log cabin, and lacking the funds, they appealed to the people of South Bend to donate funds or their time. Thanks to the help from the locals, they were able to assemble the timber and erect the walls, and the Sorin and the brothers erected the roof and completed the cabin on March 19, 1843. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33791684 | 1,652,002 |
2,151,558 | Prof. Montañez's more recent contributions have consisted of developing quantitative proxies for paleoclimate reconstruction. Much of this work has focused on Paleozoic and Mesozoic climate change during periods of acute glaciation, oceanic anoxic events of greenhouse periods, and greenhouse gas-forced turnovers from icehouses to greenhouse conditions. This work involved development and refinement of geochemical proxies of atmospheric CO, seasonality, and surface temperatures. Her work on past periods of major climate change spans the marine to terrestrial realms and integrates field and laboratory studies with numerical modeling. Field studies have spanned South America, China, Europe, and North and Central America. Recent studies evaluate the nature of CO—climate—vegetation feedbacks in Earth's earliest tropical forests through the study of fossil plants, time series of past atmospheric CO, process-based ecosystem modeling, and climate simulations. In addition to her contributions to the understanding of how CO in the atmosphere influenced deep-time climates, Montañez's research also extends to Pleistocene and Holocene records of hydroclimate in California through the geochemical study of stalagmites in Sierra Nevada caves and climate modeling. Over the past two decades, Montañez has played an active role in shaping the NSF's and the National Academy of Science's appreciation of deep-time paleoclimate and paleoceanographic records and their relevance to society. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42068331 | 2,150,327 |
325,058 | Piaget's research relied on very small samples that were not randomly selected. His book "The Origins of Intelligence in Children" was based on the study of just three children: his own. This means that it is difficult to generalize Piaget's findings to the broader population. Piaget interacted closely with his research subjects and did not follow a set script, meaning that experimental conditions may not have been exactly the same from participant to participant, introducing issues of consistency. As he worked in the era before widespread use of voice recording equipment, his data collection method was simply to make handwritten notes in the field, which he would analyse himself. This differs from the modern practice of using multiple coders to ensure test validity. Furthermore, critics such as Linda Siegel have argued that Piaget's experiments did not adequately control for social context and the child's understanding (or lack of understanding) of the language used in the test task, leading to mistaken conclusions about children's lack of reasoning skills. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=95274 | 324,885 |
1,056,612 | As Type 346 development continued, 14th Institute team went another personnel change. Due to the urgent need of integrating Russian MR-710 radar to Type 052B destroyer, the original general designer Wan Jun was reassigned as the general engineer of this program, and later on, deputy general designer Diao Chen-Xi immigrated to Canada in July 1996. Zhou Wan-Xing (周万幸) was appointed as the new general designer of Type 346. Half a decade later, in late December 2001, sea trials for the pre-production unit begun in northern China. In April 2002, development suffered a setback in that the radar suddenly stopped working during a trial. After two days of simulation, the problem was identified and resolved. In 2003, the 14th Institute development team spent half a year to resolve the sea clutter problem. In June 2004, final trials for certification begun and successfully concluded in the winter of the same year, with the APAR officially accepted into service one and half a decade later after it first begun. Chinese media only claims it took a decade to develop the APAR, starting in mid-1995 when the 14th Institute was finally selected as the official developer of the SAPARS, but in reality, the program really begun in approximately half a decade earlier in November 1989 when both competitors begun to work on their own respective designs for the bid. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51215241 | 1,056,063 |
187,427 | The RAN commenced plans to improve their frigates' combat capability in 1996, with the Warfighting Improvement Program (WIP). Upgrades proposed under the WIP included installation of a phased-array radar, a second Mark 41 vertical launch system. The WIP was scrapped near the end of 1999, and plans for a less ambitious anti-ship missile defence (ASMD) upgrade were made. In 2004, Tenix, Saab, and the Department of Defence formed a Private Public Partnership to upgrade the anti-ship missile defence (ASMD) capability of the "Anzac" class, through the installation of CEA Technologies' CEAFAR and CEAMOUNT active phased array radars, a Vampir NG Infrared Search and Track system, and Sharpeye Navigational Radar Systems. On 18 January 2010, "Perth" docked at the Australian Marine Complex in Henderson, Western Australia for the ASMD upgrade. Both of the frigate's masts were replaced, and the operations room layout was improved. Additional ballast was required to maintain stability, and the combined weight increase brought the ship's full load displacement to 3,810 tons. After completion in October 2010, "Perth" was used to test the modifications, with trials completed in July 2011. Approval to upgrade the other seven RAN "Anzac"s was granted in November 2011, with work on the A$650 million refits to begin in 2012. As of March 2017, all eight ships of the RAN had completed the upgrade. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=897679 | 187,330 |
118,213 | As global talk about climate change and the future of industrial corporations, the world systems theory can help to explain the creation of the G-77 group, a coalition of 77 peripheral and semi-peripheral states wanting a seat at the global climate discussion table. The group was formed in 1964, but it now has more than 130 members who advocate for multilateral decision making. Since its creation, G-77 members have collaborated with two main aims: 1) decreasing their vulnerability based on the relative size of economic influence, and 2) improving outcomes for national development. World-systems theory has also been utilized to trace CO emissions’ damage to the ozone layer. The levels of world economic entrance and involvement can affect the damage a country does to the earth. In general, scientists can make assumptions about a country's CO emissions based on GDP. Higher exporting countries, countries with debt, and countries with social structure turmoil land in the upper-periphery tier. Though more research must be done in the arena, scientists can call core, semi-periphery, and periphery labels as indicators for CO intensity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1582335 | 118,168 |
1,959,692 | One major strand of Wößmann's research studies the determinants of student achievement, including the role of class size and teacher quality, of educational institutions and education systems, and of tracking and early childhood education. Key themes that emerge from this research focus on the often small effect of quantitative educational inputs such as class size, on students' cognitive skills in developed countries and the substantial effects of educational institutions and systems as well as of the quality of teaching. In this context, Wößmann's analyses of students' performance using TIMSS and PISA data find central exams and control mechanisms, school autonomy in personnel and process decisions, individual teachers' influence over teaching methods, limits to teacher unions' influence on curriculum scope, scrutiny of students' achievements and competition from private schools to be related with higher student performance, findings for which Wößmann and John Bishop provide theoretical foundations. As a consequence, Wößmann has argued in favour of policies promoting school accountability, school autonomy, and school choice, the latter including school choice through public funding for private schools as means to improve learning outcomes. However, while Wößmann emphasizes that school autonomy has positively affected student achievement in developed countries or countries with high-performing education systems, he also cautions that school autonomy may have the opposite effect in countries with low-performing education systems, including many developing countries. In other words, he emphasizes that educational reforms need to be applied with nuance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=56571686 | 1,958,565 |
1,771,974 | By discovering many geological forms that are typically formed from large amounts of water, Viking orbiters caused a revolution in our ideas about water on Mars. Huge river valleys were found in many areas. They showed that floods of water broke through dams, carved deep valleys, eroded grooves into bedrock, and traveled thousands of kilometers. Large areas in the southern hemisphere contained branched valley networks, suggesting that rain once fell. The flanks of some volcanoes are believed to have been exposed to rainfall because they resemble those occurring on Hawaiian volcanoes. Many craters look as if the impactor fell into mud. When they were formed, ice in the soil may have melted, turned the ground into mud, then the mud flowed across the surface. Normally, material from an impact goes up, then down. It does not flow across the surface, going around obstacles, as it does on some Martian craters. Regions, called "chaotic terrain", seemed to have quickly lost great volumes of water which caused large channels to form downstream. The amount of water involved was almost unthinkable—estimates for some channel flows run to ten thousand times the flow of the Mississippi River. Underground volcanism may have melted frozen ice; the water then flowed away and the ground just collapsed to leave chaotic terrain. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32939362 | 1,770,977 |
309,158 | "n"-grams can also be used for efficient approximate matching. By converting a sequence of items to a set of "n"-grams, it can be embedded in a vector space, thus allowing the sequence to be compared to other sequences in an efficient manner. For example, if we convert strings with only letters in the English alphabet into single character 3-grams, we get a formula_5-dimensional space (the first dimension measures the number of occurrences of "aaa", the second "aab", and so forth for all possible combinations of three letters). Using this representation, we lose information about the string. For example, both the strings "abc" and "bca" give rise to exactly the same 2-gram "bc" (although {"ab", "bc"} is clearly not the same as {"bc", "ca"}). However, we know empirically that if two strings of real text have a similar vector representation (as measured by cosine distance) then they are likely to be similar. Other metrics have also been applied to vectors of "n"-grams with varying, sometimes better, results. For example, z-scores have been used to compare documents by examining how many standard deviations each "n"-gram differs from its mean occurrence in a large collection, or text corpus, of documents (which form the "background" vector). In the event of small counts, the g-score (also known as g-test) may give better results for comparing alternative models. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=986182 | 308,993 |
70,728 | In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey carried out a chemical experiment to demonstrate how organic molecules could have formed spontaneously from inorganic precursors under prebiotic conditions like those posited by the Oparin–Haldane hypothesis. It used a highly reducing (lacking oxygen) mixture of gases—methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, as well as water vapor—to form simple organic monomers such as amino acids. Bernal said of the Miller–Urey experiment that "it is not enough to explain the formation of such molecules, what is necessary, is a physical-chemical explanation of the origins of these molecules that suggests the presence of suitable sources and sinks for free energy." However, current scientific consensus describes the primitive atmosphere as weakly reducing or neutral, diminishing the amount and variety of amino acids that could be produced. The addition of iron and carbonate minerals, present in early oceans, however produces a diverse array of amino acids. Later work has focused on two other potential reducing environments: outer space and deep-sea hydrothermal vents. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19179706 | 70,701 |
582,633 | The navy began the program by testing and reverse engineering two German Type XXI U-boats— and —obtained as war reparation. That analysis led to four goals—increasing the submarines' battery capacity, streamlining the boats' structures, adding snorkels, and improving fire control systems. The navy immediately focused on designing a new class of submarine, but the Bureau of Ships believed the fleet of existing , , and submarines could be modified to incorporate the desired improvements. In June 1946, the Chief of Naval Operations approved the GUPPY project. The initial two-boat test program, implemented by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, eventually grew into several successive conversion programs. Those upgrades proceeded in seven variants, in the following order: GUPPY I, GUPPY II, GUPPY IA, Fleet Snorkel, GUPPY IIA, GUPPY IB, and GUPPY III. Some boats that went through an early phase were then upgraded further in a later phase. Most GUPPY phases were assigned a corresponding Ship Characteristics Board / SCB project number. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=444566 | 582,334 |
487,498 | In this approach, the body is modeled as a set of point masses (nodes) connected by ideal weightless elastic springs obeying some variant of Hooke's law. The nodes may either derive from the edges of a two-dimensional polygonal mesh representation of the surface of the object, or from a three-dimensional network of nodes and edges modeling the internal structure of the object (or even a one-dimensional system of links, if for example a rope or hair strand is being simulated). Additional springs between nodes can be added, or the force law of the springs modified, to achieve desired effects. Applying Newton's second law to the point masses including the forces applied by the springs and any external forces (due to contact, gravity, air resistance, wind, and so on) gives a system of differential equations for the motion of the nodes, which is solved by standard numerical schemes for solving ODEs. Rendering of a three-dimensional mass-spring lattice is often done using free-form deformation, in which the rendered mesh is embedded in the lattice and distorted to conform to the shape of the lattice as it evolves. Assuming all point masses equal to zero one can obtain the Stretched grid method aimed at several engineering problems solution relative to the elastic grid behavior. These are sometimes known as mass-spring-damper models. In pressurized soft bodies spring-mass model is combined with a pressure force based on the ideal gas law. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5917746 | 487,248 |
1,712,203 | On 23 April 2020, NASA reported building, in 37 days, a ventilator (called VITAL). On April 30, NASA reported receiving fast-track approval for emergency use by the United States Food and Drug Administration for the new ventilator. , 26 manufacturers around the world have been licensed to make the device. The COVID-19 pandemic increased the demand for oxygen concentrators. During the pandemic open source oxygen concentrators were developed, locally manufactured – with prices below imported products – and used, especially during a COVID-19 pandemic wave in India. Due to capacity limitations in the standard supply chains, some manufacturers are 3D printing healthcare material such as nasal swabs and ventilator parts. In one example, when an Italian hospital urgently required a ventilator valve, and the supplier was unable to deliver in the timescale required, a local startup received legal threats due to alleged patent infringement after reverse-engineering and printing the required hundred valves overnight. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65339945 | 1,711,238 |
1,940,954 | Russia had just one match point deficit to the leaders before the round and still had hopes for stealing the gold in the last minute but their hopes were dashed in the match against India that ended in a 2–2 tie. The Russian team were even trailing after the World Champion Challenger Sergey Karjakin lost to Pentala Harikrishna on the top board. Yet, Vladimir Kramnik beat Baskaran Adhiban in a King's Indian Attack, where the Indian was playing anti-positionally in the opening. He put all his pawns on light squares and traded his bishop on h5 for a knight on f3 on move 11 but switched on the colour controlled by his remaining bishop after the position opened up. Kramnik knew how to deal with it and converted his advantage to a win. England narrowly beat Azerbaijan 2½-1½ with wins by Gawain Jones and Nigel Short against Arkadij Naiditsch and Eltaj Safarli, respectively; Rauf Mamedov defeated David Howell to score the only full point for the Azeri team, while Michael Adams and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov drew their game. Norway won with a huge margin against Iran 3½-½ with three wins by Magnus Carlsen, Aryan Tari and Frode Urkedal. Hungary minimally defeated the Netherlands 2½-1½ with only one decisive game played on board three, where Csaba Balogh beat Loek van Wely with the White pieces in a game that lasted 113 moves. Canada continued their strong performance with a 3–1 victory over Latvia. Alexei Shirov beat Evgeny Bareev on the first board for Latvia but Anton Kovalyov, Alexandre Lesiège and Eric Hansen all won on the lower boards to secure the match victory for their team. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51472590 | 1,939,843 |
1,959,372 | To promote student mobility, AOTULE members organize intra-AOTULE student short stays and research exchanges varying in length from one week at Chulalongkorn University to three months at Tokyo Institute of Technology. These exchanges facilitate global engineering, cross-cultural competencies, foreign language learning, and research experiences by students since the majority of AOTULE members' students live in countries where English is not the native language. AOTULE members such as Tokyo Tech's School of Engineering have used AOTULE as a test bed for creating new research exchange programs that are later broaden to university-wide programs with research university partners in the USA and EU. Recently, there has been growing numbers of double degree graduate programs signed between AOTULE member institutions to allow participating graduate students to obtain two degrees by completing graduation requirements at two institutions. This allows double degree participants an opportunity to learn more about the host country where they are studying, undertake a research project in greater depth and establish a greater network of peers than that provided by a short term exchanges. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44810542 | 1,958,245 |
2,026,871 | The field of Near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) got its start in 1968, when Karl Norris and co-workers with the Instrumentation Research Lab of the U.S. Department of Agriculture first applied the technology to agricultural products. The USDA discovered how to use NIR empirically, based on available sources, gratings, and detector materials. Even the wavelength range of NIR was empirically set based on the operational range of a PbS detector. Consequently, it was not seen as a rigorous science: it had not evolved in the usual way, from research institutions to general usage. Even though the Kubelka-Munk theory provided a remission function that could have been used as the absorption metric, Norris selected formula_13 for convenience. He believed that the problem of non-linearity between the metric and concentration was due to particle size (a theoretical concern) and stray light (an instrumental effect). In qualitative terms, he would explain differences in spectra of different particle size as changes in the effective path length that the light traveled though the sample. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67525376 | 2,025,704 |
241,334 | Nuclear medicine imaging involves the administration into the patient of radiopharmaceuticals consisting of substances with affinity for certain body tissues labeled with radioactive tracer. The most commonly used tracers are technetium-99m, iodine-123, iodine-131, gallium-67, indium-111, thallium-201 and fludeoxyglucose (F) (F-FDG). The heart, lungs, thyroid, liver, brain, gallbladder, and bones are commonly evaluated for particular conditions using these techniques. While anatomical detail is limited in these studies, nuclear medicine is useful in displaying physiological function. The excretory function of the kidneys, iodine-concentrating ability of the thyroid, blood flow to heart muscle, etc. can be measured. The principal imaging devices are the gamma camera and the PET Scanner, which detect the radiation emitted by the tracer in the body and display it as an image. With computer processing, the information can be displayed as axial, coronal and sagittal images (single-photon emission computed tomography - SPECT or Positron-emission tomography - PET). In the most modern devices, nuclear medicine images can be fused with a CT scan taken quasisimultaneously, so the physiological information can be overlaid or coregistered with the anatomical structures to improve diagnostic accuracy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=152623 | 241,214 |
2,062,109 | Cutbacks in funding hit Canada's premier astronomical research organization the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics hard. Money could not be found to resurface the Algonquin Park Radio Telescope and it along with the solar telescope near Ottawa were closed in 1986. However that same year, the HIA did establish the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) which created special software for the archiving of astronomical date. In 1987, the HAI took a 25 percent stake in the 15-m James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (submillimetre radio) and in the nineties a 15 percent stake in the optical 8 metre Gemini Telescope, which became operational in 1999. Headquarters for the HIA moved from Ottawa to Victoria in 1995. In the 21st century, the Institute designed instruments for its international telescope programme, including the Gemini multi-object spectrograph, the JCMT auto-correlation spectrometer and imaging system and the CFHT adaptive optics bonnette. Of note is the initiation of the CFHT Legacy Survey in 2003. Using the telescope's wide field Megacam the survey consists of three studies, "Very Wide", "Wide", and "Deep", and investigates a number of phenomena including the nature of dark matter and dark energy. The University of Calgary is participating in the development of the software to be used for data acquisition and image production at the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Telescope under construction in the Atacama Desert in Chile. First light is expected in 2011. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18401364 | 2,060,919 |
748,995 | As high-throughput technologies became common, technological and/or financial constraints led researchers to collect datasets with relatively small sample sizes (e.g. few individuals being tested) and large numbers of variables being measured per sample (e.g. thousands of gene expression levels). In these datasets, too few of the measured variables showed statistical significance after classic correction for multiple tests with standard multiple comparison procedures. This created a need within many scientific communities to abandon FWER and unadjusted multiple hypothesis testing for other ways to highlight and rank in publications those variables showing marked effects across individuals or treatments that would otherwise be dismissed as non-significant after standard correction for multiple tests. In response to this, a variety of error rates have been proposed—and become commonly used in publications—that are less conservative than FWER in flagging possibly noteworthy observations. The FDR is useful when researchers are looking for "discoveries" that will give them followup work (E.g.: detecting promising genes for followup studies), and are interested in controlling the proportion of "false leads" they are willing to accept. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4574271 | 748,597 |
690,506 | Brenner then focused on establishing a free-living roundworm "Caenorhabditis elegans" as a model organism for the investigation of animal development including neural development. He chose this 1-millimeter-long soil roundworm mainly because it is simple, is easy to grow in bulk populations, and turned out to be quite convenient for genetic analysis. One of the key methods for identifying important function genes was the screen for roundworms that had some functional defect, such as being "uncoordinated", leading to the identification of new sets of proteins, such as the set of UNC proteins. For this work, he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston. The title of his Nobel lecture in December 2002, "Nature's Gift to Science", is a homage to this nematode; in it, he considered that having chosen the right organism turned out to be as important as having addressed the right problems to work on. In fact, the "C. elegans" community has grown rapidly in recent decades with researchers working on a wide spectrum of problems. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=379148 | 690,143 |
24,594 | Following a series of arcade game successes in the early 1980s, Nintendo made plans to create a cartridge-based console called the Family Computer, or Famicom. Masayuki Uemura designed the system. The console's hardware was largely based on arcade video games, particularly the hardware for Namco's "Galaxian" (1979) and Nintendo's "Radar Scope" (1980) and "Donkey Kong" (1981), with the goal of matching their powerful sprite and scrolling capabilities in a home system. Original plans called for an advanced 16-bit system which would function as a full-fledged computer with a keyboard and floppy disk drive, but Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi rejected this and instead decided to go for a cheaper, more conventional cartridge-based game console as he believed that features such as keyboards and disks were intimidating to non-technophiles. A test model was constructed in October 1982 to verify the functionality of the hardware, after which work began on programming tools. Because 65xx CPUs had not been manufactured or sold in Japan up to that time, no cross-development software was available and it had to be produced from scratch. Early Famicom games were written on a system that ran on an NEC PC-8001 computer and LEDs on a grid were used with a digitizer to design graphics as no software design tools for this purpose existed at that time. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18944028 | 24,585 |
1,638,007 | In February 2010, Takana, a rabbinical forum set up to prevent sexual abuse in the national religious community, issued a statement claiming that it had received complaints against Elon dealing with allegations of "a long-term relationship that was clearly of a sexual nature" since shortly after its founding in 2003. During investigation, "the committee lost faith in statements by the rabbi, who concealed his acts during deliberation on the first complaint," according to the statement. A year later, Takana received "another complaint more severe than the first", which allegedly took place a year earlier, and was concealed by Elon in his talks with the forum. Coming to the conclusion that it was no longer fitting for him to work as a religious teacher or counselor, they asked him to leave his post as head of Yeshivat Hakotel, and cancel a number of public appearances and community roles. Takana claims that although at the time Elon agreed to their demands, namely leaving his position at Yeshivat Hakotel and moving to Migdal in northern Israel, he did not fulfill completely the obligations he agreed to, specifically the requirement to stay away from intimate, personal, and private meetings with people seeking his advice or religious counsel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4625240 | 1,637,082 |
26,611 | DSC compression works on a horizontal line of pixels encoded using groups of three consecutive pixels for native 4:4:4 and simple 4:2:2 formats, or six pixels (three compressed containers) for native 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 formats. If RGB encoding is used, it is first converted to reversible YCC. Simple conversion from 4:2:2 to 4:4:4 can add missing chroma samples by interpolating neighboring pixels. Each luma component is coded separately using three independent substreams (four substreams in native 4:2:2 mode). Prediction step is performed using one of the three modes: modified median adaptive coding (MMAP) algorithm similar to the one used by JPEG-LS, block prediction (optional for decoders due to high computational complexity, negotiated at DSC handshake), and midpoint prediction. Bit rate control algorithm tracks color flatness and buffer fullness to adjust the quantization bit depth for a pixel group in a way that minimizes compression artifacts while staying within the bitrate limits. Repeating recent pixels can be stored in 32-entry Indexed Color History (ICH) buffer, which can be referenced directly by each group in a slice; this improves compression quality of computer-generated images. Alternatively, prediction residuals are computed and encoded with entropy coding algorithm based on delta size unit-variable length coding (DSU-VLC). Encoded pixel groups are then combined into slices of various height and width; common combinations include 100% or 25% picture width, and 8-, 32-, or 108-line height. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2515655 | 26,601 |
1,547,889 | The apparently tumbling movements are composed of a series of very rapid separate jumps (each jump of a duration of approximately 80 ms). They result from the beetle's efforts to get itself back into take-off position for flight when it has been in either lateral or dorsal position. Each individual jump should be considered as an extended rotation, performed by one leg of the third leg pair (metapodium). Depending on whether the left or the right metapodium is used as the leg that provides the leverage for take-off, change occurs in the direction of the jump. The energy for propulsion varies with the beetle's immediate muscle work, so that jump lengths and heights vary, with rotation frequencies recorded up to 48 per second ("Mordellochroa abdominalis") around the gravitation centre of the body's longitudinal axis. Additional revolving around the transverse axis (at lower frequency) effects spiralling somersaults that are perceived as tumbling. The pintail (pygidium) is of no significance for the jump. While the pintail is no significance for the jump, meta-trochanter-femur (thighs and surrounding rings of the third leg pair)has a great capacity of free rotation (up to 270 degrees, at one level only). This capacity is due to a screw joint that connects the base of metacoxa to the head of trochanter. The nut gradient is 21 degrees (as seen under a scanning electron microscopy SEM, 1985). Technically similar jumps, though less powerful, can be observed in family Melandryidae (=Serropalpidae) (genus "Orchesia") and family Scraptiidae (genus "Anaspis"). Their coxa-trochanter-joints are of similar structure. It can be assumed that the capacity of a tumbling form of locomotion is rooted in a common phylogeny and can therefore not be ascribed specifically to Mordellidae. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21719540 | 1,547,011 |
1,102,137 | Chaudhuri sat in the editorial boards of several journals including "International Journal of Computer Vision" of Springer, "IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence" of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and "IET Computer Vision" of Institution of Engineering and Technology. He chaired a program at the 2005 edition of International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) at Beijing and served as the program chair of Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP) held in 2006 at Mumbai; he also co-chaired the 2002 edition of ICVGIP. He has delivered invited or plenary speeches in several conferences including the Fifth National Conference on Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image Processing and Graphics (NCVPRIPG) held in December 2015 at Patna and has been involved in external teaching programs of IIT Bombay and other institutions. He serves as a member of the Council of the Indian National Science Academy, the Publications Committee of International Conference on Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications (RAHA 2016) and the Advisory Council of the Information Technology Research Academy. As the Dean of International Relations of IIT Bombay, he has been involved in inter-institutional cooperations; spearheading the IITB's efforts to open an off-campus in New York and the establishment of cooperation with International Cooperation Between the Advanced Institute of Manufacturing With High-Tech Innovations (AIM-HI), Taiwan count among them. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=53067697 | 1,101,576 |
599,890 | For this reason, while super-miniature electronic integrated circuits are fully functional, the same technology cannot be used to make working mechanical devices beyond the scales where frictional forces start to exceed the available power. So even though you may see microphotographs of delicately etched silicon gears, such devices are currently little more than curiosities with limited real world applications, for example, in moving mirrors and shutters. Surface tension increases in much the same way, thus magnifying the tendency for very small objects to stick together. This could possibly make any kind of "micro factory" impractical: even if robotic arms and hands could be scaled down, anything they pick up will tend to be impossible to put down. The above being said, molecular evolution has resulted in working cilia, flagella, muscle fibers and rotary motors in aqueous environments, all on the nanoscale. These machines exploit the increased frictional forces found at the micro or nanoscale. Unlike a paddle or a propeller which depends on normal frictional forces (the frictional forces perpendicular to the surface) to achieve propulsion, cilia develop motion from the exaggerated drag or laminar forces (frictional forces parallel to the surface) present at micro and nano dimensions. To build meaningful "machines" at the nanoscale, the relevant forces need to be considered. We are faced with the development and design of intrinsically pertinent machines rather than the simple reproductions of macroscopic ones. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8327305 | 599,584 |
832,106 | Visible surface features such as oil seeps, natural gas seeps, pockmarks (underwater craters caused by escaping gas) provide basic evidence of hydrocarbon generation (be it shallow or deep in the Earth). However, most exploration depends on highly sophisticated technology to detect and determine the extent of these deposits using exploration geophysics. Areas thought to contain hydrocarbons are initially subjected to a gravity survey, magnetic survey, passive seismic or regional seismic reflection surveys to detect large-scale features of the sub-surface geology. Features of interest (known as "leads") are subjected to more detailed seismic surveys which work on the principle of the time it takes for reflected sound waves to travel through matter (rock) of varying densities and using the process of depth conversion to create a profile of the substructure. Finally, when a prospect has been identified and evaluated and passes the oil company's selection criteria, an exploration well is drilled in an attempt to conclusively determine the presence or absence of oil or gas. Offshore the risk can be reduced by using electromagnetic methods | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=614302 | 831,657 |
215,279 | The Air Corps Act gave authorization to carry out a five-year expansion program. However, a lack of appropriations caused the beginning of the program to be delayed until 1 July 1927. Patrick proposed an increase to 63 tactical squadrons (from an existing 32) to maintain the program of the Lassiter Board already in effect, but Chief of Staff Gen. John Hines rejected the recommendation in favor of a plan drawn up by ground force Brig. Gen. Hugh Drum that proposed 52 squadrons. The act authorized expansion to 1,800 airplanes, 1,650 officers, and 15,000 enlisted men, to be reached in regular increments over a five-year period. None of the goals was reached by July 1932. Neither of the relatively modest increases in airplanes or officers was accomplished until 1938 because adequate funds were never appropriated and the coming of the Great Depression forced reductions in pay and modernization across the board in the Army. Organizationally the Air Corps doubled from seven to fifteen groups, but the expansion was meaningless because all were seriously understrength in aircraft and pilots. (Origin of first seven groups shown here) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23869026 | 215,171 |
1,276,224 | The company continued to develop electronic memory, batteries, and solar cells, reinvesting almost every penny of profit into the scientific study of a wide variety of problems, much of which later became the basis of lucrative industries, e.g., flat screen liquid crystal displays. In time, license fees to ECD began to grow, especially when amorphous silicon was used to make solar cells "by the mile," with an approach that originated from Ovshinsky's non-silver photographic film work. It led to the bold approach of using the first continuous web photovoltaic machine, designed and built under Stan's direction by Herb Ovshinsky and a small group in the machine division. Generations of machines later resulted in sufficient money to reach Ovshinsky's objective of building a 30 megawatt machine, rather than a 5 megawatt machine. Despite considerable skepticism toward the machine, it is now being cloned very successfully by ECD in new plants. ECD also saw profits from the nickel metal hydride batteries, which were important for a time in laptop computers and continue to be important in hybrid gas-electric automobiles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2785878 | 1,275,531 |
36,645 | In 1961, several aircraft companies began studying heavy jet transport designs that would replace the Douglas C-133 Cargomaster and complement Lockheed C-141 Starlifters. In addition to higher overall performance, the United States Army wanted a transport aircraft with a larger cargo bay than the C-141, whose interior was too small to carry a variety of their outsized equipment. These studies led to the "CX-4" design concept, but in 1962, the proposed six-engined design was rejected, because it was not viewed as a significant advance over the C-141. By late 1963, the next conceptual design was named CX-X. It was equipped with four engines, instead of six in the earlier CX-4 concept. The CX-X had a gross weight of , a maximum payload of , and a speed of Mach 0.75 (). The cargo compartment was wide by high and long with front and rear access doors. USAF studies showed that high-bypass turbofan engines were needed for thrust and fuel efficiency requirements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=160434 | 36,633 |
67,371 | One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals", and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:Modern behavioral psychologists have disputed Skinner's "superstition" explanation for the behaviors he recorded. Subsequent research (e.g. Staddon and Simmelhag, 1971), while finding similar behavior, failed to find support for Skinner's "adventitious reinforcement" explanation for it. By looking at the timing of different behaviors within the interval, Staddon and Simmelhag were able to distinguish two classes of behavior: the "terminal response", which occurred in anticipation of food, and "interim responses", that occurred earlier in the interfood interval and were rarely contiguous with food. Terminal responses seem to reflect classical (as opposed to operant) conditioning, rather than adventitious reinforcement, guided by a process like that observed in 1968 by Brown and Jenkins in their "autoshaping" procedures. The causation of interim activities (such as the schedule-induced polydipsia seen in a similar situation with rats) also cannot be traced to adventitious reinforcement and its details are still obscure (Staddon, 1977). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4868 | 67,345 |
991,230 | REXIS is a coded aperture soft X-ray (0.3–7.5 keV) telescope that images X-ray fluorescence line emission produced by the absorption of solar X-rays and the solar wind with elements in the regolith of Bennu leading to local X-ray emissions. Images are formed with 21 arcminute resolution (4.3 m spatial resolution at a distance of 700 m). Imaging is achieved by correlating the detected X-ray image with a 64×64 element random mask (1.536 mm pixels). REXIS will store each X-ray event data in order to maximize the data storage usage and to minimize the risk. The pixels will be addressed in 64×64 bins and the 0.3–7.5 keV range will be covered by five broad bands and 11 narrow line bands. A 24 second resolution time tag will be interleaved with the event data to account for Bennu rotation. Images will be reconstructed on the ground after downlink of the event list. Images are formed simultaneously in 16 energy bands centered on the dominant lines of abundant surface elements from O-K (0.5 keV) to Fe-Kß (7 keV) as well the representative continuum. During orbital phase 5B, a 21 day orbit 700 m from the surface of Bennu, a total of at least 133 events/asteroid pixel/energy band are expected under 2 keV; enough to obtain significant constraints on element abundances at scales larger than 10 m. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31883732 | 990,713 |
2,018,544 | Swiss racing driver, engineer, and fuel injection specialist Michael May transferred from Mercedes Benz to Porsche to work on the 753 engine, but wound up developing improvements for the 547/3 engine instead. May's changes included reducing the oil pressure, removing two of the engines five piston rings, using a new hardening process on the built-up Hirth crankshaft, narrowing the inlet ports, modifying the piston crowns and valve depth, using direct fuel injection, and adding a second non-drive fan impeller below the driven one. The cam profiles were unchanged. The modified engine, dubbed 547/3B, managed to produced a reliable at a time when May estimated that the 753 was producing just , the Ferrari 156 V6 engine and the Coventry-Climax and BRM V8s about . May felt that the 547/3B could win Formula One races, and showed Porsche's engineers that the 804 chassis could be modified to take the four-cylinder. He then struck an agreement with Ferry Porsche to have a 547/3B installed in a 718/2 that May would personally drive in practice at the 1962 Pau Grand Prix. When the car failed to arrive at Pau, May left Porsche for Ferrari. Only three 547/3B engines were ever built. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=69036377 | 2,017,381 |
404,600 | The playing environment in "Eve Online" consists of more than 5000 star systems, as well as 2500 randomly accessible wormhole systems, taking place in 23341 C.E. Systems are classified by their Security Status, on a decimal scale from −1.0 to 1.0. These systems are categorized into three groups, each determining the response from CONCORD (Consolidated Co-operation and Relations Command) NPC law enforcement units. Star systems classed as 0.5–1.0 security are considered "high security" and any unauthorized/unprovoked attack by a character on another character anywhere in the system will result in the appearance of law enforcement. These units will attack and destroy the aggressor, and are designed to reinforce in such strength that they will always win an engagement. However, CONCORD is not preventive, but punitive, meaning there is a short window between beginning an attack and getting destroyed where a player (or group of) can destroy another player's ship. Systems classified as 0.1–0.4 are considered "low security", where CONCORD law enforcement units will not destroy aggressors, but do monitor unprovoked acts of aggression and have automated sentry guns in some locations. Unprovoked attacks will flag the aggressor as a free target for other players, and attacks within sight of sentry guns will cause them to fire on the aggressor. Systems classified 0.0 to −1.0 are called "zero space" or "null sec", and feature no law enforcement; individual systems, or groups of systems, may be controlled by player alliances, up to the creation of player-owned empires reaching across entire "regions" (an aggregate group of star systems). Wormhole systems are accessible only by wormholes that randomly appear and disappear, and are also lawless space, showing as −1.0. However, player-run corporations cannot claim sovereignty in wormhole systems. Star systems contain different types of celestial objects, making them more or less suitable for different kinds of operations. Typically, players find asteroid fields, planets, stations, stargates, and moons in a system. Many of the game's most profitable income sources are found in dangerous null or low security systems, giving players incentive to engage in high-risk, high-reward activities in which they must survive the possible harassment of other players who may also enter the system. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=403307 | 404,400 |
10,989 | The new group of drugs was initially greeted with optimism by the medical profession, but gradually concerns arose; in particular, the risk of dependence became evident in the 1980s. Benzodiazepines have a unique history in that they were responsible for the largest-ever class-action lawsuit against drug manufacturers in the United Kingdom, involving 14,000 patients and 1,800 law firms that alleged the manufacturers knew of the dependence potential but intentionally withheld this information from doctors. At the same time, 117 general practitioners and 50 health authorities were sued by patients to recover damages for the harmful effects of dependence and withdrawal. This led some doctors to require a signed consent form from their patients and to recommend that all patients be adequately warned of the risks of dependence and withdrawal before starting treatment with benzodiazepines. The court case against the drug manufacturers never reached a verdict; legal aid had been withdrawn and there were allegations that the consultant psychiatrists, the expert witnesses, had a conflict of interest. The court case fell through, at a cost of £30 million, and led to more cautious funding through legal aid for future cases. This made future class action lawsuits less likely to succeed, due to the high cost from financing a smaller number of cases, and increasing charges for losing the case for each person involved. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4781 | 10,984 |
76,842 | Final development of the M1918A2 was authorized on 30 June 1938. The FN-designed pistol grip and rate-reducer mechanism with two rates of automatic fire was shelved in favor of a rate-reducer mechanism designed by Springfield Armory, and housed in the butt stock. The Springfield Armory rate reducer also provided two selectable rates of fully automatic fire only, activated by engaging the selector toggle. Additionally, a skid-footed bipod was fitted to the muzzle end of the barrel, magazine guides were added to the front of the trigger guard, the hand guard was shortened, a heat shield was added to help the cooling process, a small separate stock rest (monopod) was included for attachment to the butt and the weapon's role was changed to that of a squad light machine gun. The BAR's rear sight scales were also modified to accommodate the newly standardized M2 ball ammunition with its lighter, flat-base bullet. The M1918A2's walnut butt stock is approximately one inch (2.5 cm) longer than the M1918 BAR's butt stock. The M1918A2's barrel was also fitted with a new flash suppressor and fully adjustable iron sights. Late in the war a barrel-mounted carrying handle was added. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=378838 | 76,813 |
926,607 | During the eruption of the Siberian Traps, some of magma penetrated the crust, covering an area of , equal to 62% of the area of the contiguous states of the United States. The hot magma contained vast quantities of carbon dioxide and sulfur oxides, and released additional carbon dioxide and methane from deep petroleum reservoirs and younger coal beds in the region. The released gases created over 6400 blast pipes, each typically over in diameter. The pipes emitted up to 160 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and 46 trillion tons of methane. Coal ash from burning coal beds spread toxic chromium, arsenic, mercury, and lead across northern Canada. Evaporite beds heated by the magma released hydrochloric acid, methyl chloride, methyl bromide, which damaged the ozone layer and reduced ultraviolet shielding by as much as 85%. Over 5 trillion tons of sulfur dioxide was also released. The carbon dioxide produced extreme greenhouse conditions, with global average sea water temperatures peaking at , the highest ever seen in the geologic record. Temperatures did not drop to for another 5.1 million years. Temperatures this high are lethal to most marine organisms, and land plants have difficulty continuing to photosynthesize at temperatures above . The Earth's equatorial zone became a dead zone. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1097662 | 926,121 |
480,956 | Rhizotomy is usually performed on the pediatric spastic cerebral palsy population between the ages of 2 and 6, since this is the age range where orthopedic deformities from spasticity have not yet occurred, or are minimal. It is also variously claimed by clinicians that another advantage of doing the surgery so young is that it is inherently easier for these extremely young children to restrengthen their muscles and to re-learn how to walk, often having the effect that later in life, they do not even remember the period of time when they lived with the spasticity at all. However, recent cases of successful SDR procedures among those with spastic diplegia across all major age ranges (years 3-40 and even above) has finally proven its universal effectiveness and safety regardless of the age of the spastic diplegic patient. A counter-argument against the prevailing view concerning the younger years is that it may actually be quicker and easier to restrengthen an older patient's musculature and regaining of walking may happen faster with an older patient due to the fact that the patient is fully matured and very aware of what is going on, and so may work harder and with more focus than might a young child. These two schools of thought have equally objectively valid bases for their formation and thus are each defended quite intensely by their respective proponents. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8417113 | 480,712 |
972,282 | Causal dynamical triangulation (abbreviated as "CDT") invented by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy Jurkiewicz, and popularized by Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin, is an approach to quantum gravity that like loop quantum gravity is background independent. This means that it does not assume any pre-existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves. The Loops '05 conference, hosted by many loop quantum gravity theorists, included several presentations which discussed CDT in great depth, and revealed it to be a pivotal insight for theorists. It has sparked considerable interest as it appears to have a good semi-classical description. At large scales, it re-creates the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime, but it shows spacetime to be 2-dimensional near the Planck scale, and reveals a fractal structure on slices of constant time. Using a structure called a simplex, it divides spacetime into tiny triangular sections. A simplex is the generalized form of a triangle, in various dimensions. A 3-simplex is usually called a tetrahedron, and the 4-simplex, which is the basic building block in this theory, is also known as the pentatope, or pentachoron. Each simplex is geometrically flat, but simplices can be "glued" together in a variety of ways to create curved spacetimes. Where previous attempts at triangulation of quantum spaces have produced jumbled universes with far too many dimensions, or minimal universes with too few, CDT avoids this problem by allowing only those configurations where cause precedes any effect. In other words, the timelines of all joined edges of simplices must agree. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=151577 | 971,772 |
1,573,121 | While a neurons electrical properties are an important when considering defining a cell type its morphology, types of neurotransmitters released, neurotransmitter receptors expressed at synapses, as well as the neuron's location in the nervous system and its local circuit are equally important. Neurons come in a huge diversity of shapes with many differences in cell bodies (soma), dendrites, and axons. The position of the dendrites determines which other neurons a cell receives its input from and their shape can have massive impacts on how a neurons responds to this input. Likewise the targets of a neurons axon determine its outputs. The types of synapses formed between neurons axons and dendrites are equally important as well. For instance in the cortical microcircuit of the mammalian cortex, portrayed to the right, cells have highly specific projection patterns both within the local circuit as well as for input and output from and to other cortical and non-cortical regions. Dendritic geometry can influence the electrical behavior of a neurons as well, having a massive influence on how dendrites process input in the form of postsynaptic potentials. Disordered geometry and projection patterns has been linked to a diverse set of psychiatric and neurological conditions including autism and schizophrenia though the behavioral relevance of these phenotypes is not yet understood. Neuronal cell types appeared to often vary continuously between each other. Previous attempts at neuronal classification by morpho-electric properties have been limited by the use of incompatible methodologies and different cell line selection. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66692692 | 1,572,232 |
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