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Knight shift The is a shift in the nuclear magnetic resonance frequency of a paramagnetic substance first published in 1949 by the UC Berkeley physicist Walter D. Knight. For an ensemble of N spins in a magnetic induction field formula_1, the nuclear Hamiltonian for the is expressed in Cartesian form by: formula_2, where for the "i" spin formula_3 is the gyromagnetic ratio, formula_4 is a vector of the Cartesian nuclear angular momentum operators, the formula_5 matrix is a second-rank tensor similar to the chemical shift shielding tensor. The refers to the relative shift K in NMR frequency for atoms in a metal (e.g. sodium) compared with the same atoms in a nonmetallic environment (e.g. sodium chloride). The observed shift reflects the local magnetic field produced at the sodium nucleus by the magnetization of the conduction electrons. The average local field in sodium augments the applied resonance field by approximately one part per 1000. In nonmetallic sodium chloride the local field is negligible in comparison. The is due to the conduction electrons in metals. They introduce an "extra" effective field at the nuclear site, due to the spin orientations of the conduction electrons in the presence of an external field. This is responsible for the shift observed in the nuclear magnetic resonance. The shift comes from two sources, one is the Pauli paramagnetic spin susceptibility, the other is the s-component wavefunctions at the nucleus. Depending on the electronic structure, the may be temperature dependent
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Knight shift However, in metals which normally have a broad featureless electronic density of states, Knight shifts are temperature independent.
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Apollo Mussin-Pushkin Count Apollos Apollosovich Musin-Pushkin (; February 17, 1760 – April 18, 1805) was a Russian chemist and plant collector. He led a botanical expedition to the Caucasus in 1802 with his friend botanist Friedrich August Marschall von Bieberstein. In 1797, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the Russian mining board and developed several new methods of refining and processing of platinum. The genus of Puschkinia commemorates his name.
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Regulation of therapeutic goods The regulation of therapeutic goods, defined as drugs and therapeutic devices, varies by jurisdiction. In some countries, such as the United States, they are regulated at the national level by a single agency. In other jurisdictions they are regulated at the state level, or at both state and national levels by various bodies, as in Australia. The role of therapeutic goods regulation is designed mainly to protect the health and safety of the population. Regulation is aimed at ensuring the safety, quality, and efficacy of the therapeutic goods which are covered under the scope of the regulation. In most jurisdictions, therapeutic goods must be registered before they are allowed to be sold. There is usually some degree of restriction on the availability of certain therapeutic goods, depending on their risk to consumers. Modern drug regulation has historical roots in the response to the proliferation of universal antidotes which appeared in the wake of Mithridates' death. Mithridates had brought together physicians, scientists, and shamans to concoct a potion that would make him immune to poisons. Following his death, the Romans became keen on further developing the Mithridates potion's recipe. Mithridatium re-entered western society through multiple means. The first was through the "Leechbook of the Bald" ("Bald's Leechbook"), written somewhere between 900 and 950, which contained a formula for various remedies, including for a theriac
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Regulation of therapeutic goods Additionally, theriac became a commercial good traded throughout Europe based on the works of Greek and Roman physicians. The resulting proliferation of various recipes needed to be curtailed in order to ensure that people were not passing off fake antidotes, which led to the development of government involvement and regulation. Additionally, the creation of these concoctions took on ritualistic form and were often created in public and the process was observed and recorded. It was believed that if the concoction proved unsuccessful, it was due to the apothecaries’ process of making them and they could be held accountable because of the public nature of the creation. In the 9th century, many Muslim countries established an office of the "hisba", which in addition to regulating compliance to Islamic principles and values took on the role of regulating other aspects of social and economic life, including the regulation of medicines. Inspectors were appointed to employ oversight on those who were involved in the process of medicine creation and were given a lot of leigh weigh to ensure compliance and punishments were stringent. The first official 'act', the 'Apothecary Wares, Drugs and Stuffs' Act (also sometimes referred to as the 'Pharmacy Wares, Drugs and Stuffs' Act) was passed in 1540 by Henry VIII and set the foundation for others
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Regulation of therapeutic goods Through this act, he encouraged physicians in his "College of Physicians" (founded by him in 1518) to appoint four people dedicated to consistently inspecting what was being sold in apothecary shops. In conjunction with this first piece of legislation, there was an emergence of standard formulas for the creation of certain ‘drugs’ and ‘antidotes’ through Pharmacopoeias which first appeared in the form of a decree from Frederick II of Sicily in 1240 to use consistent and standard formulas. The first modern pharmacopoeias were the Florence Pharmacopoeia published in 1498, the Spanish Pharmacopoeia published in 1581 and the London Pharmacopoeia published in 1618. In the United States, regulation of drugs was originally a state right, as opposed to federal right. But with the increase in fraudulent practices due to private incentives to maximize profits and poor enforcement of state laws, increased the need for stronger federal regulation. President Roosevelt signed the Federal Food and Drug Act (FFDA) in 1906 which established stricter standards. A 1911 Supreme Court decision, "United States vs. Johnson", established that misleading statements were not covered under the FFDA. This directly led to Congress passing the Sherley Amendment which established a clearer definition of ‘misbranded’. Another key catalyst for advances in drug regulation were certain catastrophes that served as calls to the government to step in and impose regulations that would prevent repeats of those instances
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Regulation of therapeutic goods One such instance occurred in 1937 when more than a hundred people died from using sulfanilamide elixir which had not gone through any safety testing. This directly led to the passing of the Federal, Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938. One other major catastrophe occurred in the late 1950s when Thalidomide, which was originally sold in Germany (introduced into a virtually unregulated market) and eventually sold around the world, led to approximately 100,000 babies being born with various deformities. The UK's Chief Medical Officer had established a group to look into safety of drugs on the market in 1959 prior to the crisis and was moving in the direction of address the problem of unregulated drugs entering the market. The crisis created a greater sense of emergency to establish safety and efficacy standards around the world. The UK started a temporary Committee on Safety of Drugs while they attempted to pass more comprehensive legislation. Though compliance and submission of drugs to the Committee on Safety of Drugs was not mandatory immediately after, the pharmaceutical industry larger complied due to the thalidomide situation. The European Economic Commission also passed a directive in 1965 in order to impose greater efficacy standards before marketing a drug. The United States congress passed the Drug Amendments Act of 1962 The Drug Amendments Act required the FDA to ensure that new drugs being introduced to the market had passed certain tests and standards
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Regulation of therapeutic goods Both the EU and US acts introduced the requirements to ensure safety and efficacy. Of note, increased regulations and standards for testing actually led to greater innovation in pharmaceutical research in the 1960s, despite greater preclinical and clinical standards. In 1989, the International Conference of Drug Regulatory Authorities organized by the WHO, officials from around the world discussed the necessity for streamlined processes for global drug approval. Various other events throughout history have demonstrated the importance of drug and medicine regulation keeping up with scientific advances. In 2006, the challenges associated with TGN 1412 highlighted the shortcomings of animal models and paved the way for further advances in regulation and development for biological products. Rofecoxib represents a drug that was on the market that had not clearly represent the risks associated with the use drug which led to the concept of 'risk management planning' within the field of regulation by introducing the need to understand how various safety concerns would be managed. Various cases over recent years have demonstrated the need for regulation to keep up with scientific advances that have implications for people's health. Therapeutic goods in Australia are regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)
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Regulation of therapeutic goods The availability of drugs and poisons is regulated by scheduling under individual state legislation, but is generally under the guidance of the national Standard for the Uniform Scheduling of Drugs and Poisons (SUSDP). Under the SUSDP, medicinal agents generally belong to one of five categories: Therapeutic goods in Brazil are regulated by the Brazilian Health Ministry, through its National Health Surveillance Agency (equivalent to the USA's FDA). There are six main categories: In Canada, regulation of therapeutic goods are governed by the Food and Drug Act and associated regulations. In addition, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act requires additional regulatory requirements for controlled drugs and drug precursors. The regulation of drugs in Burma is governed by the Food and Drug Administration (Burma) and Food and Drug Board of Authority. The regulation of drugs in China is governed by the China Food and Drug Administration. The European Union (EU) medicines regulatory system is based on a network of around 50 regulatory authorities from the 31 EEA countries (28 EU Member States plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), the European Commission and European Medicines Agency (EMA) . This network is what makes the EU regulatory system unique. The network is supported by a pool of thousands of experts drawn from across Europe, allowing it to source the best possible scientific expertise for the regulation of medicines in the EU and to provide scientific advice of the highest quality
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Regulation of therapeutic goods EMA and the Member States cooperate and share expertise in the assessment of new medicines and of new safety information. They also rely on each other for exchange of information in the regulation of medicine, for example regarding the reporting of side effects of medicines, the oversight of clinical trials and the conduct of inspections of medicines’ manufacturers and compliance with good clinical practice (GCP), good manufacturing practice (GMP), good distribution practice (GDP), and good pharmacovigilance practice (GVP). This works because EU legislation requires that each Member State operates to the same rules and requirements regarding the authorisation and monitoring of medicines. See more at https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/leaflet/european-regulatory-system-medicines-european-medicines-agency-consistent-approach-medicines_en.pdf German law classifies drugs into Medicines for Human Use in the United Kingdom are regulated by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The availability of drugs is regulated by classification by the MHRA as part of marketing authorisation of a product. The United Kingdom has a three-tiered classification system: Within POM, certain agents with a high abuse/addiction liability are also separately scheduled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (amended with the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001); and are commonly known as Controlled Drugs (CD)
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Regulation of therapeutic goods Medicines in Norway are divided into five groups: Class A Narcotics, sedative-hypnotics, and amphetamines in this class require a special prescription form: Class B Restricted substances which easily lead to addiction like: Class C - All prescription-only substances Class F - Substances and package-sizes not requiring a prescription Unclassifieds - Brands and packages not actively marketed in Norway Medicines in Iceland are regulated by the Icelandic Medicines Control Agency. Medicines in the Republic of Ireland are regulated according to the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 1988. Controlled drugs (CDs) are divided into five categories based on their potential for misuse and therapeutic effectiveness. Medicines in Switzerland are regulated by Swissmedic. The country is not part of the European Union, and is regarded by many as one of the easiest places to conduct clinical trials on new drug compounds. There are five categories from A to E to cover different types of delivery category: Medicines in India are regulated by Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) Under Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Headed by Directorate General of Health Services, CDSCO regulates pharmaceutical products through Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) at Chair. Drugs are classified under five headings. Under retail and distribution: Under manufacturing practice: The Food and Drug Administration regulates drugs and medical devices in the Philippines. Prohibited
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Regulation of therapeutic goods Brands and packages not actively marketed in Sri Lanka National Dangerous Drugs Control Board Therapeutic goods in the United States are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which makes some drugs available over the counter (OTC) at retail outlets and others by prescription only. The prescription or possession of some substances is controlled or prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act, under the FDA and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Some US states apply more stringent limits on the prescription of certain controlled substances C-V and BTC (behind the counter) drugs such as pseudoephedrine.
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Pressure-gradient force The pressure-gradient force is the force that results when there is a difference in pressure across a surface. In general, a pressure is a force per unit area, across a surface. A difference in pressure across a surface then implies a difference in force, which can result in an acceleration according to Newton's second law of motion, if there is no additional force to balance it. The resulting force is always directed from the region of higher-pressure to the region of lower-pressure. When a fluid is in an equilibrium state (i.e. there are no net forces, and no acceleration), the system is referred to as being in hydrostatic equilibrium. In the case of atmospheres, the pressure-gradient force is balanced by the gravitational force, maintaining hydrostatic equilibrium. In Earth's atmosphere, for example, air pressure decreases at altitudes above Earth's surface, thus providing a pressure-gradient force which counteracts the force of gravity on the atmosphere. Consider a cubic parcel of fluid with a density formula_1, a height formula_2, and a surface area formula_3. The mass of the parcel can be expressed as, formula_4. Using Newton's second law, formula_5, we can then examine a pressure difference formula_6 (assumed to be only in the formula_7-direction) to find the resulting force, formula_8. The acceleration resulting from the pressure gradient is then, formula_9. The effects of the pressure gradient are usually expressed in this way, in terms of an acceleration, instead of in terms of a force
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Pressure-gradient force We can express the acceleration more precisely, for a general pressure formula_10 as, formula_11. The direction of the resulting force (acceleration) is thus in the opposite direction of the most rapid increase of pressure.
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Peter Waage (29 June 1833 – 13 January 1900) was a Norwegian chemist and professor. He was a professor of chemistry at the University of Kristiania. Along with his brother-in-law Cato Maximilian Guldberg, he co-discovered and developed the law of mass action between 1864 and 1879. He grew up on the island of Hidra in Vest-Agder, Norway. He was the son of Peder Pedersen Waage (1796–1872) and Regine Lovise Wathne (1802–72). He attended the Bergen Cathedral School and studied chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Kristiania (now University of Oslo) under Adolph Strecker. In 1858, he received the Crown Prince's gold medal ("Kronprinsens gullmedalje") for work on the development of the Theory's acidic acid radicals. He became a cand.real. in 1859. He subsequently traveled to France and Germany, where he studied for two years including time spent with Robert Bunsen in Heidelberg. In 1861, Waage was made an associate professor and in 1866 he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Kristiania. He remained a professor at the University over 30 years. He was also chairman of the Norwegian Polytechnic Society from 1868 to 1869, and the first chairman of the Norwegian branch of the YMCA when it was established in 1880. He was married twice. In 1862, he married Johanne Christiane Tandberg Riddervold (1838- 1869), daughter of Hans Riddervold (1795-1876) and Anne Marie Bull (1804-70). Following the death of his first wife, he was married in 1870 with Mathilde Sofie Guldberg (1845-1907), sister of Cato Guldberg.
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Hořava–Witten domain wall In theoretical physics, a is a type of domain wall that behaves as a boundary of the eleven-dimensional spacetime in M-theory. Petr Hořava and Edward Witten argued that the cancellation of anomalies guarantees that a supersymmetric gauge theory with the E8 gauge group propagates on this domain wall. This fact is important for various relations between M-theory and superstring theory.
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Peierls bracket In theoretical physics, the is an equivalent description of the Poisson bracket. It can be defined directly from the action and does not require the canonical coordinates and their canonical momenta to be defined in advance. The bracket is defined as as the difference between some kind of action of one quantity on the other, minus the flipped term. In quantum mechanics, the becomes a commutator i.e. a Lie bracket. Peierls, R. "The Commutation Laws of Relativistic Field Theory," Proc. R. Soc. Lond. August 21, 1952 214 1117 143-157.
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Spectral signature is the variation of reflectance or emittance of a material with respect to wavelengths (i.e., reflectance/emittance as a function of wavelength). The spectral signature of stars indicates the composition of the stellar atmosphere. The spectral signature of an object is a function of the incidental EM wavelength and material interaction with that section of the electromagnetic spectrum. The measurements can be made with various instruments, including a task specific spectrometer, although the most common method is separation of the red, green, blue and near infrared portion of the EM spectrum as acquired by digital cameras. Calibrating spectral signatures under specific illumination are collected in order to apply a correction to airborne or satellite imagery digital images. The user of one kind of spectroscope looks through it at a tube of ionized gas. The user sees specific lines of colour falling on a graduated scale. Each substance will have its own unique pattern of spectral lines. Most remote sensing applications process digital images to extract spectral signatures at each pixel and use them to divide the image in groups of similar pixels (segmentation) using different approaches. As a last step, they assign a class to each group (classification) by comparing with known spectral signatures. Depending on pixel resolution, a pixel can represent many spectral signature "mixed" together - that is why much remote sensing analysis is done to "unmix mixtures"
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Spectral signature Ultimately correct matching of spectral signature recorded by image pixel with spectral signature of existing elements leads to accurate classification in remote sensing.
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Degree (temperature) The term degree is used in several scales of temperature. The symbol ° is usually used, followed by the initial letter of the unit, for example “°C” for degree(s) Celsius. A degree can be defined as a set change in temperature measured against a given scale, for example, one degree Celsius is one hundredth of the temperature change between the point at which water starts to change state from solid to liquid state and the point at which it starts to change from its liquid to gaseous state.. Common scales of temperature measured in degrees: Unlike the degree Fahrenheit and degree Celsius, the kelvin is not referred to or written as a degree. The kelvin is the primary unit of temperature measurement in the physical sciences, but is often used in conjunction with the degree Celsius, which has the same magnitude. Other scales of temperature: (Measurement of temperature) "Degrees Kelvin" (°K) is a former name for the SI unit of temperature on the thermodynamic (absolute) temperature scale. Since 1967 it has been known simply as the kelvin, with symbol K (without a degree symbol). Degree absolute (°A) is obsolete terminology, often referring specifically to the kelvin but sometimes the degree Rankine as well. To covert a scale into other there is a simple formula That is c-0\100 = f-32\180 = k-0\273 Here c , f and k are scales if we want to convert anyone of these we just require the value of temp in any scale.
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RiboGreen is a proprietary fluorescent dye that is used in the detection and quantification of nucleic acids, including both RNA and DNA. It is synthesized and marketed by Molecular Probes/Invitrogen (a division of Life Technologies, now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific) of Eugene, Oregon, United States. In its free form, exhibits little fluorescence and possesses a negligible absorbance signature. When bound to nucleic acids, the dye fluoresces with an intensity that, according to the manufacturer, is several orders of magnitude greater than the unbound form. The fluorescence can be detected by a sensor and the nucleic acid can be quantified. The presence of protein contaminants in the sample of nucleic acids to be tested does not make significant contributions to the absorbance, and thus allows for the addition of deoxyribonucleases to the protocol in order to degrade DNA, in the instances where one is only interested in detecting or quantifying RNA.
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Cabinet of curiosities Cabinets of curiosities (also known in German loanwords as Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer; also Cabinets of Wonder, and wonder-rooms) were notable collections of objects. The term "cabinet" originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. The classic cabinet of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century, although more rudimentary collections had existed earlier. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums. The earliest pictorial record of a natural history cabinet is the engraving in Ferrante Imperato's "Dell'Historia Naturale" (Naples 1599) ("illustration, left"). It serves to authenticate its author's credibility as a source of natural history information, in showing his open bookcases at the right, in which many volumes are stored lying down and stacked, in the medieval fashion, or with their spines upward, to protect the pages from dust. Some of the volumes doubtless represent his herbarium. Every surface of the vaulted ceiling is occupied with preserved fishes, stuffed mammals and curious shells, with a stuffed crocodile suspended in the centre
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Cabinet of curiosities Examples of corals stand on the bookcases. At the left, the room is fitted out like a "studiolo" with a range of built-in cabinets whose fronts can be unlocked and let down to reveal intricately fitted nests of pigeonholes forming architectural units, filled with small mineral specimens. Above them, stuffed birds stand against panels inlaid with square polished stone samples, doubtless marbles and jaspers or fitted with pigeonhole compartments for specimens. Below them, a range of cupboards contain specimen boxes and covered jars. In 1587 Gabriel Kaltemarckt advised Christian I of Saxony that three types of item were indispensable in forming a "Kunstkammer" or art collection: firstly sculptures and paintings; secondly "curious items from home or abroad"; and thirdly "antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals". When Albrecht Dürer visited the Netherlands in 1521, apart from artworks he sent back to Nuremberg various animal horns, a piece of coral, some large fish fins and a wooden weapon from the East Indies. The highly characteristic range of interests represented in Frans II Francken's painting of 1636 ("illustration, left") shows paintings on the wall that range from landscapes, including a moonlit scene—a genre in itself—to a portrait and a religious picture (the "Adoration of the Magi") intermixed with preserved tropical marine fish and a string of carved beads, most likely amber, which is both precious and a natural curiosity
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Cabinet of curiosities Sculpture both classical and secular (the sacrificing "Libera", a Roman fertility goddess) on the one hand and modern and religious ("Christ at the Column") are represented, while on the table are ranged, among the exotic shells (including some tropical ones and a shark's tooth): portrait miniatures, gem-stones mounted with pearls in a curious quatrefoil box, a set of sepia chiaroscuro woodcuts or drawings, and a small still-life painting leaning against a flower-piece, coins and medals—presumably Greek and Roman—and Roman terracotta oil-lamps, a Chinese-style brass lock, curious flasks, and a blue-and-white Ming porcelain bowl. The "Kunstkammer" of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor (ruled 1576–1612), housed in the Hradschin at Prague, was unrivalled north of the Alps; it provided a solace and retreat for contemplation that also served to demonstrate his imperial magnificence and power in symbolic arrangement of their display, ceremoniously presented to visiting diplomats and magnates. Rudolf's uncle, Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, also had a collection, organized by his treasurer, Leopold Heyperger, which put special emphasis on paintings of people with interesting deformities, which remains largely intact as the Chamber of Art and Curiosities at Ambras Castle in Austria. "The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction
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Cabinet of curiosities " Of Charles I of England's collection, Peter Thomas states succinctly, "The "Kunstkabinett" itself was a form of propaganda.". Two of the most famously described seventeenth-century cabinets were those of Ole Worm, known as Olaus Wormius (1588–1654) ("illustration, above right"), and Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). These seventeenth-century cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, as well as other interesting man-made objects: sculptures wondrously old, wondrously fine or wondrously small; clockwork automata; ethnographic specimens from exotic locations. Often they would contain a mix of fact and fiction, including apparently mythical creatures. Worm's collection contained, for example, what he thought was a Scythian Lamb, a woolly fern thought to be a plant/sheep fabulous creature. However he was also responsible for identifying the narwhal's tusk as coming from a whale rather than a unicorn, as most owners of these believed. The specimens displayed were often collected during exploring expeditions and trading voyages. In the second half of the 18th century, Belsazar Hacquet (c. 1735–1815) operated in Ljubljana, then the capital of Carniola, a natural history cabinet () that was appreciated throughout Europe and was visited by the highest nobility, including the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, the Russian grand duke Paul and Pope Pius VI, as well as by famous naturalists, such as and
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Cabinet of curiosities It included a number of minerals, including specimens of mercury from the Idrija mine, a "herbarium vivum" with over 4,000 specimens of Carniolan and foreign plants, a smaller number of animal specimens, a natural history and medical library, and an anatomical theatre. Cabinets of curiosities would often serve scientific advancement when images of their contents were published. The catalog of Worm's collection, published as the "Museum Wormianum" (1655), used the collection of artifacts as a starting point for Worm's speculations on philosophy, science, natural history, and more. Cabinets of curiosities were limited to those who could afford to create and maintain them. Many monarchs, in particular, developed large collections. A rather under-used example, stronger in art than other areas, was the Studiolo of Francesco I, the first Medici Grand-Duke of Tuscany. Frederick III of Denmark, who added Worm's collection to his own after Worm's death, was another such monarch. A third example is the Kunstkamera founded by Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg in 1714. Many items were bought in Amsterdam from Albertus Seba and Frederik Ruysch. The fabulous Habsburg Imperial collection included important Aztec artifacts, including the feather head-dress or crown of Montezuma now in the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna. Similar collections on a smaller scale were the complex "Kunstschränke" produced in the early seventeenth century by the Augsburg merchant, diplomat and collector Philipp Hainhofer
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Cabinet of curiosities These were cabinets in the sense of pieces of furniture, made from all imaginable exotic and expensive materials and filled with contents and ornamental details intended to reflect the entire cosmos on a miniature scale. The best preserved example is the one given by the city of Augsburg to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632, which is kept in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala. The curio cabinet, as a modern single piece of furniture, is a version of the grander historical examples. The juxtaposition of such disparate objects, according to Horst Bredekamp's analysis (Bredekamp 1995), encouraged comparisons, finding analogies and parallels and favoured the cultural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic view of endlessly transforming natural history and a historical perspective that led in the seventeenth century to the germs of a scientific view of reality. A late example of the juxtaposition of natural materials with richly worked artifice is provided by the "Green Vaults" formed by Augustus the Strong in Dresden to display his chamber of wonders. The "Enlightenment Gallery" in the British Museum, installed in the former "Kings Library" room in 2003 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the museum, aims to recreate the abundance and diversity that still characterized museums in the mid-eighteenth century, mixing shells, rock samples and botanical specimens with a great variety of artworks and other man-made objects from all over the world
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Cabinet of curiosities In seventeenth-century parlance, both French and English, a "cabinet" came to signify a collection of works of art, which might still also include an assembly objects of "virtù" or curiosities, such as a "virtuoso" would find intellectually stimulating. In 1714, Michael Bernhard Valentini published an early museological work, "Museum Museorum", an account of the cabinets known to him with catalogues of their contents. Some strands of the early universal collections, the bizarre or freakish biological specimens, whether genuine or fake, and the more exotic historical objects, could find a home in commercial freak shows and sideshows. Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) was an English physician, a member of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, and the founder of the British Museum in London. He began sporadically collecting plants in England and France while studying medicine. In 1687, the Duke of Albemarle offered Sloane a position as personal physician to the West Indies fleet at Jamaica. He accepted and spent fifteen months collecting and cataloguing the native plants, animals, and artificial curiosities (e.g. cultural artifacts of native and enslaved African populations) of Jamaica. This became the basis for his two volume work, "Natural History of Jamaica", published in 1707 and 1725. Sloane returned to England in 1689 with over eight hundred specimens of plants, which were live or mounted on heavy paper in an eight-volume herbarium. He also attempted to bring back live animals (e.g
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Cabinet of curiosities , snakes, an alligator, and an iguana) but they all died before reaching England. Sloane meticulously cataloged and created extensive records for most of the specimens and objects in his collection. He also began to acquire other collections by gift or purchase. Herman Boerhaave gave him four volumes of plants from Boerhaave's gardens at Leiden. William Charleton, in a bequest in 1702, gave Sloane numerous books of birds, fish, flowers, and shells and his miscellaneous museum consisting of curiosities, miniatures, insects, medals, animals, minerals, precious stones and curiosities in amber. Sloane purchased Leonard Plukenet's collection in 1710. It consisted of twenty-three volumes with over 8,000 plants from Africa, India, Japan and China. Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort (1630–1715), left him a twelve-volume herbarium from her gardens at Chelsea and Badminton upon her death in 1714. Reverend Adam Buddle gave Sloane thirteen volumes of British plants. In 1716, Sloane purchased Englebert Kaempfer's volume of Japanese plants and James Petiver's virtual museum of approximately one hundred volumes of plants from Europe, North America, Africa, the Near East, India, and the Orient. Mark Catesby gave him plants from North America and the West Indies from an expedition funded by Sloane. Philip Miller gave him twelve volumes of plants grown from the Chelsea Physic Garden
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Cabinet of curiosities Sloane acquired approximately three hundred and fifty artificial curiosities from North American Indians, Eskimos, South America, the Lapland, Siberia, East Indies, and the West Indies, including nine items from Jamaica. "These ethnological artifacts were important because they established a field of collection for the British Museum that was to increase greatly with the explorations of Captain James Cook in Oceania and Australia and the rapid expansion of the British Empire." Upon his death in 1753, Sloane bequeathed his sizable collection of 337 volumes to England for £20,000. In 1759, George II's royal library was added to Sloane's collection to form the foundation of the British Museum. John Tradescant the elder (circa 1570s–1638) was a gardener, naturalist, and botanist in the employ of the Duke of Buckingham. He collected plants, bulbs, flowers, vines, berries, and fruit trees from Russia, the Levant, Algiers, France, Bermuda, the Caribbean, and the East Indies. His son, John Tradescant the younger (1608–1662) traveled to Virginia in 1637 and collected flowers, plants, shells, an Indian deerskin mantle believed to have belonged to Powhatan, father of Pocahontas. Father and son, in addition to botanical specimens, collected zoological (e.g., the dodo from Mauritius, the upper jaw of a walrus, and armadillos), artificial curiosities (e.g., wampum belts, portraits, lathe turned ivory, weapons, costumes, Oriental footwear and carved alabaster panels) and rarities (e.g
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Cabinet of curiosities , a mermaid's hand, a dragon's egg, two feathers of a phoenix's tail, a piece of the True Cross, and a vial of blood that rained in the Isle of Wight). By the 1630s, the Tradescants displayed their eclectic collection at their residence in South Lambeth. Tradescant's Ark, as it came to be known, was the earliest major cabinet of curiosity in England and open to the public for a small entrance fee. Elias Ashmole (1617–1692) was a lawyer, chemist, antiquarian, Freemason, and a member of the Royal Society with a keen interest in astrology, alchemy, and botany. Ashmole was also a neighbor of the Tradescants in Lambeth. He financed the publication of "Musaeum Tradescantianum", a catalogue of the Ark collection in 1656. Ashmole, a collector in his own right, acquired the Tradescant Ark in 1659 and added it to his collection of astrological, medical, and historical manuscripts. In 1675, he donated his library and collection and the Tradescant collection to the University of Oxford, provided that a suitable building be provided to house the collection. Ashmole's donation formed the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Cabinets of Curiosities can now be found at Snowshill Manor and Wallington Hall. The concept has been reinterpreted at The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History. Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular curiosities of their curators but as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society
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Cabinet of curiosities There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design". In addition to cabinets of curiosity serving as an establisher of socioeconomic status for its curator, these cabinets served as entertainment, as particularly illustrated by the proceedings of the Royal Society, whose early meetings were often a sort of open floor to any Fellow to exhibit the findings his curiosities led him to. However purely educational or investigative these exhibitions may sound, it is important to note that the Fellows in this period supported the idea of "learned entertainment," or the alignment of learning with entertainment. This was not unusual, as the Royal Society had an earlier history of a love of the marvellous. This love was often exploited by eighteenth-century natural philosophers to secure the attention of their audience during their exhibitions. Places of exhibitions of and places of new societies that promoted natural knowledge also seemed to culture the idea of perfect civility
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Cabinet of curiosities Some scholars propose that this was "a reaction against the dogmatism and enthusiasm of the English Civil War and Interregum [sic]." This move to politeness put bars on how one should behave and interact socially, which enabled the distinguishing of the polite from the supposed common or more vulgar members of society. Exhibitions of curiosities (as they were typically odd and foreign marvels) attracted a wide, more general audience, which "[rendered] them more suitable subjects of polite discourse at the Society." A subject was considered less suitable for polite discourse if the curiosity being displayed was accompanied by too much other material evidence, as it allowed for less conjecture and exploration of ideas regarding the displayed curiosity. Because of this, many displays simply included a concise description of the phenomena and avoided any mention of explanation for the phenomena. Quentin Skinner describes the early Royal Society as "something much more like a gentleman's club," an idea supported by John Evelyn, who depicts the Royal Society as "an Assembly of many honorable Gentlemen, who meete inoffensively together under his Majesty's Royal Cognizance; and to entertaine themselves ingenously, whilst their other domestique avocations or publique business deprives them of being always in the company of learned men and that they cannot dwell forever in the Universities." Thomas Dent Mutter (1811–1859) was an early American pioneer of reconstructive plastic surgery
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Cabinet of curiosities His specialty was repairing congenital anomalies, cleft lip and palates, and club foot. He also collected medical oddities, tumors, anatomical and pathological specimens, wet and dry preparations, wax models, plaster casts, and illustrations of medical deformities. This collection began as a teaching tool for young physicians. Just prior to Mütter's death in 1859, he donated 1,344 items to the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia, along with a $30,000 endowment for the maintenance and expansion of his museum. Mütter's collection was added to ninety-two pathological specimens collected by Doctor Isaac Parrish between 1849 and 1852. The Mütter Museum began to collect antique medical equipment in 1871, including Benjamin Rush's medical chest and Florence Nightingale's sewing kit. In 1874 the museum acquired one hundred human skulls from Austrian anatomist and phrenologist, Joseph Hyrtl (1810–1894); a nineteenth-century corpse, dubbed the "soap lady"; the conjoined liver and death cast of Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese twins; and in 1893, Grover Cleveland's jaw tumor. The Mütter Museum is an excellent example of a nineteenth-century grotesque cabinet of medical curiosities. P. T. Barnum established Barnum's American Museum on five floors in New York, "perpetuating into the 1860s the Wunderkammer tradition of curiosities for gullible, often slow-moving throngs—Barnum's famously sly but effective method of crowd control was to post a sign, "THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS!" at the exit door"
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Cabinet of curiosities In 1908, New York businessmen formed the Hobby Club, a dining club limited to 50 men, in order to showcase their "cabinets of wonder" and their selected collections. These included literary specimens and incunable; antiquities such as ancient armour; precious stones and geological items of interest. Annual formal dinners would be used to open the various collections up to inspection for the other members of the club. The Houston Museum of Natural Science houses a hands-on Cabinet of Curiosities, complete with taxidermied crocodile embedded in the ceiling a la Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale. In Los Angeles, the modern-day Museum of Jurassic Technology anachronistically seeks to recreate the sense of wonder that the old cabinets of curiosity once aroused. In Spring Green, Wisconsin, the house and museum of Alex Jordan, known as House on the Rock, can also be interpreted as a modern day curiosity cabinet, especially in the collection and display of automatons. In Bristol, Rhode Island, Musée Patamécanique is presented as a hybrid between an automaton theater and a cabinet of curiosities and contains works representing the field of Patamechanics, an artistic practice and area of study chiefly inspired by Pataphysics. The idea of a cabinet of curiosities has also appeared in recent publications and performances
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Cabinet of curiosities For example, "Cabinet" magazine is a quarterly magazine that juxtaposes apparently unrelated cultural artifacts and phenomena to show their interconnectedness in ways that encourage curiosity about the world. The Italian cultural association Wunderkamern uses the theme of historical cabinets of curiosities to explore how "amazement" is manifested within today's artistic discourse. The May of 2008, the University of Leeds Fine Art BA programme hosted a show called "Wunder Kammer", the culmination of research and practice from students, which allowed viewers to encounter work from across all disciplines, ranging from intimate installation to thought-provoking video and highly skilled drawing, punctuated by live performances. Several internet bloggers describe their sites as a wunderkammern either because they are primarily made up of links to things that are interesting, or because they inspire wonder in a similar manner to the original wunderkammern (see External Links, below). The researcher Robert Gehl describes such internet video sites as YouTube as modern-day wunderkammern, although in danger of being refined into capitalist institutions "just as professionalized curators refined Wunderkammers into the modern museum in the 18th century." Historic cabinets Modern "cabinets"
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February 13, 1979 windstorm The is a natural phenomenon that took place on February 13, 1979 in Pacific Canada and the United States. During the early morning of February 13, 1979, an intense wave cyclone moved across southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. South of the low center, a strong atmospheric pressure gradient was carried across Washington, with associated high winds. With a cold airflow moving toward the northeast interacting with the high terrain of the Olympic Mountains, a lee low developed east of the Olympics. The mesoscale low caused a particularly intense pressure gradient to develop across the Kitsap Peninsula region. At 6 mbar over 8 miles, the geostrophic wind potential easily exceeded 200 knots (which roughly translates to about 100 knots in ageostrophic flow over the Earth's rough surface, or 115 mph). As reported by the crew of the Hood Canal Bridge, average winds reached at least 80 mph out of the south, with gusts into the triple digits. These wind velocities were cross-checked on two different anemometers at the bridge control tower. Extensive damage to trees on surrounding private timberland also corroborate the extreme intensity of this tempest. The pressure of wind and wave on the Hood Canal Bridge stressed the structure enough to cause catastrophic failure. It is suspected that a severe list in the bridge exposed pontoon access hatches to the waves, which subsequently tore the covers loose and allowed water to enter the flotation devices, causing sections to sink
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February 13, 1979 windstorm It took nearly three years and over $140 million U.S. to rebuild the lost bridge.
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Smith–Purcell effect The was the precursor of the free electron laser (FEL). It was studied by Steve Smith, a graduate student under the guidance of Edward Purcell. In their experiment, they sent an energetic beam of electrons very closely parallel to the surface of a ruled optical diffraction grating, and thereby generated visible light. Smith showed there was negligible effect on the trajectory of the inducing electrons. Essentially, this is a form of Cherenkov radiation where the phase velocity of the light has been altered by the periodic grating.
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Spring Triangle The is an astronomical asterism involving an imaginary triangle drawn upon the celestial sphere, with its defining vertices at Arcturus, Spica, and Regulus. This triangle connects the constellations of Boötes, Virgo, and Leo. It is visible rising in the south eastern sky of the northern hemisphere between March and May. George Lovi of Sky & Telescope magazine had a slightly different "Spring triangle", including the tail of Leo, Denebola, instead of Regulus. Denebola is dimmer, but the triangle is more nearly equilateral. These stars form parts of a larger Spring asterism called the Great Diamond together with Cor Caroli.
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Series (botany) In botany and plant taxonomy, a series is a subdivision of a genus, a taxonomic rank below that of section (and subsection) but above that of species. Sections and/or series are typically used to help organize very large genera, which may have hundreds of species. The term "series" is also used (in seed marketing) for groupings of cultivars, but this term has no formal status with that meaning in the "ICNCP".
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Monogastric A monogastric organism has a simple single-chambered stomach, compared with a ruminant organism, like a cow, goat, or sheep, which has a four-chambered complex stomach. Examples of monogastric herbivores are horses, rabbits, gerbils, and hamsters. Examples of monogastric omnivores include humans, rats, dogs and pigs. Furthermore, carnivores such as cats. Herbivores with monogastric digestion can digest cellulose in their diets by way of symbiotic gut bacteria. However, their ability to extract energy from cellulose digestion is less efficient than in ruminants. Herbivores digest cellulose by microbial fermentation. herbivores which can digest cellulose nearly as well as ruminants are called hindgut fermenters, while ruminants are called foregut fermenters. These are subdivided into two groups based on the relative size of various digestive organs in relationship to the rest of the system: colonic fermenters tend to be larger species such as horses and rhinos, and cecal fermenters are smaller animals such as rabbits and rodents. Great apes derive significant amounts of phytanic acid from the hindgut fermentation of plant materials. Monogastrics cannot digest the fiber molecule cellulose as efficiently as ruminants, though the ability to digest cellulose varies amongst species. A monogastric digestive system works as soon as the food enters the mouth. Saliva moistens the food and begins the digestive process. (Note that horses have no (or negligible amounts of) amylase in their saliva)
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Monogastric After being swallowed, the food passes from the esophagus into the stomach, where stomach acid and enzymes help to break down the food. Bile salts are stored in the gall bladder (note that horses do not have a gall bladder and bile is directly secreted into the small intestine) and secreted once the contents of the stomach have reached the small intestines where most fats are broken down. The pancreas secretes enzymes and alkali to neutralize the stomach acid.
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DIDO (nuclear reactor) DIDO was a materials testing nuclear reactor at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom. It used enriched uranium metal fuel, and heavy water as both neutron moderator and primary coolant. There was also a graphite neutron reflector surrounding the core. In the design phase, DIDO was known as AE334 after its engineering design number. DIDO was designed to have a high neutron flux, largely to reduce the time required for testing of materials intended for use in nuclear power reactors. This also allowed for the production of intense beams of neutrons for use in neutron diffraction. DIDO was shut down in 1990. The primary facilities decommissioning is expected to be complete in 2023 with the reactor decommissioning completed in 2031 and final site clearance achieved in 2064 In all, six DIDO class reactors were constructed based on this design: HIFAR was the last to shut down, in 2007.
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Invariant speed The invariant speed or observer invariant speed is a speed which is measured to be the same in all reference frames by all observers. The invariance of the speed of light is one of the postulates of special relativity, and the terms "speed of light" and "invariant speed" are often considered synonymous. In non-relativistic classical mechanics, or Newtonian mechanics, finite invariant speed does not exist (the only invariant speed predicted by Newtonian mechanics is infinity).
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Heat current A heat current is a kinetic exchange rate between molecules, relative to the material in which the kinesis occurs. It is defined as formula_1, where formula_2 is heat and formula_3 is time. For conduction, heat current is defined by Fourier's law as where The above differential equation, when integrated for a homogeneous material of 1-D geometry between two endpoints at constant temperature, gives the heat flow rate as: where For thermal radiation, heat current is defined as where the constant of proportionality formula_11 is the Stefan–Boltzmann constant, formula_12 is the radiating surface area, and formula_13 is temperature. can also be thought of as the total phonon distribution multiplied by the energy of one phonon, times the group velocity of the phonons. The phonon distribution of a particular phonon mode is given by the Bose-Einstein factor, which is dependent on temperature and phonon energy.
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Corymb is a botanical term for an inflorescence with the flowers growing in such a fashion that the outermost are borne on longer pedicels than the inner, bringing all flowers up to a common level. A corymb has a flattish top superficially resembling an umbel, and may have a branching structure similar to a panicle. Flowers in a corymb structure can either be parallel, or alternate, and form in either a convex, or flat form. Many species in the Maloideae, such as hawthorns and rowans, produce their flowers in corymbs. The Norway maple and yerba maté are also examples of corymbs. The word "corymb" is derived from the Ancient Greek word "korymbos" meaning "bunch of flowers or fruit".
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Sculptor Dwarf Irregular Galaxy The (SDIG) is an irregular galaxy in the constellation Sculptor. The galaxy was discovered in 1976. The and the dwarf galaxy UGCA 442 are both companions of the spiral galaxy NGC 7793. These galaxies all lie within the Sculptor Group, a weakly bound, filament-like group of galaxies located near the Local Group.
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Moolooite is a rare blue-green mineral with the formula Cu(CO)·n(HO) (n<1) (copper oxalate hydrate). It was discovered by Richard M Clarke and Ian R Williams in Bunbury Well, Mooloo Downs station, Murchison, Western Australia in 1986. It has an orthorhombic crystalline structure, and is formed by the interaction of bird guano with weathering copper sulfides. Used in plastics to color them blueish-green. A second occurrence is reported from the Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines silver mining district of Vosges Mountains, France.
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Cryptoexplosion The term cryptoexplosion structure (or cryptovolcanic structure) means an explosion of unknown cause. The term is now largely obsolete. It was once commonly used to describe sites where there was geological evidence of a large-scale explosion within the Earth's crust, but no definitive evidence for the cause such as normal volcanic rocks. These sites are usually circular with signs of anomalous rock deformation contrasting with the surrounding region, and often showing evidence that crustal material had been uplifted and/or blown outwards. The assumption was that some unusual form of volcanism, or a gas explosion originating within the crust, was the cause. The use of the term went away with the rise of the science of impact crater recognition in the late 20th century. Most structures described as cryptoexplosions turned out to be eroded impact craters, caused by the impact of meteorites. Today geologists discount former cryptoexplosion theories.
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White squall A white squall is a sudden and violent windstorm at sea which is not accompanied by the black clouds generally characteristic of a squall. It manifests as a sudden increase in wind velocity in tropical and sub-tropical waters, and may be a microburst. The name refers to the white-capped waves and broken water, its meager warning to any unlucky seaman caught in its path. A white squall was allegedly behind the sinking of the brigantine "Albatross" on May 2, 1961 although,in fact, there were a number of traditional line squalls all around and a microburst was very unlikely. White squalls are rare at sea, but common on the Great Lakes of North America. White squalls are the culprits of many sea stories and have been blamed for several tragedies. A white squall was the reported cause of the loss of the schooner "Paul Pry" off Cape Schanck, Australia, on September 3, 1841. In May 1986, the "Pride of Baltimore", a modern schooner, was reportedly struck by a white squall. The 121-ton vessel sank about north of Puerto Rico, casting the surviving crew members adrift for five days. The "Toro", a Norwegian freighter, picked them up at 2:30 a.m. May 19, 1986. An eyewitness account described it as follows: "A tremendous whistling sound suddenly roared through the rigging and a wall of wind hit us in the back. The "Pride" heeled over in a matter of seconds. The wind pushed a high wall of water into the starboard side. She sank in minutes."
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Active ingredient An active ingredient is the ingredient in a pharmaceutical drug or pesticide that is biologically active. The similar terms active pharmaceutical ingredient and bulk active are also used in medicine, and the term active substance may be used for natural products. Some medication products may contain more than one active ingredient. The traditional word for the active pharmaceutical agent is pharmacon or pharmakon (from , adapted from pharmacos) which originally denoted a magical substance or drug. The terms active constituent or active principle are often chosen when referring to the active substance of interest in a plant (such as salicylic acid in willow bark or arecoline in areca nuts), because the word "ingredient" in many minds connotes a sense of human agency (that is, something that a person combines with other substances), whereas the natural products present in plants were not added by any human agency but rather occurred naturally ("a plant doesn't have ingredients"). In contrast with the active ingredients, the inactive ingredients are usually called excipients in pharmaceutical contexts. The main excipient that serves as a medium for conveying the active ingredient is usually called the vehicle. Petrolatum and mineral oil are common vehicles
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Active ingredient The dosage form for a pharmaceutical contains the active pharmaceutical ingredient, which is the drug substance itself, and excipients, which are the ingredients of the tablet, or the liquid in which the active agent is suspended, or other material that is pharmaceutically inert. Drugs are chosen primarily for their active ingredients. During formulation development, the excipients are chosen carefully so that the active ingredient can reach the target site in the body at the desired rate and extent. Patients often have difficulty identifying the active ingredients in their medication, and are often unaware of the notion of an active ingredient. When patients are on multiple medications, active ingredients can interfere with each other, often resulting in severe or life-threatening complications. There now exist online services which can identify the active ingredient of most medications, such as the Medicines database providing information on medications available in Australia. In phytopharmaceutical or herbal medicine, the active ingredient may be either unknown or may require cofactors in order to achieve therapeutic goals. This leads to complications in labelling. One way manufacturers have attempted to indicate strength is to engage in standardization to a marker compound. However, standardization has not been achieved yet: different companies use different markers, or different levels of the same markers, or different methods of testing for marker compounds
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Active ingredient For instance, St John's wort is often standardized to the hypericin which is now known not to be the "active ingredient" for antidepressant use. Other companies standardize to hyperforin or both, although there may be some 24 known possible active constituents. Many herbalists believe that the active ingredient in a plant is the plant itself.
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Gopinath Kartha (26 January 1927 – 18 June 1984) was a prominent crystallographer of Indian origin. In 1967, he determined the molecular structure of the enzyme ribonuclease. This was the first protein structure elucidated and published in the United States. was born in Cherthala, near Alappuzha in the state of Kerala, India. He went to school at Sanathanadharma Vidya Sala in Alappuzha. His undergraduate diploma in Math, Physics, and Chemistry was from University College, Thiruvananthapuram(Trivandrum). He obtained his B.Sc. in Physics in 1950 from the University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. He obtained another B.Sc. in Mathematics from Andhra University in Visakhapatnam in 1951. He began his graduate studies in 1952 at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore but followed his advisor G.N. Ramachandran back to the University of Madras. As a graduate student, he and Ramachandran worked on the triple helix structure of the collagen molecule. After completing his Ph.D. in 1955, he worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai from 1955 to 1956. He did post-doctoral work at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1956 and then at the National Research Council of Canada from 1957 to 1958. In 1959, he moved to the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to work with Dr. David Harker and Dr. Jake Bello. Later that year, the entire Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute's crystallography group moved to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. He stayed at Roswell Park until the end of his life
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Gopinath Kartha In 1972 he spent eight months as a visiting professor of biophysics at Kyoto University. The collagen structure proposed by Ramachandran and Kartha was disputed by Francis Crick initially and in fact, their paper to the London-based Nature magazine was not published for five months while Crick's proposal for the collagen structure was published within a month of submission. However, their proposed structure was accepted subsequently.
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Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme The (PACS) is a scheme developed in 1970 by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) for classifying scientific literature using a hierarchical set of codes. PACS has been used by over 160 international journals, including the "Physical Review" series since 1975. Since 2016, American Physical Society introduced the PhySH (Physics Subject Headings) system instead of PACS. AIP has announced that "PACS 2010" will be the final version, but it will continue to be available through their website. The decision was made to discontinue PACS, owing to the administrative complexity of the revision process and its future viability in light of changing technological and research trends. However, PACS is still in use by scientific journals. In association with Access Innovations, Inc., the AIP has developed a new "AIP Thesaurus", which it states will enable faster, more accurate and more efficient searches.
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Johannes Abraham Bierens de Haan Johan(nes) Abraham Bierens de Haan (March 17, 1883 – June 13, 1958) was a Dutch biologist and ethologist. He was born in Haarlem, and died in Siena, Italy.
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Gummite is a yellow amorphous mixture of uranium minerals, oxides, silicates, and hydrates of uranium, derived from the alteration of uraninite. It is named for its gum-like luster. The material was also known under various names, mostly because of different origins of the samples, including: eliasite from "Elias" – the name of a mine at Jáchymov, coracite – a variety from Lake Superior, pittinite, pechuran, urangummit, and uranogummite.
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Pratiwi Sudarmono Pratiwi Pujilestari Sudarmono (born 31 July 1952) is an Indonesian scientist. She is currently professor of microbiology at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta. received a master's degree from the University of Indonesia in 1977, and the Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Osaka, Japan, in 1984. She then started her scientific career as WHO grantee researching the molecular biology of "Salmonella typhi". From 1994 to 2000, she was head of the Department of Microbiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Indonesia. From 2001 to 2002, she was a scholar in the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program. In October 1985, she was selected to take part in the NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-61-H as a Payload Specialist. Taufik Akbar was her backup on the mission. However, after the Challenger disaster the deployment of commercial satellites like the Indonesian Palapa B-3 planned for the STS-61-H mission was canceled, thus the mission never took place. The satellite was later launched with a Delta rocket.
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Leonard Huxley (physicist) Sir Leonard George Holden Huxley (29 May 1902 – 4 September 1988) was an Australian physicist. Huxley was born in London, the eldest son of George Hamborough and Lilian Huxley. He was a second-cousin once removed of Thomas Huxley. His family migrated from England to Australia in 1905 when he was three, and settled in Tasmania, where Huxley showed great academic and sporting promise while attending The Hutchins School. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to New College, Oxford while in his second year at the University of Tasmania and obtained a D.Phil. from Oxford in 1928. On 5 October 1929 he married Ella Mary Child 'Molly' Copeland who was reading history at Somerville College. Huxley was a physicist at the Australian Radio Research Board, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research 1929 to 1931; Lecturer in Physics, University College, Leicester 1932 to 1940; Principal Scientific Officer, Ministry of Aircraft Production, UK 1940 to 1946; Reader in Electromagnetism, University of Birmingham 1946 to 1949; Professor of Physics, University of Adelaide 1949 to 1960; and Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University 1960 to 1967. Huxley was president of the Australian Branch of the Institute of Physics (UK) 1954 to 1955; and president of the Australian Institute of Physics 1962 to 1965. He was elected a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1953, and knighted in 1964. Huxley died in London at the age of 86.
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Weyl transformation In theoretical physics, the Weyl transformation, named after Hermann Weyl, is a local rescaling of the metric tensor: which produces another metric in the same conformal class. A theory or an expression invariant under this transformation is called conformally invariant, or is said to possess Weyl invariance or Weyl symmetry. The Weyl symmetry is an important symmetry in conformal field theory. It is, for example, a symmetry of the Polyakov action. The ordinary Levi-Civita connection and associated spin connections are not invariant under Weyl transformations. An appropriately invariant notion is the Weyl connection, which is one way of specifying the structure of a conformal connection. A quantity formula_2 has conformal weight formula_3 if, under the Weyl transformation, it transforms via Thus conformally weighted quantities belong to certain density bundles; see also conformal dimension. Let formula_5 be the connection one-form associated to the Levi-Civita connection of formula_6. Introduce a connection that depends also on an initial one-form formula_7 via Then formula_9 is covariant and has conformal weight formula_10. For the transformation We can derive the following formulas Note that the Weyl tensor is invariant under a Weyl rescaling.
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Thermal fluids Thermofluids is a branch of science and engineering encompassing four intersecting fields: The term is a combination of "thermo", referring to heat, and "fluids", which refers to liquids, gases and vapors. Temperature, pressure, equations of state, and transport laws all play an important role in thermofluid problems. Phase transition and chemical reactions may also be important in a thermofluid context. The subject is sometimes also referred to as "thermal fluids". Heat transfer is a discipline of thermal engineering that concerns the transfer of thermal energy from one physical system to another. Heat transfer is classified into various mechanisms, such as heat conduction, convection, thermal radiation, and phase-change transfer. Engineers also consider the transfer of mass of differing chemical species, either cold or hot, to achieve heat transfer. Sections include : Thermodynamics is the science of energy conversion involving heat and other forms of energy, most notably mechanical work. It studies and interrelates the macroscopic variables, such as temperature, volume and pressure, which describe physical, thermodynamic systems. Fluid Mechanics the study of the physical forces at work during fluid flow. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid kinematics, the study of fluid motion, and fluid kinetics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid motion. Fluid mechanics can further be divided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest, and fluid dynamics, the study of fluids in motion
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Thermal fluids Some of its more interesting concepts include momentum and reactive forces in fluid flow and fluid machinery theory and performance. Sections include: Combustion is the sequence of exothermic chemical reactions between a fuel and an oxidant accompanied by the production of heat and conversion of chemical species. The release of heat can result in the production of light in the form of either glowing or a flame. Fuels of interest often include organic compounds (especially hydrocarbons) in the gas, liquid or solid phase.
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Pariser–Parr–Pople method In molecular physics, the applies semi-empirical quantum mechanical methods to the quantitative prediction of electronic structures and spectra, in molecules of interest in the field of organic chemistry. Previous methods existed—such as the Hückel method which led to Hückel's rule—but were limited in their scope, application and complexity, as is the Extended Hückel method. This approach was developed in the 1950s by Rudolph Pariser with Robert Parr and co-developed by John Pople. Originally, Pariser's goal of using this method was to predict the characteristics of complex organic dyes, but this was never realized. The method has wide applicability in precise prediction of electronic transitions, particularly lower singlet transitions, and found wide application in theoretical and applied quantum chemistry. The two basic papers on this subject were among the top five chemistry and physics citations reported in ISI, Current Contents 1977 for the period of 1961–1977 with a total of 2450 references. In contrast to the Hartree–Fock-based semiempirical method counterparts (i.e.: MOPAC), the pi-electron theories have a very strong ab initio basis. The PPP formulation is actually an approximate pi-electron effective operator, and the empirical parameters, in fact, include effective electron correlation effects. A rigorous, ab initio theory of the PPP method is provided by diagrammatic, multi-reference, high order perturbation theory (Freed, Brandow, Lindgren, etc.)
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Pariser–Parr–Pople method (The exact formulation is non-trivial, and requires some field theory) Large scale ab initio calculations (Martin and Birge, Martin and Freed, Sheppard and Freed, etc.) have confirmed many of the approximations of the PPP model and explain why the PPP-like models work so well with such a simple formulation.
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Scotochromogenic bacteria develop pigment in the dark. Runyon Group II nontuberculous mycobacteria are examples but the term could apply to many other organisms.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1240502
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Phytochemistry is the study of phytochemicals, which are chemicals derived from plants. Those studying phytochemistry strive to describe the structures of the large number of secondary metabolic compounds found in plants, the functions of these compounds in human and plant biology, and the biosynthesis of these compounds. Plants synthesize phytochemicals for many reasons, including to protect themselves against insect attacks and plant diseases. Phytochemicals in food plants are often active in human biology, and in many cases have health benefits. The compounds found in plants are of many kinds, but most are in four major biochemical classes, the alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenols, and terpenes. can be considered sub-fields of botany or chemistry. Activities can be led in botanical gardens or in the wild with the aid of ethnobotany. The applications of the discipline can be for pharmacognosy, or the discovery of new drugs, or as an aid for plant physiology studies. Techniques commonly used in the field of phytochemistry are extraction, isolation, and structural elucidation (MS,1D and 2D NMR) of natural products, as well as various chromatography techniques (MPLC, HPLC, and LC-MS). The list of simple elements of which plants are primarily constructed—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, calcium, phosphorus, etc.—is not different from similar lists for animals, fungi, or even bacteria. The fundamental atomic components of plants are the same as for all life; only the details of the way in which they are assembled differs
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Phytochemistry is widely used in the field of Chinese medicine especially in the field of herbal medicine. Phytochemical technique mainly applies to the quality control of Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine(Indian traditional medicine) or herbal medicine of various chemical components, such as saponins, alkaloids, volatile oils, flavonoids and anthraquinones. In the development of rapid and reproducible analytical techniques, the combination of HPLC with different detectors, such as diode array detector (DAD), refractive index detector (RID), evaporative light scattering detector (ELSD) and mass spectrometric detector (MSD), has been widely developed. In most cases, biologically active compounds in Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, or herbal medicine have not been determined. Therefore, it is important to use the phytochemical methods to screen and analyze bioactive components, not only for the quality control of crude drugs, but also for the elucidation of their therapeutic mechanisms. Modern pharmacological studies indicate that binding to receptors or ion channels on cell membranes is the first step of some drug actions. A new method in phytochemistry called biochromatography has been developed. This method combines human red cell membrane extraction and high performance liquid chromatography to screen potential active components in Chinese medicine. Many plants produce chemical compounds for defence against herbivores
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Phytochemistry These are often useful as drugs, and the content and known pharmacological activity of these substances in medicinal plants is the scientific basis for their use. The major classes of pharmacologically active phytochemicals are described below, with examples of medicinal plants that contain them. Human settlements are often surrounded by weeds useful as medicines, such as nettle, dandelion and chickweed. Many phytochemicals, including curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, genistein and resveratrol are pan-assay interference compounds and are not useful in drug discovery. Alkaloids are bitter-tasting chemicals, very widespread in nature, and often toxic. There are several classes with different modes of action as drugs, both recreational and pharmaceutical. Medicines of different classes include atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine (all from nightshade), the traditional medicine berberine (from plants such as "Berberis" and "Mahonia"), caffeine ("Coffea"), cocaine ("Coca"), ephedrine ("Ephedra"), morphine (opium poppy), nicotine (tobacco), reserpine ("Rauvolfia serpentina"), quinidine and quinine ("Cinchona"), vincamine ("Vinca minor"), and vincristine ("Catharanthus roseus"). Anthraquinone glycosides are found in the laxatives senna, rhubarb and "Aloe". The cardiac glycosides are powerful drugs from plants including foxglove and lily of the valley. They include digoxin and digitoxin which support the beating of the heart, and act as diuretics. Polyphenols of several classes are widespread in plants
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Phytochemistry They include the colourful anthocyanins, hormone-mimicking phytoestrogens, and astringent tannins. In Ayurveda, the astringent rind of the pomegranate is used as a medicine, while polyphenol extracts from plant materials such as grape seeds are sold for their potential health benefits They have been continually studied in cell cultures for their different anti-cancer effects. Plants containing phytoestrogens have been used for centuries to treat gynaecological disorders such as fertility, menstrual, and menopausal problems. Among these plants are "Pueraria mirifica", kudzu, angelica, fennel, and anise. Terpenes and terpenoids of many kinds are found in resinous plants such as the conifers. They are strongly aromatic and serve to repel herbivores. Their scent makes them useful in essential oils, whether for perfumes such as rose and lavender, or for aromatherapy. Some have had medicinal uses: thymol is an antiseptic and was once used as a vermifuge (anti-worm medicine).
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Barton Zwiebach (full name "Cantor", born October 4, 1954) is a string theorist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, born in Lima, Perú. Zwiebach's undergraduate work was in Electrical Engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Peru, from which he graduated in 1977. His graduate work was in physics at the California Institute of Technology. Zwiebach obtained his Ph.D. in 1983, working under the supervision of Murray Gell-Mann. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and at MIT, where he became an assistant professor of physics in 1987, and a permanent member of the faculty in 1994. He is one of the world's leading experts in string field theory. He wrote the textbook "A First Course in String Theory" (2004, ), meant for undergraduates. Professor Zwiebach's publications are available on the SPIRES HEP Literature Database.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1247296
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Witch of November The Witch of November, or November Witch, refers to the strong winds that frequently blow across the Great Lakes in autumn. The "witches" are caused by intense low atmospheric pressure over the Great Lakes pulling cold Canadian/Arctic air from the north or northwest and warm Gulf air from the south. When these cold and warm air masses collide, they can result in hurricane force winds that stir up large waves on the lakes. Gordon Lightfoot's song "The Wreck of the "Edmund Fitzgerald"""" makes reference to the Witch of November: the storm that wrecked the "Edmund Fitzgerald" was 978 mbar, equivalent to a borderline Category 1/2 hurricane. Similar witches have caused numerous shipwrecks over the years. Another storm that hit in November 1998 was 967 mbar, equivalent to a solid Category 2 hurricane. A still stronger storm, of October 2010, brought Minnesota and Wisconsin record low barometric pressures of, respectively, 954.96 and 961.06 mbar (both equivalent to a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale) and lashed Duluth with 81 mph wind gusts and 19-foot seas during the night of October 26–27, 2010.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1254144
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National Radiological Protection Board The (NRPB) was a public authority in the UK created by the Radiological Protection Act 1970. Its statutory functions were to conduct research on radiological protection and provide advice and information on the subject to Government Departments and others. It was also authorized to provide technical services and charge for them. Originally NRPB dealt only with ionizing radiation, but its functions were extended in 1974 to non-ionizing radiation. The Board consisted of a chairman and a maximum of nine other members, later increased to twelve, all appointed by Health Ministers. Throughout its existence, NRPB had 300 members of staff on average. They were located at the headquarters in Chilton near Oxford and at laboratories in Leeds and Glasgow. The Department of Health funded the difference between the cost of NRPB and its income by annual grant. Research on ionizing radiation included: plutonium exposure; internal dosimetry; radioactive discharges; nuclear accidents and wastes; radon hazards; medical x rays; epidemiology and molecular biology. Research on non-ionizing radiation included the physics and biology of exposure to ultraviolet sources, electricity supplies, and mobile phones
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National Radiological Protection Board As well as a full range of technical services - from personnel dosimetry to radiation surveys - NRPB also engaged in projects such as: the safe transport of radioactive materials; preparedness for nuclear emergencies; exposure to cosmic rays; optimization of protection; improved radiation instruments; training courses; a wide selection of publications. Members of staff contributed to major public inquiries about the nuclear industry in the UK and supported the UK response to the Chernobyl disaster. They also participated in the work of the: International Commission on Radiological Protection; International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection; United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation; Nuclear Energy Agency; various committees of the Commission of the European Communities. The Health Protection Agency Act 2004 repealed the Radiological Protection Act. On 1 April 2005, NRPB became the Radiation Protection Division of the Health Protection Agency (HPA). Under the terms of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, the HPA was abolished, and responsibility for radiation protection functions was assigned to the Public Health England Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards (CRCE) at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus near Chilton, Oxfordshire.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1257241
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Somaclonal variation is the variation seen in plants that have been produced by plant tissue culture. Chromosomal rearrangements are an important source of this variation. The term somaclonal variation is a phenomenon of broad taxonomic occurrence, reported for species of different ploidy levels, and for outcrossing and inbreeding, vegetatively and seed propagated, and cultivated and non-cultivated plants. Characters affected include both qualitative and quantitative traits. is not restricted to, but is particularly common in, plants regenerated from callus. The variations can be genotypic or phenotypic, which in the latter case can be either genetic or epigenetic in origin. Typical genetic alterations are: changes in chromosome numbers (polyploidy and aneuploidy), chromosome structure (translocations, deletions, insertions and duplications) and DNA sequence (base mutations). A typical epigenetics-related event would be gene methylation. If no visual, morphogenic changes are apparent, other plant screening procedures must be applied. There are both benefits and disadvantages to somaclonal variation. The phenomenon of high variability in individuals from plant cell cultures or adventitious shoots has been named somaclonal variation. The major likely benefit of somaclonal variation is plant/crop improvement. leads to the creation of additional genetic variability
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Somaclonal variation Characteristics for which somaclonal mutants can be enriched during "in vitro" culture includes resistance to disease pathotoxins, herbicides, high salt concentration, mineral toxicity and tolerance to environmental or chemical stress, as well as for increased production of secondary metabolites. Suitable for breeding of new species. A serious disadvantage of somaclonal variation occurs in operations which require clonal uniformity, as in the horticulture and forestry industries where tissue culture is employed for rapid propagation of elite genotypes. Different steps can be used to reduce somaclonal variation. It is well known that increasing numbers of subculture increases the likelihood of somaclonal variation, so the number of subcultures in micropropagation protocols should be kept to a minimum. Regular reinitiation of clones from new explants might reduce variability over time. Another way of reducing somaclonal variation is to avoid 2,4-D in the culture medium, as this hormone is known to introduce variation.
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Parafilm is a semi-transparent, flexible film composed of a proprietary blend of waxes and polyolefins. It is a ductile, malleable, non-toxic, tasteless and odorless, and self-sealing thermoplastic. The name "Parafilm" is a registered trademark of Bemis Company, Inc, headquartered in Neenah, WI (United States). M is commonly used in health care, pharmaceutical and research laboratories for covering or sealing vessels such as flasks, cuvettes, test tubes, beakers, petri dishes and more. Because it melts quickly when heated, M is not safe for use in an autoclave. It is also soluble in many organic solvents.. Some growers use M instead of fungicides or other coatings to prevent rot, wrapping it around the freshly cut crowns of bananas, pineapples and other produce. Florists use Stem Wrap to extend the flower's life by protecting moisture in the stem as a floral tape. Horticulturalists use Grafting Tape in grafting. Several grafting styles call for wrapping a graft to hold it together, and sealing it to prevent drying and Grafting Tape does both. In this context is also known as grafting tape. M is used by some modelers as a masking material during airbrushing, due to its lack of adhesion, which can destroy a finish. Entomologists have used M as a membrane to feed hematophagous insects such as mosquitoes and bedbugs reared in the lab. A new application of M is to make paper-based microfluidic devices
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Parafilm Paper-based microfluidic devices are considered a suitable way to fabricate low-cost point-of-care diagnostics for developing countries and areas where expensive medical instrumentation is not accessible. Digital microfluidic devices can also use it as the electrode insulator and hydrophobic layer A similar but now discontinued product is Fuji's Sealon film.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1263387
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Xenobiology (XB) is a subfield of synthetic biology, the study of synthesizing and manipulating biological devices and systems. The name "xenobiology" derives from the Greek word "xenos", which means "stranger, alien". is a form of biology that is not (yet) familiar to science and is not found in nature. In practice it describes novel biological systems and biochemistries that differ from the canonical DNA-RNA-20 amino acid system (see central dogma of molecular biology). For example, instead of DNA or RNA, XB explores nucleic acid analogues, termed Xeno Nucleic Acid (XNA) as information carriers. It also focuses on an expanded genetic code and the incorporation of non-proteinogenic amino acids into proteins. "Astro" means "star" and "exo" means "outside". Both exo- and astrobiology deal with the search for naturally evolved life in the Universe, mostly on other planets in the circumstellar habitable zone. (These are also occasionally referred to as xenobiology.) Whereas astrobiologists are concerned with the detection and analysis of life elsewhere in the Universe, xenobiology attempts to design forms of life with a different biochemistry or different genetic code than on planet Earth. In xenobiology, the aim is to design and construct biological systems that differ from their natural counterparts on one or more fundamental levels. Ideally these new-to-nature organisms would be different in every possible biochemical aspect exhibiting a very different genetic code
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Xenobiology The long-term goal is to construct a cell that would store its genetic information not in DNA but in an alternative informational polymer consisting of xeno nucleic acids (XNA), different base pairs, using non-canonical amino acids and an altered genetic code. So far cells have been constructed that incorporate only one or two of these features. Originally this research on alternative forms of DNA was driven by the question of how life evolved on earth and why RNA and DNA were selected by (chemical) evolution over other possible nucleic acid structures. Two hypotheses for the selection of RNA and DNA as life's backbone are either they are favored under life on Earth's conditions, or they were coincidentally present in pre-life chemistry and continue to be used now. Systematic experimental studies aiming at the diversification of the chemical structure of nucleic acids have resulted in completely novel informational biopolymers. So far a number of XNAs with new chemical backbones or leaving group of the DNA have been synthesized, e.g.: hexose nucleic acid (HNA); threose nucleic acid (TNA), glycol nucleic acid (GNA) cyclohexenyl nucleic acid (CeNA). The incorporation of XNA in a plasmid, involving 3 HNA codons, has been accomplished already in 2003. This XNA is used in vivo (E coli) as template for DNA synthesis
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Xenobiology This study, using a binary (G/T) genetic cassette and two non-DNA bases (Hx/U), was extended to CeNA, while GNA seems to be too alien at this moment for the natural biological system to be used as template for DNA synthesis. Extended bases using a natural DNA backbone could, likewise, be transliterated into natural DNA, although to a more limited extent. Aside being used as extensions to template DNA strands, XNA activity has been tested for use as genetic catalysts. Although proteins are the most common components of cellular enzymatic activity, nucleic acids are also used in the cell to catalyze reactions. A 2015 study found several different kinds of XNA, most notably FANA (2'-fluoroarabino nucleic acids), as well as HNA, CeNA and ANA (arabino nucleic acids) could be used to cleave RNA during post-transcriptional RNA processing acting as XNA enzymes, hence the name XNAzymes. FANA XNAzymes also showed the ability to ligate DNA, RNA and XNA substrates. Although XNAzyme studies are still preliminary, this study was a step in the direction of searching for synthetic circuit components that are more efficient than those containing DNA and RNA counterparts that can regulate DNA, RNA, and their own, XNA, substrates. While XNAs have modified backbones, other experiments target the replacement or enlargement of the genetic alphabet of DNA with unnatural base pairs
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Xenobiology For example, DNA has been designed that has - instead of the four standard bases A, T, G, and C - six bases A, T, G, C, and the two new ones P and Z (where Z stands for 6-Amino-5-nitro3-(l'-p-D-2'-deoxyribofuranosyl)-2(1H)-pyridone, and P stands for 2-Amino-8-(1-beta-D-2'-deoxyribofuranosyl)imidazo[1,2-a]-1,3,5-triazin-4 (8H)). In a systematic study, Leconte et al. tested the viability of 60 candidate bases (yielding potentially 3600 base pairs) for possible incorporation in the DNA. In 2002, Hirao et al. developed an unnatural base pair between 2-amino-8-(2-thienyl)purine (s) and pyridine-2-one (y) that functions "in vitro" in transcription and translation toward a genetic code for protein synthesis containing a non-standard amino acid. In 2006, they created 7-(2-thienyl)imidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (Ds) and pyrrole-2-carbaldehyde (Pa) as a third base pair for replication and transcription, and afterward, Ds and 4-[3-(6-aminohexanamido)-1-propynyl]-2-nitropyrrole (Px) was discovered as a high fidelity pair in PCR amplification. In 2013, they applied the Ds-Px pair to DNA aptamer generation by "in vitro" selection (SELEX) and demonstrated the genetic alphabet expansion significantly augment DNA aptamer affinities to target proteins
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Xenobiology In May 2014, researchers announced that they had successfully introduced two new artificial nucleotides into bacterial DNA, alongside the four naturally occurring nucleotides, and by including individual artificial nucleotides in the culture media, were able to passage the bacteria 24 times; they did not create mRNA or proteins able to use the artificial nucleotides. Neither the XNA nor the unnatural bases are recognized by natural polymerases. One of the major challenges is to find or create novel types of polymerases that will be able to replicate these new-to-nature constructs. In one case a modified variant of the HIV-reverse transcriptase was found to be able to PCR-amplify an oligonucleotide containing a third type base pair. Pinheiro et al. (2012) demonstrated that the method of polymerase evolution and design successfully led to the storage and recovery of genetic information (of less than 100bp length) from six alternative genetic polymers based on simple nucleic acid architectures not found in nature Xeno nucleic acids. One of the goals of xenobiology is to rewrite the genetic code. The most promising approach to change the code is the reassignment of seldomly used or even unused codons. In an ideal scenario, the genetic code is expanded by one codon, thus having been liberated from its old function and fully reassigned to a non-canonical amino acid (ncAA) (“code expansion”)
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Xenobiology As these methods are laborious to implement, and some short cuts can be applied (“code engineering”), for example in bacteria that are auxotrophic for specific amino acids and at some point in the experiment are fed isostructural analogues instead of the canonical amino acids for which they are auxotrophic. In that situation, the canonical amino acid residues in native proteins are substituted with the ncAAs. Even the insertion of multiple different ncAAs into the same protein is possible. Finally, the repertoire of 20 canonical amino acids can not only be expanded, but also reduced to 19. By reassigning transfer RNA (tRNA)/aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase pairs the codon specificity can be changed. Cells endowed with such aminoacyl-[tRNA synthetases] are thus able to read [mRNA] sequences that make no sense to the existing gene expression machinery. Altering the codon: tRNA synthetases pairs may lead to the in vivo incorporation of the non-canonical amino acids into proteins. In the past reassigning codons was mainly done on a limited scale. In 2013, however, Farren Isaacs and George Church at Harvard University reported the replacement of all 321 TAG stop codons present in the genome of "E. coli" with synonymous TAA codons, thereby demonstrating that massive substitutions can be combined into higher-order strains without lethal effects
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Xenobiology Following the success of this genome wide codon replacement, the authors continued and achieved the reprogramming of 13 codons throughout the genome, directly affecting 42 essential genes. An even more radical change in the genetic code is the change of a triplet codon to a quadruplet and even pentaplet codon pioneered by Sisido in cell-free systems and by Schultz in bacteria. Finally, non-natural base pairs can be used to introduce novel amino acid in proteins. The goal of substituting DNA by XNA may also be reached by another route, namely by engineering the environment instead of the genetic modules. This approach has been successfully demonstrated by Marlière and Mutzel with the production of an "E. coli" strain whose DNA is composed of standard A, C and G nucleotides but has the synthetic thymine analogue 5-chlorouracil instead of thymine (T) in the corresponding positions of the sequence. These cells are then dependent on externally supplied 5-chlorouracil for growth, but otherwise they look and behave as normal "E. coli". These cells, however, are currently not yet fully auxotrophic for the Xeno-base since they are still growing on thymine when this is supplied to the medium. Xenobiological systems are designed to convey orthogonality to natural biological systems. A (still hypothetical) organism that uses XNA, different base pairs and polymerases and has an altered genetic code will hardly be able to interact with natural forms of life on the genetic level
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Xenobiology Thus, these xenobiological organisms represent a genetic enclave that cannot exchange information with natural cells. Altering the genetic machinery of the cell leads to semantic containment. In analogy to information processing in IT, this safety concept is termed a “genetic firewall”. The concept of the genetic firewall seems to overcome a number of limitations of previous safety systems. A first experimental evidence of the theoretical concept of the genetic firewall was achieved in 2013 with the construction of a genomically recoded organism (GRO). In this GRO all known UAG stop codons in E.coli were replaced by UAA codons, which allowed for the deletion of release factor 1 and reassignment of UAG translation function. The GRO exhibited increased resistance to T7 bacteriophage, thus showing that alternative genetic codes do reduce genetic compatibility. This GRO, however, is still very similar to its natural “parent” and cannot be regarded as a genetic firewall. The possibility of reassigning the function of large number of triplets opens the perspective to have strains that combine XNA, novel base pairs, new genetic codes, etc. that cannot exchange any information with the natural biological world. Regardless of changes leading to a semantic containment mechanism in new organisms, any novel biochemical systems still has to undergo a toxicological screening. XNA, novel proteins, etc. might represent novel toxins, or have an allergic potential that needs to be assessed
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Xenobiology might challenge the regulatory framework, as currently laws and directives deal with genetically modified organisms and do not directly mention chemically or genomically modified organisms. Taking into account that real xenobiology organisms are not expected in the next few years, policy makers do have some time at hand to prepare themselves for an upcoming governance challenge. Since 2012, the following groups have picked up the topic as a developing governance issue: policy advisers in the US, four National Biosafety Boards in Europe, the European Molecular Biology Organisation, and the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks (SCENIHR) in three opinions (Definition, Risk assessment methodologies and safety aspects, and Risks to the environment and biodiversity related to synthetic biology and research priorities in the field of synthetic biology ).
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Juan José Elhuyar Lubize (15 June 1754 – 20 September 1796) was a Spanish chemist and mineralogist, who is best known for being first to isolate tungsten with his brother Fausto Elhuyar in 1783. He was born in Logroño, in northern Spain and died in Santafé de Bogotá, New Granada (present-day Colombia) at 42.
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Marc Delafontaine (March 31, 1837/1838, Céligny, Switzerland–1911) was a Swiss chemist and spectroscopist who was involved in discovering and investigating some of the rare earth elements. Delafontaine studied with Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac at the University of Geneva. He also worked at the University of Geneva. Delafontaine moved to the United States of America, arriving in New York in 1870, and later becoming a naturalized citizen. He taught in Chicago, Illinois at city high schools, and at a women's college. He also worked as analytical chemist with the Chicago Police Department. In 1878, along with Jacques-Louis Soret, Delafontaine first observed holmium spectroscopically. In 1879, Per Teodor Cleve chemically separated it from thulium and erbium. All three men are given credit for the element's discovery. In 1843 Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered terbium and erbium as components of yttria. However, this discovery was hotly contested. Spectroscopist Nils Johan Berlin denied that the two elements existed, failing to confirm the existence of "erbia" and suggesting that its name be applied to "terbia". In 1864, used optical spectroscopy to conclusively prove that yttrium, terbium and erbium were separate elements. Ironically, however, the confusion that had been introduced between the names continued. Mosander's proposed names were switched, giving the amethyst compound the name "erbium" oxide and the yellow substance the name "terbium" oxide, instead of the other way around as originally proposed.
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Jacques-Louis Soret (30 June 1827 – 13 May 1890) was a Swiss chemist and spectroscopist. He studied both spectroscopy and electrolysis. He held the chairs of chemistry (1873-1887) and medical physics (1887-1890) at the University of Geneva. Soret determined the chemical composition and density of ozone and the conditions for its production. He described it correctly as being composed of three oxygen atoms bound together. Soret also developed optical instruments. He climbed Mont Blanc, where he was the first scientist to make actinometric measurements of solar radiation. These observations were published in the "Philosophical Magazine" in 1867. In 1878, he and Marc Delafontaine were the first to spectroscopically observe the element later named holmium, which they identified simply as an "earth X" derived from "erbia". Independently, Per Teodor Cleve separated it chemically from thulium and erbium in 1879. All three researchers are given credit for the element's discovery. The Soret peak or Soret band, a strong absorption band at approximately 420 nm in the absorption spectra of hemoglobin, is also named after him. died in Geneva on 13 May 1890. His son was Charles Soret, a recognized physicist and chemist in his own right.
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Skew-T log-P diagram A skew-T log-P diagram is one of four thermodynamic diagrams commonly used in weather analysis and forecasting. In 1947, N. Herlofson proposed a modification to the emagram that allows straight, horizontal isobars and provides for a large angle between isotherms and dry adiabats, similar to that in the tephigram. It was thus more suitable for some of the newer analysis techniques being invented by the United States Air Force. Such a diagram has pressure plotted on the vertical axis, with a logarithmic scale (thus the "log-P" part of the name), and the temperature plotted skewed, with isothermal lines at 45° to the plot (thus the "skew-T" part of the name). Plotting a hypothetical set of measurements with constant temperature for all altitudes would result in a line angled 45° to the right. In practice, since temperature usually drops with altitude, the graphs are usually mostly vertical (see examples linked to below). The major use for skew-T log-P diagrams is the plotting of radiosonde soundings, which give a vertical profile of the temperature and dew point temperature throughout the troposphere and lower stratosphere. The isopleths on the diagram can then be used to simplify many tedious calculations involved, which were previously performed by hand or not at all. Many skew-T log-P diagrams also include a vertical representation of the wind speed and direction using wind barbs
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Skew-T log-P diagram Important atmospheric characteristics such as saturation, atmospheric instability, and wind shear are critical in severe weather forecasting, by which skew-T log-P diagrams allow quick visual analysis. The diagrams are widely used by glider pilots to forecast the strength of thermals and the height of the base of the associated cumulus clouds.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1268839
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Open pollination "Open pollination" and "open pollinated" refer to a variety of concepts in the context of the sexual reproduction of plants. Generally speaking, the term refers to plants pollinated naturally by birds, insects, wind, or human hands. "Open pollinated" generally refers to seeds that will "breed true". When the plants of an open-pollinated variety self-pollinate, or are pollinated by another representative of the same variety, the resulting seeds will produce plants roughly identical to their parents. This is in contrast to the seeds produced by plants that are the result of a recent cross (such as, but not confined to, an F1 hybrid), which are likely to show a wide variety of differing characteristics. Open-pollinated varieties are also often referred to as standard varieties or, when the seeds have been saved across generations or across several decades, heirloom varieties. While heirlooms are usually open-pollinated, open-pollinated seeds are not necessarily heirlooms; open-pollinated varieties are still being developed. One of the challenges in maintaining an open-pollinated variety is avoiding introduction of pollen from other strains. Based on how broadly the pollen for the plant tends to disperse, it can be controlled to varying degrees by greenhouses, tall wall enclosures, field isolation, or other techniques. Because they breed true, the seeds of open-pollinated plants are often saved by home gardeners and farmers
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1274964
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Open pollination Popular examples of open-pollinated plants include heirloom tomatoes, beans, peas, and many other garden vegetables. A second use of the term "open pollination" refers to pollination by insects, birds, wind, or other natural mechanisms. This can be contrasted with cleistogamy, closed pollination, which is one of the many types of self pollination. When used in this sense, open pollination may contrast with controlled pollination, a procedure used to ensure that all seeds of a crop are descended from parents with known traits, and are therefore more likely to have the desired traits. The seeds of open-pollinated plants will produce new generations of those plants; however, because breeding is uncontrolled and the pollen (male parent) source is unknown, open pollination may result in plants that vary widely in genetic traits. may increase biodiversity. Some plants (such as many crops) are primarily self pollenizing and also breed true, so that even under open pollination conditions the next generation will be (almost) the same. Even among true breeding organisms, some variation due to genetic recombination or to mutation can produce a few "off types". Hybrid pollination, a type of controlled pollination in which the pollen comes from a different strain (or species), can be used to increase crop suitability, especially through heterosis. The resulting hybrid strain can sometimes be inbred and selected for desired traits until a strain that breeds true by open pollination is achieved
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1274964
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Open pollination The result is referred to as a inbred hybrid strain. To add some confusion, the term hybrid inbred applies to hybrids that are made from selected inbred lines that have certain desired characteristics (see inbreeding). The latter type of hybrid is sometimes designated F1 hybrid, i.e. the first hybrid (filial) generation whose parents were (different) inbred lines.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1274964
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Moti Lal Dhar ( 22 October 1914 – 20 January 2002) was an eminent drug chemist, and science administrator in India. He remained Director Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow from 1960 until his retirement in 1972 and he has been the only Kashmiri Pandit to serve as Vice- Chancellor, of Banaras Hindu University, B.H.U.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1275240
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GNS Science () is a New Zealand Crown Research Institute. It focuses on geology, geophysics (including seismology and volcanology), and nuclear science (particularly ion-beam technologies, isotope science and carbon dating). was known as the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (IGNS) from 1992 to 2005. Originally part of the New Zealand Government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), it was established as an independent organisation when the Crown Research Institutes were set up in 1992. As part of that process, became semi-commercial, and operates as a government-owned company rather than as a government department. This change led to greater autonomy, accompanied by greater emphasis on financial viability. This is essential in the corporate environment, especially for the purchase and maintenance of research equipment and infrastructure, because the New Zealand public science funding system doesn't normally provide grants for these purposes. As well as undertaking basic research, and operating the national geological hazards monitoring network (GeoNet) and the National Isotope Centre (NIC), contracts its services to various private groups (notably energy companies) both in New Zealand and overseas, as well as to central and local government agencies, to provide scientific advice and information. has its head office in Avalon (Lower Hutt), with other facilities in Gracefield, Dunedin and Wairakei.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1276100
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Antarctic oscillation The (AAO, to distinguish it from the Arctic oscillation or AO) is a low-frequency mode of atmospheric variability of the southern hemisphere. It is also known as the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). It is defined as a belt of westerly winds or low pressure surrounding Antarctica which moves north or south as its mode of variability. In its positive phase, the westerly wind belt that drives the Antarctic Circumpolar Current intensifies and contracts towards Antarctica, while its negative phase involves this belt moving towards the Equator. Winds associated with the Southern Annular Mode cause oceanic upwelling of warm circumpolar deep water along the Antarctic continental shelf, which has been linked to ice shelf basal melt, representing a possible wind-driven mechanism that could destabilize large portions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. In 2014, Nerilie Abram used a network of temperature-sensitive ice core and tree growth records to reconstruct a 1000-year history of the Southern Annular Mode. This work suggests that the Southern Annular Mode is currently in its most extreme positive phase over at least the last 1000 years, and that recent positive trends in the SAM are attributed to increasing greenhouse gas levels and later stratospheric ozone depletion.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1277885
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Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596, Neuhausen, – 1665, Hoorn) was a Dutch-German cartographer, best known for his "Harmonia Macrocosmica" of 1660, a major star atlas, published by Johannes Janssonius in Amsterdam. He was born in Neuhausen (now a part of Worms), and was educated in Heidelberg. The Protestant Cellarius may have left Heidelberg at the onset of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 or in 1622 when the city came in Catholic hands. His activities are unclear at this time but based on his later works it is conjectured he spent time in Poland and may have even worked as a military engineer there. In 1625 he married Catharina Elt(e)mans in Amsterdam, where he worked as school master of a Latin School. After a brief stay in The Hague, the family moved to Hoorn. From 1637 until his death he was rector of the Latin School in Hoorn, where Pieter Anthoniszoon Overtwater was conrector.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1280673
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