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68,686,019 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1V-LSD | 1V-LSD (1-valeryl-D-lysergic acid diethylamide), sometimes nicknamed Valerie, is a psychotropic substance and a research chemical with psychedelic effects. 1V-LSD is an artificial derivative of natural lysergic acid, which occurs in ergot alkaloids, as well as being an analogue of LSD.
1V-LSD has been sold online until an amendment to the German NpSG was enforced in 2022 which controls 1P-LSD and now 1cP-LSD, 1V-LSD and several other lysergamides.
Pharmacology
As demonstrated with other N-acylated derivatives of LSD, 1V-LSD is believed to serve as a prodrug for LSD but may also act as a weak partial agonist at the 5-HT2A receptor.
Animal studies
A Head-twitch response assay in mice found that 1V-LSD has a similar potency to 1P-LSD and 1cP-LSD, with behavioral effects also closely resembling these structural analogs.
Chemistry
1V-LSD is the condensation product of valeric acid (pentanoic acid) and LSD, where the valeroyl group is substituted on the NH position of the indole moiety.
Ehrlich's reagent is used to identify the presence of an indole moiety; the chemical backbone of the lysergamide and ergoline molecules. However, as with other N-acylated lysergamides, 1V-LSD reacts very slowly to Ehrlich reagent and may not give reliable results if the reagent isn't fresh.
Legal position
1V-LSD is not a controlled substance in North America (United States and Canada), unless sold for human consumption in the US.
Since March 2nd 2022, 1V-LSD has been under investigation in Sweden and may therefore soon become controlled.
1V-LSD was placed under legal control in South Korea in July 2022 on a temporary but renewable basis.
An amendment to the NpSG banned the sale of 1V-LSD in Germany in September 2022. Due to a interpunctation error in the actualised NpSG, the ban never took effect. The law was amended in March 2023, now banning 1V-LSD.
See also
1B-LSD
1cP-LSD
1D-LSD
1P-LSD
AL-LAD
LSD
References
Designer drugs
Psychedelic_drugs
Lysergamides
Prodrugs
Serotonin receptor agonists
Fatty acid amides | 1V-LSD | [
"Chemistry"
] | 553 | [
"Chemicals in medicine",
"Prodrugs"
] |
68,686,623 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morals%2C%20Reason%2C%20and%20Animals | Morals, Reason, and Animals is a 1987 book by American philosopher Steve F. Sapontzis, that examines whether humans should give moral consideration to nonhuman animals and the practical implications of this.
Content
Sapontzis argues that nonhuman animals have interests, and that it is the existence of these interests that justifies their inclusion in the moral community. He writes that human beings should extend to animals the same moral protection for the latter's interests that we enjoy for our own. Sapontzis argues further that the burden of proof should shift toward those who argue against equal consideration for animals:Aristotle thought that men were naturally superior to women and Greeks naturally superior to other races; Victorians thought white men had to shoulder the burden of being superior to savages; and Nazis thought Aryans were a master race. We have come to reject these and many other supposedly natural hierarchies; the history of what we consider moral progress can be viewed as, in large part, the replacement of hierarchical worldviews with a presumption in favor of forms of egalitarianism. This substitution places the burden of proof on those who would deny equal consideration to the interests of all concerned, rather than on those who seek such consideration. Consequently, some reason is needed to justify the fairness of maintaining a hierarchical worldview when we are dealing with animals.The claim that rationality should be prerequisite for moral consideration is challenged by Sapontzis, who argues that the experience of pain is not greater if an individual is more intelligent and that the opposite may well be the case, as individuals who lack the capacity to understand why they are experiencing pain in a certain situation may suffer more as a result.
Sapontzis also investigates the issue of wild animal suffering and whether humans have an obligation to help these animals. He questions the view that aiding these individuals is ridiculous or absurd, instead arguing that if we have the means to help an individual suffering in such a situation, we should do so; as long as we do not inflict a greater harm in the process. Sapontzis makes a clear distinction between his antispeciesist position and that of environmentalists who are against helping animals suffering in these situations. These ideas were anteceded by his 1984 paper, "Predation".
References
Further reading
1987 non-fiction books
Animal ethics books
Books about animal rights
Books about animal testing
Books about vegetarianism
Books about wild animal suffering
Environmental ethics books
Temple University Press books | Morals, Reason, and Animals | [
"Environmental_science"
] | 504 | [
"Environmental ethics books",
"Environmental ethics"
] |
68,687,659 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeVe%201 | NeVe 1 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy, which is the central, dominant member and brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) of the Ophiuchus Cluster. It lies at a distance of about 411 million light-years away from Earth and is located behind the Zone of Avoidance region in the sky. It is the host galaxy of the Ophiuchus Supercluster eruption, the most energetic astronomical event known.
Observation history
Despite being in the relatively nearby, large Ophiuchus Cluster, due to its location behind the Milky Way galactic disc relative to the Earth's perspective (known as the Zone of Avoidance), the majority of the cluster including NeVe 1 are heavily obscured and invisible to the naked eye, such that it can only be observed in wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, such as X-rays and infrared.
When first observed in 1985 it was initially thought to be a planetary nebula within the large, star-forming Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. In a catalogue published by the German astronomers Thorsten Neckel and Hans Vehrenberg using data retrieved from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, the object was then assigned as the first entry of their Atlas of Galactic Planetary Nebulae (NeVe, from their surnames Neckel and Vehrenberg). The "planetary nebula" was then further incorporated in the Strasbourg-ESO Catalogue of Galactic Planetary Nebulae in 1991.
In a subsequent survey using six films from the ESO/SERC Sky Survey Atlas, at least 4,100 galaxies including NeVe 1 were identified. This was further attested by the detection of luminous X-ray and radio emission in the object that is indicative of an active galactic nucleus, leading to its identification as not a nearby planetary nebula from a dying star, but a full-fledged giant galaxy lying beyond the Milky Way.
Characteristics
NeVe 1's location in the sky behind the plane of the Milky Way makes it very difficult to study in the optical wavelengths. Using near-infrared and X-ray measurements it is shown to be a large elliptical galaxy—probably one of the largest such galaxies near the Milky Way, with the diameter twice that of Messier 87. Observations using the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2010 revealed that NeVe 1 sits at the center of a comet-like structure of its host cluster, indicative of ram-pressure stripping and the merger of at least two smaller subclusters. This enormous structure may have slowed down the velocity of NeVe 1 via the interaction of its stars and dark matter. The head of the structure sits about 4 kiloparsecs (13,000 light-years) from NeVe 1 and the galaxy itself is classified as a cooling core with high X-ray emission in contrast to the hot, intracluster medium of the Ophiuchus Cluster.
Eruption
In a paper published in 2020, NeVe 1 and its surrounding region has been identified as an extreme example of a giant radio fossil—with structures indicative of a much more violent AGN activity in the past. In the case of NeVe 1 there is a striking concave arc terminating the bubble of the X-ray halo surrounding the galaxy, with smaller mini-lobes that may be a result of further, smaller activity of its AGN. This concave arc is part of an enormous cavity, a void region of the intracluster medium with the diameter of at least 460 kpc (1.5 million light-years) that corresponds to an extensive, radio-emitting structure extending throughout the cluster.
The creation of such an enormous cavity could be explained by an extraordinarily large AGN outburst from NeVe 1. Assuming that the cavity and the galaxy are roughly in the same radial orientation relative to Earth, the energy required to create the cavity (factoring in the density of the intracluster medium of the Ophiuchus Cluster that resist and must be displaced by the expansion) would be on the order of of energy. This violent outburst, likely to have happened no less than 240 million years before, is the Ophiuchus Supercluster eruption—the most energetic astronomical event known. It was five times more energetic than the outburst at the galaxy cluster MS 0735.6+7421, and 4.2 million times more energetic than GRB 221009A—the most energetic gamma-ray burst known. It was a high-energy low-power event, occurring over millions of years.
The outburst has been attested to have been generated by NeVe 1's central supermassive black hole, which may have consumed an equivalent of 270 million solar masses of material—possibly from a cannibalized dwarf galaxy—that generated shock waves and relativistic jets of high-energy particles that displaced the intracluster medium to form the cavity. The eruption occurred slowly over millions of years and released as much energy equivalent to thousands of gamma-ray bursts per year. A later 2020 study by the NanoGRAV survey estimates the central black hole of NeVe 1 having a mass of 7 billion (best fit; the range is between 2.5 billion to 19 billion ).
The question remains as to how the still extant cool core of NeVe 1 would have survived such a cataclysmic activity, which would have completely destroyed the core. It has been suggested that the eruption may be the result of some form of large-scale hydrodynamic activity within the intracluster medium, allowing it to distribute the energy by a Kelvin–Helmholtz instability eddy allowing the core to survive. Such structures have been found in the similar Perseus Cluster and its galaxy NGC 1275.
This observation is a result of collaboration among various space-based and Earth-based observatories including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM Newton X-ray space observatory and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.
See also
MS 0735.6+7421—galaxy cluster whose eruption was the previously known most energetic astronomical event
NGC 1275
Messier 87
AT 2021lwx
Orders of magnitude (energy)
References
Elliptical galaxies
Ophiuchus Supercluster
Astronomical objects discovered in 1985
Astronomical X-ray sources | NeVe 1 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 1,288 | [
"Astronomical X-ray sources",
"Astronomical objects"
] |
68,688,298 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protists%20in%20the%20fossil%20record | A protist is any eukaryotic organism (that is, an organism whose cells contain a cell nucleus) that is not an animal, plant, or fungus. While it is likely that protists share a common ancestor, the last eukaryotic common ancestor, the exclusion of other eukaryotes means that protists do not form a natural group, or clade. Therefore, some protists may be more closely related to animals, plants, or fungi than they are to other protists. However, like algae, invertebrates and protozoans, the grouping is used for convenience.
Many protists have neither hard parts nor resistant spores, and their fossils are extremely rare or unknown. Examples of such groups include the apicomplexans, most ciliates, some green algae (the Klebsormidiales), choanoflagellates, oomycetes, brown algae, yellow-green algae, Excavata (e.g., euglenids). Some of these have been found preserved in amber (fossilized tree resin) or under unusual conditions (e.g., Paleoleishmania, a kinetoplastid).
Others are relatively common in the fossil record, as the diatoms, golden algae, haptophytes (coccoliths), silicoflagellates, tintinnids (ciliates), dinoflagellates, green algae, red algae, heliozoans, radiolarians, foraminiferans, ebriids and testate amoebae (euglyphids, arcellaceans). Some are used as paleoecological indicators to reconstruct ancient environments.
More probable eukaryote fossils begin to appear at about 1.8 billion years ago, the acritarchs, spherical fossils of likely algal protists. Another possible representative of early fossil eukaryotes are the Gabonionta.
Modern classifications
Systematists today do not treat Protista as a formal taxon, but the term "protist" is still commonly used for convenience in two ways. The most popular contemporary definition is a phylogenetic one, that identifies a paraphyletic group: a protist is any eukaryote that is not an animal, (land) plant, or (true) fungus; this definition excludes many unicellular groups, like the Microsporidia (fungi), many Chytridiomycetes (fungi), and yeasts (fungi), and also a non-unicellular group included in Protista in the past, the Myxozoa (animal).
The other definition describes protists primarily by functional or biological criteria: protists are essentially those eukaryotes that are never multicellular, that either exist as independent cells, or if they occur in colonies, do not show differentiation into tissues (but vegetative cell differentiation may occur restricted to sexual reproduction, alternate vegetative morphology, and quiescent or resistant stages, such as cysts); this definition excludes many brown, multicellular red and green algae, which may have tissues.
The taxonomy of protists is still changing. Newer classifications attempt to present monophyletic groups based on morphological (especially ultrastructural), biochemical (chemotaxonomy) and DNA sequence (molecular research) information. However, there are sometimes discordances between molecular and morphological investigations; these can be categorized as two types: (i) one morphology, multiple lineages (e.g. morphological convergence, cryptic species) and (ii) one lineage, multiple morphologies (e.g. phenotypic plasticity, multiple life-cycle stages).
Because the protists as a whole are paraphyletic, new systems often split up or abandon the kingdom, instead treating the protist groups as separate lines of eukaryotes. The recent scheme by Adl et al. (2005) does not recognize formal ranks (phylum, class, etc.) and instead treats groups as clades of phylogenetically related organisms. This is intended to make the classification more stable in the long term and easier to update. Some of the main groups of protists, which may be treated as phyla, are listed in the taxobox, upper right. Many are thought to be monophyletic, though there is still uncertainty. For instance, the Excavata are probably not monophyletic and the chromalveolates are probably only monophyletic if the haptophytes and cryptomonads are excluded.
Archaeplastida
(in part)
Red algae
One of the oldest fossils identified as a red alga is also the oldest fossil eukaryote that belongs to a specific modern taxon. Bangiomorpha pubescens, a multicellular fossil from arctic Canada, strongly resembles the modern red alga Bangia and occurs in rocks dating to 1.05 billion years ago.
Two kinds of fossils resembling red algae were found sometime between 2006 and 2011 in well-preserved sedimentary rocks in Chitrakoot, central India. The presumed red algae lie embedded in fossil mats of cyanobacteria, called stromatolites, in 1.6 billion-year-old Indian phosphorite – making them the oldest plant-like fossils ever found by about 400 million years.
Red algae are important builders of limestone reefs. The earliest such coralline algae, the solenopores, are known from the Cambrian period. Other algae of different origins filled a similar role in the late Paleozoic, and in more recent reefs.
Calcite crusts that have been interpreted as the remains of coralline red algae, date to the Ediacaran Period. Thallophytes resembling coralline red algae are known from the late Proterozoic Doushantuo formation.
Glaucophyta
SAR supergroup
Stramenopiles
Brown algae
The occurrence of Phaeophyceae as fossils is rare due to their generally soft-bodied nature, and scientists continue to debate the identification of some finds. Part of the problem with identification lies in the convergent evolution of morphologies between many brown and red algae. Most fossils of soft-tissue algae preserve only a flattened outline, without the microscopic features that permit the major groups of multicellular algae to be reliably distinguished. Among the brown algae, only species of the genus Padina deposit significant quantities of minerals in or around their cell walls. Other algal groups, such as the red algae and green algae, have a number of calcareous members. Because of this, they are more likely to leave evidence in the fossil record than the soft bodies of most brown algae and more often can be precisely classified.
Fossils comparable in morphology to brown algae are known from strata as old as the Upper Ordovician, but the taxonomic affinity of these impression fossils is far from certain. Claims that earlier Ediacaran fossils are brown algae have since been dismissed. While many carbonaceous fossils have been described from the Precambrian, they are typically preserved as flattened outlines or fragments measuring only millimeters long. Because these fossils lack features diagnostic for identification at even the highest level, they are assigned to fossil form taxa according to their shape and other gross morphological features. A number of Devonian fossils termed fucoids, from their resemblance in outline to species in the genus Fucus, have proven to be inorganic rather than true fossils. The Devonian megafossil Prototaxites, which consists of masses of filaments grouped into trunk-like axes, has been considered a possible brown alga. However, modern research favors reinterpretation of this fossil as a terrestrial fungus or fungal-like organism. Likewise, the fossil Protosalvinia was once considered a possible brown alga, but is now thought to be an early land plant.
A number of Paleozoic fossils have been tentatively classified with the brown algae, although most have also been compared to known red algae species. Phascolophyllaphycus possesses numerous elongate, inflated blades attached to a stipe. It is the most abundant of algal fossils found in a collection made from Carboniferous strata in Illinois. Each hollow blade bears up to eight pneumatocysts at its base, and the stipes appear to have been hollow and inflated as well. This combination of characteristics is similar to certain modern genera in the order Laminariales (kelps). Several fossils of Drydenia and a single specimen of Hungerfordia from the Upper Devonian of New York have also been compared to both brown and red algae. Fossils of Drydenia consist of an elliptical blade attached to a branching filamentous holdfast, not unlike some species of Laminaria, Porphyra, or Gigartina. The single known specimen of Hungerfordia branches dichotomously into lobes and resembles genera like Chondrus and Fucus or Dictyota.
The earliest known fossils that can be assigned reliably to the Phaeophyceae come from Miocene diatomite deposits of the Monterey Formation in California. Several soft-bodied brown macroalgae, such as Julescraneia, have been found.
Diatoms
Heterokont chloroplasts appear to derive from those of red algae, rather than directly from prokaryotes as occurred in plants. This suggests they had a more recent origin than many other algae. However, fossil evidence is scant, and only with the evolution of the diatoms themselves do the heterokonts make a serious impression on the fossil record.
The earliest known fossil diatoms date from the early Jurassic (~185 Ma ago), although the molecular clock and sedimentary evidence suggests an earlier origin. It has been suggested that their origin may be related to the end-Permian mass extinction (~250 Ma), after which many marine niches were opened. The gap between this event and the time that fossil diatoms first appear may indicate a period when diatoms were unsilicified and their evolution was cryptic. Since the advent of silicification, diatoms have made a significant impression on the fossil record, with major fossil deposits found as far back as the early Cretaceous, and with some rocks such as diatomaceous earth, being composed almost entirely of them.
Although diatoms may have existed since the Triassic, the timing of their ascendancy and "take-over" of the silicon cycle occurred more recently. Prior to the Phanerozoic (before 544 Ma), it is believed that microbial or inorganic processes weakly regulated the ocean's silicon cycle. Subsequently, the cycle appears dominated (and more strongly regulated) by the radiolarians and siliceous sponges, the former as zooplankton, the latter as sedentary filter-feeders primarily on the continental shelves. Within the last 100 My, it is thought that the silicon cycle has come under even tighter control, and that this derives from the ecological ascendancy of the diatoms.
However, the precise timing of the "take-over" remains unclear, and different authors have conflicting interpretations of the fossil record. Some evidence, such as the displacement of siliceous sponges from the shelves, suggests that this takeover began in the Cretaceous (146 Ma to 66 Ma), while evidence from radiolarians suggests "take-over" did not begin until the Cenozoic (66 Ma to present).
The expansion of grassland biomes and the evolutionary radiation of grasses during the Miocene is believed to have increased the flux of soluble silicon to the oceans, and it has been argued that this promoted the diatoms during the Cenozoic era. Recent work suggests that diatom success is decoupled from the evolution of grasses, although both diatom and grassland diversity increased strongly from the middle Miocene.
Diatom diversity over the Cenozoic has been very sensitive to global temperature, particularly to the equator-pole temperature gradient. Warmer oceans, particularly warmer polar regions, have in the past been shown to have had substantially lower diatom diversity. Future warm oceans with enhanced polar warming, as projected in global-warming scenarios, could thus in theory result in a significant loss of diatom diversity, although from current knowledge it is impossible to say if this would occur rapidly or only over many tens of thousands of years.
The fossil record of diatoms has largely been established through the recovery of their siliceous frustules in marine and non-marine sediments. Although diatoms have both a marine and non-marine stratigraphic record, diatom biostratigraphy, which is based on time-constrained evolutionary originations and extinctions of unique taxa, is only well developed and widely applicable in marine systems. The duration of diatom species ranges have been documented through the study of ocean cores and rock sequences exposed on land. Where diatom biozones are well established and calibrated to the geomagnetic polarity time scale (e.g., Southern Ocean, North Pacific, eastern equatorial Pacific), diatom-based age estimates may be resolved to within <100,000 years, although typical age resolution for Cenozoic diatom assemblages is several hundred thousand years.
Diatoms preserved in lake sediments are widely used for paleoenvironmental reconstructions of Quaternary climate, especially for closed-basin lakes which experience fluctuations in water depth and salinity.
The Cretaceous record of diatoms is limited, but recent studies reveal a progressive diversification of diatom types. The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which in the oceans dramatically affected organisms with calcareous skeletons, appears to have had relatively little impact on diatom evolution.
Although no mass extinctions of marine diatoms have been observed during the Cenozoic, times of relatively rapid evolutionary turnover in marine diatom species assemblages occurred near the Paleocene–Eocene boundary, and at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary. Further turnover of assemblages took place at various times between the middle Miocene and late Pliocene, in response to progressive cooling of polar regions and the development of more endemic diatom assemblages.
A global trend toward more delicate diatom frustules has been noted from the Oligocene to the Quaternary. This coincides with an increasingly more vigorous circulation of the ocean's surface and deep waters brought about by increasing latitudinal thermal gradients at the onset of major ice sheet expansion on Antarctica and progressive cooling through the Neogene and Quaternary towards a bipolar glaciated world. This caused diatoms to take in less silica for the formation of their frustules. Increased mixing of the oceans renews silica and other nutrients necessary for diatom growth in surface waters, especially in regions of coastal and oceanic upwelling.
Oomycetes
Alveolata
Apicomplexa
Ciliophora
Dinoflagellata
Dinoflagellates are mainly represented as fossils by fossil dinocysts, which have a long geological record with lowest occurrences during the mid-Triassic, whilst geochemical markers suggest a presence to the Early Cambrian.
Some evidence indicates dinosteroids in many Paleozoic and Precambrian rocks might be the product of ancestral dinoflagellates (protodinoflagellates).
Molecular phylogenetics show that dinoflagellates are grouped with ciliates and apicomplexans (=Sporozoa) in a well-supported clade, the alveolates. The closest relatives to dinokaryotic dinoflagellates appear to be apicomplexans, Perkinsus, Parvilucifera, syndinians, and Oxyrrhis. Molecular phylogenies are similar to phylogenies based on morphology.
The earliest stages of dinoflagellate evolution appear to be dominated by parasitic lineages, such as perkinsids and syndinians (e.g. Amoebophrya and Hematodinium).
All dinoflagellates contain red algal plastids or remnant (nonphotosynthetic) organelles of red algal origin. The parasitic dinoflagellate Hematodinium however lacks a plastid entirely. Some groups that have lost the photosynthetic properties of their original red algae plastids has obtained new photosynthetic plastids (chloroplasts) through so-called serial endosymbiosis, both secondary and tertiary. Like their original plastids, the new chloroplasts in these groups can be traced back to red algae, except from those in the members of the genus Lepidodinium, which possess plastids derived from green algae, possibly Trebouxiophyceae or Ulvophyceae. Lineages with tertiary endosymbiosis are Dinophysis, with plastids from a cryptomonad, the Karenia, Karlodinium, and Takayama, which possess plastids of haptophyte origin, and the Peridiniaceae, Durinskia and Kryptoperidinium, which has plastids derived from diatoms Some species also perform kleptoplasty.
Dinoflagellate evolution has been summarized into five principal organizational types: prorocentroid, dinophysoid, gonyaulacoid, peridinioid, and gymnodinoid.
The transitions of marine species into fresh water have been infrequent events during the diversification of dinoflagellates and in most cases have not occurred recently, possibly as late as the Cretaceous.
Recently, the "living fossil" Dapsilidinium pastielsii was found inhabiting the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, which served as a refugium for thermophilic dinoflagellates.
Rhizaria
Cercozoa
Foraminifera
Molecular clocks indicate that the crown-group of foraminifera likely evolved during the Neoproterozoic, between 900 and 650 million years ago; this timing is consistent with Neoproterozoic fossils of the closely related filose amoebae. As fossils of foraminifera have not been found prior to the very end of the Ediacaran, it is likely that most of these Proterozoic forms did not have hard-shelled tests.
Due to their non-mineralised tests, "allogromiids" have no fossil record.
The mysterious vendozoans of the Ediacaran period have been suggested to represent fossil xenophyophores. However, the discovery of diagenetically altered C27 sterols associated with the remains of Dickinsonia cast doubt on this identification and suggest it may instead be an animal. Other researchers have suggested that the elusive trace fossil Paleodictyon and its relatives may represent a fossil xenophyophore and noted the similarity of the extant xenophyophore Occultammina to the fossil; however, modern examples of Paleodictyon have not been able to clear up the issue and the trace may alternately represent a burrow or a glass sponge. Supporting this notion is the similar habitat of living xenophyophores to the inferred habitat of fossil graphoglyptids; however, the large size and regularity of many graphoglyptids as well as the apparent absence of xenophyae in their fossils casts doubt on the possibility. As of 2017 no definite xenophyophore fossils have been found.
Test-bearing foraminifera have an excellent fossil record throughout the Phanerozoic eon. The earliest known definite foraminifera appear in the fossil record towards the very end of the Ediacaran; these forms all have agglutinated tests and are unilocular. These include forms like Platysolenites and Spirosolenites.
Single-chambered foraminifera continued to diversity throughout the Cambrian. Some commonly encountered forms include Ammodiscus, Glomospira, Psammosphera, and Turritellella; these species are all agglutinated. They make up part of the Ammodiscina, a lineage of spirillinids that still contains modern forms. Later spirillinids would evolve multilocularity and calcitic tests, with the first such forms appearing during the Triassic; the group saw little effects on diversity due to the K-Pg extinction.
The earliest multi-chambered foraminifera are agglutinated species, and appear in the fossil record during the middle Cambrian period. Due to their poor preservation they cannot be positively assigned to any major foram group.
The earliest known calcareous-walled foraminifera are the Fusulinids, which appear in the fossil record during the Llandoverian epoch of the early Silurian. The earliest of these were microscopic, planispirally coiled, and evolute; later forms evolved a diversity of shapes including lenticular, globular, and elongated rice-shaped forms. Later species of fusulinids grew to much larger size, with some forms reaching 5 cm in length; reportedly, some specimens reach up to 14 cm in length, making them among the largest foraminifera extant or extinct. Fusulinids are the earliest lineage of foraminifera thought to have evolved symbiosis with photosynthetic organisms. Fossils of fusulinids have been found on all continents except Antarctica; they reached their greatest diversity during the Visean epoch of the Carboniferous. The group then gradually declined in diversity until finally going extinct during the Permo-Triassic extinction event.
During the Tournaisian epoch of the Carboniferous, Miliolid foraminifera first appeared in the fossil record, having diverged from the spirillinids within the Tubothalamea. Miliolids suffered about 50% casualties during both the Permo-Triassic and K-Pg extinctions but survived to the present day. Some fossil miliolids reached up to 2 cm in diameter.
The earliest known Lagenid fossils appear during the Moscovian epoch of the Carboniferous. Seeing little effect due to the Permo-Triassic or K-Pg extinctions, the group diversified through time. Secondarily unilocular taxa evolved during the Jurassic and Cretaceous.
The earliest Involutinid fossils appear during the Permian; the lineage diversified throughout the Mesozoic of Eurasia before apparently vanishing from the fossil record following the Cenomanian-Turonian Ocean Anoxic Event. The extant group planispirillinidae has been referred to the involutinida, but this remains the subject of debate.
The Robertinida first appear in the fossil record during the Anisian epoch of the Triassic. The group remained at low diversity throughout its fossil history; all living representatives belong to the Robertinidae, which first appeared during the Paleocene.
The first definite Rotaliid fossils do not appear in the fossil record until the Pliensbachian epoch of the Jurassic, following the Triassic-Jurassic event. Diversity of the group remained low until the aftermath of the Cenomanian-Turonian event, after which the group saw a rapid diversification. Of this group, the planktonic Globigerinina—the first known group of planktonic forams—first appears in the aftermath of the Toarcian Turnover; the group saw heavy losses during both the K-Pg extinction and the Eocene-Oligocene extinction, but remains extant and diverse to this day. An additional evolution of planktonic lifestyle occurred in the Miocene or Pliocene, when the rotaliid Neogallitellia independently evolved a planktonic lifestyle.
Radiolaria
The earliest known radiolaria date to the very start of the Cambrian period, appearing in the same beds as the first small shelly fauna—they may even be terminal Precambrian in age. They have significant differences from later radiolaria, with a different silica lattice structure and few, if any, spikes on the test. Ninety percent of radiolarian species are extinct. The skeletons, or tests, of ancient radiolarians are used in geological dating, including for oil exploration and determination of ancient climates.
Some common radiolarian fossils include Actinomma, Heliosphaera and Hexadoridium.
Excavata
Euglenozoa
Percolozoa
Metamonada
Amoebozoa
Hacrobia
Coccolithophores: The diagram on the right shows —>
(A) coccolithophore species richness over time combining heterococcoliths and nannoliths. Q, Quaternary; N, Neogene; Pal, Paleogene; E/O, Eocene/Oligocene glacial onset event; PETM, Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum warming event; K/Pg, Cretaceous/Paleogene; OAE, oceanic anoxic event; T-OAE, Toarcian oceanic anoxic event; T/J, Triassic/Jurassic; P/T, Permian/Triassic; mass ext., mass extinction.
(B) the fossil record of major coccolithophore biomineralization innovations and morphogroups, including the first appearances of muroliths (simple coccoliths with narrow, wall-like rims), placoliths (coccoliths with broad shields that interlock to form strong coccospheres), holococcoliths (coccoliths formed from microcrystals in the haploid life cycle phase), Braarudosphaera (pentagonal, laminated nannoliths forming dodecahedral coccospheres); Calciosolenia (distinct, rhombic murolith coccoliths), Coccolithus (long-ranging and abundant Cenozoic genus), Isochrysidales (dominant order that includes Emiliania, Gephyrocapsa, and Reticulofenestra). Significant mass extinctions and paleoceanographic/paleoclimatic events are marked as horizontal lines.
Hemimastigophora
Apusozoa
Opisthokonta
(in part)
Choanozoa
(reclassified)
Golden algae
Because many of these organisms had a silica capsule, they have a relatively complete fossil record, allowing modern biologists to confirm that they are, in fact, not derived from cyanobacteria, but rather an ancestor that did not possess the capability to photosynthesize. Many of the chrysophyta precursor fossils entirely lacked any type of photosynthesis-capable pigment. Most biologists believe that the chrysophytes obtained their ability to photosynthesize from an endosymbiotic relationship with fucoxanthin-containing cyanobacteria.
Green algae
The ancestral green alga was a unicellular flagellate.
See also
Marine sediment
Microfossils
Protist shells
List of prehistoric foraminifera genera
Footnotes
References
Evolution
Protista
Micropaleontology | Protists in the fossil record | [
"Biology"
] | 5,645 | [
"Eukaryotes",
"Protists"
] |
68,688,913 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedimental%20sculpture | Pedimental sculpture is a form of architectural sculpture designed for installation in the tympanum, the space enclosed by the architectural element called the pediment. Originally a feature of Ancient Greek architecture, pedimental sculpture started as a means to decorate a pediment in its simplest form: a low triangle, like a gable, above an horizontal base or entablature. However, as classical architecture developed from the basis of Ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the varieties of pedimental sculpture also developed. The sculpture can be either freestanding or relief sculpture, in which case it is attached to the back wall of the pediment. Harris in The Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Architecture defines pediment as "In classical architecture, the triangular gable end of the roof above the horizontal cornice, often filled with sculpture." Pediments can also be used to crown doors or windows.
In Romanesque architecture, and very often in Gothic architecture, the tympanum is usually semi-circular at the top, and the sculptural groups, usually with religious subjects, adapted to fit the new spaces. In the Renaissance triangular pediments returned, as gradually did sculptural groups within them, becoming very popular for important buildings in the 19th century.
History
Ancient Greek architecture
The pediment begins in Ancient Greek architecture; according to the mid-fifth century BCE poet Pindar, it was a Corinthian invention. It is possible that it was devised specifically to contain sculpture, which from the early 6th century became "customary (though never obligatory)" in Doric temples; in Ionic ones it was a "rarity". A difference between the ancient Greek temple and temples of other, older, cultures of the Near East was that the visual effect and decoration of the exterior exceeded that of the interiors and exteriors behind the main facade. Like the other forms of exterior decoration such as statues, antefixes, and acroteria, the pedimental sculptures were originally in terracotta and coloured.
The "earliest pedimental composition to have survived," from the Early Archaic Period, was from the Temple of Artemis, Corfu, about 580–570 BCE. Large parts of the sculptural group are in the Archaeological Museum of Corfu, including the central figure of the winged gorgon Medusa, flanked by two crouching lions. Richter points out that the "weak points are the lack of concerted action and unity as well as the ludicrously small scale of the side figures compared with the central Gorgon."
Gorgons and gorgon heads were the most common early pedimental sculptures, as an architectural version of the gorgoneion apotropaic amulet, which both Athena and Zeus are said to have worn as a pendant. Greek temples with pediment sculptures usually had them at both ends of the temple, and tended to have contrasting scenes, one perhaps a peaceful scene with deities, and the other with a battle or dramatic scene from mythology.
Over the next decades refinements were made in the design and carving of pedimental sculpture, the small "Hydra pediment" in Athens (about 570 BCE), the "Bluebeard pediment from the 'old Athena temple' the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi (about 525 BCE), the Megarian Treasury at Olympia (about 520–510 BCE), the temple to Aphaia at Aigina (about 500–480 BCE), the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (about 465–460 BCE, the remains of the Eastern pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia are in the site museum) and others, but "they did not satisfy the Greek sculptor for long." Finally, in the Parthenon pediments (about 438–432) "we reach the climax of Greek pedimental composition". After the Parthenon there is no outstanding pedimental composition, at least now known.
In the late or Hellenistic phase of Etruscan art, after about 300 BCE, Greek-style groups were introduced, but in terracotta rather than stone; some large fragments of these have survived. The Romans also used terracotta, but also stone for the grandest temples. An Amazonomachy in marble on the Temple of Apollo Sosianus in Rome, whose fragments were excavated in the 1930s, is thought to be a Greek work of the 5th century BCE, removed by the Romans from a temple there in the 1st century CE. Allusions to the recent Battle of Actium have been proposed. The group on the final rebuilding of the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus is known from literary descriptions and depictions in other works of art, but none of it is known to survive.
The Parthenon
The Parthenon's west pediment depicted the contest between Athena and Poseidon over Attica and the east pediment the birth of Athena. Classical archeologists since Johann Joachim Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (published 1764) have recognized Greek pediment sculpture, in particular the pediments of the Parthenon, as the standard of the highest-quality art in antiquity. For Martin Schede, writing in 1923, the remains of limestone pediments, although "badly shattered indeed," represented "the highest artistic achievement of two generations of a most artistic people," the value of which was impossible to overestimate. The travel writer Solomon Charles Kaines Smith specifically named the "Three Fates" of the east pediment the "highest surviving achievement of Greek sculpture," and for Wincklemann's contemporary Ennio Quirino Visconti the Parthenon pediments "met the criteria for the best artists of the best period." The Parthenon compositions are considered to be the magnum opus of Classical pedimental decoration.
Awareness of the Parthenon pediments, almost the only classical example to substantially survive in situ to the Renaissance, and eventually highly influential, increased only gradually in Western Europe. They were first drawn, not accurately, in 1436 by Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli. It grew significantly over the 17th century, especially as numerous careful drawings were made in Athens in 1674 by Jacques Carrey, a member of Charles Le Brun's workshop, who was sent in the suite of Charles Marie François Olier, marquis de Nointel, the French ambassador to Constantinople to make drawings. These were made before the sculptures were greatly damaged in an explosion in 1687. The drawings had all reached Paris by Carrey's return in 1679, and contain crucial evidence as to the original appearance of the portions that were destroyed.
The British Museum holds 17 figurative pedimental sculptures from the Parthenon, as part of the so-called Elgin Marbles, in their permanent collection. The rest of the pedimental sculpture from the Parthenon is now on display in the Acropolis Museum at Athens.
Post-classical
Sculptures above lintels continued to be produced, indeed became more common, in post-classical architectural styles, but in recent times the medieval examples tend not to be called "pedimental sculptures", although it is technically correct to do so. "Tympanum reliefs" is a more common term, as these are now mostly in a relatively low relief, and less than life-size, as they are lower down the building, over doorways, and so closer to the observer than on classical temples. They are typically framed by round tops in Romanesque architecture, and pointed Gothic arch shapes in Gothic architecture. In both cases the composition was often arranged in tiers, with many small figures making up a Christian scene, sometimes dominated by a much larger Christ in Majesty or a Virgin Mary. There are often supporting figures on the archivolts to the sides, and on the lintel below.
Renaissance and Baroque
The low triangular pediment was revived, initially mainly for the main facade of churches, in Renaissance architecture, but at first the triangular tympanum was left plain or only decorated with a round window, or sometimes a round motif such as a star. The cathedral at Pienza (c. 1460), with the coat of arms of Pope Pius II is one of the earliest examples to feature the arms of the donor of the church. This became common by the next century, as at Saint Peter's Basilica and the Church of the Gesù (completed 1584), both in Rome. Heraldic sculpture was to remain extremely common in tympani, especially as the triangular pediment spread to large houses.
Most buildings with pediments by Andrea Palladio followed the simpler formulae, but some of his villas around the Veneto feature large sprawling figures supporting the coat of arms, so that most of the tympanum is filled. Examples are the Villa Barbaro (completed c. 1558) and Villa Emo (by 1561). The small Tempietto Barbaro near the villa (c. 1583) has a composition in stucco with eight figures filling the space; like some other examples this seems to have been added after the rest of the building was finished, and the designer and sculptor are unknown.
Such compositions remained uncommon in Baroque architecture, even in the grandest buildings, and somewhat unexpectedly are found more often north of the Alps, with many in Protestant countries. Examples include crowded scenes, all in relief, at Saint Paul's Cathedral (Conversion of Saint Paul), the south front of Hampton Court Palace (Hercules Triumphing Over Envy, by Caius Cibber), both buildings by Christopher Wren, and the Royal Palace of Amsterdam (1655, built as the City Hall). The expansion of the Louvre Palace under Louis XIV included much pedimental sculpture filling various shapes of tympanum. Buildings with military connections could surround heraldic devices with trophies of arms and armour to fill the whole space, as at Blenheim Palace and many Central European palaces, such as Nieborów Palace (on both fronts, in stucco). Otherwise, flanking angels or winged Victory figures, strapwork or other ornamental motifs, could fill the rest of the triangle.
Heraldic sculptures
Neoclassicism
The arrival of Neoclassical architecture favoured the return of large free-standing figure compositions in the pediments of important buildings, with Vilnius Cathedral (by 1783) one of the earliest in the style. They remained popular during the 19th century, now used for additional types of buildings such as museums, stock exchanges, legislature buildings, law courts, banks and town halls. Allegorical groups became typical on secular buildings. The pediment over the main entrance of the British Museum has The Progress of Civilisation by Sir Richard Westmacott, consisting of fifteen figures, installed in 1852, well after the main building. Westmacott's son sculpted the comparable pediment of the Royal Exchange, London; like the later New York Stock Exchange Building (1903), this featured an allegory of commerce. The group on the Panthéon in Paris was changed three times over its first 50 years, varying between religious and patriotic subjects as the political wind changed.
By 1874, perhaps the most ambitious example in size and in the number of figures was that by Philippe Joseph Henri Lemaire for the La Madeleine Church in Paris. It represents the Last Judgement, with Jesus Christ in the centre, and was completed between 1826 and 1834; it is in length, and tall at its apex.
In the United States, many government buildings in Washington DC carry large groups, as well as numerous State Capitols and important courthouses. Drafting the Declaration of Independence on the Jefferson Memorial, by
Adolph Alexander Weinman (1943) is an exception to the usual allegorical subject matter, showing the Committee of Five around a table. Since World War II relatively few new groups have been created.
Architectural terracotta was sometimes used, as at the department store Harrods in London (glazed, by Royal Doulton), and (in polychrome) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the 1930s. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a mosaic group, for which there are medieval Italian precedents.
Format
Gisela Richter, in The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, states that, "pediment groups presented peculiar difficulties. The chief requirements were: to place in the center a prominent figure or group, since here comes the chief accent; to fill the awkward space of the angles; and to compose figures for the intervening parts of constantly diminishing heights. And the composition as a whole had to produce the needed variety of line and create a harmonious effect. The gradual evolution from primitive renderings to the wonderful solutions of the Parthenon are fascinating to watch."
The sculptures themselves may be freestanding, in-the-round statues that stand on the bed of the pediment, or they can be relief sculpture, attached to its back wall. As an additional physical restriction in the pediment format, a deeper recess will throw the triangular field into deeper shadow, which means the figures should be executed in deeper relief or fully in the round. Only the pediments from the temple of Aphaia at Aegina and the Parthenon compositions are fully finished in the round, other temples the back-side of the sculptures are summarily or roughly finished. Some statues from the pediments of the temple of Zeus at Olympia are even hollowed out, to relieve weight.
Aside from sculptural adornment of the tympanum, the triangular or sometimes curved area of a pediment, reclining figures were sometimes placed on the slanting sides above the pediment. Alternatively, the apex, or the apex and both corners, may be topped with vertical elements called acroteria taking the form of urns, palmettes, or figural sculpture.
Walter Copland Perry wrote that it was proof of the power of Greek art that the classical sculptors not only overcame the rigid restrictions of the pediment's shape, but turned them to their advantage. Compositionally, the restrictions imposed by both the physical triangular shape of a pediment, and the traditional themes that are usually employed for the subject matter, are, according to Ernest Arthur Gardner, "as exactly regulated as that of a sonnet or a Spenserian stanza: the artist has liberty only in certain directions and must not violate the laws of rhythm."
In all examples, classical and modern, the central area below the apex is inevitably the tallest, most spacious, the natural focus, and will contain the main figures and the focus of action. Secondary figures decrease in size and importance on both sides, as they approach the far angles at the base. The well-known classical examples all observe "unity of action", although the Greek geographer Pausanias describes a sculpture by Praxiteles in which Hercules appears several times in different sizes.
See also
Pedimental sculptures in the United States
Pedimental sculptures in Canada
Notes
References
Lawrence, A. W., Greek Architecture, 1957, Penguin, Pelican history of art
Richter, Gisela M. A., The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1929 Second Edition 1941
Ornaments (architecture)
Architectural elements
Columns and entablature | Pedimental sculpture | [
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"Engineering"
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"Building engineering",
"Structural system",
"Architectural elements",
"Columns and entablature",
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68,689,367 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morowali%20Industrial%20Park | The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) is an industrial park hosting primarily nickel-related industries in Morowali Regency, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. It is the largest nickel processing site in Indonesia, which is the world's top nickel producer. In 2023, Wired magazine called it "the world's epicenter for nickel production." The park is a joint venture between Indonesian mining company Bintang Delapan Group and the Chinese firm Tsingshan Holding Group.
IMIP's activities have seriously polluted the local environment and disrupted nearby communities. Workers and advocacy organizations report poor working conditions, with a number of deaths and injuries from industrial accidents. The park employs about 81,000 people.
Background
Indonesia has the world's largest nickel reserves. Nickel is used to manufacture lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, and Indonesia is positioned to be a key supplier of the mineral for the booming electric vehicle battery market. The country banned export of unprocessed nickel ores around 2013, and has signed several deals with battery manufacturers.
In 2022, Indonesia produced 1.6 million tons of nickel. This was nearly half of world production. Also in 2022, the administration of president Joko Widodo relaxed environmental and worker safety regulations to attract foreign investment.
There is a private airport inside Morowali Industrial Park called IMIP airport which is 20 minutes drive to the park. Commercial flights would be stopping via Manado.
Description
The industrial park is located in Bahodopi district of Morowali Regency, Central Sulawesi. It covers 3,000 hectares, and is served by a seaport, an airport, and a 2 GW coal power plant. It is operated by PT Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park.
There were reportedly 18 companies operating at IMIP with a total investment of USD 15.3 billion in October 2022, with the park's management predicting 40 companies by 2025. By December 2024, the total investment was claimed to have reached USD 34.3 billion. The park's estimated total capacity for stainless steel production was 3 million metric tonnes per year in 2020. In 2019, IMIP had plans to develop electric vehicle battery plants. It generated USD 6.6 billion in exports for Indonesia in 2019.
History
Morowali had been the site of a nickel mining operation by Vale's subsidiary Inco since 1968. In August 2013, the Indonesian Ministry of Industry announced plans to develop a 1,500 hectare nickel-oriented industrial park in Morowali. A MoU for the USD 1.5 billion project was signed between Tsingshan Holding Group and Bintang Delapan Group in October 2013, and the first stone for the industrial park's construction was placed by Minister of Industry Saleh Husin on 5 December 2014. Companies began to operate starting in April 2015, with president Joko Widodo inaugurating a smelter on 28 May 2015.
In 2018, it was estimated that IMIP produced 50% of Indonesia's nickel products.
On 24 December 2023, an explosion occurred at a Tsingshan-owned nickel smelter inside the facility, killing at least 18 people and injuring 44 others. The dead were identified as ten Indonesians and eight Chinese workers. By 31 December, two more workers had died to their injuries.
Impact
Local
Environmentalists report that pollution from IMIP has destroyed fish populations and local forests. Local residents also experience frequent disruptions in power, phone, and internet services due to oversaturation. The population has grown very quickly due to the workers, sanitation services have not been provided, and there are open sewers. Large numbers of commuting workers have also overloaded local roads and caused daily traffic jams lasting hours at a time.
The regency government of Morowali reported an increase of municipal government revenues from Rp 180 billion in 2018 to Rp 600 billion in 2022, of which 80 percent were attributed to IMIP. On paper, Morowali Regency's GDP per capita became the highest in Indonesia at 927.2 million (~USD 60,000) in 2023, however, activists claimed that around 95 percent of this were remitted to other regions of Indonesia or abroad.
Workforce
There were around 28,500 employees working at IMIP in August 2018, of which around 3,100 were foreign workers, and an additional 50,000 indirect jobs were estimated to be related to the industrial park. In February 2023, approximately 81,000 people worked there, including around 10,700 foreign workers, mostly from China. Many workers report working 15-hour days for $25/day with no days off. Indonesian workers have also complained about how foreign (i.e. Chinese) workers receive higher pay, and communication problems have caused further frustrations.
Workers and advocacy organisations report unsafe working conditions in some smelters at IMIP. Deaths and injuries are frequently reported, and pollution has caused respiratory illness and eye problems. One report found that ten people had died at the smelter between 2020 and 2023. Two workers were killed on the fourth day of the strike. A government official said they had little power to enforce safety regulations in the industry.
In 2023, some workers filed a lawsuit against the company over poor working conditions.
References
Central Sulawesi
Industrial parks in Indonesia
Nickel mines in Indonesia | Morowali Industrial Park | [
"Chemistry"
] | 1,085 | [
"Metallurgical industry of Indonesia",
"Metallurgical industry by country"
] |
68,689,792 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface%20Duo%202 | The Surface Duo 2 is a discontinued dual-touchscreen Android smartphone manufactured by Microsoft. Announced during a hardware-oriented event on September 22, 2021, it is the successor to the original Surface Duo.
Specifications
Hardware
The Surface Duo 2 uses a similar folio form factor to the first-generation model, although it is slightly thicker to accommodate a larger battery, and now offered in a new black color option. It features a pair of 5.8-inch OLED displays with a 90 Hz refresh rate, with their innermost edges being curved over the side. This is used as part of a new feature known as the "Glance Bar", which allows notifications and other content to be displayed along its spine. As with the Surface Duo, it supports Surface Pen styluses, including the concurrently-unveiled Surface Slim Pen 2.
The device uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G system-on-chip, adding 5G and near-field communication (NFC) support that was not present on the original Surface Duo. It also has an increased, 8 GB of RAM, dual speakers, and a fingerprint reader in its power button.
The Surface Duo 2 has both front and rear-facing cameras, with the rear camera featuring a 12-megapixel lens, 16-megapixel wide-angle lens, and a 12-megapixel telephoto lens.
Software
The Surface Duo 2 launched with Android 11. An update to Android 12 L was released in October 2022, adding Windows 11-inspired design elements and other new features.
Reception
The Surface Duo 2 received a mixed reception. The Verge praised the Duo 2 for having more competitive hardware than the first-generation model, including a faster processor, more RAM, and 5G support (although still lacking features such as wireless charging), and its software for being "undeniably better than it was on the original at launch". However, the reviewer noted issues with touch input response, web browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome did not support displaying multiple pages on the two screens, and felt that its cameras were exceeded in quality by even cheaper devices such as the Pixel 5a. In conclusion, it was felt that "between the bugs and inherent awkwardness of the form factor, the Duo 2 is just a difficult device to live with day to day, much like its predecessor." As of October 21, 2024, the Surface Duo 2 was discontinued by Microsoft and the last security update was October 8, 2024.
Timeline
References
Foldable smartphones
Microsoft Surface
Products introduced in 2021 | Surface Duo 2 | [
"Technology"
] | 528 | [
"Crossover devices",
"Foldable smartphones"
] |
68,690,907 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventive%20plant | Adventive plants or adventitious plants are plants that have established themselves in a place that does not correspond to their area of origin due to anthropogenic influence and, therefore, are all wild species that have only been established with the help of humans, in contrast to the native species.
Term
The term "adventive" is used to describe species that are not self-sufficient, but need an episodic population assistance from their homeland. If, however, an adventive species becomes self-sustaining in its new geographic area, it is then naturalized.
The term hemerochory is sometimes used synonymously with this one, but is often restricted to species that were unintentionally brought into the area and then naturalized, sometimes also for species that have firmly established themselves in their new habitat.
Categorization
Depending on the question and perspective, adventitious plants are divided into different subcategories:
Classification according to establishment history
Archaeophytes were introduced before 1492
Neophytes were introduced or immigrated after 1492.
The year 1492 is a conventionally chosen reference point. With the "discovery" of America and the Age of Discovery and colonialism, alien species from other parts of the world came to new areas on a large scale. Most of the archaeophytes immigrated with the introduction of agriculture (in the Neolithic). The status of a species as an archaeophyte is usually deduced (from the location and ecology of the species) and is hardly directly detectable.
Classification according to the degree of establishment
Agriophytes: species that have invaded natural or near-natural vegetation and could survive there without human intervention.
Epecophytes: Species that are only naturalized in vegetation units shaped by humans, such as meadows, weed flora or ruderal vegetation, but are firmly naturalized here.
Ephemerophytes: Species that are only introduced inconsistently, that will die out of culture for a short period of time, or that would disappear again without a constant replenishment of seeds.
Classification according to immigration route
Spontaneous immigrants (sometimes referred to as "acolutophytes") immigrated on their own without direct human assistance, for example when new locations were created through culture or soil changes.
Companions (sometimes also "xenophytes") were brought in through human transport. Examples would be seed companions, which were unintentionally sown due to their similarity to cultivated plant seeds, or “wool adventures”, which were dragged into the wool fleece during the transport of sheep's wool.
Feral species or cultural refugees in the narrower sense are those that were originally cultivated, but later escaped from the culture and were able to spread on their own. Such descendants of original cultural clans are subject to natural evolution as they become wild and can more or less quickly differ both from the culture form itself and from the original wild clan that preceded the culture.
Habitat
Adventitious plants are often found at freight stations, along railway lines and port areas as well as airports, but also on roads. Seeds of many species were accidentally imported there with the import of goods (so-called agochoria). Occasionally, seed contamination also introduces new plants that could reproduce for a short period of time (so-called speirochory). Agochory and speirochory are sub-forms of hemerochory. The seeds can also hang in wheel arches so that they can be transported and distributed along highways.
The proportion of adventitious species in open ruderal corridors at such locations can exceed 30% of the flora of these locations. In natural and near-natural vegetation, adventitious plants are much rarer. Their share here is between zero and about 5%.
References
Further reading
FG Schroeder: On the classification of the anthropochores. In: Vegetatio. 16, pp. 225-238 (1969).
Invasive species
Environmental conservation
Environmental terminology
Habitat
Introduced plants | Adventive plant | [
"Biology"
] | 811 | [
"Pests (organism)",
"Invasive species"
] |
68,691,754 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessible%20Books%20Consortium | The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) is a public-private partnership which was launched in 2014 by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The ABC was created with the intent of being "one possible initiative, amongst others, to implement the aims of the Marrakesh VIP Treaty at a practical level." ABC's goal is "to increase the number of books worldwide in accessible formats - such as braille, audio, e-text, and large print and to make them available to people who are blind, have low vision or are otherwise print disabled."
Context
The World Health Organization estimated in 2018 that worldwide 253 million people are visually impaired, with more than 90% of them living in developing and least developed countries. The World Blind Union (WBU) estimates that only 10% of people who are blind are able to go to school or have employment. World Blind Union (WBU) estimates that less than 10% of all published materials can be read by people who are blind or visually impaired, with the lack of accessible books being a significant barrier to getting an education and leading an independent life.
Work
The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) operates through three channels:
The ABC Global Book Service: hosting an online platform that allows for the cross-border exchange of books in accessible formats. The Service contains titles in over 80 languages, with English, French and Spanish being the predominant languages.
Training and Technical Assistance: establishing projects in developing and least-developed countries to "provide training and funding for the production of educational materials in accessible formats in national languages for students who are print disabled."
Accessible Publishing: promoting the production of "born accessible" publications by all publishers. Born accessible books are usable by both people who are print disabled or sighted. ABC encourage accessible publishing through the ABC Charter for Accessible Publishing and the ABC International Excellence Award, which 'recognizes outstanding leadership and achievements in advancing the accessibility of digital publications'''.
Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) Global Book Service
The ABC Global Book Service is a free service that puts into practice the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty. It allows participating libraries for the blind, referred to in the Marrakesh Treaty as Authorized Entities (AEs), to search, order and exchange books in accessible digital formats across national borders. Through the Service, Authorized Entities that are located in countries that have implemented the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty are able to perform these exchanges without requiring further authorization from rights holders.
Through their participation in the Service, AEs are able to make the accessible books that are shared by all other AEs available to their own patrons. By pooling their collective resources in this way, libraries can vastly increase their selection of books in large-print, audio books, digital braille and braille music.
In April 2021, ABC launched an additional application that allows individuals who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled to have direct access to search and download books in accessible formats from the ABC Global Book Service. This new application is offered to Authorized Entities located in countries that have ratified and implemented the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty.
List of authorized entities that have joined the ABC Global Book Service
Training and Technical Assistance
The Accessible Books Consortium provides training and technical assistance to organizations in developing and least developed countries on the production of accessible format books. According to the ABC: "the ABC model for capacity building aims to equip organizations in developing and least developed countries with the ability to produce educational materials in national languages to be used by primary, secondary and university students who are print disabled." This allows participating organizations to convert textbooks into accessible formats, such as DAISY, ePUB3, and digital braille. Such assistance has been provided to organizations including in Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Tunisia.
In February 2021, ABC launched an online course providing similar training on the production of books in accessible formats, in part to 'ensure the continuation of its assistance programs during the COVID-19 pandemic'''.
Accessible publishing
The Accessible Books Consortium encourages the production of accessible eBooks through the use of the accessibility features of the EPUB3 standard.
ABC International Excellence Award for Accessible Publishing
List of winners:
ABC Charter for Accessible Publishing Signatories
The Accessible Books Consortium Charter for Accessible Publishing contains eight principles designed to encourage publishers are following accessibility best practices. The Accessible Books Consortium partners include
Accessible Books Consortium advisory board members
The ABC has an advisory board which provides technical expertise, transparency and communication with stakeholders. Its members are:
African Union for the Blind
Blind Citizens of New Zealand
DAISY Consortium
Dedicon
eBound Canada
Government of Australia
International Authors Forum (IAF)
International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO)
International Publishers Association (IPA)
Manual Moderno
Sao Mai Vocational and Assistive Technology Center for the Blind
World Blind Union (WBU)
World Intellectual Property Organization
References
External links
Accessible Books Consortium official website
World Intellectual Property Organization
Accessibility
Book promotion
Consortia
2014 establishments in Switzerland
Accessible information | Accessible Books Consortium | [
"Engineering"
] | 1,018 | [
"Accessibility",
"Design"
] |
68,692,311 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioserenity | BioSerenity is a medtech company created in 2014 that develops ambulatory medical devices to help diagnose and monitor patients with chronic diseases such as epilepsy. The medical devices are composed of medical sensors, smart clothing, a smartphone app for Patient Reported Outcome, and a web platform to perform data analysis through Medical Artificial Intelligence for detection of digital biomarkers. The company initially focused on Neurology, a domain in which it reported contributing to the diagnosis of 30 000 patients per year. It now also operates in Sleep Disorders and Cardiology. BioSerenity reported it provides pharmaceutical companies with solutions for companion diagnostics.
Company history
BioSerenity was founded in 2014, by Pierre-Yves Frouin. The company was initially hosted at the ICM Institute (Institute du Cerveau et de la Moëlle épinière), in Paris, France.
Fund Raising
June 8, 2015 : The company raises a $4 million seed round with Kurma Partners and IdInvest Partners
September 20, 2017 : The company raises a $17 million series A round with LBO France, IdInvest Partners and BPI France
June 18, 2019 : The company raises a $70 million series B round with Dassault Systèmes, IdInvest Partners, LBO France et BPI France
November 13, 2023 : The company raises a 24M€ series C round with Jolt Capital
Acquisitions
In 2019, BioSerenity announced the acquisition of the American Company SleepMed and working with over 200 Hospitals.
In 2020, BioSerenity was one of the five French manufacturers (Savoy, BB Distrib, Celluloses de Brocéliande, Chargeurs) working on the production of sanitary equipment including FFP2 masks at request of the French government.
In 2021, the Neuronaute would be used by approximately 30,000 patients per year.
Awards
BioSerenity is one of the Disrupt 100
BioSerenity joined the Next40
BioSerenity was selected by Microsoft and AstraZeneca in their initiative AI Factory for Health
BioSerenity accelerated at Stanford's University StartX program
References
External links
FDA Clearance Neuronaute
FDA Clearance Cardioskin
FDA Clearance Accusom
Healthcare companies of France
Machine learning
Health care companies established in 2014
French companies established in 2014 | Bioserenity | [
"Engineering"
] | 467 | [
"Artificial intelligence engineering",
"Machine learning"
] |
68,692,478 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon%20dibromide | Xenon dibromide is an unstable chemical compound with the chemical formula XeBr2. It was only produced by the decomposition of iodine-129:
129IBr2– → XeBr2 + e–
Attempts to prepare this compound by combining elemental xenon and bromine only resulted in the XeBr radical. This compound is expected to be less stable than xenon difluoride and xenon dichloride. It is also expected to decompose to xenon and bromine.
References
Xenon(II) compounds
Bromides | Xenon dibromide | [
"Chemistry"
] | 123 | [
"Bromides",
"Salts"
] |
68,692,916 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptopharmacophagy | Kleptopharmacophagy is a term used for describing the ecological relationship between two different organisms, where the first is stealing the second's chemical compounds and consuming them. This scientific term was proposed by Australian, Singaporean, and American biologists in September 2021 in an article that was published in the journal Ecology by the Ecological Society of America. The phenomenon was first noticed in milkweed butterflies that were attacking caterpillars and drinking their internal liquid, proposedly to obtain toxic alkaloids used for defense, as well as for mating purposes.
Characteristics
Kleptopharmacophagy is a generic term and a scientific neologism, that is used to describe the phenomenon of chemical theft between living organisms. This special type of behavior is something new for researchers, as it does not match the traditional descriptions of biological interaction. Kleptopharmacophagy cannot be defined simply with a use of classical ecological relationships and their descriptions, such as predation, parasitism and mutualism. Besides being an interspecific interaction, kleptopharmacophagy can also be seen as a cannibalizing act (hence an intraspecific act), with adults attacking larvae of their own species.
In butterflies
Kleptopharmacophagy has only been reported for butterflies in the subfamily Danainae, more commonly known as the milkweed butterflies. The phenomenon was first described in butterflies that were observed scratching and feeding on live larvae of other milkweed butterflies. The initial discovery was made in year 2019 in forests of North Sulawesi, in Indonesia, when two researchers noticed that milkweed butterflies of different species, well-known for their toxicity and bright warning colours (aposematism), were interacting with the larval stages of other butterflies. The adult insects were attacking and harassing the caterpillars by scratching at them with tarsal claws on their legs. The butterflies then imbibed the juices from the wounded caterpillars with their long and curved proboscis. Caterpillars that were targeted appeared to range from living to dead and dying individuals. Live caterpillars were observed to contort their bodies in an attempt to deter scratching, but usually succumbed to the repeat harassment.
There is also one recorded example of kleptopharmachophagy occurring between two adult butterflies; a male Ideopsis vitrea vitrea was feeding on a liquid, oozing from the wings of the male I. blanchardii blanchardii.
Role
It is thought that such chemical theft serves at least two roles. By feeding on toxic caterpillars, the adult butterflies acquire additional toxins, which serve as a protection against predation. The stolen toxins, mostly pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), are also of great importance for male butterflies, which use those compounds for producing mating pheromones. Additionally such chemicals are components of so-called nuptial gifts, consisting of male sperm and some nutrients, that are given from males to females during mating. Significance of the alkaloid use for male butterflies can be demonstrated through observation of male danaine butterflies congregating in large numbers at alkaloid producing plants, where they spend hours fervently scratching and liberating plant juices.
Similar behaviour
Milkweed butterflies have also been previously seen feasting on some moribund pyrgormorphid grasshoppers, that are known to contain toxic alkaloids, as well as obtaining desired chemicals from carcasses of dead insects of different taxa. Note that in this case, the term necropharmacophagy may be more appropriate, since butterflies feed on the dead animals.
Similar behavior was observed with adult butterflies scratching leaves of different plants that possess various toxins in their vegetative organs (so-called leaf-scratching). Adult male danaine butterflies use their sharp tarsal claws to scratch and damage leaves of plants that contain high levels of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, thereby liberating the juices for consumption. Since kleptopharmacophagy was recorded and described only a few times, it is thought that obtaining such chemicals by feeding on plants with alkaloids is a common and more frequent way of stocking toxins. Kleptopharmacophagy is proposed to be an alternative way of acquiring these chemicals.
References
Bibliography
Animal cannibalism
Eating behaviors
Butterflies
2021 in biology | Kleptopharmacophagy | [
"Biology"
] | 918 | [
"Animal cannibalism",
"Behavior",
"Ethology",
"Biological interactions",
"Eating behaviors"
] |
68,693,671 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WR%20138a | WR 138a is a Wolf-Rayet star in the constellation Cygnus. It is of a very late spectral type of WN9h. The WR is also at the centre of a ring nebula (typical of WRs) and is a runaway.
Position and Discovery
WR 138a was first identified as a star with H-Alpha emission in 1997. Its Wolf-Rayet nature was discovered in 2009, along with its physical parameters. Although WR 138a is located in the Cygnus X complex from our viewpoint, in actually it is further away (4,200 pc compared to ~1,800 pc) and unrelated to the complex.
The star is also very reddenned, and in the visible wavelength, it is reddenned by 7.4 magnitudes. It is also a runaway star, with a peculiar velocity of 50 km/sec−1, and is located about 230 pc above the galactic plane.
Nebula
WR 138a has a ring nebula around it, which measures 2.3 arcminutes across, and in reality measures about 1.4 pc across. WR 138a is offset from the centre of the nebula by around 0.2 arcminutes.
Properties
WR 138a is a relatively dim WNL star. Modelling WR 138a's spectrum with PoWR gives a luminosity of around 200,000 L☉ and a temperature of approximately 40,000 K. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann Law the star's radius can be calculated, which turns out at approximately 9.4 R☉. WR 138a has a very strong stellar wind, typical of Wolf-Rayet stars, and it loses 10-4.7 M☉ (about ) per year because of this stellar wind, which has a terminal velocity of about 700 kilometres per second. Therefore, the star loses around 1 solar mass every 50,000 years.
Evolution
WR 138a has a current mass of about 13 M☉, and probably evolved from a star with an initial mass of about 30 M☉, and is about 6.7 million years old. The small size and nearly circular shape of the nebula around WR 138a imply that the stellar wind interacts with the dense ambient medium comoving with the star, which is what shapes the nebula. This consideration suggests that the immediate precursor of WR 138a was a red supergiant (i.e. the star's initial mass is below 40 M☉) and that the WR wind still propagates and ploughs through the high-density region around the star, which is occupied by material shed by the star during its RSG phase.
According to evolution models, stars with initial masses of 25 to 40 M☉ have lifecycles of O → RSG → WN, and the evolution of WR 138a is consistent with the models. Considering average cumulative RSG mass loss values, and velocities, a dynamical age of WR 138a's nebula can be obtained, which turns out at 14,000 years old, which suggests that WR 138a only recently entered the WR phase.
References
Wolf–Rayet stars
Runaway stars
Cygnus (constellation) | WR 138a | [
"Astronomy"
] | 641 | [
"Cygnus (constellation)",
"Constellations"
] |
68,693,806 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimonoecy | Trimonoecy, also called polygamomonoecy, is when male, female, and hermaphrodite flowers are on the same plant. Trimonoecy is rare.
It is a monomorphic sexual system along with monoecy, gynomonoecy, and andromonoecy. It is hypothesized that trimonoecy originated from gynomonoecy.
Occurrence
Trimonoecy occurs in plant families like Anacardiaceae, Apiaceae, Araliaceae, Chenopodiaceae, Fabaceae, Orchidaceae, Palmae, and more. It is rare in the family Commelinaceae.
Trimonoecious species include:
Cocos nucifera
Sanguisorba minor
Thymelaea hirsuta
There is evidence Phyllanthus acidus is trimonoecious.
References
Plant reproductive system
Sexual system | Trimonoecy | [
"Biology"
] | 184 | [
"Sexual system",
"Sex"
] |
67,275,493 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigloidine | Tigloidine is a tropane alkaloid that naturally occurs as a minor constituent of a number of solanaceous plants, including Duboisia myoporoides, Physalis peruviana, and Mandragora turcomanica.
It was formerly marketed as an antiparkinsonian drug under the trade name Tropigline.
References
Tropane alkaloids
Antiparkinsonian agents | Tigloidine | [
"Chemistry"
] | 89 | [
"Alkaloids by chemical classification",
"Tropane alkaloids"
] |
67,275,893 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallmarks%20of%20aging | Aging is characterized by a progressive loss of physiological integrity, leading to impaired function and increased vulnerability to death. The hallmarks of aging are the types of biochemical changes that occur in all organisms that experience biological aging and lead to a progressive loss of physiological integrity, impaired function and, eventually, death. They were first listed in a landmark paper in 2013 to conceptualize the essence of biological aging and its underlying mechanisms.
The following three premises for the interconnected hallmarks have been proposed:
"their age-associated manifestation"
"the acceleration of aging by experimentally accentuating them"
"the opportunity to decelerate, stop, or reverse aging by therapeutic interventions on them"
Overview
Over time, almost all living organisms experience a gradual and irreversible increase in senescence and an associated loss of proper function of the bodily systems. As aging is the primary risk factor for major human diseases, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases, it is important to describe and classify the types of changes that it entails.
After a decade, the authors of the heavily cited original paper updated the set of proposed hallmarks in January 2023. In the new review, three new hallmarks have been added: macroautophagy, chronic inflammation and dysbiosis, totaling 12 proposed hallmarks.
The nine hallmarks of aging of the original paper are grouped into three categories as below:
Primary hallmarks (causes of damage)
Genome instability
Telomere shortening (or telomere attrition)
Epigenetic alterations
Loss of proteostasis
macroautophagy
Antagonistic hallmarks (responses to damage)
Deregulated nutrient sensing
Mitochondrial dysfunction
Cellular senescence
Integrative hallmarks (culprits of the phenotype)
Stem cell exhaustion
Altered intercellular communication
chronic inflammation
dysbiosis
Primary hallmarks are the primary causes of cellular damage. Antagonistic hallmarks are antagonistic or compensatory responses to the manifestation of the primary hallmarks. Integrative hallmarks are the functional result of the previous two groups of hallmarks that lead to further operational deterioration associated with aging.
There are also proposed further hallmarks or underlying mechanisms that drive multiple of these hallmarks.
The hallmarks
Each hallmark was chosen to try to fulfill the following criteria:
manifests during normal aging;
experimentally increasing it accelerates aging;
experimentally amending it slows the normal aging process and increases healthy lifespan.
These conditions are met to different extents by each of these hallmarks. The last criterion is not present in many of the hallmarks, as science has not yet found feasible ways to amend these problems in living organisms.
Genome instability
Proper functioning of the genome is one of the most important prerequisites for the smooth functioning of a cell and the organism as a whole. Alterations in the genetic code have long been considered one of the main causal factors in aging. In multicellular organisms genome instability is central to carcinogenesis, and in humans it is also a factor in some neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or the neuromuscular disease myotonic dystrophy.
Abnormal chemical structures in the DNA are formed mainly through oxidative stress and environmental factors. A number of molecular processes work continuously to repair this damage. Unfortunately, the results are not perfect, and thus damage accumulates over time. Several review articles have shown that deficient DNA repair, allowing greater accumulation of DNA damages, causes premature aging; and that increased DNA repair facilitates greater longevity.
Telomere shortening
Telomeres are regions of repetitive nucleotide sequences associated with specialized proteins at the ends of linear chromosomes. They protect the terminal regions of chromosomal DNA from progressive degradation and ensure the integrity of linear chromosomes by preventing DNA repair systems from mistaking the ends of the DNA strand for a double strand break.
Telomere shortening is associated with aging, mortality and aging-related diseases. Normal aging is associated with telomere shortening in both humans and mice, and studies on genetically modified animal models suggest causal links between telomere erosion and aging. Leonard Hayflick demonstrated that a normal human fetal cell population will divide between 40 and 60 times in cell culture before entering a senescence phase. Each time a cell undergoes mitosis, the telomeres on the ends of each chromosome shorten slightly. Cell division will cease once telomeres shorten to a critical length. This is useful when uncontrolled cell proliferation (like in cancer) needs to be stopped, but detrimental when normally functioning cells are unable to divide when necessary.
An enzyme called telomerase elongates telomeres in gametes and stem cells. Telomerase deficiency in humans has been linked to several aging-related diseases related to loss of regenerative capacity of tissues. It has also been shown that premature aging in telomerase-deficient mice is reverted when telomerase is reactivated. The shelterin protein complex regulates telomerase activity in addition to protecting telomeres from DNA repair in eukaryotes.
Epigenomic alterations
Out of all the genes that make up a genome, only a subset are expressed at any given time. The functioning of a genome depends both on the specific order of its nucleotides (genomic factors), and also on which sections of the DNA chain are spooled on histones and thus rendered inaccessible, and which ones are unspooled and available for transcription (epigenomic factors). Depending on the needs of the specific tissue type and environment that a given cell is in, histones can be modified to turn specific genes on or off as needed. The profile of where, when and to what extent these modifications occur (the epigenetic profile) changes with aging, turning useful genes off and unnecessary ones on, disrupting the normal functioning of the cell.
As an example, sirtuins are a type of protein deacetylases that promote the binding of DNA onto histones and thus turn unnecessary genes off. These enzymes use NAD as a cofactor. With aging, the level of NAD in cells decreases and so does the ability of sirtuins to turn off unneeded genes at the right time. Decreasing the activity of sirtuins has been associated with accelerated aging and increasing their activity has been shown to stave off several age-related diseases.
Loss of proteostasis
Proteostasis is the homeostatic process of maintaining all the proteins necessary for the functioning of the cell in their proper shape, structure and abundance. Protein misfolding, oxidation, abnormal cleavage or undesired post-translational modification can create dysfunctional or even toxic proteins or protein aggregates that hinder the normal functioning of the cell. Though these proteins are continually removed and recycled, formation of damaged or aggregated proteins increases with age, leading to a gradual loss of proteostasis. This can be slowed or suppressed by caloric restriction or by administration of rapamycin, both through inhibiting the mTOR pathway.
Deregulated nutrient sensing
Nutrient sensing is a cell's ability to recognize, and respond to, changes in the concentration of macronutrients such as glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. In times of abundance, anabolism is induced through various pathways, the most well-studied among them the mTOR pathway. When energy and nutrients are scarce, the AMPK receptor senses this and switches off mTOR to conserve resources.
In a growing organism, growth and cell proliferation are important and thus mTOR is upregulated. In a fully grown organism, mTOR-activating signals naturally decline during aging. It has been found that forcibly overactivating these pathways in grown mice leads to accelerated aging and increased incidence of cancer. mTOR inhibition methods like dietary restriction or administering rapamycin have been shown to be one of the most robust methods of increasing lifespan in worms, flies and mice.
Mitochondrial dysfunction
The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell. Different human cells contain from several up to 2500 mitochondria, each one converting carbon (in the form of acetyl-CoA) and oxygen into energy (in the form of ATP) and carbon dioxide.
During aging, the efficiency of mitochondria tends to decrease. The reasons for this are still quite unclear, but several mechanisms are suspected: reduced biogenesis, accumulation of damage and mutations in mitochondrial DNA, oxidation of mitochondrial proteins, and defective quality control by mitophagy.
Dysfunctional mitochondria contribute to aging through interfering with intracellular signaling and triggering inflammatory reactions.
Cellular senescence
Under certain conditions, a cell will exit the cell cycle without dying, instead becoming dormant and ceasing its normal function. This is called cellular senescence. Senescence can be induced by several factors, including telomere shortening, DNA damage and stress. Since the immune system is programmed to seek out and eliminate senescent cells, it might be that senescence is one way for the body to rid itself of cells damaged beyond repair.
The links between cell senescence and aging are several:
The proportion of senescent cells increases with age.
Senescent cells secrete inflammatory markers which may contribute to aging.
Clearance of senescent cells has been found to delay the onset of age-related disorders.
Stem cell exhaustion
Stem cells are undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells with the unique ability to self-renew and differentiate into specialized cell types. For the first few days after fertilization, the embryo consists almost entirely of stem cells. As the fetus grows, the cells multiply, differentiate and assume their appropriate function within the organism. In adults, stem cells are mostly located in areas that undergo gradual wear (intestine, lung, mucosa, skin) or need continuous replenishment (red blood cells, immune cells, sperm cells, hair follicles).
Loss of regenerative ability is one of the most obvious consequences of aging. This is largely because the proportion of stem cells and the speed of their division gradually lowers over time. It has been found that stem cell rejuvenation can reverse some of the effects of aging at the organismal level.
Altered intercellular communication
Different tissues and the cells they consist of need to orchestrate their work in a tightly controlled manner so that the organism as a whole can function. One of the main ways this is achieved is through excreting signal molecules into the blood where they make their way to other tissues, affecting their behavior. The profile of these molecules changes as we age.
One of the most prominent changes in cell signaling biomarkers is "inflammaging", the development of a chronic low-grade inflammation throughout the body with advanced age. The normal role of inflammation is to recruit the body's immune system and repair mechanisms to a specific damaged area for as long as the damage and threat are present. The constant presence of inflammation markers throughout the body wears out the immune system and damages healthy tissue.
It's also been found that senescent cells excrete a specific set of molecules called the SASP (Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype) which induce senescence in neighboring cells. Conversely, lifespan-extending manipulations targeting one tissue can slow the aging process in other tissues as well.
Further hallmarks
These may constitute further hallmarks or underlying mechanisms that drive multiple of these hallmarks.
Resurrection of endogenous retroviruses could be "a hallmark and driving force of cellular senescence and tissue aging" as retroviruses in the human genomes can become awakened from dormant states and contribute to aging which can be blocked by neutralizing antibodies.
Alternative conceptual models
In 2014, other scientists have defined a slightly different conceptual model for aging, called 'The Seven Pillars of Aging', in which just three of the 'hallmarks of aging' are included (stem cells and regeneration, proteostasis, epigenetics). The seven pillars model highlights the interconnectedness between all of the seven pillars which is not highlighted in the nine hallmarks of aging model.
Links to other diseases or hallmarks
Authors of the original paper merged or linked various hallmarks of cancer with those of aging.
The authors also concluded that the hallmarks are not only interconnected among each other but also "to the recently proposed hallmarks of health, which include organizational features of spatial compartmentalization, maintenance of homeostasis, and adequate responses to stress".
See also
References
Ageing
Senescence | Hallmarks of aging | [
"Chemistry",
"Biology"
] | 2,549 | [
"Senescence",
"Metabolism",
"Cellular processes"
] |
67,275,956 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC%203900 | NGC 3900 is a lenticular galaxy located in the Leo constellation. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1785. It is estimated to be about 95 to 100 light-years away from Earth.
References
External links
Leo (constellation)
3900
Unbarred lenticular galaxies | NGC 3900 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 57 | [
"Leo (constellation)",
"Constellations"
] |
67,278,659 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK%20Elevator%20MULTI | MULTI is the first cable-less elevator developed by TK Elevator (formerly ThyssenKrupp Elevator). Rather than using cables to lift the elevator, MULTI uses linear motors. As well as moving vertically between floors of a building, MULTI can also move horizontally through a floor of a building. MULTI is being tested at Rottweil Test Tower.
History
The system was installed inside a test tower in 2017. As of 2024, there are no installations outside of testing sites.
References
ThyssenKrupp
Elevators | TK Elevator MULTI | [
"Engineering"
] | 107 | [
"Building engineering",
"Elevators"
] |
67,279,229 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan%20Hongwei | Fan Hongwei (; born February 1967) is a Chinese entrepreneur and billionaire who is the chair and CEO of the chemical fiber company Hengli Petrochemical (恒力石化) and vice chair of its holding company Hengli Group (恒力集团). She was the fourth richest woman in China in 2019.
Early life and education
Fan was born in February 1967 in Jiangsu Province, China. She attended Nanjing Normal University.
Career
Fan started her career as an accountant.
In 1994, Fan and her husband Chen Jianhua (陈建华) took out a 3 million RMB loan to buy Wujiang Chemical Fibre Textile Factory (吴江化纤织造厂), a failing textile factory in Wujiang, Suzhou. Fan took over the factory as general manager, and she and Chen restructured the company and grew it from a factory with 27 employees into the largest fiber producer in China and one of the largest weaving companies in the world.
The company is now known as Hengli Group, and its main unit is Hengli Petrochemical. According to the company, Hengli Petrochemical became publicly traded through a backdoor listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2016. In 2019, Hengli Group earned more than 500 billion RMB in revenue. Its activities include refining petroleum to produce polyester, manufacturing chemical fibers, and real estate. It mainly serves the apparel industry, but also produces chips and filaments for packaging, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. It has factories in Nantong, Suqian, and Suzhou.
Fan owns a 45% stake in Hengli Petrochemical. In 2020, Forbes estimated her and her family's net worth at US$6 billion. As of 2021, her net worth is estimated at US$23 billion.
Recognition
In 2020 she was included on Forbes list of the 50 top CEOs in China and on Fortune list of the 50 most influential business leaders in China. The same year, she was ranked sixth on Hurun list of the world's richest self-made women, with an estimated net worth of 53 billion RMB.
In 2021, Forbes listed her as one of China's 20 top businesswomen.
China Daily has listed her as one of the ten richest women in China three times: she was ranked fifth in 2018, fourth in 2019, and seventh in 2020.
Personal life
Fan's husband Chen Jianhua (陈建华) is also a billionaire. He is the chair and director of Hengli Group. Their daughter Chen Yiting (陈逸婷), born in 1993, is a director of Tongli Lake Travel (同里旅游), a subsidiary of Hengli Group.
Fan lives in Suzhou.
See also
List of female billionaires
Petrochemical industry
References
External links
Hengli Group
Hengli Petrochemical (in Chinese)
Living people
Billionaires from Jiangsu
Chinese chief executives
Chinese women chief executives
Female billionaires
Petrochemical industry
20th-century Chinese businesswomen
20th-century Chinese businesspeople
21st-century Chinese businesswomen
21st-century Chinese businesspeople
People from Jiangsu
Nanjing Normal University alumni
1967 births | Fan Hongwei | [
"Chemistry"
] | 633 | [
"Petrochemical industry"
] |
67,279,554 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize%20white%20line%20mosaic%20satellite%20virus | Maize white line mosaic satellite virus (syn. Satellite maize white line mosaic virus, Satellite virus of maize white line mosaic virus, SMWLMV, SV-MWLMV) is a plant satellite virus. It is the only species in genus Aumaivirus, which is a member of realm Riboviria without assigned family or order. It only infects maize which is infected by Maize white line mosaic virus (MWLMV) of genus Aureusvirus.
Etymology
The genus name, Aumaivirus, is a combination of Aureusvirus (the name of the helper virus) and maize, the host plant of the only species of the genus.
Virology
SMWLMV has a genome consisting of linear single-stranded RNA of positive polarity. It has a length of 1,168 nucleotides and consists of a single gene that encodes a capsid protein (CP). It neither has a poly(A) tail nor a cap structure.
As in satellite tobacco necrosis virus (STNV), the SMWLMV virion is 17 nm in diameter, but the capsid protein has limited sequence homology with the corresponding proteins of STNV viruses.
See also
List of subviral agents
References
External links
Family Groups—The Baltimore Method
Mart Krupovic: Plant Satellite Viruses (Albetovirus, Aumaivirus, Papanivirus, Virtovirus) (PDF). In: Reference Module in Life Sciences. Jan 2020. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-809633-8.21289-2. ResearchGate.
SIB: Aumaivirus. Expasy ViralZone
Viral plant pathogens and diseases
Satellite viruses
Positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses | Maize white line mosaic satellite virus | [
"Biology"
] | 369 | [
"Viruses",
"Satellite viruses"
] |
67,279,729 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albetovirus | Albetovirus is a plant satellite virus genus. As a member of realm Riboviria without assigned family or order it contains just three species, Tobacco albetovirus 1, 2, and 3 (alias Satellite tobacco necrosis virus 1, 2, respectively C). The three virus species included in this genus represent satellite viruses that depend for their replication on helper viruses of the genera Alphanecrovirus or Betanecrovirus (prior to 2011 together referred to as Necrovirus, family Tombusviridae)
These satellite viruses may not be confused with Satellite tobacco mosaic virus, which is also known as Satellite tobacco necrosis virus (just that), member of genus Virtovirus.
Etymology
The genus name, Albetovirus, is a combination of Al, for Alphanecrovirus, be, for Betanecrovirus, and to for tobacco..
Virology
Viruses of genus Albetovirus have a genome consisting of linear single-stranded RNA of positive polarity, similar in size (1221 to 1245 nucleotides long), which has a single gene. This codes for a single protein which is the capsid protein. The virions are non-enveloped, paraspherical in shape with icosahedral symmetry and 17 nm in diameter.
References
External links
Family Groups—The Baltimore Method
Mart Krupovic: Plant Satellite Viruses (Albetovirus, Aumaivirus, Papanivirus, Virtovirus) (PDF). In: Reference Module in Life Sciences. Jan 2020. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-809633-8.21289-2. ResearchGate.
SIB: Albetovirus. Expasy ViralZone
Viral plant pathogens and diseases
Satellite viruses
Positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses
Virus genera | Albetovirus | [
"Biology"
] | 385 | [
"Viruses",
"Satellite viruses"
] |
67,280,250 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali%20Akbar%20Moosavi-Movahedi | Ali Akbar Moosavi-Movahedi (; born February 1953) is an Iranian biophysicist, and biophysical chemist at the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Tehran. He is the founder of the Iran Society of Biophysical Chemistry. He is the fellow of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), fellow of Islamic World Academy of Sciences (IAS), and a member of the Islamic Republic of Iran Academy of Sciences.
Education and early life
Ali Akbar Moosavi-Movahedi was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1953. He attended Alborz High School in 1968, graduated from the National University of Iran (now known as Shahid Beheshti University) with a BSc in chemistry in 1975, earned his MSc in Bioanalytical Chemistry at the Eastern Michigan University in 1979, and obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry at the University of Manchester in 1986.
Professional experience
Ali Akbar Moosavi-Movahedi's research career has been mostly marked on thermodynamics of protein denaturation especially by surfactants, protein folding/unfolding, protein glycation, biophysics of molecular diabetes, amyloid and protein aggregation and fibrillation, bioactive peptides, nutraceuticals, functional foods and artificial enzyme. He has been selected as the chair of UNESCO Chair on Interdisciplinary Research in Diabetes, University of Tehran which is mostly oriented in the area of oxidative stress and diabetes complications.
He has established a highly equipped BCL laboratory for collaborations and working with different international research groups.
Ali A. Moosavi-Movahedi has been one of the pioneering scientists in establishing the first PhD programs in Biochemistry and Biophysics in Iran. He has initiated a few science and technology institutional foundations in Iran. His publications include 20 books and numerous full research papers published mostly in international research journals, mainly around structural elucidation of proteins, enzymes, and DNA strands. He is the chair of Center of Excellence in Biothermodynamics and national committee member of the International Science Council (ISC) (previous name: ICSU) at University of Tehran.
He is a member of a few national and international scientific societies and is currently the president of Iran Society of Biophysical Chemistry(ISOBC). Several awards are given to researchers by the society such as ISOBC Global Science Contribution for senior highly cited distinguished scientists, ISOBC for talented young (under 35 year) researcher, Moosavi-Movahedi Award for young (under 40 years) eminent PhD that confer to scientists in Annual ISOBC Congress. ISOBC is a member of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) and the European Biophysical Societies' Association (EBSA).
He is the founding member of the Federation of Iran Bioscience Societies (FIrBS), Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN), Biochemical Society of Iran, Iranian Biology Society.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of a journal named "Science Cultivation," which publishes aimed popularization of science, policy research in science and technology, promotion of science, assisting managers and policymakers in scientific centers, steering the direction of research for scientific elites and innovators in science and technology. This Journal attempts to create the necessary context for cultivating and fertilizing new areas of sciences through monitoring, culture building, and scientific capacity building.
He supports organizing National, Regional, and International conferences in the field of Biophysical Chemistry, biothermodynamics, Biomolecular Sciences and also in the area of enculturing science and technology advancements.
He has published a new international book entitled "Rationality and Scientific Lifestyle for Health" Springer 2021.
Awards and honors
Khwarizmi International Award,
Distinguished National Professor, 1997,
The first-class Research Medal, University of Tehran, 2003,
National Eminent Character 2003,
First-rank basic science research medal in Annual Razi Medical Sciences Research Festival 2005,
Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame, 2005
Top Researcher Elsevier-Scopus International Award in the field of Biochemistry, Genetics & Molecular Biology, 2007,
First Rank Avicenna Festival Award as Top Researcher 2008,
Member of Academy of Sciences of Iran, 2009,
National eminent researcher first- rank award conferred in National Research Festival by Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran, 2009,
Chosen as Eminent Professor of University of Tehran 2010,
distinguished Professor appointed by Iran's National Elites Foundation 2012,
Essential Science Indicators (ESI) 1% citation scientist in the field of Biology and Biochemistry since 2013,
TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences) Fellow 2015,
IAS (The Islamic Academy of Sciences) Fellow 2016
COMSTECH Award for Lifetime Achievement Award in Chemistry 2021
References
Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame recipients
People from Shiraz
Academic staff of the University of Tehran
Iranian chemists
Iranian biophysicists
Protein structure
Thermodynamics
1953 births
Living people
Fellows of the Islamic World Academy of Sciences | Ali Akbar Moosavi-Movahedi | [
"Physics",
"Chemistry",
"Mathematics"
] | 1,025 | [
"Protein structure",
"Thermodynamics",
"Structural biology",
"Dynamical systems"
] |
67,281,928 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine%20storage | Vaccine storage relates to the proper vaccine storage and handling practices from their manufacture to the administration in people. The general standard is the 2–8 °C cold chain for vaccine storage and transportation. This is used for all current US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-licensed human vaccines and in low and middle-income countries. Exceptions include some vaccines for smallpox, chickenpox, shingles and one of the measles, mumps, and rubella II vaccines, which are transported between −25 °C and −15 °C. Some vaccines, such as the COVID-19 vaccine, require a cooler temperature between −80 °C and −60 °C for storage.
In 1996, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to spread vaccines worldwide. This urges researchers to design storage for vaccines without losing its potency. Since then, the production of vaccines has spiked, and various kinds of vaccines have their handling practices. WHO has set standards to ensure cold chain and has different types of storage, including refrigerators, freezers, cold boxes, and vaccine carriers. Different types of thermometers are also used because a slight temperature change could result in loss of potency. The storage are necessary to improve vaccine shelf life and transport vaccine worldwide.
History
Vaccine storage was first developed in the early 1960s, when the infectious smallpox disease outbreaks. During this time, vaccine technology was available and offered for protection. Since smallpox has been one of the deadliest diseases known, the World Health Organization (WHO) prepared to launch a campaign to spread the vaccines and end smallpox in 1966. It was not until 1974 where WHO first introduced the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI). The main goal was to make immunization available to every child worldwide by 1990. Immunization of six illnesses was being transported, including tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, and polio. Dr. Rafe Henderson, the first director of EPI, designed a plan to deliver temperature-sensitive vaccines across dozens of countries safely. It was an important step to ensure that the vaccines were maintained in their determined conditions and guides towards the development of the cold chain. The WHO supported countries worldwide to ensure the vaccine cold chain is maintained.
The cold chain has been implemented for years. After EPI was initiated, over 700,000 measles deaths were prevented, and millions of the target diseases have been prevented. There has been a huge milestone in the vaccine industry as scientists create more vaccines for new types of diseases. Therefore, it has a direct impact on the cost of transportation and different kinds of refrigerator storage either at +2° to +8 °C or +20° to +25 °C. This urge EPI to create a strategy to encompasses both vaccines and medicines to be able to sustain their components without the need of storage. The term 'cold chain' has now been replaced with 'supply chain'. The current system of vaccine cold chain still continues for delivering particular vaccines. WHO has made improvements by introducing the "controlled temperature chain" (CTC), which is an innovative approach allowing the vaccine to be taken out of the cold chain for a limited period of time, but CTC is still in the development process and will not be available for all vaccines for many years. Nowadays, engineers is still thinking of a way to eliminate refrigeration at +2 to +8C from the entire supply chain for all vaccines. With the initiatives of reducing temperature sensitivity of vaccines and regulation permits, it could eliminate the need for refrigeration in the supply chain. It will be suitable for an undeveloped country as less handling of vaccines needs to be done.
Recommended storage temperature
The cold chain has been one of the most reliable supply chains for transporting vaccines around the globe. Since vaccines are sensitive biological products, proper storage and handling of vaccines are important to ensure the potency of vaccines is not lost. Vaccines must be continuously monitored as each has different reactivity to low temperature, high temperature, and light.
The majority of vaccines required storage temperature of +35° to +46 °F (+2° to +8 °C) and must not be exposed to freezing temperature. Temperature too cold can result in an irreversible reaction that reduces vaccines potency and loss in adjuvant effect. Certain vaccines contain adjuvants (aluminum) that will precipitate when exposed to freezing temperatures. Temperature too hot could also result in wanted viruses permanently degrading and losing potency. However, the effects are usually smaller, gradual, and predictable than from freezing temperatures. Visible signs of physical changes after exposure to undesirable temperature are not necessary to result in a decrease of vaccine potency.
Vaccine storage and handling requirements
Health facilities use storage called purpose-built units (also referred to pharmaceutical-grade units). These refrigerators or freezers are specifically designed for the storage of biologics, including vaccines. These units differ from standard household-grade units since it has microprocessor-based temperature control with a digital temperature sensor (thermistor, thermocouple, or resistance temperature detector), and fan-forced air circulation to promote uniform temperature around the unit. These storage are usually a stand-alone refrigerator or freezers because they perform better at keeping the temperature constant.
A Household-grade refrigerator can also be an acceptable alternative to purpose-built units. However, the freezer compartment of this type is not recommended to store vaccines, and vaccines should be stored centrally inside the refrigerator. Many combination units cool the refrigerator using air from the freezer, resulting in different temperature zones inside the fridge. Placing vaccines near the cold air output from the freezer could cause too low temperature, and placing it at the very bottom could cause too high temperature. It is important not to place vaccines near the storage unit doors because it affects the temperature and exposes vaccines to light, reducing potency for some vaccines.
Types of vaccine storage
WHO has set standards to ensure the cold chain types of equipment can sustain different vaccines in health facilities.
Refrigerators
Refrigerators are the most common type of storage in health facilities as they can hold many vaccines in one single unit. This storage will help temperature-sensitive vaccines to withstand their components, and the surrounding area will always remain between +2° and +8 °C. In developed countries, electric refrigerators (compression units) are wildly used as there is an electricity supply for at least 8 hours per day. If the country doesn't have sufficient electricity, the solar energy refrigerator (photovoltaic units) or bottled gas/kerosene (absorption units) is also reliable. It is important to keep the desired temperature in any of the models in any circumstances and should not be changed.
Freezers
Freezers act the same way as refrigerators but for extreme temperatures. Its minimum temperature depends on the manufacture. Typically this storage is to store frozen vaccines and maintained temperature between -80 and -15C. Health facilities use purpose-built or pharmaceutical-grade units and vary in size.
Dippin' Dots, a manufacturer of frozen desserts, had previously created equipment to preserve its products. This equipment was subsequently utilized by developers of the COVID-19 vaccine for transportation and storage of the vaccine.
Cold boxes
Cold boxes are typically used to carry vaccines around the area. It is a self-supporting container with insulation and ice-packs surrounding the interior to keep vaccines at low temperatures. Unlike the refrigerator, the cold box has limited time to maintain temperatures below +10 °C, normally 48–96 hours. It comes in many different types and shapes, and this storage is very useful for the transportation of vaccines in or out of the health facility.
Vaccine carriers
Vaccine carriers are similar to cold boxes, but they are smaller and easier to carry around. This small carrier is also packed with ice packs to keep the vaccine at a low temperature. However, they do not stay cold for as long as cold boxes, at most 36–48 hours. It is generally used for transporting from a health facility to outreach sites.
Water packs
Water packs are flat and leak-proof plastic containers used in the interiors of cold boxes and vaccine carriers. These containers are set to the appropriate temperature depending on the type of vaccine being transported. The temperature could range from -10° to +24 °C and does not last that long before coming back to the same temperature as the surroundings.
Foam pads
Foam pads are used to cover the lid of cold boxes and vaccine carriers, protecting the vaccine vials from damage during transportation and external heat. It is just a soft sponge that ensures the vials stay in place and prolong the desired temperature inside the containers.
Temperature monitoring
Temperature plays a crucial part in maintaining the potency of vaccines. Although the risk of storage cooler malfunction is low, it is better to check than the need to replace vaccines wasted due to the loss of potency. Temperature monitoring needs to take place in both storage units and transport units. The refrigerator should maintain a temperature between 2° and 8 °C (36° and 46 °F). Freezers should maintain a temperature between -50° and -15 °C (-58° and +5 °F). Thermometers are useful to monitor the temperature by placing at the storage unit's central location, adjacent to the vaccines.
Every vaccine storage unit must have a temperature monitoring device. There are many different thermometers, including standard fluid-filled, min-max, and continuous temperature monitoring devices. Each type of thermometer has its advantages and disadvantage.
Health facilities use the digital data logger (DDL) as their temperature monitoring device. This continuous temperature monitoring device uses a buffered temperature probe, the most accurate way to measure actual vaccine temperature. The DDL also includes details on how long a unit has been operating outside the temperature range and record all temperatures at present intervals. Temperature probes are also designed to prevent false readings by protecting the thermometer from sudden temperature changes when opening a refrigerator door.
Applications
The breakthrough of vaccines has changed the health industry, and numerous vaccines are still being developed nowadays. Each type of vaccine has its standard to keep wanted components intact.
Due to the abundant number of vaccines, pharmaceutics combines two or more vaccines to save more time. These types of vaccines might change in storage temperature recommendation due to the additional stability of each vaccine.
See also
Vaccine
Medicine
Cold chain
Supply chain
Immunization
Refrigerators
Temperature
Thermometer
Vaccine cooler
References
Vaccines
Computer storage systems
Public health
Cooling technology | Vaccine storage | [
"Biology"
] | 2,127 | [
"Vaccination",
"Vaccines"
] |
67,281,948 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination%20in%20Mexico | Vaccination in Mexico includes the use of vaccines in advancing public health. Mexico has a multi-year program for immunization of children. The immunization of children is fully covered by the government of Mexico. Mexico has an adverse events committee to monitor the adverse effects of vaccination as well as a standing technical advisory group on immunization.
COVID-19 vaccination
In Mexico, 4% of individuals received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as of March 2021. Wealthy Mexicans were reported to travel to the neighboring United States for receiving their vaccinations. In March, the White House announced that four million doses of COVID-19 vaccines manufactured in the United States will be sent to Mexico.
In a survey conducted in March 2021, 52% of Mexicans said that they were willing to get vaccinated against COVID-19, 20% said they were not sure and 28% said they would not get vaccinated. As of early October, children's COVID-19 vaccination programs began, but only for those with medical conditions, yet when asked in an open survey, parents were highly interested in having their children vaccinated. Nonetheless, parents did express levels of concern involving their children developing adverse effects from the vaccine.
On April 20, 2021, President López Obrador televised himself receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine.
National vaccination plan
The national vaccination plan against COVID-19 has been planned as below in Mexico:
December 2020 – February 2021: Health workers dealing with COVID
February – April 2021: Other health workers and people 60+ years of age
April – May 2021: People 50–59 years old
May – June 2021: People 40–49 years old
June 2021 – March 2022: People 19–39 years old (children under 18 are exempted from vaccination)
Authorized vaccines
The following vaccines are authorized by the Mexican government for use against COVID-19 (approval date in parentheses):
BNT162b2 by Pfizer Inc./BioNTech (December 11, 2020)
AZD1222 by AstraZeneca/Oxford University (January 4, 2021)
Sputnik V by the Gamaleya Institute (February 2, 2021)
Ad5-nCoV by CanSino Biologics Inc. (February 9, 2021)
CoronaVac by Sinovac Research and Development Co. (February 9, 2021)
Covaxin by Bharat Biotech/Indian Council of Medical Research (April 6, 2021)
Routine vaccines
The recommended vaccine schedule for children in Mexico contains vaccinations against sixteen vaccine preventable diseases. Vaccine doses administered in Mexico are usually valid in the United States. The immunization schedule for children in Mexico is as follows:
In addition, Vitamin A supplements are offered to all children aged 6 to 59 months.
Vaccine coverage
The vaccine coverage of various vaccines in Mexico are as follows, according to the most recent survey conducted by the World Health Organization in 2014:
According to the statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), no cases of diphtheria, measles, polio or yellow fever were reported in Mexico in 2019. However, mumps and pertussis cases are on the rise in Mexico, with 8009 and 874 children reportedly having contracted mumps and pertussis respectively in 2019. There was an increase in tetanus cases from a total of 23 in 2018 to 35 in 2019.
References
Healthcare in Mexico
Mexico | Vaccination in Mexico | [
"Biology"
] | 714 | [
"Vaccination by country",
"Vaccination"
] |
67,281,971 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danmaku%20subtitling | Danmaku or danmu (figuratively translated as "barrage") is a subtitle system in online video platforms that originates from Japan and popularised in mainland China. Such system allows user to post moving comments onto a playing video that are synchronized to the video timeline. The comments are typically presented as "shooting" across the screen, resembling a barrage.
History
The term danmaku () originates from the shoot 'em up arcade game Batsugun created by now-defunct Japanese developer Toaplan. It is a conventional vertically scrolling shooter game, with a "level up" system for the player's weapons that shoot a lot of bullets across the screen, hence the term danmaku. Batsugun is the first recorded example of what would become the genre of bullet hell (danmaku in Japanese) and subgenres stemming from it. While Batsugun is not credited with actually creating the danmaku subgenres, it sets a lot of the modern templates in place.
Japan
Danmaku originated in Japan's video-sharing website Niconico in 2006. The videos on the website are mostly generated and uploaded by online users. Niconico provides a comment function which enables viewers to write comments on the screen for the video. The comments will be "shot" onto the screen in a "bullet curtain" likeness, and will be reproduced and displayed in accordance with the time axis thereafter. The comments go beyond real-time, with previous and later comments being shown together.
China
With the rise of Niconico in mainland China, Chinese video-sharing platforms also began to adopt danmaku functions, or danmu in Chinese language. Around 2008–2009, Chinese ACG websites AcFun and Bilibili introduced the danmu system to their video streaming services. Danmu rapidly gained popularity among ACG users in China. Soon, other major Chinese platforms, such as iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video, followed suit to deploy danmu.
The combination of video and synchronous messaging creates a sense of community for the viewer. The messages take multiple forms including spoiler or jump scare warnings, comments, parody, translations including explanatory notes, expert opinion, and special effects created using text, including visual cues. The format also makes use of memes (233333 means "laughter", 666666 means "awesome"), and its own vernacular. Object recognition technology has also been used to prevent the text occluding key parts of a scene, such as actors or singers.
Posting danmu typically requires the user to sign in first.
Due to its popularity and impact, danmu has become a topic of scholarly research, including linguistic, sociological, and cultural study as well as potential applications in online learning use.
Characteristics
Interface
Video player with superimposed danmaku
Danmaku comments left by viewers are overlaid directly on the videos and are scrolled across the screen, synchronized specifically to the playback time point where the users input the comments. At certain moments of the videos, user comments fill up the screen giving the appearance of a bullet curtain, or danmaku in Japanese and danmu in Chinese. This movement and synchronization of text creates a co-viewing experience for users who watch the same videos, but at different locations and times. The format also allows more "multi-modal" text than traditional video comment systems - e.g. different font color or screen position.
Editing danmaku
The danmaku editor shows the number of connected viewers and danmaku in real time, but there is a limit for the viewable danmaku for each video depending on the duration. The danmaku editor also provides an option that allows the user to deactivate the danmaku function, and also a function to customize the visual effects of danmaku. This includes changing of font, amount, transparency and speed of texts viewable on screen, activating the anti-block function and filtering comments based on specific characteristics like movement, colour and type of danmaku.
Others
In a danmaku website, users may choose to leave comments in a traditional comment section below the video, but the content of these comments differ greatly from those that are scrolled simultaneously with the video. The former usually involves users commenting after watching the video, writing the comment from an overall perspective. On the other hand, the synchronic feature danmaku commenting makes it easy for users to leave comments at multiple timestamps in the video, and include other information related to the content in the specific time point of the video.
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) in danmaku
Danmaku utilises a type of asynchronous text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is experienced synchronously. Comments and annotations appear and disappear from the viewable screen at set times for users unless playback is interrupted. This interactivity differentiates danmaku from traditional comment sections, which are typically located below or beside the video and remain as static posts and replies (resembling the structure of an online forum).
Synchronization
Communication between users through the danmaku system is not marked by dates of insertion nor any form of authorship, but danmaku does not provide users the option to structure their comments, such as the option to 'reply to comment' unlike many other social media platforms. Instead, danmaku messages appear in the order of the moment of insertion in the video's timeline.
This distinctive feature promotes user participation at any moment due to the anonymous, spontaneous and democratic nature of the platform. However, participants will be unaware of the possible replies from future viewers as there are no notifications of such responses. Instead, the video would have to be periodically reviewed intentionally after leaving the comments. This lack of knowledge creates responses that are delayed and sometimes redundant, leaving less room for productive conversations between danmaku users.
Some have likened danmaku to the scrolling, real-time comments in livestream videos, although the latter does not feature such a high level of interference of comments on the video. These live-streaming sites that host more concurrent viewers tend to produce massive chats that prioritize crowd-based reactions and interactions over interpersonal conversation.
The temporal incoherence between real time and virtual time is further heightened by the rate of appearance and disappearance of the comment text onscreen. Since there are limits to the number of comments being displayed at one time, older comments are often replaced by new comments. This incites a sense of urgency among the viewers, where the fear of missing a piece of information propels users to search, access and download old danmaku comments that were flushed out due to the limitations of the platform.
Knowledge-sharing
Subtitling
As danmaku comments are automatically synced to video, the technology provides opportunity for viewers to spontaneously create translation subtitles for foreign language videos, leading to a sort of "grassroot practice" in which amateur subtitlers are respectfully regarded by others as "caption-kun" (字幕君).
Usage
Danmaku is widely popular in Japan and mainland China. Although originated in subcultural areas of anime and gaming, the use of danmaku has been successfully popularised in China and extended to more mainstream media, appearing in well-known TV dramas or films on streaming media websites. The popularity of danmaku has also attracted advertisers who wish to target younger consumers, leading to an increased commercialisation of the medium.
There is currently little to no usage of danmaku or similar systems on Western media platforms. Some have attributed this absence to the fact that the English language has lower entropy than Chinese and Japanese; in other words, Chinese and Japanese may convey more information within the same length of a comment, making it easier to write and read danmaku. Others have suggested that danmaku is enjoyed by the more collectivist cultures of East Asia, whereas individualistic viewers (such as Americans) would prefer their viewing experience to not be interfered.
Critique
Distraction
Danmaku is capable of creating huge blocks of comments that overlay and even obscure the video completely and is therefore highly criticised for its visual clutter that can be extremely distracting, obstructing and annoying, especially for viewers outside China and Japan (which are the only two countries that danmaku had been popularised in) where the danmaku culture is largely absent. Irrelevant, revealing or unpleasant comments can also ruin one's viewing experience.
Most video platforms like Bilibili allow users to customise danmaku displays, such as toggling the function off entirely, adjusting the speed of comments, showing selective comments (for example, only showing comments located at the top of the screen), controlling the number of comments displayed, and filtering out comments containing certain keywords. Some videos use AI technology to prevent danmaku from obstructing faces or figures of people. If a video reaches a maximum number of danmaku, some of the comments will also be deleted.
Interactivity
Danmaku facilitates interaction both between the viewer and the video content, and among viewers themselves. Commenters get to share their opinions and feelings immediately as a video plays. In especially notable parts of a video, a large volume of (often highly repetitive) danmaku comments might occupy the screen, expressing similar emotions. Although the comments are anonymous, they can refer to one another by font colour ("the yellow letters"), location ("the person below") or content ("the one who said"). This makes it possible for users to interact, such as answer questions or display disagreement.
Some unique slang and conventions have also arisen as a result. For example, moments before a shocking, exciting or funny scene happens in a video, many danmaku comments would appear, alerting the viewer, "Attention!!" ("!") preparing the viewer for an upcoming surprise. Hence, danmaku produces a social experience of co-viewership; the sense of togetherness and belonging is often cited as a major appeal of danmaku videos.
Censorship
Since its popularisation by AcFun and Bilibili, danmaku has been adopted by more and more video streaming platforms in China, such as iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Videos. To manage the comments, government regulations and censorship have tightened; in 2019, the Online Short Video Platform Management Regulations were enforced, requiring danmaku comments to be reviewed before being published.
References
Further reading
Nakajima, Seio. 2019. "The Sociability of Millennials in Cyberspace: A Comparative Analysis of Barrage Subtitling in Nico Nico Douga and Bilibili". Pp. 98–115 in China's Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces: Creativity, Sociality, Identity and Resistance, edited by Vanessa Frangville and Gwennaël Gaffric. London: Routledge.
Japanese words and phrases
Subtitling
Online chat
Video game terminology | Danmaku subtitling | [
"Technology"
] | 2,251 | [
"Computing terminology",
"Video game terminology"
] |
67,281,985 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction-Based%20Reporting | Transaction-based reporting, or Invoice reporting, sometimes called Continuous Transaction Controls (CTC), is a method of data collection of governmental bodies to reduce fraud and increase compliance. Invoice reporting helps in overcoming the inefficiencies of post audit systems, where the auditors can only check VAT refunds after the facts and mainly needs to use data that is collected by the companies it is auditing. The core of invoice reporting is that all companies within a jurisdiction report their invoices to their tax authority.
History
Invoice reporting was first implemented in Latin America. In most Latin American countries, transaction-based reporting is coupled with electronic invoicing and therefore the Inter-American Development Bank named the system ‘electronic invoicing of taxes’. However, the key principle is the same as it is defined as ‘electronic invoices that are not only valid for all tax purposes but that are also received in their entirety by the tax authority’. Chile and Mexico were the first and soon others followed.
Over time, transaction-based reporting has proved to be efficient in contrasting VAT fraud. For instance, Brazil saw an increase of US$58 billion in tax revenues, while Chile and Mexico reduced their VAT gap by 50%. Furthermore, Colombia estimates that it can achieve the same result if they implement such an invoice reporting system.
Around the same time, China started its Golden Tax Project. Part of this project is the Golden Tax System, which started as a pilot in the 1990s and is soon to be integrated with every company in the country. India, is also implementing e-invoicing to increase compliance. Other countries in the region, such as Israel and Jordan are investigating this possibility as well.
Tunisia has been a pioneer in the African region as they introduced mandatory e-invoicing in 2016. In Tunisia, invoices are reported to the responsible authorities, and therefore can be considered as transaction-based reporting. Furthermore, Egypt is also conducting research in the best model of invoice reporting.
The trend and successes of invoice reporting also reached Europe, though not combined with mandatory electronic invoicing. Countries such as Hungary, Spain, and Italy have implemented a variant of invoice reporting in the second half of the 2010s. The successes of these and other systems made France decide to implement an invoice reporting system combined with e-invoicing from July 2024. The news also reached the European Commission as it stated in their Action Plan for Fair and Simple Taxation Supporting the Recovery Strategy, published in 2020, that by 2022/2023 the Commission ‘will present a legislative proposal for modernising VAT reporting obligations. The EU's Digital Reporting Requirements Directive amendment proposals are due by the end of 2022.
Usage
In countries where a VAT system exists without mandatory invoice reporting, often companies self-report the amount of VAT which they supposedly received and sent in a certain reporting period. These reporting periods are typically between 1 and 12 months. Because companies are free to fill in what they want on their VAT return, fraudsters can potentially fill in false information. Suppliers might report that they collected 100 euro in VAT, whilst in reality they collected 1000 euro in VAT, which allows them to keep VAT instead of giving it to the tax authority. Buyers might report that they paid 10,000 euro in VAT, which allows them to fraudulently get back money from the tax authority. A widely noted type of VAT fraud is Missing Trader Fraud. By using transaction-based reporting systems, discrepancies between the buyer and seller can be identified, and reduced. Moreover, even without analysing data, transaction-based reporting systems have a preventative effect due to the fact that companies are aware that their data is collected.
Implementation
Most invoice reporting systems are developed by the country implementing the system itself. This results in a wide variety of ways to implement them.
– (Near) real-time transaction-based reporting: Transaction-based reporting can be either real-time or near real-time. A near-time invoice reporting system requires the taxpayer to report all invoices within a certain amount of days after the invoice was actually sent to the buyer. An example of such a system can be found in Spain. The system is called Sistema de Información Inmediata (SII) and companies have 4 days to report all invoices after issuance. Real-time invoice reporting requires to report invoices at the same time of their issuance. The Italian system Sistema di Interscambio (SdI) is an example of such a system.
– Electronic invoicing and data exchange: In some countries, transaction-based reporting requirements are coupled with a particular mandatory electronic invoicing standard. This approach was taken e.g. by many Latin American countries. Alternatively, companies can also be given the freedom to use existing electronic invoicing and Electronic Data Interchange solutions to exchange data. While the freedom to choose a data format may lower the administrative burden for some companies, it also raises questions about which invoice data and format can be considered legally valid.
– Centralised clearance: Some countries require companies to send the invoice to the tax authority before it will be sent to the buyer. Transaction-based reporting systems in Peru and Italy function like this. The advantage is that fraudulent companies can be interrupted in their business activities at a very early stage. However, it could also cause honest businesses to be interrupted when a false-positive fraud alert has been triggered. Furthermore, VAT experts like Aleksandra Bal underline the high compliance costs that may generate for businesses from a centralised clearance system.
– Data to report: The type of data required by the transaction-based reporting system can vary. In Italy and Spain, the national transaction-based reporting system requires significant amounts of invoice information from businesses. The PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online) e-invoicing network suggested the use of only a few data points per invoice. During a working group session of the European Parliament, a design was praised to only share a fingerprint or a hash of the original invoice.
References
Tax investigation
Data collection
Corporate taxation | Transaction-Based Reporting | [
"Technology"
] | 1,285 | [
"Data collection",
"Data"
] |
67,283,146 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiesprong | Energiesprong (English: Energy leap) is a program that originated in the Netherlands that introduced and retrofitted houses that satisfy energy efficient standards. It has since been implemented in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Canada. The program typically consists of snapping a shell of panels to the outside of a building to increase its thermal efficiency.
Background
Energiesprong was created by the government of the Netherlands in 2010 to retrofit existing buildings for higher energy efficiency standards, becoming zero-energy buildings. When the program was launched by the Dutch government, it initiated agreements with social housing companies and contractors to convert 111,000 houses in the Netherlands into near zero energy buildings. Once a house is retrofitted, it would have net zero energy, which means it is capable of generating the total amount of its own energy requirements.
Principles
The Energiesprong model increases the energy efficiency of new and existing buildings through the application of five criteria:
Performance guarantees for thirty years
Implementation possible in less than one week
Affordability created through energy savings and reduced maintenance costs
Attractive design with upgraded features
Procuring is based on purchasing housing concepts instead of detailed specifications and drawings
Energiesprong retrifitting typically involves snapping a pre-fabricated shell of panels to the exterior of a building to improve its thermal efficiency. The panels are created by taking a laser scan of the building's exterior to create a building information model, which can then be used for computer-aided manufacturing. The work can therefore be mostly completed at the factory, with installation taking less than one week. In contrast to shallow retrofits such as the installation of heat pumps or basic insulation, energiesprong is considered a "deep" retrofit. The renovations should pay for themselves in thirty years.
Application
More than 5,000 homes in the Netherlands have been retrofitted with Energiesprong. In 2018, the first ten homes were retrofitted in the UK as part of its Energiesprong pilot program. Energiesprong has also been applied to buildings in France and Canada, as well as the US states of California and New York.
In the United Kingdom, the home owner - after the refurbishment - pays a monthly fee, which is significantly less than the utility bills before the conversion - and a guaranteed free electricity and hot water.
References
Low-energy building
Sustainable architecture | Energiesprong | [
"Engineering",
"Environmental_science"
] | 472 | [
"Architecture stubs",
"Sustainable architecture",
"Environmental social science",
"Architecture"
] |
67,285,336 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malassezia%20vespertilionis | Malassezia vespertilionis is a species of yeast-like fungus that grows on the skin of bats. It was described as a new species in 2018. The holotype was obtained from a swab of wing skin of a hibernating northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) collected in Wisconsin. The species epithet vespertilionis uses the Latin vespertilio (bat) to refer to the host.
Additional isolates were collected from various bat species in several locations in the United States – Alabama, California, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Other bat species that harbor the fungus are the California myotis (Myotis californicus), the fringed myotis (Myotis thysanodes), the Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis), the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), the gray bat (Myotis grisescens), and the silver-haired bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans). The fungus appears to be fairly common on bats found in the United States, occurring in 28% of 264 individuals sampled.
Description
When grown on Leeming and Notman agar (LNA), colonies of Malassezia vespertilionis are about in diameter after 10 days of growth at ; this increases to about after 40 days. The fungus was able to grow at a variety of temperatures ranging from , but grew best at . The cells have an ellipsoid or ovoid shape (in rare instances they are spherical), ranging in size from 2–3 by 2–4 μm, although 2 by 3 μm is the usual size.
References
Basidiomycota
Fungi described in 2018
Fungi of the United States
Yeasts
Fungi without expected TNC conservation status
Fungus species | Malassezia vespertilionis | [
"Biology"
] | 386 | [
"Yeasts",
"Fungi",
"Fungus species"
] |
67,285,553 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS-27349 | CS-27349, or L-2-α-tropinyl benzilate, is an experimental incapacitating agent. It acts as an antagonist to muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, causing delirium. It has 37% of the potency of the related compound 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ) in producing peripheral effects, but 85% of the potency in producing central effects. The mean dose required to incapacitate subjects was 1.2 times that of BZ. It has not been in use since the 1970s, and there have been no publications about its effects or long-term toxicology since then.
References
Muscarinic antagonists
Deliriants
Incapacitating agents
Chemical weapons of the United States
Benzilate esters | CS-27349 | [
"Chemistry"
] | 168 | [
"Incapacitating agents",
"Pharmacology",
"Chemical weapons",
"Medicinal chemistry stubs",
"Pharmacology stubs"
] |
67,285,940 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinic%20acid%20N-oxide | Nicotinic acid N-oxide is an organic compound with the formula (HO2C)C5H4NO. It is the N-oxide of nicotinic acid ((HO2C)C5H4N). It is prepared by oxidation of nicotinic acid or the hydrolysis of 3-cyanopyridine N-oxide. The compound is a precursor to the popular drugs niflumic acid and pranoprofen.
References
Amine oxides
Pyridinium compounds
Carboxylic acids | Nicotinic acid N-oxide | [
"Chemistry"
] | 112 | [
"Carboxylic acids",
"Amine oxides",
"Functional groups"
] |
67,286,675 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic%20circle | A geodesic circle is either "the locus on a surface at a constant geodesic distance from a fixed point" or a curve of constant geodesic curvature.
A geodesic disk is the region on a surface bounded by a geodesic circle.
In contrast with the ordinary circle and disk, the geodesic circle is not necessarily a plane curve and the geodesic disk is not necessarily a planar surface.
They can be used to define Gaussian curvature.
References
Geodesic (mathematics)
Circles | Geodesic circle | [
"Mathematics"
] | 109 | [
"Circles",
"Pi"
] |
67,287,307 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell%20engineering | Cell engineering is the purposeful process of adding, deleting, or modifying genetic sequences in living cells to achieve biological engineering goals such as altering cell production, changing cell growth and proliferation requirements, adding or removing cell functions, and many more. Cell engineering often makes use of recombinant DNA technology to achieve these modifications as well as closely related tissue engineering methods. Cell engineering can be characterized as an intermediary level in the increasingly specific disciplines of biological engineering which includes organ engineering, tissue engineering, protein engineering, and genetic engineering.
The field of cellular engineering is gaining more traction as biomedical research advances in tissue engineering and becomes more specific. Publications in the field have gone from several thousand in the early 2000s to nearly 40,000 in 2020.
Overview
Improving production of natural cellular products
One general form of cell engineering involves altering natural cell production to achieve a more desirable yield or shorter production time. A possible method for changing natural cell production includes boosting or repressing genes that are involved in the metabolism of the product. For example, researchers were able to overexpress transporter genes in hamster ovary cells to increase monoclonal antibody yield. Another approach could involve incorporating biologically foreign genes into an existing cell line. For example, E.Coli, which synthesizes ethanol, can be modified using genes from Zymomonas mobilis to make ethanol fermentation the primary cell fermentation product.
Altering cell requirements
Another beneficial cell modification is the adjustment of substrate and growth requirements of a cell. By changing cell needs, the raw material cost, equipment expenses, and skill required to grow and maintain cell cultures can be significantly reduced. For example, scientists have used foreign enzymes to engineer a common industrial yeast strain which allows the cells to grow on substrate cheaper than the traditional glucose. Because of the biological engineering focus on improving scale-up costs, research in this area is largely focused on the ability of various enzymes to metabolize low-cost substrates.
Augmenting cells to produce new products
Closely tied with the field of biotechnology, this subject of cell engineering employs recombinant DNA methods to induce cells to construct a desired product such as a protein, antibody, or enzyme. One of the most notable examples of this subset of cellular engineering is the transformation of E. Coli to transcript and translate a precursor to insulin which drastically reduced the cost of production. Similar research was conducted shortly after in 1979 in which E. Coli was transformed to express human growth hormone for use in treatment of pituitary dwarfism. Finally, much progress has been made in engineering cells to produce antigens for the purpose of creating vaccines.
Adjustment of cell properties
Within the focus of bioengineering, various cell modification methods are utilized to alter inherent properties of cells such as growth density, growth rate, growth yield, temperature resistance, freezing tolerance, chemical sensitivity, and vulnerability to pathogens. For example, in 1988 one group of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology successfully expressed a Vitreoscilla hemoglobin gene in E. Coli to create a strain that was more tolerant to low-oxygen conditions such as those found in high density industrial bioreactors.
Stem cell engineering
One distinct section of cell engineering involves the alteration and tuning of stem cells. Much of the recent research on stem cell therapies and treatments falls under the aforementioned cell engineering methods. Stem cells are unique in that they may differentiate into various other types of cells which may then be altered to produce novel therapeutics or provide a foundation for further cell engineering efforts. One example of directed stem cell engineering includes partially differentiating stem cells into myocytes to enable production of pro-myogenic factors for the treatment of sarcopenia or muscle disuse atrophy.
History
The phrase "cell engineering" was first used in a published paper in 1968 to describe the process of improving fuel cells. The term was then adopted by other papers until the more specific "fuel-cell engineering" was used.
The first use of the term in a biological context was in 1971 in a paper which describes methods to graft reproductive caps between algae cells. Despite the rising popularity of the phrase, there remains unclear boundaries between cell engineering and other forms of biological engineering.
Examples
Therapeutic T cell engineering: altering T cells to target cancer-related antigens for treatment
Monoclonal antibody production: improving monoclonal antibody production using engineered cells
In vivo cell factories: engineering cells to produce therapeutics within the patient's body
Directed stem cell differentiation: using external factors to direct stem cell differentiation
Antibody Drug Conjugates: engineering antibody and cytotoxic drug linkages for disease treatment
References
External links
Institute for Cell Engineering at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Cell & Tissue Engineering at University of California, Berkeley Bioengineering Department
Cells
Cell lines
Molecular biology | Cell engineering | [
"Chemistry",
"Biology"
] | 968 | [
"Biochemistry",
"Molecular biology"
] |
60,826,815 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silanes | In organosilicon chemistry, silanes are a diverse class of charge-neutral organic compounds with the general formula . The R substituents can be any combination of organic or inorganic groups. Most silanes contain Si-C bonds, and are discussed under organosilicon compounds. Some contain Si-H bonds and are discussed under hydrosilanes.
Examples
Silane , the parent.
Binary silicon-hydrogen compounds (which are sometimes called silanes also) includes silane itself but also compounds with Si-Si bonds including disilane and longer chains.
Silanes with one, two, three, or four Si-H bonds are called hydrosilanes. Silane is again the parent member. Examples: triethylsilane () and triethoxysilane ().
Polysilanes are organosilicon compounds with the formula . They feature Si-Si bonds. Attracting more interest are the organic derivatives such as polydimethylsilane . Dodecamethylcyclohexasilane is an oligomer of such materials. Formally speaking, polysilanes also include compounds of the type , but these less studied.
Carbosilanes are polymeric silanes with alternating Si-C bonds.
Chlorosilanes have Si-Cl bonds. The dominant examples come from the Direct process, i.e., (CH3)4-xSiClx. Another important member is trichlorosilane ().
Organosilanes are a class of charge-neutral organosilicon compounds. Example: tetramethylsilane ()
By tradition, compounds with Si-O-Si bonds are usually not referred to as silanes. Instead, they are called siloxanes. One example is hexamethyldisiloxane, .
Applications
See compound-specific applications. Commonly:
Polysilicone production
PEX crosslinking agent
See also
Silane quats
References
Silanes
Trimethylsilyl compounds
Carbosilanes | Silanes | [
"Chemistry"
] | 421 | [
"Functional groups",
"Trimethylsilyl compounds"
] |
60,826,875 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital%20ion%20trap | The digital ion trap (DIT) is an quadrupole ion trap driven by digital signals, typically in a rectangular waveform, generated by switching rapidly between discrete DC voltage levels. The digital ion trap has been mainly developed as a mass analyzer.
History
A digital ion trap (DIT) is an ion trap having a trapping waveform generated by the rapid switching between discrete high-voltage levels. The timing of the high voltage switch is controlled precisely with digital electronic circuitry. Ion motion in a quadrupole ion trap driven by a rectangular wave signal was theoretically studied in 1970s by Sheretov, E.P. and Richards, J.A. Sheretov also implemented the pulsed waveform drive for the quadrupole ion trap working in mass-selective instability mode, although no resonance excitation/ejection was used.
The idea was substantially revisited by Ding L. and Kumashiro S. in 1999, where the ion stability in the rectangular wave quadrupole field was mapped in the Mathieu space a-q coordinate system, with the parameters a and q having the same definition as the Mathieu parameters normally used in dealing with sinusoidal RF driven quadrupole field. The secular frequency dependence on the a, q parameters was also derived thus the foundation was laid for many modern ion trap operation modes based on the resonance excitation.
Also, in 1999, Peter T.A. Reilly began trapping and subsequently ablating and mass analyzing the product ions from nanoparticles obtained from car exhaust with a primitive hybrid square wave/sine wave driven 3D ion trap. In 2001 Reilly attended the 49th American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Applied Topics where he presented his nanoparticle mass analysis work and met Li Ding for the first time. Reilly suggested to Ding at that time that they should focus the DIT for analysis in the high mass range where other instruments could not compete. However, work published by Ding and Shimadzu over the years following the 2001 meeting were focused on development of square wave driven DIT's in the conventional mass range of commercial instrumentation. During this time Reilly began developing digital waveforms to increase the mass range of quadrupole-based mass spectrometers and ion traps that operate with rectangular waveforms.
Over the course of eighteen years, the Reilly group contributed substantially to the development of modern digital waveform technology (DWT), its implementation and characterization, methods of waveform generation, and general theory which includes but is not limited to stability diagrams, the pseudopotential model, and more recently digital quadrupole acceptance. In parallel to Reilly's achievements but also working separately, the Ding group at the Shimadzu Research Lab continued to implement their digital drive technology for a 3D ion trap. Finally, after 18 years Shimadzu unveiled a bench top MALDI square wave driven 3D ion trap mass spectrometer that was designed to work in the higher mass range at the 2019 ASMS conference. The DIT technology has also been developed and implemented in the linear and 3D quadrupole ion traps by many other groups around the world.
The Stability Under the Digital Drive
For a 3D type of quadrupole ion trap, ion motion under the influence of a digital waveform (see figure right) can be expressed in terms of the conventional trapping parameters:
and
Here, Ω =2πf is the angular frequency of the digital waveform. Similar definitions of the for the 2D (linear) ion trap were also given in literature. There are at least two postulates about the nature of the DC component. The first, of which has been attributed to Ding, assumes for the DIT that the DC component, U depends on not only the mid-level of the AC voltages, V1and V2, but also the duty cycle, d of the waveform:
Whereas, the second but more general postulate assumes that there is no DC component unless there is an explicit DC voltage offset added to the waveforms. The latter interpretation is explained by the change to the stability diagram that results when the duty cycle moves away from d = 0.5. When this happens the range of stable q and a values for both quadrupole axes change. These changes cause the motion of ions to be more displaced along one axis compared to the other. This, consequently is the effect of the DC bias.
It is important to accurately know the stability of ions inside the DIT. For example, different waveform duty cycles result in a different stability boundary. For the case of a square wave, where d = 0.5, the boundary of the first stability region crosses the axis at approximately 0.712, which is less than 0.908, the boundary value for a sinusoidal waveform. The stability of ion motion in a digitally driven quadrupole can be calculated from the analytical matrix solutions of Hill's equation:
The analytical solutions apply to any periodic function so long as each period, can be represented as a series of n constant potential steps . Each constant potential step is represented in dimensionless Mathieu space by the waveform potential parameter , where q and a were defined earlier by (1) and (2). The value in (3) is the temporal width of the constant potential step. In a digital system that is operated without a physical DC offset the waveform potential reduces to the value . The sign of the parameter will depend on the sign of the constant potential at each step, and the appropriate matrix will depend on the sign of the parameter. Because a digital waveform may be approximated as existing in only high and low states (potential sign), the stability of ions, as demonstrated by Brabeck, may be determined in as few as two or three constant potential steps. In the simple but frequent case that a full cycle of a digital waveform can be represented by two constant potential steps, the matrix representing the first potential step would be multiplied onto the matrix representing the second potential step. In the general case, the final matrix of a waveform cycle defined by n constant potential steps is:
The matrix (4) is often referred to as the transfer matrix. It is used to evaluate whether an ion will have stable motion. If the absolute value of the trace of this matrix is less than 2 the ion is said to have stable motion. Stable motion simply means that the secular oscillation of the ion has a maximum displacement. When the absolute value of the trace is greater than 2 ion motion is not stable and the displacement of the ion increases with each secular oscillation.
Ion trajectories in a linear or 3D DIT as well as in a digital mass filter, may also be calculated using a similar procedure. Unlike stability calculation it is advantageous for the purpose of resolution and accuracy to represent each period of the waveform with an adequate number of constant voltage steps. The trajectory for the constant potential step, , for example, is calculated by multiplication of the appropriate matrix (3) for that step onto the trajectory vector of the step, :
A stability diagram may be generated by calculating the matrix trace for each axis over a defined range of q and a values. The stability diagram of a square wave is very similar to that of the traditional harmonic quadrupole field. Having the additional parameter d in the waveform, the digital ion trap can perform certain experiments which are not available in the conventional harmonic wave RF ion trap. One example is the digital asymmetric wave isolation which is the method of using a d value around 0.6 to narrow the mass range to isolate a precursor ion.
The DIT is a versatile instrument because it is capable of operating at constant AC voltage without a DC offset for any conceivable duty cycle and frequency. The dynamic frequency does not impose a limit on the mass range. The Mathieu space stability diagram of the linear and 3D DIT change with duty cycle. When a = 0 there will be a finite range of stable q values for each quadrupole axis that will depend on the duty cycle. Fig 3 (a) shows a Mathieu space stability diagram for the duty cycle d = 0.50 of a linear DIT. The horizontal line indicates where the parameter a = 0. The range of completely stable q values appear where this line passes through the green colored region; it ranges from q = 0 to roughly q = 0.7125. The blue colored areas in the figure depict stability along the x-axis only. Yellow colored regions depict stability along the y-axis only. When the duty cycle is increased to d = 0.60 the range of completely stable q values decreases (see Fig 3 (b)) as indicated by the reduction of green that the horizontal line intersects. In this representation the total range of stable q values along the x-axis, that is defined by the intersection of the line through the blue and green regions, is greater than the total range of stable q values along the y-axis that is defined by the intersection of the line through the yellow and green regions. In Fig 3 (b) the overall stability of the linear DIT in the y direction is smaller than in the x direction. If the frequency of the linear DIT is decreased to cause a particular ion to have a q value that corresponds to right hand side boundary of the completely stable green region, then it will excite and ultimately eject in the y direction. This is the fundamental mechanism that allows control over the direction of ion excitation in a linear DIT without resonant excitation.
The DIT and other forms of digital mass analyzers scan ions by scanning the frequency of the drive waveform. The AC voltage is typically fixed during the scan. Digital devices use a duty cycle which allows them to operate completely independent of a DC voltage and without resonant excitation. When the DC voltage is zero the parameter a is also zero.
Consequently, ion stability will depend on q. With these considerations it was possible to design a new type of stability diagram that is more suitable for planning and performing experiment. In 2014 Brabeck and Reilly created a stability diagram that maps the range of stable mass-to-charge ratios, m/z to the corresponding range of drive frequencies based on several user inputs. For a particular duty cycle, the operator can quickly reference the range of stable masses at each frequency of a scan. Fig 4 (a) and (b) shows the frequency-m/z stability diagram for a linear DIT with a duty cycle of d = 0.50 and d= 0.60 respectively.
Secular Frequency and Pseudopotential Well Depth
Secular frequency is the fundamental frequency component of the ion motion in the quadrupole field driven by a periodical signal, and it is usually chosen for resonance excitation of ion motion to achieve ion ejection, and/or ion energy activation which may lead to the collision induced dissociation. The secular frequency is conventionally written as:
For digital driving signal, Ding derived the expression of the secular frequency using matrix transform theory.
Where : are two diagonal elements of the transform matrix of ion motion. For a DC free square wave ( ) the transform matrix may be expressed using the stability parameter , thus:
The formula (6) and (7) give a direct relation between the secular frequency and the digital drive waveform parameters (frequency and amplitude), without using the iterative process that is needed for a sinusoidal driven quadrupole ion trap.
Normally the depth of the 'effective potential' well, or the pseudopotential well, is used to estimate the maximum kinetic energy of ions that remain trapped. For DIT, this was also derived using Dehmelt approximation:
[eV]
Instrumentation and Performance
Initially the digital ion trap was constructed in form of a 3D ion trap, where the drive signal was fed to the ring electrode of the trap. Instead of scanning up the RF voltage, in the DIT, the frequency of the rectangular waveform signal is scanned down during a forward mass scan. This avoided the high voltage breakdown which set the upper limitation of a mass scan. Mass range of DIT up to 18,000 Th was demonstrated by use of an atmospheric MALDI ion source and was later expanded to cover m/z of a singly charged antibody at about 900,000 Th by Koichi Tanaka etc.
The MOSFET switch circuit is responsible to provide the rectangular wave drive signal. The drive circuit of DIT is much compact compared to the RF generator with LC resonator circuit used for conventional sinusoidal wave ion trap. It also provides the capability of fast start up and fast termination of the waveform, which enables injection and ejection of ion with high efficiency. A field adjusting electrode placed adjacent to the entrance end-cap and biased with certain dc voltages helped to achieve good mass resolution for both forward and reverse mass scans, as well as for precursor isolation. With trapping voltage of +/- 1kV, a zoom scan resolving power of 19,000 was demonstrated.
Many new features for tandem mass analysis were gradually revealed by using the digital ion trap. Ions can be selectively removed from the ion trap by boundary ejection simply by varying the duty cycle of the digital waveform, instead of applying the conventional "resolving DC" voltage. Since rectangular waveforms are employed in the DIT, electrons can be injected into the trap during one of the voltage level without being accelerated up by the varying electric field. This enabled Electron-capture dissociation, which needs very low energy electron beam to interact with the trapped ions, achieved in the digital ion trap, without assistance of a magnetic field.
Other forms of digital ion trap were also developed, including the linear ion trap constructed using printed circuit boards and the rods structure linear ion guide/trap. Two sets of switch circuitry were normally used to generate 2 phases of rectangular pulse waveform for two pairs of rods in case of the linear digital ion trap.
Commercialization
Hexin Instrument Co., Ltd (Guangzhou, China) commercialized a portable ion trap mass spectrometer DT-100 in 2017 for VOC monitoring. The mass spectrometer employs a VUV photo ionization source and a digital linear ion trap as mass analyzer. With an overall weight of 13 kg and size of 350 x 320 x 190 mm3 including the rechargeable Li battery. The specification includes a mass range of 20–500 Th for both MS and MS2, and mass resolving resolution of 0.3 Th (FWHM) at 106 Th.
Shimadzu Corp. released the MALDI digital ion trap mass spectrometer MALDImini-1 in 2019. Having a foot print of a A3 paper, the MALDI mass spectrometer covered an impressive mass range up to 70,000 Th and a MSn mass rang to 5,000 Th. Tandem mass analysis function up to MS3 is available, which allows researchers to carry out comprehensive structural analyses, such as direct glycopeptide analysis, post translational modification analysis, and branched glycan structural analysis.
References
Mass spectrometry
Measuring instruments
Particle traps | Digital ion trap | [
"Physics",
"Chemistry",
"Technology",
"Engineering"
] | 3,078 | [
"Molecular physics",
"Spectrum (physical sciences)",
"Instrumental analysis",
"Mass",
"Measuring instruments",
"Particle traps",
"Mass spectrometry",
"Matter"
] |
60,828,981 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation%20spraying | Detonation spraying is one of the many forms of thermal spraying techniques that are used to apply a protective coating at supersonic velocities to a material in order to change its surface characteristics. This is primarily to improve the durability of a component. It was first invented in 1955 by H.B. Sargent, R.M. Poorman and H. Lamprey and is applied to a component using a specifically designed detonation gun (D-gun). The component being sprayed must be prepared correctly by removing all surface oils, greases, debris and roughing up the surface in order to achieve a strongly bonded detonation spray coating. This process involves the highest velocities (≈3500 m/s shockwave that propels the coating materials) and temperatures (≈4000 °C) of coating materials compared to all other forms of thermal spraying techniques. Because of these characteristics, detonation spraying is able to apply low porous (below 1%) and low oxygen content (between 0.1 and 0.5%) protective coatings that protect against corrosion, abrasion and adhesion under low load.
This process allows the application of very hard and dense surface coatings which are useful as wear resistant coatings. For this reason, detonation spraying is commonly used for protective coatings in aircraft engines, plug and ring gauges, cutting edges (skiving knives), tubular drills, rotor and stator blades, guide rails or any other metallic material that is subject to high wear and tear. Commonly the materials that are sprayed onto components during detonation spraying are powders of metals, metal alloys and cermets; as well as their oxides (aluminum, copper, iron, etc.).
Detonation spraying is an industrial process that can be dangerous if not performed correctly and in a safe environment. As such there are many safety precautions that must be adhered to when using this thermal spraying technique.
History
The process of detonation spraying was first developed in 1955 by H.B. Sargent, R.M. Poorman and H. Lamprey and was subsequently patented. It was first made commercially available as the 'D-Gun Process' by Union Carbide in the same year. It was further developed in the 1960s by the Paton Institute in Kiev (Ukraine), into a technology that is still currently commercially available in the US by Demeton Technologies (West Babylon).
D-Gun
Detonation spray coatings are applied using a detonation gun (D-gun) which is composed of a long-water-cooled metal barrel containing inlet valves for introducing gases and powders into the chamber. A preselected amount of the desired protective coating material known as feedstock (in powder form of particle size 5–60μm) is introduced into the chamber (at common powder flow rates of 16–40 g/min). Here oxygen and fuel (generally acetylene) are ignited by a spark plug to create a supersonic shock wave that propels the mixture of melted and/or partially-melted and/or solid feedstock (depending on the type of material used) out of the barrel and onto the subject being sprayed. The barrel is then cleared using a short burst of nitrogen before the D-gun is ready to be fired again. This is an important step because the heat from the residual gases can cause the new fuel mixture to combust which would in turn cause an uncontrollable reaction. Also a small amount of inert nitrogen gas inserted between the two mixtures of fuel and feedstock prior to firing, helps to prevent backfiring. D-guns typically operate at firing rates of between 1–10 Hz. Many different mixtures of coating powders and D-gun settings can be used during detonation gun spraying of a material, all of which influence the final surface characteristics of the sprayed coating. Common powder materials used include but are not limited to: alumina-titania, alumina, tungsten carbide-tungsten-chromium carbide mixture with nickel-chromium alloy binder, chromium carbide, tungsten carbide with cobalt binder.
Metallurgists consider the measurements of surface oxygen content, macro and micro-hardness, porosity, bond strength and surface roughness when determining the quality of a thermally sprayed coating.
Components
Spark plug
Water cooled barrel
Nitrogen inlet valve
Fuel inlet valve
Oxygen inlet valve
Powder feedstock inlet valve
Cycle of operation overview
Mixture of fuel and oxygen is injected into the combustion chamber.
Powder feedstock is introduced into the chamber.
Nitrogen gas is added between the fuel-oxygen mixture and powder feedstock in order to prevent backfiring.
Mixture is ignited, and heated powder is ejected from the barrel onto the target material.
Barrel is then purged by nitrogen gas ready for firing again.
This process is repeated at a rate of between 1–10 Hz until desired thickness of coating is achieved.
Surface Preparation
Detonation sprayed coatings are primarily mechanically bonded. This means that the surface of the component being sprayed, must be properly prepared so as to maximise the bond strength between the sprayed coating and the substrate. To successfully prepare the surface it must be cleaned of all greases, oils, dirt and other contaminants and sufficiently roughened to provide enough of a surface irregularity for the coating to cling to. Chemical processes are generally the most suitable methods used to clean the substrate surface. After which care must be taken not to touch and/or dirty the surface prior to spraying. The three methods used to roughen up the substrate surface are abrasive blasting, machining and bond coating. Cleaning occurs only after the roughening of the surface except for when a bond coating is used; the surface must be cleaned before and possibly after this process too. Application of the detonation spray coating should be performed as soon as possible after a substrates surface has been prepared.
Abrasive Blasting
Abrasive blasting also known as sandblasting, involves using compressed air to fire a steam of clean, sharp, crushed steel grit or aluminum oxide onto the surface of the component. Aluminum is a good option as it is relatively cheap. The fired grit breaks off small chucks of the substrate surface creating an evenly rough surface for good mechanical bonds to form. The substrate needs to be cleaned of any debris and residual grit from blasting prior to spraying.
Machining
For cases where a very strong mechanical bond is required (such as for components that are going to be used to machine with) the components surface is often machined to create grooves for the coating to bond to. Dovetail grooves offer strong positive bonding but can be laboursome and costly. A cheaper method is to cut simple partially open grooves, yet this method produces an inferior final bond strength. The edges and corners of a component present possible weak points in the coating structure, as they can break off from the component. To increase the bond strength at these points the corners and edges of the component should be rounded off. If the coating does not need to reach the edges of a component, then an undercut can be used (as shown in the diagram to the right) to secure the coating to the substrate. Although undercuts can also be used in other scenarios.
Coatings often have a tendency to shrink after being applied due to the cooling process. This means steps need to be taken in order to minimise the negative effects of shrinking. If not, the coating can suffer from stress due to tension which will weaken the coating and in some cases may cause it to peel off. The fact coatings shrink can be used to increase the bond strength if applied wisely. Coating over the entire external surface of a component means that the coating will shrink around the component when cooled providing a sort of gripping force that will increase the mechanical bond strength. This is also the case if a flat component is sprayed over the edges, the coating will grip the surface like a clamp; again increasing bond strength. Internal coatings suffer from the effect of shrinking in that they will be pulled away from the surface of the component. To counter this the component can be heated to reduce the relative shrinking effects on cooling.
Components should be dry machined (without oils) to avoid oils being deposited on the component before spraying. If this is unavoidable then the substrate will need to be cleaned again prior to detonation spraying.
Bond Coating
After a surface has been abrasion blasted and/or machined a thin layer of molybdenum, nickel-chromium alloys or nickel aluminide can be spayed before the final detonation spray coating to improve the bond strength. This is known as a bond coating. Bond coatings are often used when spray coating materials of ceramic composites are being applied. The component may need to be machined and/or abrasion blasted slightly deeper for the purpose of allowing space for the bond coating and spray coating to fit flush on the component surface.
Areas that are not to be sprayed must be covered in stop-off chemicals (chemicals that stop the spay from bonding) or tape. The chemicals and tape are then removed after the coating has cooled.
Detonation Spray Coatings
Detonation spraying produces coatings of very high chemical bond strength and hardness. Coatings are of low porosity, oxygen content and have a low to medium surface roughness. This is achieved due to the extremely high temperatures and velocities produced by the detonation gun during surface coating application. These properties make detonation spraying the standard of comparison for all other thermal spray coatings (wire arc, plasma, flame, HVAF, HVOF, Warm, Cold).
There are many factors that determine the final detonation gun coating properties. Primarily, surface properties are determined by the type and properties of the powdered feedstock used (composition and particle size) but they are also affected by the settings used on the D-gun. These are powder flow rate, firing rate, distance from gun to target, how the D-gun is moved around to apply the coating, size of barrel, amount and composition of fuel and oxygen mixture.
Detonation spraying is able to apply protective coatings to relatively sensitive and delicate materials. This is due to the nature of the application of detonation gun coatings, being very quick and having the heat source removed from the target material. This allows for a large range of suitable applications for detonation spraying.
Types of Materials
Many materials are able to be sprayed as coatings using the D-gun. These materials used for the feedstock are powders of metals, alloys and cermets; as well as their oxides. However, mainly high-tech coatings are used, these include ceramics, and complex composites. Characteristics such as strength, hardness, shrink, corrosion resistance and wearing quality of possible spraying materials are factored into the decision of selecting a coating material.
Some examples include:
Al2O3
Cu–Al
Cu–SiC
Al–Al2O3
Cu–Al2O3
Al–SiC
Al–Ti
TiMo(CN)–36NiCo
Fe–A
Applications
The main functions of detonation spray coatings are to protect against corrosion (due to low oxygen content), abrasion and adhesion under low load. This means that detonation spraying produces hard durable coatings that are suitable for:
Various components of general machinery: shafts, seals, bushings, bearings, seals
Aviation:
rotor and stator blades
engine components
guide rails
Oil and gas industry:
bushings and sealing rings of ESP units
gate valves
shut-off valves
working surface of drill tools
Space rocket industry
Electronic and radio industry
Engineering of instruments
Tools industry
Tubular drills
Skiving knives for rubber and plastic
Shipbuilding industry
D-gun plated plug and ring gauges
Limitations
There are a few limitations of detonation spraying, these are:
Detonation spraying creates a coating that is mostly mechanically bonded as opposed to being metallurgically bonded, which is a much stronger type of bond.
Detonation spraying is a 'line of sight' process meaning that components generally need to be coated before being put to use or assembled. This is because the detonation gun needs to be able to access the surface to be able to apply an effective coating.
The coatings despite being considerably strong in compression are weak under tension, meaning they can't be applied to malleable or expanding components.
The coatings tend to fatigue under pinpoint loading.
Detonation guns are quite large and loud.
Detonation spraying has to be performed at a location specifically designed for it, as the gun is reasonable large and it is a loud process that produces substantial noise. For this reason, it is usually installed in a sound-proof room (with concrete walls 45 cm thick).
The process involves a considerable amount of mechanisation and automation because the operator can't be in the room whilst the D-gun is in operation.
Safety
Detonation gun spraying like any other industrial process carries with it a number of safety hazards that need to be managed correctly in order to ensure operator safety whilst in use. These safety precautions primarily fall into the following categories and the hazard minimisation techniques suggested, in some cases have a positive effect on the resultant detonation spray coating. For example, having to automate the spraying process means that a very even and consistent spray coating can be achieved.
Noise
The operation of a detonation gun is a very loud process due to the multiple explosions occurring in the chamber per second. This could cause damage to operators hearing if in close proximity to the D-gun. As a result, detonation spraying should be performed within a sound proof room and no one should be present in the room during operation. Also operators should wear ear protection (such as ear muffs and/or ear plugs) while working with a D-gun.
Heat
Extremely high temperatures are reached by the D-gun (≈4000 °C) whilst in operation. Flammable and explosive fuels (generally acetylene) are used in detonation spraying to produce the supersonic shockwave that propels the powder coating materials onto their target components. This poses a serious burn and explosion hazard. Again, no-one should be present in the room whilst the D-gun is in operation and the room should be designed to withstand any malfunction of the D-gun. Also protective gloves should be used to handle the D-gun and sprayed components to void burns form hot components after spraying.
Dust and Fumes
The D-gun atomises the powder feedstock into extremely small particles (80–95% of particles by total number are of size <100 nm). This means proper extraction facilities are required for inhalation safety purposes. Also isolation of the D-gun is recommended to avoid operators breathing in the dangerous dust and fumes. If operators are to enter the room they should wear appropriate dust masks or respirators. Many of the compounds used as the feedstock in detonation spraying are detrimental to human health if ingested or inhaled. Airborne metals from the detonation gun in particular are harmful to the lungs. Exposure to cadmium for example can cause harm to the kidneys and lungs, vomiting, loss of consciousness and even reduced fertility. Also heavy metals have been shown in recent studies to be carcinogenic such as lead, nickel, chromium, and cadmium. Some serious lung conditions caused by metal dust inhalation include:
Silicosis - a lung disease cause by inhaling silica present in the feedstock compounds.
Siderosis - (silver polisher's lung or welder's lung), a lung disease cause by inhaling iron present in the feedstock compounds.
Alzheimer's - a memory loss disease more common among the elderly has been shown by some studies to be caused by high levels of exposure to aluminum (among many other causes). However, it must be noted that these studies were not conclusive, and others have proven otherwise.
Metal fume fever - this can occur in some individuals following exposure certain metal compounds (such as copper, zinc, magnesium and aluminum alloys or oxides) that have a particularly unpleasant odour. The fumes are caused as a byproduct when the metals are heated and can trigger a fever-like reaction that may need medical attention.
References
Chemical processes
Metallurgical processes
Coatings | Detonation spraying | [
"Chemistry",
"Materials_science"
] | 3,366 | [
"Metallurgical processes",
"Metallurgy",
"Coatings",
"Chemical processes",
"nan",
"Chemical process engineering"
] |
60,830,939 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonochemical%20synthesis | Sonochemical synthesis is the process which utilizes the principles of sonochemistry to make molecules undergo a chemical reaction with the application of powerful ultrasound radiation (20 kHz–10 MHz). Sonochemistry generates hot spots that can achieve very high temperatures (5000–25.000 K), pressures of more than 1000 atmospheres, and rates of heating and cooling that can exceed 10^11 K/s. High intensity ultrasound produces chemical and physical effects that can be used for the production or modification of a wide range of nanostructured materials. The principle that causes the modification of nanostructures in the sonochemical process is acoustic cavitation.
References
Physical phenomena | Sonochemical synthesis | [
"Physics"
] | 142 | [
"Physical phenomena"
] |
60,831,687 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive%20Antibiotic%20Resistance%20Database | The Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (CARD) is a biological database that collects and organizes reference information on antimicrobial resistance genes, proteins and phenotypes. The database covers all types of drug classes and resistance mechanisms and structures its data based on an ontology. The CARD database was one of the first resources that covered antimicrobial resistance genes. The resource is updated monthly and provides tools to allow users to find potential antibiotic resistance genes in newly-sequenced genomes.
Ontology
Each resistance determinant described by the CARD Antibiotic Resistance Ontology (ARO) must include a connection to each of three branches: Determinant of Antibiotic Resistance, Antibiotic Molecule and Mechanism of Antibiotic Resistance. CARD has recently also launched draft ontologies for both virulence and mobile genetic elements, which are in active development.
Curation
CARD curation occurs continuously, with monthly updates released by a team of biocurators. The curation process primarily involves regular review of the available scientific literature. Enforced curation guidelines provide the necessary context to ensure proper hierarchical classification, defined semantic relationships and data standardization. The biocuration team additionally annotates each ARO term with supplemental information from external references, including relevant publications, chemical structures or protein structure via the Protein Data Bank. ARO terms for AMR determinants are paired with an AMR detection model, which includes the nucleotide and peptide sequence retrieved from NCBI GenBank and any additional parameters needed for prediction of the determinant from raw DNA sequence. Curation is sometimes supplemented with de novo analyses, often to resolve problematic nomenclature.
Overall, CARD’s primary curation paradigm is as follows: to be included in CARD an AMR determinant must be described in a peer-reviewed scientific publication, with its DNA sequence available in GenBank, including clear experimental evidence of elevated minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) over controls. AMR genes predicted by in silico methods, but not experimentally characterized, are not included in CARD’s primary curation. Yet, data harmonization efforts in 2019 that involved a comparison of ResFinder, ARG-ANNOT and NCBI’s catalog of β-lactamase alleles, revealed a large number of historical β-lactamases without associated peer-reviewed publication. As β-lactamases comprise nearly a third of ARO terms in CARD, that convention leads to each β-lactamase sequence variant being given a new name in the literature and missing β-lactamase reference sequences in CARD, leading to annotation imprecision by RGI and notable content differences between CARD and other databases. CARD now includes β-lactamase reference sequences and names even if they lack published experimental evidence of elevated MIC. This back-curation of older β-lactamase sequences is ongoing.
While a large part of CARD’s value is expert human biocuration of AMR sequence data and its relationship to antibiotics, with AMR publications in PubMed exceeding over 5000 per year for the last 10 years the task of keeping CARD both comprehensive and up-to-date is daunting. CARD addresses this problem using three approaches: ad hoc biocuration, pathogen AMR reviews, and computer-assisted literature triage. Ad hoc biocuration involves addressing feedback from the AMR research community as well as literature discovered during quality-control checks or review of AMR gene nomenclature. Pathogen AMR review involves systematic review of the AMR literature for specific pathogens. In 2017, the CARD*Shark text-mining algorithm was introduced for computer-assisted literature triage, which has been expanded based on the new ARO Drug Class classification tags. CARD*Shark assigns priority scores to publications from a general PubMed Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) search based on relevance and assigns the results to a CARD biocurator for manual review.
The CARD curation team continuously updates the database on a development server and prior to release, rigorous QC scripts are implemented to validate these data before porting it to the publicly available website. These QC steps verify the use of external identifiers, publication citations, AMR detection model parameters and imposed rules for the ontology structure. Any detected issues are resolved prior to release. After QC, the public CARD website is updated monthly. The website also includes a built-in BLAST instance for comparing sequences to CARD reference sequences and a web instance of RGI for resistome prediction with data visualization tools.
Community involvement
In response to the 2019 European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) AMR Databases Workshop, the ‘AMR_Curation’ public repository was established for collective curation of AMR genes and mutations involving the majority of AMR database curators (e.g. NCBI, Resfinder, MEGARes, etc.) with an active and monitored curation issue tracker, a parallel AMR curation mailing list, editable Google Spreadsheet List of AMR Databases and Software, and curated Wikipedia list of AMR Databases all accessible at https://github.com/arpcard/amr_curation. CAD encourages researchers, software developers and AMR data curators to use this repository and associated resources to submit, discuss and resolve AMR curation issues. Anyone with a GitHub account can submit an issue.
AMR detection models
CARD’s Model Ontology includes reference nucleotide and protein sequences, as well as additional search parameters including mutations conferring AMR (if applicable) and curated BLAST(P/N) bit score cut-offs. The majority of CARD AMR determinants use either a protein homolog model (PHM) or a protein variant model (PVM). PHMs predict AMR protein sequences from raw DNA sequence based on homology to a curated reference sequence, based on a curated BLAST bit score cut-off. PVMs perform a similar search, but include additional parameters for the detection of specific curated non-synonymous mutations or other genetic variants (i.e. INDELs, frameshifts) that differentiate between antibiotic-susceptible wild-type and antibiotic-resistant alleles.
From 2017, CARD transitioned each detection model to curated BLAST bit score cut-offs, discontinuing use of less discriminatory BLAST expectation values (E). Bit score cut-offs are selected based on values that perform this discrimination when the curated reference sequence is compared by BLAST against CARD itself and against GenBank's non-redundant database, with hand inspection to determine a value that correctly classifies matches as homologs of similar antimicrobial function or similar proteins with different function or AMR Gene Family membership. The asymptotic nature of the BLAST expectation value (E) gave it very low discriminatory power between different β-lactamase gene families (nearly ⅓ of CARD’s content), but the linear nature of the BLAST bit score allowed this level of discrimination.
See also
Antimicrobial Resistance databases
References
Antimicrobial resistance organizations
Biological databases | Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database | [
"Biology"
] | 1,440 | [
"Bioinformatics",
"Biological databases"
] |
60,831,908 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy%20engine | A buoyancy engine is a device that alters the buoyancy of a vehicle or object in order to either move it vertically, as in the case of underwater profiling floats and stealth buoys, or provide forward motion (therefore providing variable-buoyancy propulsion) such as with underwater gliders and some autonomous aircraft.
For underwater applications, buoyancy engines typically involve a hydraulic pump that either inflates and deflates an external bladder filled with hydraulic fluid, or extends and retracts a rigid plunger. The change in the vehicle's total volume alters its buoyancy, making it float upwards or sink as required. Alternative systems employing gas obtained from water electrolysis, rather than hydraulic fluid, have also been proposed, as have systems which pump ambient water into and out of a pressure vessel.
Operation
The buoyancy engine is a technology used in research for underwater surveillance and mapping. A buoyancy engine works by changing the buoyancy of the device to make the vehicle positively or negatively buoyant so that it will float or sink through the water column. One way of doing this is by inflating and deflating an oil bladder outside the rigid pressure hull using oil stored inside the rigid pressure hull. In doing so, this changes the density of the craft the engine is installed on. As a result, an autonomous underwater vehicle such as an underwater glider can repeatedly adjust its buoyancy without external input. This allows the glider to remain in operation, independent of a surface vessel, for a longer duration, which makes the underwater glider a more viable tool for mapping the ocean floor.
An underwater glider works similarly to how an aircraft glider works, in that it utilizes the flow of water over a set of airfoil section wings to generate lift. The direction of the lift generated induces forward motion, whether the vehicle is gliding down when negatively buoyant or up when positively buoyant. The way weight is distributed within the underwater glider helps with this by putting the center of gravity at or just in front of the leading edge of the wings. This promotes an efficient and smooth glide slope. The buoyancy engine allows an underwater glider to continue this gliding process for extended periods by reversing the vertical force inducing the glide when the vehicle reaches the top and bottom depth limits of its operating envelope. Without a buoyancy engine, an underwater glider could be used once and then deploy a package that would float to the surface where it can be retrieved, or drop ballast, with the same effect. With the addition of a buoyancy engine, the underwater glider becomes a more viable tool as it can stay in operation longer and can be reused.
An underwater glider, like an aircraft glider, loses altitude as it moves forward. In the case of an underwater glider, its depth increases. Eventually, any glider will touch the ground. With a gliding aircraft, this is not much of an issue since they are expected to land and are reusable when they do so. This is not true for an underwater glider. If an underwater glider were to land on the ocean floor, it is essentially lost. Since a buoyancy engine allows a glider to change its density, the glider can glide in two directions. It can glide down like an aircraft, or it can glide up if it makes itself less dense than the water around it. In this way, as long as the buoyancy engine remains active, and power is available, an underwater glider can continue to operate.
The actual operation of a buoyancy engine occurs through a complex system of tubing, valves, and sensors. When a glider equipped with a buoyancy engine is deployed, the glider will increase its density to sink to an appropriate depth at which to start its mission. Once at that depth, the glider will begin the mission and the buoyancy engine will adjust the density to a value that is efficient for gliding. When a predetermined depth has been reached, the buoyancy engine will decrease density and this will cause the glider to glide back towards the surface. In this way, the underwater glider remains in operation between two preset depths. The mechanism used to modify buoyancy for this purpose is often a variable buoyancy pressure vessel.
Application
The buoyancy engine, when combined with the underwater glider, gives scientists and other individuals or organizations access to hardware to survey the ocean depths. For instance, the buoyancy engine, since it is used on underwater gliders and extends the capabilities of such craft, would be able to more effectively map the ocean floor. The use of the buoyancy engine has other effects as well. It could be used to improve the detection of underwater stores of oil. In addition, since the operational range of underwater gliders is increased through the use of buoyancy engines, ocean floors can be mapped in larger sections which is more efficient than pre-existing technologies. Also, buoyancy engines do not give off environmentally harmful substances making them an environmentally safe technology.
Other applications that extend from this include investigating disasters that happen at sea. Due to the increased mapping capabilities provided by the buoyancy engine, searching for the wreckage of an airliner or passenger ship can be conducted more economically by a larger number of units, so the wreckage may be found sooner and evidence can be collected more efficiently. Ocean mapping and underwater surveillance are important as they can reveal resources that would not be available otherwise.
References
Buoyancy
Fluid mechanics | Buoyancy engine | [
"Engineering"
] | 1,109 | [
"Civil engineering",
"Fluid mechanics"
] |
60,831,967 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach%20cleaning | Beach cleaning or clean-up is the process of removing solid litter, dense chemicals, and organic debris deposited on a beach or coastline by the tide, local visitors, or tourists. Humans pollute beaches with materials such as plastic bottles and bags, plastic straws, fishing gear, cigarette filters, six-pack rings, surgical masks and many other items that often lead to environmental degradation. Every year hundreds of thousands of volunteers comb beaches and coastlines around the world to clean this debris. These materials are also called "marine debris" or "marine pollution" and their quantity has been increasing due to anthropocentric activities.
There are some major sources of beach debris such as beach users, oceans, sea drifts, and river flow. Many beach users leave their litter behind on the beaches after activities. Also, marine debris or chemicals such as raw oil drift from oceans or seas and accumulate on beaches. Additionally, many rivers bring some cities' trashes to beaches. These pollutants harm marine life and ecology, human health, and coastal tourism. Hartley et al.'s (2015) study shows that environmental education is important to eliminate many beach pollutants on beaches and the marine environment.
Marine debris
There are two causes of the degradation of marine ecology and marine debris: the direct forces (population growth, technological development, and economic growth) and proximity forces (land transformation and industrial processes). We can think of the direct forces as underlying causes of why we consume an excessive amount of goods by industry process. The excessive consumption of goods causes marine debris because the goods have been packaged by manufactured cheap non-recycle materials such as plastic. Solid waste plastics cannot decompose easily in nature and their decomposition process takes thousands of years to million years but plastic breaks down into continuously smaller pieces (>5 mm) forming that is called micro-plastics. Thus, such solid waste products are called marine debris that can be seen all through coastlines and on many beaches through the world. There can be many sources of marine debris such as land-based, marine-based, and other anthropocentric activities.
Million tons of land-based waste products such as plastics, papers, woods, and metals end up in seas, oceans, and beaches through the wind, oceans currents (five major gyres), sewage, runoff, storm-water drains and rivers. Massive amount of marine debris has become a severe menace to the marine environment, aquatic life and humankind. Most land-based sources are illegal dumping, landfills, and petrochemical and other industry disposals. Also, other marine-based sources originate from anthropocentric marine activities that are drifted fishing lines, nets, plastic ropes or other petrochemical products from remote islands or lands, shipping vessels or fishing boats by wind and oceanic currents. Marine debris source is also anthropocentric activities of local populations such as beach goers, tourists and city or town sewage.
Montesinos et al., (2020) study of the total amount of 16,123 beach litter items to determine the source of marine debris at 40 bathing areas along the coast of Cádiz, Spain. The study displays that the sources of 88.5% of plastics, 67% cigarette butts, and cloth litters are related to the activity of beach-goers and tourists, 5.5% of cotton swabs, wet wipes, sanitary towels, tampons, and condoms are related to wastewater discharges at places close to rivers and tidal creeks mouths. Besides, the sources of 2.1% fishing lines, nets, and 0.6% Styrofoam are related to fishing activities and marine sources. Besides, some marine debris indicates that they are dumped directly by some international ships or by tourists into the sea on the beach from different countries such as hard food container (from Portugal), a bottle cap (Morocco), a cleaner bottle (Turkey), a food wrapper and other items related to navigation (Germany). Montesinos et al.'s study (2020) demonstrate that some marine debris can travel hundreds of kilometers and end up very far from its source because of the ocean and sea currents.
Also, tropical and subtropical islands are marine pollution hot spots as their relatively vulnerable ecosystems are being severely affected by both local and foreign marine debris. de Scisciolo et al. (2016) study on ten beaches along the leeward and windward coastlines of Aruba that is one of the Lesser Antilles islands located in the Southern Caribbean Sea. They try to determine differences of marine debris in macro (>25 mm), meso-debris (2–25 mm) and micro-debris (<2 mm) densities. The result of their study shows that meso-debris which are rounded plastic products are found on the windward coastlines because the windward coastlines experience higher pressure from distal marine-based debris. Natural factors such as wind and oceanic currents cause the accumulation and distribution of plastic meso-debris to windward coastlines. And macro-debris that contains a larger proportion of originating from eating, drinking and smoking and recreational activities are found leeward sites of the island because the leeward sites experience higher pressures from local land-based debris such as plastic plates, bottles and plastic straws.
Ghost gear
Marine debris consists of millions of tons of abandoned plastic fishing gear. Nearly 640,000 tons of plastic gear is dumped or abandoned in the oceans every year. According to Unger and Harrison, 6.4 tons of pollutant dumps the oceans every year, and the most of them are consist of by durable synthetic fishing gear, packaging, materials, raw plastic, and convenience items. Such extremely durable plastic gear cannot decompose in the seawater and marine environment and they wash up on beaches driven by inshore currents and wind. Such discarded gear such as plastic fishing lines, nets, and floats are called "ghost gear". About 46% of the 79 thousand of ghost gear that is the size of many football fields has been found at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch constituted in 2018. The discarded fishing nets and lines kill or inflict myriad marine animals such as fish, sharks, whales, dolphins, sea turtles, seals, and marine birds every year. And about 30% of fishing populations have been declining and %70 other marine animals suffer by abandoned gear each year. Besides, the huge fishing industry is an important driver of declines marine ecology by overfishing activities. Overfishing causes when big fishing vessels catch tons of fish faster than stock refills. Moreover, overfishing impacts 4.5 billion people who depend on at least 15% of fish for protein, and fishing is the principal livelihood.
Benefits
Public health
Clean beaches have many benefits for human health because the polluted beaches imperil human lives by beach accidents. Many items left on beaches such as broken glasses, sharp metals, or hard plastics may injure beach-goers physically. Also, marine debris such as fishing gear or nets may risk human life on the beaches. Such pollutants may be a trap for beach users and cause very serious injuries or drowning accidents for tourists.
Ecology
Researches on marine debris have substantially increased our knowledge of the amount and composition of marine debris as well as its impacts on the marine environment, aquatic life and people. Marine debris is very harmful to marine organisms such as plants, invertebrates, fish, seabirds, sea turtles and other large marine mammals. Marine debris contains plastic liters that are composed of industrial chemicals or toxins. These chemicals can be destructive to aquatic organisms because toxins accumulate in the tissues of marine organisms and they cause specific effects such as behavioral changes and alterations in metabolic processes. Also, a combination of plastic and seawater materials such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and heavy metals can be fatal for marine life. Moreover, consumption of micro-plastics by larger marine organisms cause obstructions of the intestinal tract that leads to starvation and death because of reduced energy fitness. According to the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, 111 out of the world's 312 species of seabirds, 26 species of marine mammals, and six out of seven of the words species of sea turtles have experienced issues with beach litter ingestion. Studies reveal that micro-plastics negatively impact human health due to consumption of marine organisms by humans.
In addition to all these impacts, the marine debris and beach litter pose dangers to wildlife on the beaches and marine ecology. Many beach pollutants such as fishing gears and nets or oil spills jeopardize many sea animals including sea turtles, seabirds, and dolphins, and can cause serious injuries or death. Marine animals can become trapped by contaminants such as fishing lines or nets.
The present issue with all of the aforementioned ailments are only made possible from human impacts, and could be ultimately prevented without human and marine interaction. It was reported by the United Nations Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution (GESAMP) that pollution originating from land was said to make up 80% of the world's marine pollution.
Sustainability
Clean beaches are indicators of the environmental quality and sustainable development level of a country. The Beach Cleaning Health Index is a cleaning classification method of European countries and their environments. The index determines the level of sustainability and cleanness of the countries and their beaches through classification notes such as A for excellent, B for good, C for regular, and D for bad.
There are numerous sustainability indices that have been created in the name of beach health and general appearance. These indexes are dependent on a wide range of variables that are used to assess both the anthropocentric as well as natural changes to beaches. These indexes' variables often merge the goals of both environmental preservation and that of the region to which the beach belongs. In addition to the heath index used in many European countries, in 2005 Israel generated its own beach analysis, their clean coast index (CCI). The goal since the start of this program has been to maintain cleanliness of all Israel's coastline, as well as educate the public on the importance of migrating marine litter. This is one of the first Indexes to determine more than just the amount of waste removed from a beach, as has been done in the past.
The CCI evaluated beach cleanliness every 2 weeks for a period of 7 months. By using this index on a periodic basis they were able to determine what processes worked well and which one did not. Other countries in the Caribbean are employing a different form of beach health index, called the Beach Quality Index (BQI). The BQI assesses many aspects of beaches, not just litter or overall cleanliness, but anthropocentric impacts and long term effects to act somewhat as a checklist for environmental quality issues. The BQI classifies beaches as both urban and urbanized, in the hopes of assessing them to their best ability, and including all factors that may impact varying beaches. The BQI helps by establishing various components and categories to help with this classification, something that not all beach indexes include.
Tourism
Beaches are recreational areas and attract many local and international visitors through sunbathing, swimming, walking or surfing activities. This coastal tourism is important for many countries because tourism activities contribute to a large facet of their economy. Therefore, a polluted beach or coastline may substantially impact a country's economy negatively. Contaminated beaches have become a global concern since the beginning of industrialization. Contaminated beaches are unattractive for international and local tourists due to aesthetic value or health concerns. Hutchings et al.'s (2000) study shows that a clean beach is a very important determinant of many local and international tourists in South Africa.
Public engagement and awareness, education, and behavior change
Participation in beach cleaning is associated with a better understanding of the issue of marine litter and its impacts. Beach cleaning volunteers demonstrated more accurate knowledge of the amount and type of waste in the local environment, as well as greater awareness of the causes and consequences of marine litter. For example, Hartley et al. (2015) found that students that volunteered to clean a local beach with their school could more accurately identify the primary origins of marine litter and estimate the lifespan of plastic. By highlighting the connection between human behavior and marine litter, beach cleaning increases the likelihood that participants will habitually remove and appropriately dispose of coastal trash, as well as engage in prevention and mitigation efforts. By comparing beach cleaning to other coastal activities—walking on the beach and rock pooling—Wyles et al. (2017) aimed to identify the benefits unique to beach cleaning. In doing so, Wyles et al. (2017) discovered that individuals that participated in beach cleaning reported a significantly greater increase in their intention to live an environmentally-friendly lifestyle and their awareness of marine issues compared to other test groups after the intervention.
Wellbeing
Beach cleaning has been shown to cultivate a positive mood and feeling of fulfillment. Wyles et al. (2017) compared the effect various coastal activities—beach cleaning, rock pooling, and walking on the beach—had on well being. The study found that participants experienced an improvement in mood across all three activities, although individuals who participated in beach cleaning reported a statistically significant difference in the sense of meaning they derived from beach cleaning compared to walking on the beach and rock pooling.
Additional research on the effects of beach cleaning on personal well being has not been conducted. However, the two core components of beach cleaning—spending time by the ocean and volunteering to advance environmental stewardship—have been associated with improved well being, mood, and outlook on life. For example, Koss and Kingsley (2010) found that individuals who volunteered at protected marine areas in Australia experienced greater mental and emotional well being and enhanced connection with the natural environment.
While beach cleaning can improve well being, Wyles et al. (2017) discovered that participants reported a statistically significant lower level of rejuvenation and relaxation when beach cleaning compared to rock pooling and walking on the beach.
Lastly, the well being benefits associated with beach cleaning are not only limited to the individuals actively removing trash from the coast but can be enjoyed by community members and beach goers as a whole. Wyles et al. (2016) claims that the presence of litter can diminish the psychological benefits of beaches. Beach goers in Wyles et al. (2016) even described feelings of sadness or anger when confronted with litter, explaining that these emotions emerged because the trash negatively impacts the environment and distracts from the beauty of the landscape.
Methods
The process of beach cleaning requires good management methods, adequate human resources, and funds. Solid litters cleaning methods are very different than oil spill cleaning methods. The beach cleaning process may be done using machinery such as sand cleaning machines that rake or sift the sand or/and other chemicals such as oil dispersants. This beach cleaning may be done by professionals company, civic organizations, the military or volunteers such as the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup and Marine Conservation Society.
Mechanical vs. manual cleaning
There are two types of beach cleaning—mechanical and manual. These methods are also referred to as mechanical grooming and nonmechanical grooming. Mechanical beach cleaning is defined as litter and/or organic material removal that relies on the work of automatic or push machinery that rakes or sieves the most superficial layer of sand. Manual cleaning involves individuals picking up trash exclusively by hand. The suggested beach cleaning approach incorporates manual and mechanical cleaning as this combination is most cost effective and environmentally sound.
Environmental concerns
Wrack cover and biodiversity
Mechanical cleaning removes organic materials, like seaweed, algae, and plants, alongside anthropogenic waste, such as plastic bottles, cigarette butts, and food packaging, leading to disturbances in the ecosystem and food chain. Organic materials naturally found on beaches, also known as wrack, provide critical nutrients and compose the foundation of the food chain. The elimination of this food source impacts organisms ranging from meiofauna to predator birds, resulting in a loss of biodiversity and a decrease in species abundance. For example, Dugan et al. studied the relationship between wrack abundance and the richness, abundance, and biomass of macrofauna of fifteen sandy beaches in Southern California and found that ungroomed beaches with relatively low levels of wrack had a mean abundance of macrofauna that thrive in the presence of wrack that was almost nine times greater than groomed beaches. Additionally, ungroomed beaches with relatively large amounts of wrack supported more than thirteen species of macrofauna that live in and around wrack while groomed beaches supported less than three. Furthermore, the presence of two shorebirds was positively correlated with the presence of wrack-associated macrofauna, indicating that beaches with more extensive wrack cover support vertebrates higher in the food chain and create a more rich, biodiverse ecosystem. Overall, the presence of wrack allows for detritivores, like isopods and talitrid amphipod, invertebrates like beetles, foraging birds, and scavenging vertebrates like mice, rats, foxes, and badgers to live and feed in that environment.
Wrack removal and public health
While removing wrack from beaches can harm the environment, the presence of excessive wrack can threaten beach goers' health. Collections of wrack decompose quickly which generates a foul odor. This environment attracts unpleasant, and even dangerous microbes and animals. Flies and buzzards are drawn to the smell of the decomposing wrack. While a large bird population increases biodiversity, the birds leave their droppings which also increase the density of potentially harmful microbes in the sand. Additionally, microbes that thrive in the presence of feces, called fecal indicator organisms, can reproduce in the conditions created by decomposing wrack. Wrack can sustain potentially harmful bacteria and fecal indicator organisms like Escherichia coli and Enterococci, which can cause gastrointestinal illness. In fact, a positive relation between time spent on wet sandy beaches and the incidence of contracting a gastrointestinal illness has been identified.
Topographic and vegetation alterations
Groomed beaches are wider, sustain substantially less vegetation, and have fewer and flatter topographic features, like dunes and hummocks, than ungroomed beaches. Naturally beaches should have a narrow stretch of sand closest to the ocean that is flattened by the tide below the extreme high tide line. Beyond this zone, the land should be composed of vegetated dunes that are infrequently touched by tides. However, mechanical beach cleaning has converted many beaches into much wider expanses of flat sand, most of which remains undisturbed by the tide and void of vegetation. Mechanical beach cleaning destroys vegetation, hummocks, and newly-formed dunes, leading to an immediate flattening of the landscape. Mechanical cleaning not only damages existing vegetation but deters the growth of future vegetation. Dugan and Hubbard found that the groomed portions of a beach experienced significantly lower rates of plant survival and reproduction after germination than the ungroomed sections of the same beach.
As vegetation abundance and the height and presence of dunes and hummocks decrease, sand transport patterns change in a way that furthers the extent of flattened topography. Hummocks, dunes, and vegetation act as obstacles that slow sand movement triggered by the wind. When these features disappear, the formation of future hummocks and dunes becomes more difficult and unlikely.
As beaches grow flatter and wider, the abundance and diversity of vegetation decreases further because vegetation requires stable sand dunes to take root and grow.
In this way, mechanical beach cleaning triggers a positive feedback loop that exacerbates the flattening and widening of beaches alongside the loss of vegetation abundance and diversity. Halting mechanical beach cleaning stops this cycle and can rebuild the damaged topography and lost vegetation. For example, Dugan and Hubbard observed that four years after stopping mechanical grooming, the San Buenaventura State Beach recovered 20 to 40 meters of vegetation, formed new hummocks and the beginning stages of sand dunes, improved sand stability, and increased the number of plants that survived beyond germination.
Best practices
A number of best practices for carrying out beach cleaning have been discussed in the literature.
Combination of mechanical and manual cleaning methods
This method allows urban and more intensely used beaches to manage larger quantities of litter while minimizing the environmental impact of mechanical cleaning. In fact, beaches cleaned less than three times a week sustain a level of biodiversity and species abundance that is similar or only slightly lower than beaches that are strictly cleaned by hand. For example, Morton et al. (2015) found that mechanical beach cleaning did not affect biodiversity but concede that this likely due to the fact that the beach only underwent mechanical cleaning once to twice a week and had moved wrack from popular sections of the beaches to less commonly visited sites. Additionally, Stelling-Wood et al. (2016) studied ghost crab populations as an indicator species for overall biodiversity on sandy beaches and discovered that the frequency of mechanical beach cleaning was the most influential factor on population size. Beaches that were mechanically cleaned less than three times a week housed the highest number of ghost crabs.
Reduction of quantity of beach litter through educational programs
Educational programs and volunteering effectively catalyze behavior change and awareness around marine pollution, leading to a reduction in marine debris and a willingness to clean that is present on beaches. More information can be found about the benefits of educational and volunteer programs under the Public Engagement and Beach Cleaning header of this page. Decreasing the quantity of marine litter makes manual beach cleaning an easier, more effective option, even for urban, frequently used beaches.
Relocation of collections of wrack to ungroomed or less popular areas of a beach
In doing so, the critical nutrient provided by wrack remains in the ecosystem, limiting disruptions to the food chain and ecosystem. Oftentimes, the nutrients from wrack will be redistributed to groomed portions of the beaches through wind and waves. For this reason, it is most important that this suggestion be implemented on beaches with consistently low tides.
Public engagement and beach cleaning
There are three primary ways the public can learn about or participate in beach cleaning: educational programs, awareness campaigns, and volunteering. All modes of public engagement can increase awareness of the issue of marine litter, educate participants about marine litter and ocean conservation, and motivate behavior change. When volunteers participate in beach cleaning, they can use mechanical or manual methods.
Educational programs and awareness campaigns
Educational and awareness campaigns can be developed by schools or promoted by government. Both have effectively enhanced their target audience's knowledge of marine litter, perception of the extent of the issue, and catalyzed behavior change.
Multiple studies research the impact of service learning programs on students' level of knowledge accumulation and awareness of both marine litter and broader marine conservation issues. For example, Owens (2018) studied the self-reported change in students' perception of their knowledge about ocean conservation and environmental behavior. The study compared the responses of two groups: an undergraduate class enrolled in a seminar course supplemented by a service learning opportunity cleaning beaches and an undergraduate class enrolled in a traditional laboratory-based environmental science course. Students who participated in beach cleaning reported a significantly greater perception of knowledge and environmentally-friendly behavior compared to the students in the laboratory-based class. The students who participated in beach cleaning also saw a significantly greater increase in their scores for perceived knowledge and environmentally-friendly behavior compared to the other cohort.
Educational campaigns can spread knowledge and incite behavior change beyond the target audience. For example, Hartley et al. (2015) explains that students who participated in beach cleaning with their school encouraged their friends and family to join them in adopting mitigation and prevention behaviors.
Volunteering
Volunteering improves participants' awareness and knowledge about marine litter and increases the likelihood that individuals will take continued action to address the issue. For example, Hartley et al. (2015) claims that after volunteering to clean a local beach with their school, children reported engaging in mitigation and prevention behavior more frequently, such as purchasing fewer, single-use plastic items, appropriately disposing of their waste, and recycling. Uneputty et al. (1998) found that individuals who had volunteered to clean beaches continued to remove trash from beaches and not litter months after they had participated in a volunteer program. Furthermore, surveys and interviews have revealed that once individuals begin volunteering in marine conservation efforts, they want to continue.
Multiple studies have determined that volunteers, whether organized through schools and universities or individual interest, can significantly reduce the quantity of solid waste on beaches.
Numerous volunteer beach cleaning programs have been facilitated by schools that promote service learning opportunities. These studies, in conjunction with research conducted with participants that joined programs entirely voluntarily, have demonstrated that groups that were and were not previously concerned about marine litter can experience an increase in awareness and knowledge, as well as positive behavior change through the hands on experience and learning involved in volunteering.
Beach cleaning volunteers reap the same, if not more, benefits from their participation as individuals who participate in other coastal activities. Wyles et al. (2017) studied the impact various coastal activities—beach cleaning, rock pooling, and walking on the beach—had on well being and discovered that all three led to a similar betterment in mood. However, individuals who participated in beach cleaning described a more intense sense of fulfillment when compared to the groups.
While further research has not been completed on the mental and emotional benefits of beach cleaning, volunteers who promote environmental stewardship have reported improvements in their well being.
Public engagement and collection methods
A study conducted in Catalonia in the late 1990s found that, on the beaches of the Llobregat Delta, engaging with the public through manual methods of beach cleanup improved citizen participation as compared to mechanical methods. Moving towards manual cleaning by citizens can benefit both the environment and aid in the local municipalities work of keeping the beaches clean. Dominguez's 2005 study found a correlation between citizens and the use of manual beach cleaning methods. This study also found that the amount of manual labor as well as employees required to manually clean stretches of beaches to be much less than anticipated.
Most polluted and cleanest beaches in the world
Most polluted beaches
Many researchers report that the ocean currents transfer floating litter by the five subtropical gyres. Thus, anthropocentric marine debris is present in all oceans, beaches and at the sea surface, even the Arctic sea ice contains small plastics particles or micro-plastics. According to Bhatia (2019), the ten most polluted beaches in the world are:{
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Phú Quốc, Vietnam.
Maya Bay, Thailand.
Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, US.
Kuta Beach, Indonesia.
Juhu Beach, India.
Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.
Guanabara Bay, Brazil.
Serendipity Beach, Cambodia.
Haina, Dominican Republic.
San Clemente Pier, California, US.
Cleanest beaches
According to Nguyen (2019), there are still some clean beaches around the world. To find out if a beach is clean or not is to look for a blue flag. The Blue Flag is the world's most recognized voluntary eco-labels awarded to beaches, marinas, and sustainable boating tourism operators. The blue flag shows when a beach has high environmental and quality standards. The six the cleanest Blue Flag awarded beaches are:{
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Victoria Beach, Canada.
Santa Maria Beach, Los Cabos.
Dado Beach, Israel.
Mellieha Bay, Malta.
Palmestranden Beach, Denmark.
Zona Balnear da Lagoa, Portugal.
Gallery
See also
Global warming
Anthropocene
Ecology
Marine ecosystem
Oil spill
Earth Day
Exploding whale
Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup
Marine Conservation Society
Ocean Conservancy
References
Cleaning
Environmental protection
Marine conservation
Environmental volunteering
Ocean pollution | Beach cleaning | [
"Chemistry",
"Environmental_science"
] | 6,694 | [
"Ocean pollution",
"Water pollution"
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60,831,992 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia%20Spaceport%20Authority | The Virginia Spaceport Authority, formally better known as Virginia Space, is a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia focused on bringing commercial spaceflight to Virginia and providing education in aerospace technologies across the Commonwealth. Created in 1995 as the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority (VCSFA) by the Virginia General Assembly, Virginia Space owns and operates the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, located within the Wallops Flight Facility. The subdivision assumed its current name in April 2023.
History
The Virginia General Assembly created the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority in 1995 to promote the development of the commercial space flight industry, economic development, aerospace research, and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education throughout the Commonwealth.
Initially partnered with Old Dominion University, which helped develop the organization, longtime professor Dr. Billie M. Reed was installed as the Executive Director of the organization. Prior to his time as a professor, he retired from the United States Navy after twenty years of service.
In 1997, Virginia Space entered into a Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which provided for permitted use of land on NASA Wallops Island. Virginia Space also applied for and was granted a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) license to launch to orbit. The Wallops Island location was first sanctioned in 1945 by NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, for spaceflight.
With these foundations in place, the Virginia Space Flight Center was founded, located on the southern portion of NASA Wallops Island. In present-day, the facility is approved for launch azimuths from 38° to 60°, making it an ideal location from which to launch to the International Space Station (ISS).
By the end of 2003, Governor Mark Warner and Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, respectively of Virginia and Maryland, partnered to establish the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), succeeding the Virginia Space Flight Center. This was done, in part, to help develop the region's presence for space flight and collaboration with the local universities. Senator Mikulski of Maryland was a long-time advocate for the advancement of this intra-state partnership during her time in office.
In 2007, NASA selected the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation to participate in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, followed by a Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract to build and demonstrate a new rocket, Antares, to resupply the International Space Station (ISS). This project was taken over by Orbital's successor company Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems. The CRS contract authorized eight missions from 2012 to 2015 carrying approximately 20,000 kg of cargo to the ISS, as well as disposal of waste, from the MARS Pad-0A launchpad.
In March 2012, it was announced that Dr. Reed was going to retire from his role at Virginia Space, with Dale Nash, a former executive officer at Alaska Aerospace Corporation, set as his immediate successor.
On MARS Pad-0B, Virginia Space made modifications and upgrades to launch the NASA Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission to the Moon in mid-2013 on a new Orbital Sciences Minotaur V launch vehicle. Also in mid-2013, the United States Air Force launched ORS-3 from MARS Pad 0B.
In October 2018, VCSFA entered into an agreement with the New Zealand-based Rocket Lab to build a new pad for their Electron rocket. This was followed in 2021 by announcing their Neutron rocket will also be set to launch from the MARS facility. With their main launchpad located in the Māhia Peninsula of New Zealand, Rocket Lab refers to their MARS location as "Launch Complex 2".
In 2021, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced the selection of Major General Roosevelt "Ted" Mercer (Retired) as the new Executive Director of Virginia Space, succeeding Dale Nash, who previously announced his retirement after working in that position since 2012. General Mercer took office in August 2021.
Facilities
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport has two active launch pads. A third is launch pad was completed in December 2019.
Launch pad 0A (LP-0A) was built for the Conestoga rocket, which made its only flight in 1995.
The launch tower was subsequently demolished in September 2008, and has now been rebuilt for use by the Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems Antares.
The pad modifications for Antares included the construction of a Horizontal Integration Facility for launcher/payload mating and a wheeled transporter/erector that will "roll out and erect the rocket on its launch pad about 24 hours prior to launch".
The facility suffered significant damage during the 28 October 2014 Antares launch failure, according to NASA officials in the immediate aftermath.
The Commonwealth of Virginia is seeking help from its two US Senators to obtain Federal funding for rebuilding the pad. Preliminary estimates for rebuilding the pad indicate the cost should be no more than . By May 2015, that estimate had been revised down to and repairs were expected to be completed by September or October 2015 with the next planned launch in March 2016. On September 30, 2015, the spaceport announced repairs on pad 0A had been completed. The launch pad resumed flight operations with the successful Cygnus CRS OA-5 mission on October 17, 2016.
Launch Pad 0B (LP-0B) became operational in 1999, and was subsequently upgraded with the construction of a mobile service tower, which was completed in 2004.
It remains active, and is currently used by Minotaur rockets. Additionally, Vector Space Systems announced on October 19, 2017 that their upcoming Vector-R rocket will be conducting three launches in the next two years, with an option for 5 additional launches, from a mobile launcher at pad 0B.
In October 2018, Virginia Space announced the construction on MARS Launch Pad 0C (also known as LP-0C or LC-2) and an associated integration facility for use by Rocket Lab for their Electron rocket. The design is largely based on the company's Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula of New Zealand. The first launch from this new launch complex is currently scheduled for the two-quarter 2020.
References
State agencies of Virginia
1995 establishments in Virginia
Space organizations
Space advocacy organizations
Aerospace business development agencies | Virginia Spaceport Authority | [
"Astronomy"
] | 1,283 | [
"Space advocacy organizations",
"Astronomy organizations",
"Space organizations"
] |
60,832,181 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea%20M.%20Bronfman%20Prize%20for%20the%20Arts | The Andrea M. Bronfman Prize for the Arts (the Andy,) is an annual design award given to an Israeli decorative artist working in ceramics, glass, textiles or jewellery.
Awards
The prize includes a cash award of NIS 50,000, in addition to a solo exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and a published catalogue of the exhibit. Also, two of the artist's works are purchased, one to be added to the permanent collection of the Israel Museum, and one to be added to the collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
In 2017 the prize was relaunched by Bronfman's children as The Andy, $5,000 prize awarded annually to each of three students at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.
History
The prize was created by Charles Bronfman in 2006 to mark Andrea Bronfman's 60th birthday; she was hit by a car and died before the first award was made.
Winners
2006: Hadas Rosenberg-Nir.
2007: Itay Noy.
2008: Esther Knobel.
2010: Tzuri Gueta.
References
Design awards
Visual arts awards
Arts awards in Israel
Awards established in 2006 | Andrea M. Bronfman Prize for the Arts | [
"Engineering"
] | 242 | [
"Design",
"Design awards"
] |
60,832,796 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC%204561 | NGC 4561 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices. It was discovered by German-British astronomer William Herschel on April 13, 1784. This galaxy is located at a distance of from the Milky Way, and is a member of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. It is 13th magnitude with an angular size of .
The morphological classification of NGC 4561 in the De Vaucouleurs system is SB(rs)dm, indicating a barred spiral galaxy (SB) with a transitional inner ring structure (rs), loosely wound spiral arms (d), and an irregular appearance with no bulge component (m). The galactic plane is inclined at an angle of 28° to the plane of the sky, with the major axis aligned along a position angle of 60°. It has a star formation rate of ·yr−1. The net stellar mass of the galaxy is .
A nuclear X-ray source was detected in NGC 4561 by Chandra, and was determined to be an active galactic nucleus based on XMM-Newton observations. It has a small supermassive black hole at the source, with a mass of at least .
References
External links
Barred spiral galaxies
Coma Berenices
07768
4561
IC objects
042020
Discoveries by William Herschel | NGC 4561 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 266 | [
"Coma Berenices",
"Constellations"
] |
60,834,137 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasqualodon | Parasqualodon is an extinct genus of toothed whale from the Oligocene. It contains a single species, Parasqualodon wilkinsoni. It has been suggested that the taxon constitutes a nomen dubium.
References
Prehistoric toothed whales
Nomina dubia
Oligocene cetaceans | Parasqualodon | [
"Biology"
] | 63 | [
"Biological hypotheses",
"Nomina dubia",
"Controversial taxa"
] |
60,835,248 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsai-Hill%20failure%20criterion | The Tsai–Hill failure criterion is one of the phenomenological material failure theories, which is widely used for anisotropic composite materials which have different strengths in tension and compression. The Tsai-Hill criterion predicts failure when the failure index in a laminate reaches 1.
Tsai–Hill failure criterion in plane stress
The Tsai-Hill criterion is based on an energy theory with interactions between stresses. Ply rupture appears when:
Where:
is the allowable strength of the ply in the longitudinal direction (0° direction)
is the allowable strength of the ply in the transversal direction (90° direction)
is the allowable in-plane shear strength of the ply between the longitudinal and the transversal directions
The Tsai hill criterion is interactive, i.e. the stresses in different directions are not decoupled and do affect the failure simultaneously. Furthermore, it is a failure mode independent criterion, as it does not predict the way in which the material will fail, as opposed to mode-dependent criteria such as the Hashin criterion, or the Puck failure criterion. This can be important as some types of failure can be more critical than others.
References
Composite materials
Mechanical failure | Tsai-Hill failure criterion | [
"Physics",
"Materials_science",
"Engineering"
] | 251 | [
"Composite materials",
"Materials science",
"Materials",
"Mechanical engineering",
"Mechanical failure",
"Matter"
] |
60,837,006 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourelle%20%28architecture%29 | A tourelle is a type of turret, sometimes used in Chateauesque architecture.
A general dictionary defines tourelle as "a small tower (as one springing from corbeling or pier)".
An architectural dictionary defines it more specifically as a "corbelled turret, circular in plan, cone-roofed, sometimes containing a circular stair, set at the angle of a tower or wall at high level, and common in Scottish-Baronial architecture".
A distinction may be made between turrets that are atop corner towers going all the way down to the ground, vs. turrets that project out and up. A tourelle is the latter.
References
Architectural elements | Tourelle (architecture) | [
"Technology",
"Engineering"
] | 137 | [
"Building engineering",
"Architectural elements",
"Components",
"Architecture"
] |
60,837,114 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexAID | FlexAID is a molecular docking software that can use small molecules and peptides as ligands and proteins and nucleic acids as docking targets. As the name suggests, FlexAID supports full ligand flexibility as well side-chain flexibility of the target. It does using a soft scoring function based on the complementarity of the two surfaces (ligand and target).
FlexAID has been shown to outperform existing widely used software such as AutoDock Vina and FlexX in the prediction of binding poses. This is particularly true in cases where target flexibility is crucial, such as is likely to be the case when using homology models. The source code is available on GitHub under Apache License.
Graphical user interface
A PyMOL plugin for FlexAID, NRGsuite, has also been developed by the original authors.
See also
Docking (molecular)
Virtual screening
List of protein-ligand docking software
References
External links
— Najmanovich Research Group resources
Molecular modelling software
Molecular modelling
Free and open-source software
Software using the Apache license
Free software programmed in C
Free software programmed in C++ | FlexAID | [
"Chemistry"
] | 223 | [
"Molecular modelling software",
"Molecular physics",
"Computational chemistry software",
"Molecular modelling",
"Theoretical chemistry"
] |
60,837,212 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDock | rDock (previously RiboDock) is an open-source molecular docking software that be used for docking small molecules against proteins and nucleic acids. It is primarily designed for high-throughput virtual screening and prediction of binding mode.
History
The development of rDock started in 1998 in RiboTargets (later Vernalis (R&D) Ltd). The software was originally called RiboDock. The development went on until 2006 when the software was licensed to University of York for academic distribution and also maintenance.
Six years later, in 2012, Vernalis and University of York decided to release rDock as open-source software to allow its further development by the wider community. The version that was released as open source is developed and supported by University of Barcelona on SourceForge. The development on SourceForge stalled after June 2014 and the repository is considered deprecated after the migration to GitHub.
A fork named RxDock continued the development of rDock from April 2019 until March 2022 on GitLab. As of April 2022, the RxDock project development activity is very low.
See also
Docking (molecular)
Virtual screening
List of protein-ligand docking software
References
External links
rDock - The Molecular Docking Platform (University of York)
rDock - A Fast, Versatile and Open Source Program for Docking Ligands to Proteins and Nucleic Acids (SourceForge)
RxDock (fork of rDock)
CmDock (fork of RxDock)
Barril Lab Software (University of Barcelona)
Molecular modelling software
Molecular modelling
Free and open-source software
Software using the GNU Lesser General Public License
Free software programmed in C++ | RDock | [
"Chemistry"
] | 338 | [
"Molecular modelling software",
"Molecular physics",
"Computational chemistry software",
"Theoretical chemistry",
"Molecular modelling"
] |
60,837,348 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark%20Triad%20Dirty%20Dozen | The Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DTDD) is a brief 12-question personality inventory test to assess the possible presence of the three subclinical dark triad traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The DTDD was developed to identify the dark triad traits among subclinical adult populations. It is a screening test.
Validity
Jonason and Webster conducted several validity tests of the DTDD as part of its development. Relevant outcomes have all shown statistically significant weaknesses.
Convergent validity (i.e. the extent to which two tests that measure the same construct are strongly related) was assessed by comparing the DTDD subscales (i.e. Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism) with established measures of each subscales; MACH IV, SRP-III, and NPI respectively. DTDD Machiavellianism was correlated with Mach IV at 0.34, DTDD psychopathy with SRP-III at 0.42 and DTDD Narcissism with NPI at 0.46. However, the SRP-III correlated stronger with DTDD Machiavellianism at 0.44 than DTDD psychopathy, a subscale that SRP-III should have the largest theoretical overlap with.
Concurrent validity (i.e. whether measures of constructs that should be theoretically related does show high correlation) with the relevant Big Five personality traits was assessed using the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) and the Big Five Inventory. As expected, the DTDD displayed negative but modest correlation with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.
Through comparison with an aggression scale, the DTDD showed some evidence of concurrent validity, as there were medium positive correlations with physical aggression, verbal aggression, hostility and anger. Subscales that were more theoretically associated with aggression (i.e. DTDD Machiavellianism and DTDD psychopathy) displayed stronger correlations with measures of aggression.
The DTDD showed positive association (.31) with the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (a personality test measuring individuals’ attitudes towards participating in casual sexual relationships), again, contributing to its concurrent validity.
Jonason and McCain investigated the concurrent validity of the DTDD in relation to the HEXACO model of personality. In line with established measures of the dark triad traits, all the DTDD subscales showed strong negative association with the Honesty/Humility factor (ranging from -.52 to -.38) and significant but weaker negative correlation with Agreeableness (ranging from -.29 to -.21).
Other researchers have also conducted validity tests. Below are the examples of the findings:
In a study investigating the DTDD's criterion validity on 200 undergraduate students, it was found that DTDD was significantly predictive of socially maladaptive outcome variables concerning sex (e.g. opting for short-term sexual relationships and likelihood of engaging in sexual harassment), money (e.g. conspicuous consumption and tendency to make unethical decisions for monetary gains) and power (e.g. one's perceived importance of power). However, DTDD was not as predictive of these outcomes as the Honesty-Humility trait of the HEXACO model of personality.
The convergent validity specifically of the DTDD psychopathy subscale was assessed in a study with other established self-report psychopathy tests on 789 undergraduates and 75 male prisoners. DTDD psychopathy showed significant correlations with prominent measures of psychopathy including the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (.38), SRP-III (.46) and Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy scale (.48). However, this study reported less promising criterion validity of the DTDD, as results indicate that the standard psychopathy scales predicted externalising behaviours (including substance use, antisocial behaviour, domestic violence, and gambling) better than the DTDD psychopathy subscale.
Reliability
In their first publication of DTDD, Jonason and Webster have reported overall good reliability of the personality scale:
The test-retest reliability of the DTDD was investigated on 60 psychology university students. In this study, the participants completed the DTDD each week for three weeks. The average test-retest correlation was high: DTDD = 0.89, Machiavellianism = 0.86, psychopathy = 0.76, narcissism = 0.87.
The item-level temporal reliability refers to whether responses of each item on the questionnaire retains stability across time. This was assessed on the same 60 psychology students over the course of three weeks.The average item-level temporal reliability was high: M = 0.92, P = 0.84, N = 0.92.
The DTDD is also found to have satisfactory internal consistency reliability: DTDD = 0.86, M = 0.79, P = 0.77, N = 0.84. After revision of Item 6, a psychopathy-specific item, the internal consistency reliability of psychopathy subscale has improved from (on average) 0.60 to 0.77.
Structure
The DTDD consists of 4 items per subscale (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy). Responses are rated on a 7-point Likert scale, wherein 1 implies a strong disagreement and the opposite for 7. The Machiavellianism items assess characteristics such as manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and likelihood of employing flattery and exploitation for personal gain. The narcissism items are concerned with whether the individual seeks admiration, attention, status, and favours from others. The psychopathy items focus on features such as amorality, cynicism, callousness, and lack of remorse.
Theoretically, the three dark triad traits are treated as separate, but related constructs. In parallel with the factor structure of the dark triad traits, traditional tests of these traits measure each trait independently (e.g. NPI, SRP-III, Mach IV). Due to the DTDD's ability to measure all three constructs simultaneously, researchers have been inquiring whether the DTDD should be better conceptualised as a scale measuring a unitary factor, that is, a composite dark triad trait, or as a scale that measures three distinct but correlating factors. It has been previously demonstrated that the three-factor model (i.e. a scale measuring Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) was more appropriate match for the DTDD more than the single-factor model (i.e. a scale measuring a compound dark triad factor). However further research on the DTDD's factor structure displayed that a bi-factor model yielded the most appropriate match. A bi-factor model combines the one-factor and three-factor models. In this model, both the general factor (i.e. composite dark triad factor) and the three factors of the DTDD subscales (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) account for the shared variance of the items.
Development
The DTDD was developed due to the absence of a single, concise test which measured the three dark triad traits simultaneously.Prior to the development of the DTDD, researchers were required to use different personality tests for each of the dark triad traits. This made scoring difficult for researchers, as it required standardisation of scores of each test for comparison. Another issue with measuring all of dark triad traits by different tests was that it would involve too many items, making administration time-consuming and potentially fatiguing among test-takers, leading to less accurate responses.
As such, Jonason and Webster sought to develop a short and easily administrable measure of the dark triad by adapting items from traditional, existing measures of each dark triad construct, namely the Mach IV for Machiavellianism, the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-III (SRP-III) for psychopathy, and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) for narcissism. The researchers first identified 22 candidate items, and conducted a principal component analysis to identify items that would be included in the DTDD. Four items that contributed to each of the dark triad trait the most were added in the DTDD. Since Jonason and Webster identified a “problem” item that was contributing to lower internal consistency reliability, it was rephrased in the final version of the DTDD.
Effects of Sex and Age
Given that personality tends to be unstable until adulthood, researchers have been reluctant to conduct self-report personality measures on younger people. In line with this, most studies on the DTDD have been administering the questionnaire in university student or adult samples; however, a study has suggested that it is also applicable to use in high-school aged population as well.
Consistent with studies investigating sex differences in scores of established measures of the dark triad traits, adult males tend to score higher on the DTDD than females, especially on the psychopathy subscale.Similar pattern of sex differences in the DTDD scores have been found among adolescents, however it is not as robust as the adult samples. Jones and Paulhus explain that this sex difference may emerge because males, more than females, tend to benefit more from using manipulative, exploitative strategies characteristic of the dark triad traits. Females may not benefit as much from engaging in these socially manipulative tactics as they tend to be more embedded in social structures.
Adaptations
The DTDD has been translated and adapted for other cultures and languages, including French-Canadian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish versions.
The DTDD has been adapted for informants with the Dark Informant-rated Triad (DIRT)
Alternatives to the DTDD
Other researchers saw the 12-item DTDD too brief in covering all relevant content involved in each of the dark triad traits. As an alternative brief measure, Jones and Paulhus have developed the 27-item Short Dark Triad (SD3) in 2014, consisting of 9 items for each of Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism subscale. As opposed to the DTDD in which items were derived from existing dark triad measures, in the SD3, items were developed through considering theoretically relevant facets of the three traits.
Criticisms of the DTDD
Comparison with the SD3
Researchers have questioned DTDD's validity, especially in comparison to the SD3. It has been found that the convergent validity of the SD3 is superior to the DTDD in relation to existing measures of dark triad subscales in multiple studies. Researchers report that the SD3 performs better than the DTDD in terms of incremental validity (i.e. the extent of a new instrument to predict additional information that was not previously predicted by other instruments). Moreover, when content validity (i.e. whether a test captures the essential elements of a construct) of the two inventories was compared, the SD3 out-performed the DTDD. Researchers suggest that the DTDD's poorer performance on these validity outcomes may be due its sheer brevity and the large content overlap between the items, which grants the scale good internal consistency at the expense of sufficient coverage of theoretically significant content.
General critiques
The DTDD has also been criticised for its low discriminating power specifically for its narcissism subscale. An item response theory analysis has revealed that the DTDD narcissism items were the easiest to respond to compared to DTDD items for Machiavellianism and psychopathy. This implies that the DTDD narcissism subscale does not sufficiently discriminate between those with “normal” range of narcissism (which may result from having self confidence or high self-esteem) and those with “abnormal” levels of the trait.
Other researchers have criticised about the sparse coverage of important psychopathy facets in the DTDD psychopathy subscale. Specifically, the DTDD does not account for disinhibition (i.e. impulsivity), which may explain why it has weaker correlations with relevant Big Five personality traits such as Agreeableness and Conscientiousness compared to established measures of psychopathy. They recommend that the DTDD should be used as an adjunct measure of psychopathy.
The DTDD's psychopathy and Machiavellianism subscales have been questioned whether they are adequately distinct from each other, given that they are conceptualised similarly in the questionnaire. A study demonstrated that the demarcation between the two subscales are blurred, as the DTDD Machiavellianism shows stronger correlation with a traditional measure of psychopathy rather than of Machiavellianism. This study concludes that at least among university student aged men, the DTDD is better understood as a measure of two factors; narcissism and “Machiavellianism-psychopathy”, where Machiavellianism is conceptualised as the subclinical form of psychopathy.
References
Personality tests
Machiavellianism
Narcissism
Psychopathy | Dark Triad Dirty Dozen | [
"Biology"
] | 2,706 | [
"Behavior",
"Narcissism",
"Human behavior"
] |
60,839,279 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourasphaira%20giraldae | Ourasphaira giraldae is an extinct process-bearing multicellular eukaryotic microorganism. Corentin Loron argues that it was an early fungus. It existed approximately a billion years ago during the time of the transition from the Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic periods, and was unearthed in the Amundsen Basin in the Canadian Arctic, specifically from layers within the Grassy Bay Formation. This fungus may have existed on land well before plants.
See also
2019 in paleontology
References
Enigmatic fungus taxa
Fossil taxa described in 2019
Fungus species | Ourasphaira giraldae | [
"Biology"
] | 121 | [
"Fungus stubs",
"Fungi",
"Fungus species"
] |
60,840,748 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei%20Mediapad%20M5 | Huawei Mediapad M5 is a series of tablets designed and marketed by Huawei, comprising three models: an 8.4 inch model, a 10.8 inch model, and a 10.8 inch Pro model. Each model came with a Wi-Fi version and a Wi-Fi+LTE version.
For the larger variant, Huawei also includes a desktop mode which allows the user to switch the mobile interface to a traditional desktop interface, by pairing with a keyboard accessory that allows it to work like a laptop.
The Huawei Mediapad M5 is a compact, high-performance Android tablet released to the market in 2018, filling the market gap after Sony's exit from the tablet market.
In 2020, the next M6 model was released based on the 7 nm Kirin 980.
The M5 has a USB-C port, however it supports USB 2.0, not USB 3.0, so it does not support HDMI over USB. It does support screen mirroring.
References
Android (operating system) devices
Tablet computers introduced in 2018
Huawei products
Tablet computers | Huawei Mediapad M5 | [
"Technology"
] | 222 | [
"Mobile computer stubs",
"Mobile technology stubs"
] |
42,951,365 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%20Sheets | Google Sheets is a spreadsheet application and part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. Google Sheets is available as a web application; a mobile app for: Android, iOS, and as a desktop application on Google's ChromeOS. The app is compatible with Microsoft Excel file formats. The app allows users to create and edit files online while collaborating with other users in real-time. Edits are tracked by which user made them, along with a revision history. Where an editor is making changes is highlighted with an editor-specific color and cursor. A permissions system regulates what users can do. Updates have introduced features that use machine learning, including "Explore", which offers answers based on natural language questions in the spreadsheet. Sheets is one of the services provided by Google that also includes Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep.
History
Google Sheets originated from XL2Web, a web-based spreadsheet application developed by 2Web Technologies, founded by Jonathan Rochelle and Farzad "Fuzzy" Khosrowshahi. XL2Web was acquired by Google in 2006 and turned into Google Labs Spreadsheets. It was launched as a test for a limited number of users, on a first-come, first-served basis on June 6, 2006. The limited test was later replaced with a beta version available to all Google Account holders, around the same time as an official announcement press release was issued. In March 2010, Google acquired the online document collaboration company DocVerse. DocVerse allowed multiple-user online collaboration on Excel-compatible documents as well as other Microsoft Office formats such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. Improvements based on DocVerse were announced and deployed in April 2010. In June 2012, Google acquired Quickoffice, a freeware proprietary productivity suite for mobile devices. In October 2012, Google Spreadsheets was renamed Google Sheets and a Google Chrome app was released that provided shortcuts to Sheets on Chrome's new tab page.
Platforms
Google Sheets is available as a web application supported on: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari web browsers. Users can access all spreadsheets, among other files, collectively through the Google Drive website. In June 2014, Google rolled out a dedicated website homepage for Sheets that contain only files created with Sheets. In 2014, Google launched a dedicated mobile app for Sheets on the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. In 2015, the mobile website for Sheets was updated with a "simpler, more uniform" interface. While users can read spreadsheets through the mobile websites, users trying to edit will be redirected towards the mobile app to eliminate editing on the mobile web.
Features
Editing
Collaboration and revision history
Google Sheets serves as a collaborative tool for cooperative editing of spreadsheets in real time. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users simultaneously and users can see character-by-character changes as other collaborators make edits. Changes are automatically saved to Google's servers and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed and reverted to. An editor's current position is represented with an editor-specific color/cursor, so if another editor happens to be viewing that part of the document they can see edits as they occur. A sidebar chat functionality allows collaborators to discuss edits. The revision history allows users to see the additions made to a document, with each author distinguished by color. Only adjacent revisions can be compared and users cannot control how frequently revisions are saved. Files can be exported to a user's local computer in a variety of formats such as PDF and Office Open XML. Sheets supports tagging for archival and organizational purposes.
Explore
Launched for the entire Drive suite in September 2016, "Explore" enables additional functionality through machine learning. In Google Sheets, Explore enables users to ask questions, such as "How many units were sold on Black Friday?" and Explore will return the answer, without requiring formula knowledge from the user. In June 2017, Google expanded the Explore feature in Google Sheets to automatically build charts and visualize data and again expanded it in December to feature machine learning capable of automatically creating pivot tables. In October 2016, Google announced the addition of "Action items" to Sheets. If a user assigns a task within a Sheet, the service will intelligently assign that action to the designated user. Google states this will make it easier for other collaborators to visualize who is responsible for a task. When a user visits Google Drive or Sheets, any files containing tasks assigned to them will be highlighted with a badge. In March 2014, Google introduced add-ons; new tools from third-party developers that add more features for Google Sheets.
Offline editing
To view and edit spreadsheets offline on a computer, users need to be using the Chromium-based web browser (e.g., Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge). A Chrome extension, Google Docs Offline, allows users to enable offline support for Sheets and other Drive suite files on the Google Drive website. The Android and iOS apps natively support offline editing.
Files
Supported file formats and limits
Files in the following formats can be viewed and converted to the Sheets format: .xls (if newer than Microsoft Office 95), .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlt, .xltx, .xltm .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt and .tab Overall document size is capped at 10 million cells.
Google Workspace
The Sheets app and the rest of the Google Docs Editors suite are free to use for individuals, but Sheets is also available as part of the business-centered Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) service by Google, which is a monthly subscription that enables additional business-focused functionality.
Integration with Charts and Wikipedia
Sheets can produce Google Charts and has a third-party plugin which allows for integration with Wikipedia.
Other functionality
A simple find and replace tool is available. The service includes a web clipboard tool that allows users to copy and paste content between Google Sheets and Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Drawings. The web clipboard can also be used for copying and pasting content between different computers. Copied items are stored on Google's servers for up to 30 days.
Google offers an extension for the Google Chrome web browser called Office editing for Docs, Sheets and Slides that enables users to view and edit Microsoft Excel documents on Google Chrome, via the Google Sheets app. The extension can be used for opening Excel files stored on the computer using Chrome, as well as for opening files encountered on the web (in the form of email attachments, web search results, etc.) without having to download them. The extension is installed on ChromeOS by default. As of June 2019, this extension is no longer required since the functionality exists natively.
Google Cloud Connect was a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, and 2010 that could automatically store and synchronize any Excel document to Google Sheets (before the introduction of Drive). The online copy was automatically updated each time the Microsoft Excel document was saved. Microsoft Excel documents could be edited offline and synchronized later when online. Google Cloud Connect maintained previous Microsoft Excel document versions and allowed multiple users to collaborate by working on the same document at the same time. However, Google Cloud Connect has been discontinued as of April 30, 2013, as, according to Google, Google Drive achieves all of the above tasks, "with better results".
While Microsoft Excel maintains the 1900 Leap year bug, Google sheets 'fixes' this bug by increasing all dates before March 1, 1900, so entering "0" and formatting it as a date returns December 30, 1899. On the other hand. Excel interprets "0" as meaning December 31, 1899, which is formatted to read January 0, 1900.
Launched in December 2022, Simple ML is the Google's add-on for machine learning.
See also
Google Slides
Google Docs
References
External links
Sheets
Spreadsheet software
Spreadsheet software for macOS
Spreadsheet software for Windows
Android (operating system) software
IOS software
Web applications
Google Docs Editors | Google Sheets | [
"Mathematics"
] | 1,686 | [
"Spreadsheet software",
"Mathematical software"
] |
42,951,933 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic%20sperm | Robotic sperm (also called spermbots) are biohybrid microrobots consisting of sperm cells and artificial microstructures. Currently there are two types of spermbots. The first type, the tubular spermbot, consists of a single sperm cell that is captured inside a microtube. Single bull sperm cells enter these microtubes and become trapped inside. The tail of the sperm is the driving force for the microtube. The second type, the helical spermbot, is a small helix structure which captures and transports single immotile sperm cells. In this case, a rotating magnetic field drives the helix in a screw-like motion. Both kinds of spermbots can be guided by weak magnetic fields. These two spermbot designs are hybrid microdevices, they consist of a living cell combined with synthetic attachments. Other approaches exist to create purely synthetic microdevices inspired by the swimming of natural sperm cells, i.e. with a biomimetic design, for example so-called Magnetosperm which are made of a flexible polymeric structure coated with a magnetic layer and can be actuated by a magnetic field.
Design
Tubular spermbots
Initially, the microtubes for the tubular spermbots were made using roll-up nanotechnology on photoresist. In this process, thin films of titanium and iron were deposited onto a sacrificial layer. When the sacrificial layer was removed, the thin films rolled into 50 μm long microtubes with a diameter of 5 - 8 μm. Later on, the microtubes were made from a temperature-responsive polymer to enable the controlled release of the sperm cells upon a small temperature change of a few degrees.
Tubular spermbots are assembled by adding a large amount of the microtubes to a diluted sperm sample under the microscope. The sperm cells randomly enter the microtubes and become trapped in their slightly conical cavity. In order to increase the coupling efficiency between sperm cells and microtubes, the microtubes have been functionalized with proteins or sperm chemoattractant. This has been done using thiol chemistry once the tubes are rolled-up or by transferring the molecules with an elastomer stamp onto the material before rolling the tubes.
Helical spermbots
Helical spermbots are assembled by driving a magnetic microhelix over an individual sperm cell, thereby confining its tail inside the helix lumen and pushing the head of the sperm forward. The sperm cell is loosely coupled to the helix and can be released by reversing the rotation of the helix, letting it withdraw from the head and free the confined tail in the process. Such microhelices were fabricated by direct laser lithography and coated with nickel or iron for magnetization.
Navigation
Robotic sperm can be navigated by weak external magnetic fields of a few mT. These fields can be generated by permanent magnets or by a setup of electromagnets. The applied magnetic field can be a homogeneous, rotating, or gradient field. Tubular and helical spermbots can also be navigated in a closed-loop control scheme with an electromagnetic coil setup.
Applications
Spermbots hold promise for potential application in single cell manipulation and assisted reproduction, but also for targeted drug delivery. A recent study shows that modified tubular spermbots can be used for delivery of cancer drugs. In this case, the sperm cell is loaded with doxorubicin. The artificial microstructure fabricated by two-photon nanolithography captures the drug-loaded sperm cell. The sperm cell is the actuation source for the magnetic microstructure and can propel it to cancer spheroids. At this location, the drug-loaded sperm is released by a spring mechanism and the sperm cell delivers the drug to the cancer cells.
Perspectives
Robotic sperms as microswimmers are interesting for diverse biomedical applications, specifically for new assisted fertilization techniques and for the targeted delivery of therapeutic cargo. These microswimmers are meant to operate in in vivo environments, a feature that may revolutionize assisted reproduction technologies and nanomedicine in the future. New designs are emerging and plenty of applications can be derived from the here reported concept.
References
Medical robotics
Nanotechnology | Robotic sperm | [
"Materials_science",
"Engineering",
"Biology"
] | 867 | [
"Nanotechnology",
"Medical robotics",
"Materials science",
"Medical technology"
] |
42,953,903 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC%204217 | NGC 4217 is an edge-on spiral galaxy which lies approximately 60 million light-years (18 million parsecs) away in the constellation of Canes Venatici. It is a possible companion galaxy to Messier 106 (NGC 4258).
One supernova, SN 2022myz (type I, mag. 19), was discovered in NGC 4217 on 19 June 2022.
Gallery
References
Further reading
External links
4217
Canes Venatici
Spiral galaxies
039241 | NGC 4217 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 104 | [
"Canes Venatici",
"Constellations"
] |
42,954,332 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher%20Neyor | Christopher Z. Neyor is a Liberian international energy analyst who is the former President/CEO of the National Oil Company of Liberia.
Education
Christopher Neyor is a former visiting scholar at the Center for Energy and the Environment of the University of Pennsylvania. He did his undergraduate study in Systems Engineering at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and pursued graduate work in energy economics at the University of Denver and Management at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a registered Professional Engineer in Texas.
Career
Neyor is the former President/CEO of the National Oil Company of Liberia, before stepping down in 2012. He is the current president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Morweh Energy Group, an energy consultancy firm based in Monrovia, Liberia. He spent a decade with the Liberia Electricity Corporation and served as its final Managing Director before the 1989 breakout of the Liberian Civil Wars. During the 2006 to 2018 administration of former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, he served as an advisor on energy issues and helped create the 2015 Liberia National Energy Policy.
From X until X, Neyor was a representative for Liberia at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Neyor is noted for his reformist agenda and the contributions he has made to the energy and educational sectors in Liberia.
Book contributions
In 2013, Neyor contributed to a textbook on environmental policy called The Globalization of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Environmental Policy in Chapter 19, titled "Assessing Potential Revenues from Reduced Forest Cover Loss in Liberia, alongside Jessica Donovan, Keith Lawrence, Eduard Niesten, and Eric Werker.
The Globalization of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Environmental Policy (2013), published by Oxford University Press, by Michael Livermore, Dean King, Lawrence King, and Richard Revesz
See also
Energy in Liberia
References
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
21st-century Liberian people
Wright State University alumni
University of Denver alumni
Stanford University alumni
Electrical engineers | Christopher Neyor | [
"Engineering"
] | 406 | [
"Electrical engineering",
"Electrical engineers"
] |
42,954,633 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantata%2B%2B | Cantata++, commonly referred to as Cantata in newer versions, is a commercial computer program designed for dynamic testing, with a focus on unit testing and integration testing, as well as run time code coverage analysis for C and C++ programs. It is developed and marketed by QA Systems, a multinational company with headquarters in Waiblingen, Germany.
Overview
Cantata++ was initially developed in 1998 by IPL Information Processing Systems. In 2012, QA Systems GmbH acquired the business and rebranded the tool as Cantata at version 6.2.
Cantata supports use within the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Visual Studio Code and via the command line interface (CLI). Cantata is a code-driven unit testing framework used for dynamic testing of software. It enables the execution of compiled test cases alongside the linked-in code under test. These test executables can be run on various computing platform, including native operating systems or target platforms. The integration of debuggers is available but optional.
Cantata is primarily utilized by developers working on application software written in C and C++, as well as those developing system software for embedded systems and mobile devices.
Industrial use
Cantata offers a solution to meet the rigorous requirements of international regulatory standards governing the development and verification of functional safety software across various industries. These standards encompass stringent criteria for achieving specific Safety Integrity Level (SIL) and advocate for practices such as unit testing and integration testing with a code-driven testing framework.
Aerospace RTCA: DO-178C: Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification.
Automotive ISO 26262: Road vehicles & Functional safety.
Energy/Nuclear Power IEC 60880: Nuclear power plants. Instrumentation and control systems important to safety. Software aspects for computer based systems performing category A functions.
Industrial Automation IEC 61508: Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems.
Medical Devices IEC 62304: Medical device software. Software lifecycle processes.
Railways EN 50128 & EN 50129: Railway applications. Communications, signalling and processing systems. Software for railway control and protection systems.
Space ECSS-E-ST-40C Space Engineering & ECSS-Q-ST-80 Space Product Assurance
Munition Related Computing Systems NATO AOP-52: Software Safety Design and Munition-Related Computing Systems.
Cantata may be used in each of these sectors to meet the verification requirements of the regulatory standard.
Tool certification
Cantata has been independently classified and certified by the functional safety certification body SGS-TÜV GmbH as “usable in the development of safety related software” to the highest safety integrity levels in each of the above standards.
The mapping of verification and validation requirements in each of the standards for functional software testing, robustness testing and structural testing (code coverage) to the capabilities of Cantata are available from the vendor, together with tool certification kits for IS0 26262, IEC 60880, IEC 61508, IEC 62304 and EN 50128, and tool qualification kits for DO-178C/DO-330.
Cantata Hybrid
In April 2024, QA Systems launched Cantata Hybrid, a specialized subset of Cantata that allows for the generation of certified test results and code coverage metrics from existing GoogleTest suites. This tool addresses the need for compliance with functional safety standards like ISO 26262, DO-178C, and IEC 61508. Cantata Hybrid ensures that existing GoogleTest suites can be used without modification, providing code coverage analysis up to the MC/DC level.
Cantata Hybrid has been independently certified by SGS-TÜV GmbH as suitable for use at the highest safety integrity level for the main software functional safety standards. This certification highlights its reliability and effectiveness in safety-critical industries such as automotive, medical, and aerospace.
References
Further reading
Peter Liggesmeyer: Software-Qualität: Testen, Analysieren und Verifizieren von Software. Spektrum, Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, Berlin, 2002, .
Rune Winther, Bjoern Axel Gran, Gustav Dahll: "Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security: 24th International Conference, SAFECOMP 2005, Fredrikstad, Norway, September 28–30, 2005, Proceedings." Springer-Verlag GmbH, 2005, .
Dorothy Graham, Mark Fewster: "Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation." Addison-Wesley Longman, Amsterdam 2012, .
Patricia Rodríguez Dapena: "Software Safety Verification in Critical Software Intensive Systems." Eindhoven: Universiteit Eindhoven, 2002, .
Cantata White-Box Testing tested by MIT An Empirical Evaluation of the MC/DC Coverage Criterion on the HETE-2 Satellite Software called 8-15-14
Cantata Feature Brief for Embedded xUnit tests Website of QA-Systems, called 6-30-14
Cantata Hybrid: Product Datasheet
External links
History of computing in the United Kingdom
Software testing tools
Unit testing frameworks | Cantata++ | [
"Technology"
] | 1,008 | [
"History of computing",
"History of computing in the United Kingdom"
] |
42,954,720 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%20O%27Riordan | Tim O'Riordan OBE DL FBA (born ) is a British geographer who is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and a prominent British environmental writer and thinker.
Background
O'Riordan grew up in the north of England, and was educated at the University of Edinburgh (MA, Geography), Cornell University (MS, Water Resources Engineering), and King's College, Cambridge (PhD in Geography).
He taught at Simon Fraser University in Canada in the late 1960s, before talking up a lectureship at UEA. He retired as Professor in 2005.
He was a founder and deputy director (1991-) of the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) at UEA.
He was widowed and has two daughters and lives in Norwich.
Contributions
O'Riordan's contributions are to environmental policy analysis; environmental appraisal and evaluation; and environmental governance and decision-making. In 1981 he published Environmentalism, one of the first critical summaries of the field. Latterly he has worked on interdisciplinary approaches pursuing the transition to sustainability, becoming active in the development of sustainability science partnerships. In 2014 he called for a "science for sustainable development which is geared to compassion, fairness, empathy, and social justice." For him, "Sustainability is not a word but a way of becoming." His work has been cited over 16,500 times.
His engaged and more practical work relates to designing future coastlines in East Anglia in England so that they are ready for sea level rise and the creation of sound economies and societies for a sustainable future, using participatory democratic decisionmaking; he has worked in Broadland since the late 1960s.
O'Riordan has edited a number of books on the institutional aspects of global environmental change, and policy and practice, including two editions of the textbook, Environmental Science for Environmental Management. His work on European environmental policy and risk management is summarised in several volumes. He is editor of the prominent magazine/journal Environment.
He has worked on the greening of business, participating in the Prince of Wales' seminar on Business and the Environment, and has sat on several advisory boards including the Corporate Responsibility Body for Asda plc, and the Growth and Climate Change Panel for Anglian Water Group. He was a member of the UK Sustainable Development Commission until it was closed down by the government in 2011.
Awards
Order of the British Empire (2010)
Fellow of the British Academy (1999)
Distinguished Friend of Oxford (2013)
Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Norfolk
Sheriff of Norwich (2009–10)
Publications
O'Riordan, T. and T. Lenton (eds.). 2013. Addressing Tipping Points for a Precarious Future. Oxford University Press/British Academy.
Horlick-Jones, T., Walls, J., Rowe, G., Pidgeon, N., Poortinga, W., Murdock, G., O'Riordan, T., (2007) The GM Debate: Risks, Politics and Public Engagement. Routledge.
O’Riordan, T. and S. Stoll-Kleemann (eds.). 2002. Biodiversity, Sustainability and Human Communities: Protecting Beyond the Protected. Cambridge University Press.
O’Riordan, T. (ed.) 2002. Globalism, Localism and Identity: New Perspectives on the Transition of Sustainability. Earthscan.
O’Riordan, T., James Cameron, and Jordan, A.J. (eds.) 2001. Reinterpreting the Precautionary Principle. Cameron May, London.
O’Riordan, T. (ed.) 1999). Environmental Science for Environmental Management, Revised Second Edition. Prentice Hall, Harlow Essex.
O'Riordan, T. (ed.). 1997. Ecotaxation. Earthscan.
O'Riordan, T. and H. Voisey (ed.). 1998. The Transition to Sustainability: the Politics of Agenda 21 in Europe. Earthscan.
O'Riordan, T. and H. Voisey (ed.). 1997. Sustainable Development in Western Europe: Coming to Terms with Agenda 21. Frank Cass.
Jager J. and T. O'Riordan (eds.). 1996. The Politics of Climate Change: A European Perspective. Routledge.
O’Riordan, T. and J. Cameron (eds.). (1994). Interpreting the Precautionary Principle. Routledge.
Pearce, D., Turner, R., O'Riordan, T.(1993) Blueprint III. Earthscan.
Weale A., T O'Riordan, L. Kramme. 1992. Controlling Pollution in the round: Change and Choice in Environmental Regulation in Britain and Germany. London: Anglo-German Foundation.
O'Riordan T., R. Kemp, M. Purdue 1988. Sizewell B: An Anatomy of Inquiry. Pergamon.
Lowe, P., Cox, G., MacEwen, M., O'Riordan, T., Winter, M. 1986. Countryside conflicts. The politics of farming, forestry and conservation. Gower Publishing.
O'Riordan, T., Turner, R. (eds.) 1983. Progress in Resource Management and Environmental Planning.
O'Riordan, T., Turner, R. (eds.). 1983. Annotated Reader in Environmental Planning and Management. Pergamon Press.
O'Riordan, T. 1981. Environmentalism. Pion.
O'Riordan, T. and D. Sewell (eds.). 1981. Project Appraisal and Policy Review. Wiley.
O'Riordan, T. and G. Padgett. 1978. Sharing rivers and canals: a study of the views of coarse anglers and boat users on selected waterways. Sports Council.
O'Riordan, T. 1971. Perspectives on resource management. Pion.
References
1942 births
Living people
British geographers
Environmental scientists
Development specialists
Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Academics of the University of East Anglia
Deputy lieutenants of Norfolk
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Fellows of the British Academy | Tim O'Riordan | [
"Environmental_science"
] | 1,287 | [
"Environmental scientists",
"British environmental scientists"
] |
42,954,903 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre%20for%20Protein%20Engineering | The MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (or CPE) was a pioneering research unit in Cambridge, England, with a main focus on the structure, stability and activity of proteins and engineering of antibodies.
Centre for Protein Engineering was established in 1990 as one of the MRC's first interdisciplinary research centres and one of the first research laboratories to bring together molecular biology, molecular genetics, biophysics and structural biology into one cohesive unit. It was formed around the research of two prominent scientists who invented protein engineering, Sir Alan Fersht and Sir Greg Winter. Sir Alan Fersht was Director of the MRC CPE from 1990 to 2010, with Greg Winter as Deputy Director. Both, Sir Alan Fersht and Sir Greg Winter were knighted in recognition of their work and for their outstanding contributions to science.
From 1990 to 2010 the unit has been extremely successful, both academically and commercially. All of Sir Alan's work on protein folding and much of Sir Greg's pioneering work to humanise antibodies was carried out at CPE. For example, Cambridge Antibody Technology was a biotechnology company founded by Sir Greg Winter in 1989 that was bought for £702 million in 2006 by AstraZeneca.
Another successful project that was started at CPE and maintained there until 2010 was the Structural Classification of Proteins database (or SCOP). Over the years SCOP has supported the development of computational tools and contributed to the understanding of protein repertoire, of how proteins relate to each other and how their structures and functions evolved.
The MRC Centre for Protein Engineering closed its doors at the end of September 2010, following the retirement of its director, Sir Alan Fersht. Nearly all of the CPE staff, including those maintaining the Structural Classification of Proteins database, and its infrastructure were incorporated into the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB).
Notable alumni
Cyrus Chothia
Jane Clarke
Alan Fersht
Tim Hubbard
Andreas Matouschek
Alexey Murzin
Mikael Oliveberg
Luis Serrano
Dan Tawfik
Gregory Winter
References
MRC Network Sept-Oct 2010 http://www.mrc.ac.uk/news-events/publications/network-sep-oct-2010/
External links
Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge
Biological research institutes in the United Kingdom
Former research units of the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom)
Protein Engineering
Research institutes in Cambridge
Proteins | Centre for Protein Engineering | [
"Chemistry"
] | 481 | [
"Biomolecules by chemical classification",
"Proteins",
"Molecular biology"
] |
42,954,942 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip%20Hallam-Baker | Phillip Hallam-Baker is a computer scientist, mostly known for contributions to Internet security, since the design of HTTP at CERN in 1992. Self-employed since 2018 as a consultant and expert witness in court cases, he previously worked at Comodo, Verisign, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a frequent participant in IETF meetings and discussions, and has written a number of RFCs. In 2007 he authored the dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime; Ron Rivest used it as a source of project ideas for his course on Computer and Network Security at MIT in 2013.
Biography
Hallam-Baker has a degree in electronic engineering from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton and a doctorate in Computer Science from the Nuclear Physics Department at Oxford University. He was appointed a Post Doctoral Research Associate at DESY in 1992 and CERN Fellow in 1993.
Hallam-Baker worked with the Clinton-Gore ’92 Internet campaign. While at the MIT Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, he worked on developing a security plan and performed work on securing high-profile federal government internet sites.
IETF Contributions
with J. Franks, J. Hostetler, P. Leach, A. Luotonen, E. Sink, L. Stewart, An Extension to HTTP : Digest Access Authentication
with J. Franks, J. Hostetler, S. Lawrence, P. Leach, A. Luotonen, L. Stewart, HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication
with S. Boeyen, Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Repository Locator Service
with T. Hansen, D. Crocker, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Service Overview
with T. Hansen, E. Siegel, D. Crocker, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Development, Deployment, and Operations
with S. Santesson, Online Certificate Status Protocol Algorithm Agility
with R. Stradling, DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) Resource Record
with S. Farrell, D. Kutscher, C. Dannewitz, B. Ohlman, A. Keranen, Naming Things with Hashes
References
External links
People in information technology
Living people
People associated with CERN
Year of birth missing (living people) | Phillip Hallam-Baker | [
"Technology"
] | 464 | [
"People in information technology",
"Computing stubs",
"Information technology",
"Computer specialist stubs"
] |
42,955,431 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betable | Betable is a London-based company that develops and markets a real-money gambling platform for the social gaming industry. The company is licensed by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission and the Alderney Gambling Control Commission and is certified by third-party testing houses. The company has raised a total of $23 million in venture funding from, among others, Venture51, Greylock Partners, and Founders Fund.
History
Christopher Griffin, the company’s current CEO, founded Betable in 2008. The first iteration of the service involved users creating betting opportunities and placing bets on a central, social-oriented gambling site. In July 2010 the company raised $3 million in seed funding from Atomico Ventures.
In 2012, Griffin re-capped the company and re-launched Betable from being a betting site to developing a real-money gambling platform. The Betable API beta program was released in July 2012, allowing game developers to integrate Betable betting features.
In October 2012, Betable partnered with game developers Slingo, Digital Chocolate, and Murka Games to incorporate betting into the developers' current offerings.
In November 2012, Mandala Games became the first European game developer to use the Betable platform, enabling real-money play in its title Slots by La Riviera.
In November 2013, Betable raised an $18.5 million Series A funding round led by Venture51.
TechCrunch April Fools' slot machine
On 1 April 2013, news website TechCrunch published a hoax article claiming that it would be launching a social betting game for venture capitalists to gamble at, remarking that it would be "an even easier way to bypass SEC regulations around being an accredited investor". The article included a TechCrunch-themed slot machine that was powered by Betable software.
Products and services
Third-party game developers use the Betable API to apply real-money gambling functionality to mobile games. In addition to converting standard games (such as slots, blackjack, and roulette) into real-money gambling titles, the software can be used to create non-traditional types of gambling games that operate on top of the Betable platform. Once installed, Betable acts as a turnkey gaming engine that manages all real-money tasks within a game such as identity verification, anti-fraud safeguards, regulatory compliance, transactions, auditing, and gambling mechanics. The platform acts as an alternative to other forms of app monetization, such as banner ads or freemium models, by allowing developers to enable revenue-generating betting features within their games.
Because Betable possesses gambling licenses from the United Kingdom Gambling Commission that allow it to provide gambling services on another party's behalf, developers can enable betting within their games without applying for any licenses themselves. Betable is compatible with games on iOS and Android operating systems.
Battle Keno
One example of a traditional gaming title being converted to a real-money gambling app through Betable's platform is 30AK Gaming's Battle Keno, an adaptation of Battleship that financially rewards or penalizes players based on gameplay.
Prospect Hall Casino
In February 2015, Betable launched Prospect Hall Casino, a UK online gambling business with online casino games for mobile and web. The business is licensed and regulated by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission and the Alderney Gambling Control Commission.
References
External links
Official website
Online gambling companies of the United Kingdom
Mobile game companies
Hotel and leisure companies based in London
Social software | Betable | [
"Technology"
] | 696 | [
"Mobile content",
"Social software"
] |
42,957,113 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigore%20T.%20Popa | Grigore T. Popa (sometimes Anglicized to Gregor T. Popa; 1 May 1892 – 18 July 1948) was a Romanian physician and public intellectual. Of lowly peasant origin, he managed to obtain a university education and become a professor at two of his country's leading universities. An anatomist by specialty, Popa worked on popularizing modern science, reforming the medical and higher education systems, and, in war hospitals, as a decorated and publicly acclaimed practitioner. His work in endocrinology and neuromorphology was valued abroad, while at home he helped train a generation of leading doctors.
Ill-treated by successive fascist dictatorships, Popa adhered to moderate left-wing ideals and publicized them by means of his review, Însemnări Ieșene. He criticized Marxism as much as scientific racism, but condemned Romania's participation in the war against the Soviets, and, in 1944, joined a protest movement of high-profile academics. During his final years, his anticommunism and his Christian democratic stances brought him into conflict with the authorities. The Communist Romanian regime drove him out of his teaching position and harassed him until his death in middle age. Upon the restoration of democracy, his alma mater and the school where he taught for much of his career was named in his honor.
Biography
Origins and early career
Born in Șurănești, Vaslui County, his parents Maria and Toader were poor răzeși, peasants who owned their own plot of land. The family was related to Emil Condurachi, future historian and archeologist. Grigore, the couple's eleventh child, was intellectually precocious. His mother noticed his aptitude early on, and despite great material difficulties, including selling off their land so he could finish high school, his parents managed to provide him with an education. As argued by historian Lucian Boia, Popa's lowly origin and his successful career stand as evidence of an "upward social mobility" in the pre-1944 Kingdom of Romania.
Raised a Romanian Orthodox, Popa blended his belief in core Christian principles with an interest in science. At the age of fifteen, he translated Ernst Haeckel's General Morphology into Romanian and obtained the author's written permission to publish. He would later translate Gray's Anatomy as well. Popa graduated from the National College in Iași and entered the Natural Sciences faculty of the local university. However, as his parents had no more money for his schooling and there were no scholarships left, he switched to the Medical faculty, where there was one scholarship, even though the field did not attract him.
Upon seeing cadavers being dissected for the first time, he fainted and had to be revived with cold water by an assistant. However, he persevered in his studies and was helped in particular by two professors, Nicolae Hortolomei and Francisc Rainer, becoming the latter's assistant after graduation. As later noted by surgeon Ilie Th. Riga, who was his colleague on Rainer's team, "we lived for years in the most select atmosphere that education may breed": "It is to [Rainer] that we owe our character, the awakening of our scientific interest". During World War I, Popa cared for the wounded and sick at Iași's Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, earning him a knighthood in the Order of the Crown. In May 1918, following Romania's withdrawal from war, Popa applied to rejoin Rainer's team in Bucharest, where Rainer was performing experimental surgery on wounded soldiers. Late in 1918, Popa also joined A. C. Cuza's regionalist group for Moldavian intellectuals—the Brotherhood of Unified Moldavia. Leading the Brotherhood's student center, he spoke in public about the United Principalities' 60th anniversary, expressing his sadness that this had not been celebrated as a national holiday in Iași.
In July 1918, he married Florica Cernătescu, a university classmate. A native of Huși, her maternal grandfather was the chemist Petru Poni. Also trained by Rainer and herself a decorated wartime physician, she went on to become associate professor of Histology and his closest scientific collaborator over the years. The couple had two sons and two daughters. Popa eventually followed Rainer to the University of Bucharest's medical faculty in 1920, and was appointed assistant professor. With Rainer as his doctoral advisor, Popa completed his docent degree, describing the functional structure of the dura mater. Over the course of his career, his students included some twenty-two university professors and Romanian Academy members, among them George Emil Palade and Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici.
Rise to prominence
By January 1924, when Rainer's alleged Jewish extraction made him a target of antisemitic agitation among the students, Popa became Rainer's voice in professional disputes. As such, he accused a Iași anatomist, Victor Papilian, of plagiarism, and published his take on the matter in the Bucharest daily Adevărul. Papilian retorted with accusations of sectarianism against Popa, Rainer, and the whole "Bucharest school": "a sterile and envious school", "a grand society of mutual admirers, wherein master and students have declared each other geniuses". Popa identified Iași with extreme nationalism, and, in a 1925 article for the student review Viața Universitară, accused the far-right National-Christian Defense League of hypocrisy. As he noted, its "hatred and brutality" were not just aimed at Jews, but also at Romanians coming in from Bessarabia, since the latter were ostensibly socialists.
With Rainer's help, Popa received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1925. He had a direct experience of America, and of what he liked to call its "guided democracy", which was rare among Romanians of his generation, and which he recorded in detail in diaries he intended for publishing. He spent the first year in Chicago, the second at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and finishing by studying Anatomy and Embryology in 1927–1928 at University College Hospital Medical School, under Grafton Elliot Smith. His scientific activity, after his work on the dura mater, focused on three areas: the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, the reform of medical education at the university level, and the physiology of spontaneous movement (motility) in spermatozoa. Regarding the first area, he worked in London alongside the Australian Una Fielding; together they discovered the vascular link between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, publishing their findings on the hypophyseal portal system in medical journals between 1930 and 1935, presenting them before the Royal Medical Society in 1935. Working alongside his Romanian colleague, Eugen Lucinescu, Popa also returned to anatomy with a study on the "mechanostructure" of the pericardium.
In 1928, Popa became professor of anatomy at Iași, the city associated with his rivals. For many years he taught histology, Anatomical Pathology and Legal Medicine, as required, and was also curator of Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, as well as head of the Physicians and Naturalists' Society. His confrontation with the city's antisemitic far-right became direct. In late 1929, he presided over a commission tasked with investigating the race riot at Iași medical faculty. He found that the Jewish and Romanian students were racially segregated during teaching hours, which contributed to the tensions, but could not identify students directly responsible for the incident.
With time, Popa became a noted public speaker in support of modernization, and a popularizer of Western science. In 1931, he gave a public lecture on "The Former and Current Situation of Iași", which recognized that the city had greatly decayed, materially and culturally, since 1866. He attributed this decline to psychological factors (a city with "depressed", "disinterested" and "filthy" inhabitants), but also to clientelism and the excessive powers of the central government. On Washington's Birthday, 1932, he discussed "The Scientific Spirit in America and in Europe" at the Friends of America society in Bucharest. An admirer of the British educational model, he was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge for four to six months a year in 1927–1930, 1932 and 1935–1938. He was also Romania's sole representative to the University of London Centennial, in 1936.
A corresponding member of the Romanian Academy from 1936, Grigore T. Popa was Dean of the Iași medical faculty for two years, from 1938 to 1940. At around that time, he drifted apart from his mentor Rainer, and relations between them became "tense". According to a popular account that Popa repeatedly challenged, Rainer had claimed the discovery of the hypophyseal portal system some years before Popa and Fielding.
Antifascism
In January 1936, together with writers Mihail Sadoveanu, George Topîrceanu and Mihai Codreanu, Popa founded Însemnări Ieșene ("Recordings from Iași"), a magazine of commentary. With his intercession, the original group grew to include other intellectuals, including philosopher Ion Petrovici and physician-novelist I. I. Mironescu. He also used the magazine to popularize the anthropological work of his former teacher, Elliott Smith. Însemnări Ieșene ran for four years, coinciding with the peak of political turmoil. It borrowed inspiration from Viața Românească, Romania's classical tribune of social criticism, with Popa joining in the trend. As argued in 2012 by author Constantin Coroiu, Popa expanded the magazine's focus beyond cultural matters: "He takes up issues, analyses and criticizes mindsets, mores, inertia, cowardice, grave failures of character, and, what's more, the scourges of Romanian, and even European, society in his own day and ever since."
At Însemnări Ieșene, which, under Topîrceanu's guidance, made efforts to preserve its political independence, Popa took a firm stand against the violently fascist Iron Guard, and denounced scientific racism. As noted by Boia, Popa took "moderately left-wing positions and [was] persistent in his defense of democracy." According to his student Bălăceanu-Stolnici, he had "a left-wing orientation of the British Labourite kind". Citing the need for intellectual freedom, he publicly defended Sadoveanu, who was being attacked by his far-right colleagues, with pieces in the left-leaning newspaper Dimineața. Although active in such civil society causes, he was never a member of a political party, and also administered criticism to the establishment National Peasants' Party. In his articles for Însemnări Ieșene, he accuses the National Peasantists of corruption and politicking.
Popa criticized the breakdown of Romanian democracy and the creation of a National Renaissance Front (FRN) dictatorship in 1938, describing it as "unprecedented lunacy or the actual perversion of leadership". He decried the new authoritarian Constitution as an act of capitulation to "political militancy and cultural inferiority", even as his colleagues in the literary world had come to endorse it. That year, in an obituary piece for the socialist physician Ioan Cantacuzino, Popa outlined his own humanist vision of science as a "sacred fire". In his view, material civilization had evolved faster than culture, unwittingly instigating a sort of "pseudo-culture" that opposed progress. He combined Herbert Spencer's take on sociocultural evolution with a measure of genetic determinism, and, against psychological nativism, suggested that all concept of morality was produced by and through evolution; he also held that primitive society, and "semi-civilized" fascism, were regulated by the brainstem, whereas civilization was a realm of the cerebral cortex. When, in 1940, Popa contributed to the FRN regime's magazine, Muncă și Voe Bună, it was to highlight its contribution to working class welfare.
In October 1939—shortly after the Invasion of Poland and the start of World War II—, Însemnări Ieșene published his article deploring man's return to his "beastly" nature and expressing fears that modern life had made soldiers indifferent about transcendentals. Popa witnessed subsequent developments from the side. The National Renaissance Front fell from power after agreeing to territorial losses in favor of Hungary and the Soviet Union. He was part of the Grand Caucus of the university, which issued a reserved protest against the cession of Northern Transylvania. With a special issue and articles in Însemnări Ieșene, Popa also mourned the loss of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Harassed by the Iron Guard, which blacklisted him for assassination, Popa managed to survive its "National Legionary State" regime, proclaimed in September 1940. However, Însemnări Ieșene was banned, with some of its staff members moved to the fascist-inspired Cetatea Moldovei review. A Iași medical faculty purging commission, headed by Iron Guard men, proposed Popa's transfer "to another scientific institution", citing Popa's "left-wing ideas" as a rationale.
The Iron Guard was ultimately toppled in the civil war of January 1941, producing the more lenient fascist dictatorship of Ion Antonescu. In June of that year, Popa was co-opted by the authorities to participate in reeducating Guardist sympathizers. With Gala Galaction, Cicerone Theodorescu and Iuliu Scriban, he lectured students at the Iași Costachi Seminary about the excesses of Guardist dogma. He continued to speak his mind, in particular objecting to Romania's participation in World War II alongside Nazi Germany. He was, as Boia notes, "an intransigent antifascist, [who] would naturally fit into any sort of plot against the regime". In 1942, following Rainer's retirement, he was transferred to Bucharest, where he worked as a professor for four years. After Rainer's death in 1944, he also took over the Anthropological Institute and reattached it to the medical school. While there, Popa wrote a study showing the lack of any scientific basis for Aryanism and asserting that there was no reason to oppress Jews. Traian Săvulescu, afraid to offend Antonescu, refused to publish it; Popa nevertheless read the work before the academy in late 1943. The listeners, few of whom were pro-German, reacted positively. However, a January 1944 address was seen as a veiled attack on the dictator, to whom the members were largely sympathetic, and as a result drew a chillier reaction. One of his conferences at the academy, Reforma Spiritului. Știința ca bază de primenire a omului ("Spiritual Reform. Science as a Basis for Bettering Mankind") objected to Romania's economic dependency, claiming that Romanians were at risk of falling back among "agricultural peoples", those "destined to perpetual ignorance". By that time, the security service, Siguranța Statului, was keeping Popa under constant surveillance.
In April 1944, together with other prominent intellectuals, Popa signed a petition asking Antonescu to seek peace with the Allies and end the war immediately. As noted by Boia, this "academics' memorandum" was belated, and did not expose its signers to any special persecution, since the Red Army was already poised to invade Romania. Its paternity was for long disputed between the semi-active National Peasants' Party, who relied on Popa's friendliness, and the repressed Romanian Communist Party. According to the National Peasantist version of the events, the text had been drafted as early as 1943 by Popa and Ioan Hudiță, and only presented to the communists for signing. Nevertheless, both versions agree that Popa had a fundamental role in the secret negotiations between centrists and communists.
Anticommunism
Popa gave a cautious welcome to the August 1944 Coup which toppled Antonescu, describing it as Romania's "return to normality." Reputedly, he was appointed Minister of Education in one of the cabinet variants shuffled after the coup, but deposed within 15 minutes of his appointment by Soviet representatives. From 1944 to 1946, he was Dean of the Bucharest medical faculty, having been handpicked for the position by Ștefan Voitec, the Social Democrat Education Minister. With the onset of the Soviet occupation and the installation of a Communist Party-led government, he continued to stand up for his principles. In front of communist-run purging committees, he defended on professional grounds those colleagues accused of having sided with fascism, and called for the reinstatement of academic freedom. In January 1945, Democrația, a liberal democratic daily, published Ion Biberi's interview with Popa, where the latter voices the opinion that a truly democratic regime "cannot be tolerant of any form of extremism".
His uncompromising stance stunned members of the Petru Groza cabinet, in particular Voitec. At a conference in 1945, he praised the British and American university systems, drawing a vehement letter of rebuke from Constantin Ion Parhon, who considered the Soviet model as optimal. As noted in 2009 by historian Bogdan Cristian Iacob, Popa's stance showed "a glaring lack of sense for the times", "an incapacity to grasp that the Academy and University were not, at least initially, attacked on the basis of the scholarship produced, but from political positions." According to Iacob, Popa was callous in not showing a willingness to indict those of his medical school colleagues who had careers in the Iron Guard.
Following his clash with Parhon, Popa took the even more drastic step of resigning from the Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union. Also in 1945, he began aiding Constant Tonegaru's "Mihai Eminescu Society", a secret opposition group that distributed appeals for help to the West. He used his dean's cabinet as a storage room for such anticommunist propaganda. During this period, he was attacked and robbed by a group of three Soviet soldiers, which he interpreted as a warning.
Popa signed his name to a public protest decrying vote-rigging during the November 1946 election; there were ten other signatories, including aviator Smaranda Brăescu and Army General Aurel Aldea. It reached the Allied Commission, and, after being examined by Soviet representatives, served as incriminating evidence for the protesters' repression. Popa's final public appearance took the form of a speech before the academy in April 1947. From an unassuming title, which implied a lecture about "nervous tension and the century's disease", it turned abruptly to political critique, likening the abuses of Nazism to those of communism. Popa's concept of "nervous tension", theorized by Popa from texts by Guglielmo Ferrero, was in fact the collective fear imposed by totalitarianism, which leads man to "hide the reservations imposed by his consciousness." Terror was inevitable, but ultimately inefficient: dictators [...] shall always be powerlessly arrested on the edge of our meditative nervous network, which they cannot control and cannot deform. There, in his own cortex, man still endures free [...]. But if, in order to make sure that they have expunged it, dictators should crucify [their victims], then the spirit, with its invisible vibrations, shall make its way from the crucified to the still-chained, and the miracle of a new resurrection will become possible, the resurrection of freedom, without which humanity would become extinct.
Popa returned to his ideas on "semi-civilization", describing revolution as an enemy of natural selection, in either its Darwinian or Lamarckism (Popa favored neither of the latter theories, viewing them as compatible). With "racism", "historical materialism" was "a dangerous simplification" of human endeavor. He warned that communism, like Nazism, was going to "exterminate, propagating hatred and violence toward any belief but its own." His was also an appeal against immoral but "exact" science, describing ideologues as "disciples of the Antichrist": "In this grave situation, the time has come for any conscience that is still pure to ask themselves: 'Where to?' And the answer will not be hard to find: 'Back to Christian morality!'". According to political scientist Ioan Stanomir, this sample of "Christian democracy" managed to reconcile the political expression of Romanian Orthodoxy, previously monopolized by the far-right, with "political freedom, understood as a set of guarantees against ideological and administrative arbitrariness."
Communist persecution and death
According to Popa's own recollection, the audience sat stone-faced through the delivery of Popa's speech, and rushed for the exits once it was over. More optimistically, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, a fellow anticommunist academician, wrote that those making an "ostentatious" exit were friends of the Soviet regime, such as Sadoveanu and Parhon. The core public cheered, as if "the Academy were infused with revolt and [...] no one takes for granted the existence of Russian democracy—that blend of dictatorship and gangsterism." As argued by Stanomir, Popa "spoke out inadmissible truths and gave value appraisals to a regime that was just getting ready to impose Stalinist orthodoxy upon the intellectuals. [...] The coming world had discovered a witness that would not hesitate to diagnose it." Within days, Popa was asked to attend a meeting with the Communist Interior Minister, Teohari Georgescu, but he casually refused. When the Gendarmes were dispatched to arrest him at his residence on the university campus, hundreds of students formed a chain and blocked their entrance.
His oppositional stance led to his removal from the academy with the enthusiastic approval of fellow scientists Săvulescu and Parhon, from the deanship and, in 1946, from teaching. This was accomplished with a novel procedure, which formally eliminated ("compressed") the teaching position, but also singled out the person in charge for further inquiry. One individual who fought to force Popa out of teaching was Simion Oeriu, a communist without scientific training who was nonetheless appointed professor against Popa's objections. Another means used to target him was a proposal to admit hundreds of students who had been victims of Nazi oppression in Northern Transylvania, some of whom spoke no Romanian, and award them doctorates in two or three years. When Popa refused, he was called a "reactionary" and even an Iron Guard sympathizer. A first attempt to fire him met with resistance from the medical students, who were very fond of their teacher. When he was ultimately dismissed, he remained unemployed; his lifelong friend Sadoveanu did not intervene.
Although seriously ill with essential hypertension and renal sclerosis, he was unable to enter a hospital. Abandoned by his colleagues and under pressure from the authorities, he withdrew into semi-clandestinity. He and his elder son fled in peasant clothes to Șurănești, then to the home of friends in Baia Mare. By constantly changing addresses and not venturing out into the street, Popa managed to evade arrest and was finally brought home, moribund, at the beginning of July 1948. The authorities were aware of his presence but no longer bothered to detain him. His death soon afterwards came several months after a Communist regime was fully established; the Bucharest university leadership refused to have his coffin publicly displayed. The new dean, Nicolae Gh. Lupu, ordered his family to leave campus.
Over the course of the communist period, there was a concerted effort to banish Popa's memory, even though his 1944 petition to Antonescu was still being officially cited as evidence of a communist-backed resistance movement to fascism. In 1991, following the Romanian Revolution, the Iași medical institute, which had meanwhile been separated from the main university, was renamed the Grigore T. Popa University of Medicine and Pharmacy. The primary school in his native village was also renamed in his honor in 2011. Popa's writings on science, culture and ideology were published by his descendants as Reforma Spiritului ("Spiritual Reform") in 2002. Other essays were collected by physician Richard Constantinescu in a 2008 volume of works by and about Ion Petrovici. This is one of several monographs and anthologies edited by Constantinescu, detailing such topics as Popa's Christian faith and his correspondence with poet-physician Vintilă Ciocâlteu, and including his American diary (published 2014).
Popa's widow was obligated to live in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Bucharest; she died in 1986, in her mid-90s. One of the couple's sons, Grigore Gr., himself became a doctor, while the other, Tudorel, was an actor. As youngsters, Tudorel Popa and his sister Marilena were both involved with their father in aiding the anticommunist underground. Tudorel Popa's son, Vlad Tudor Popa, is a chemist, head of the Romanian Academy's Institute of Physical Chemistry. Grigore Gr. died in 2006; his son is the novelist and critic Dumitru Radu Popa.
Notes
References
Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici, "Ștefan Milcu, un model", in Andrei Kozma, Cristiana Glavce, Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici (eds.), Antropologie și interdisciplinaritate. Editura Niculescu, Bucharest, 2014,
Lucian Boia, Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950. Humanitas, Bucharest, 2012,
Richard Constantinescu, "Grigore T. Popa și Victor Papilian între 'juriu de onoare' și polemică", Revista Medicală Română, Nr. 1/2011, pp. 37–40
Mihai Drăgănescu, "Grigore T. Popa: O gândire despre cunoaștere, moralitate și societate", Noema, Nr. 1/2002, pp. 2–9
Bogdan Cristian Iacob, "Avatars of the Romanian Academy and the Historical Front: 1948 versus 1955", in Vladimir Tismăneanu (ed.), Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe. CEU Press, Budapest, 2009,
Lucian Nastasă, "Suveranii" universităților românești. Mecanisme de selecție și promovare a elitei intelectuale, Vol. I. Editura Limes, Cluj-Napoca, 2007,
Arcadiu Petrescu, "Profesor Dr. Grigore T. Popa", in Vasile Igna (ed.), Subteranele memoriei. Editura Universal Dalsi, Bucharest, 2001,
I. Petrovanu, "Grigore T. Popa", in Eugen Târcoveanu, Constantin Romanescu, Mihai Lițu (eds.), 125 de ani de învățământ medical superior la Iași. Ed. Gr. T. Popa, Iași, 2004,
Grigore T. Popa, "Note. Asupra descoperirii sistemului portal hipofizar", Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Nr. 1/1945, pp. 229–231
Dan Riga, Sorin Riga, Ilie Th. Riga, Gheorghe Călin, Anatomie și antropologie. Eseuri și sinteze. Cartea Universitară, Bucharest, 2008,
Ioan Stanomir, "Facerea lumii", in Paul Cernat, Ion Manolescu, Angelo Mitchievici, Ioan Stanomir, Explorări în comunismul românesc. Polirom, Iași, 2004,
1892 births
1948 deaths
Romanian anatomists
Romanian endocrinologists
20th-century Romanian educators
Romanian educational theorists
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University alumni
Academic staff of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
Academic staff of the University of Bucharest
Deans (academic)
Corresponding members of the Romanian Academy
Critics of Marxism
Knights of the Order of the Crown (Romania)
Romanian academic administrators
Romanian hospital administrators
20th-century Romanian essayists
20th-century Romanian translators
English–Romanian translators
German–Romanian translators
Romanian magazine founders
Romanian medical writers
Romanian science writers
Romanian travel writers
Adevărul writers
Romanian people of World War I
Romanian people of World War II
Romanian Christian socialists
Theistic evolutionists
Anti-fascists
Romanian anti-communists
People from Vaslui County
Members of the Romanian Orthodox Church
Eastern Orthodox socialists
20th-century Romanian diarists | Grigore T. Popa | [
"Biology"
] | 6,141 | [
"Non-Darwinian evolution",
"Theistic evolutionists",
"Biology theories"
] |
42,957,799 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2%20Piscis%20Austrini | 2 Piscis Austrini, also known as HD 200763 or simply 2 PsA, is a solitary orange hued star located in the southern constellation Microscopium. It was once part of Piscis Austrinus, the southern fish. The object has an apparent magnitude of 5.2, making it faintly visible to the naked eye under ideal conditions. Based on parallax measurements from the Gaia satellite, it is estimated to be 354 light years away from the Solar System. However, it is receding with a poorly constrained heliocentric radial velocity of . At its current distance, 2 PsA's brightness is diminished by 0.11 magnitudes due to interstellar dust. It has an absolute magnitude of 0.19.
This is an evolved star with a stellar classification of either K2 III or K3 III. Nevertheless, both indicate that the object is a red giant. 2 PsA is estimated to be 930 million years old, enough time for it to cool and expand to 16.4 times the Sun's radius. It is currently on the horizontal branch (HB), generating energy through helium fusion at its core. The star is located in a metal rich region of the HB called the red clump. At present 2 PsA has 2.36 times the mass of the Sun and is radiating 122 times the Sun's luminosity from its enlarged photosphere at an effective temperature of . 2 PsA has a solar metallicity and spins slowly with a projected rotational velocity lower than .
References
K-type giants
Horizontal-branch stars
Microscopium
CD-32 16398
Piscis Austrini, 02
200763
104174
8076
Microscopii, 49 | 2 Piscis Austrini | [
"Astronomy"
] | 359 | [
"Microscopium",
"Constellations"
] |
42,959,802 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformed%20cladistics | Transformed cladistics, also known as pattern cladistics is an epistemological approach to the cladistic method of phylogenetic inference and classification that makes no a priori assumptions about common ancestry. It was advocated by Norman Platnick, Colin Patterson, Ronald Brady and others in the 1980s, but has few modern proponents. The book, Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography by David Williams and Malte Ebach provides a thoughtful history of the origins of this point of view.
Patterns vs. processes
The traditional approach to cladistics, which traces back to Willi Hennig, groups together organisms based on whether or not they share derived characters or character states that are assumed to be descended from a common ancestor. Transformed cladists maintain that the assumption of common descent is uninformative and/or potentially misleading, and that therefore cladistic methods should be free from evolutionary process assumptions, and based only on parsimonious interpretation of empirical data:
In other words, pattern cladists argue that the fewer evolutionary assumptions a classification presupposes, the fewer errors creep in, and greater transparency results. They draw a distinction between patterns, which are observed, and processes, which may be inferred from patterns, but which should not be presupposed. Before the emergence of cladistics as a school, Joseph Henry Woodger criticized phylogenetic systematics on the grounds that homology by way of common ancestry is "putting the cart before the horse, because descent from a common ancestor is something assumed, not observed. It belongs to theory, whereas morphological correspondence is observed.". Colin Patterson later wrote similarly:
Pattern cladists, like traditional cladists, think that classifications should be isomorphic to cladograms, recognizing groups based on nested patterns of synapomorphies, but they argue that the discovery of characters is not dependent on apriori considerations about common ancestry:
Nelson & Platnick (1981) also noted that: "all of Hennig’s groups correspond by definition to patterns of synapomorphy. Indeed, Hennig’s trees are frequently called synapomorphy schemes. The concept of ‘patterns within patterns’ seems, therefore, an empirical generalization.” Pattern cladists hence regard synapomorphies to be patterns free of processes.
Criticism
A frequent (but false) accusation against pattern cladistics is that its proponents claim that systematics should be "theory free." At some point in the 1960s and '70s pheneticists may have believed that, but pattern cladists are not pheneticists. Obviously, rejecting a priori evolutionary process theories is not the same thing as categorically rejecting "theory" in toto. Furthermore, pattern cladists do not reject post hoc evolutionary explanations for cladograms, they simply think that the evidence is independent of the explanation. Nevertheless, some philosophers with a background conciliatory towards evolutionary taxonomy continue to offer criticisms in this vein:
Of course, the distinction between the phenomenon and its explanation was clear to Darwin: "the grand fact in natural history of the subordination of group under group, which from its familiarity, does not always sufficiently strike us, is in my judgment fully explained."
Brady introduced to systematics the terms explanandum for empirical patterns (the phenomenon to be explained) and explanans for process theory (the explanation), writing: "by making our explanation into the definition of the condition [data] to be explained, we express not scientific hypothesis but belief". In the above quote, Darwin's "fact" is the explanandum; his theory of descent with modification is the explanans.
In this view, whatever the characters imply as the preferred hypothesis of relationships becomes, de facto, "genealogical" when we explain it as a result of evolution.
Creationist distortion
As noted, transformed cladistics does not deny common ancestry, rather it argues a logical precedence: theories regarding processes should only be formulated after patterns are discovered. Creationists have distorted this to argue that there are pattern cladists who are skeptical about whether evolution occurs.
Colin Patterson
In November, 1981, Patterson delivered a seminar to the Systematics Discussion Group in the American Museum of Natural History. In the talk, Patterson asked provocatively: "Can you tell me anything about evolution, any one thing that is true?", and remarked:
A creationist in the audience taped segments of Patterson's talk to imply he was "agnostic" on the subject of evolution. To his dismay, Patterson soon found his name quoted in creationist publications:
(Note that a transcript of Patterson's talk has been published in the Linnean 18(2), and may be downloaded from the Linnean Society).
Modern proponents
A notable contemporary pattern cladist is Andrew V. Z. Brower.
References
Additional references
Nelson, G. (1985). "Outgroups and ontogeny". Cladistics. 1(1): 29–45.
Nelson, G. (1989). "Cladistics and evolutionary models". Cladistics. 5(3): 275–289.
Patterson, C. (1980). "Cladistics". The Biologist. 27: 234–240.
Patterson, C. (1980). "Phylogenies and Fossils". Systematic Zoology. 29: 216–219.
Patterson, C. (1981). "Significance of Fossils in Determining Evolutionary Relationships". Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. 12: 195–223.
Patterson, C. (1981). "The Goals, Uses, and Assumptions of Cladistic Analysis" presented to the Second Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Patterson, C. (1982). "Classes and cladists or individuals and evolution". Systematic Zoology. 31. 284–286.
Patterson, C. (1982). "Morphological Characters and Homology". In: Problems of Phylogenetic Reconstruction. K.A. Joysey., A.E. Friday (eds.). Academic Press, 21–74.
Patterson, C. (1983). "How does phylogeny differ from ontogeny?". In: Development and Evolution. B.C. Goodwin, N. Holder., C. Wylie (eds.). Cambridge University Press, 1-31.
Patterson, C. (1988). "Homology in Classical and Molecular Biology". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 5: 603–625.
Platnick, N. I. (1985). "Philosophy and the transformation of cladistics revisited". Cladistics. 1(1): 87–94.
Platnick, N. I. (1982). "Defining characters and evolutionary groups". Systematic Zoology. 31: 282–284.
Scott-Ram, N. R. (1990). Transformed cladistics, taxonomy and evolution. Cambridge University Press.
Phylogenetics
Philosophy of biology
Taxonomy (biology) | Transformed cladistics | [
"Biology"
] | 1,438 | [
"Bioinformatics",
"Phylogenetics",
"Taxonomy (biology)"
] |
62,026,792 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benthozoa | The Benthozoa or Myriazoa
are a proposed basal animal clade consisting of the Porifera and ParaHoxozoa as a sister group of Ctenophora.
An alternative phylogeny is given by the Porifera-sister hypothesis in which Porifera are the first diverging animal group.
References
Animal taxa | Benthozoa | [
"Biology"
] | 72 | [
"Animal taxa",
"Animals",
"Animal stubs"
] |
62,027,085 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian%20military%20equipment%20of%20World%20War%20I | During World War I, the Kingdom of Romania was a source of various types of military equipment. Either directly, or indirectly through Romanian-born people designing military equipment abroad.
Munitions and related equipment
Between 1914 and 1916, 59 Romanian factories along with numerous private contractors produced a total of 400,000 artillery rounds and 45 million small-arms cartridges. Added to these completed projectiles there were cartridge components (70 million bullets and 110 million primers) and artillery shell components (250,000 fuzes). Three Romanian factories produced 1.5 tons of explosives daily, and grenades were also manufactured. Daily production of ammunition amounted to one cartridge for every rifle and two shells for every gun. When it joined the Great War in August 1916, Romania had a total of 600,000 shells. The Romanian Army had enough ammunition for its rifles to last five months, but the country needed 500,000 shells per month to avoid being overwhelmed. From France, 400,000 more shells were awaiting delivery. The entire Romanian production of artillery rounds amounted to 400,000.
At the beginning of the war, the Romanian factories in Bucharest were producing small quantities of ammunition, mostly for training purposes. Made of cast iron, these old models had low striking power. After the start of the war, following the huge amount of ammunition usage observed on the Western Front, production was focused on and quick-fire shells, but production remained limited and shells remained of poor quality. Such was the quality of Romanian-manufactured shells that during the Battle of Nagyszeben (Sibiu) – a Romanian defeat – percussion fuzes exploded inside gun barrels, killing and wounding gunners, or would not explode on the target.
Artillery elements
As elsewhere, in order to create new artillery units, the Romanians resorted to disarming their fortifications, a decision prompted in part by the quick German destruction of Belgian forts in 1914. By August 1916, part of the 1,400 guns and howitzers from the Romanian forts ( to ) had been mounted on Romanian-produced carriages and assigned to field service. Some were converted to anti-aircraft guns. For instance, the Romanian officer Ștefan Burileanu invented an effective anti-aircraft system for the Hotchkiss rapid-fire gun. Up until Romania's entry into the war, the focus was on light and medium guns. Between 1914 and 1916, 332 gun carriages were produced for guns up to 75 mm. During the same time period, 1,500 caissons were also produced. After Romania entered the war, however, the heavy pieces were also turned into field guns. The 150 mm Krupp M1891/16 L/25 is one example. According to one photography dated October 1916, at least five such guns were converted for field use. Seven new heavy artillery regiments were formed. By 1918, the heaviest Romanian fortress guns had been converted for field use, as exemplified by the Iași (Krupp) Model 1888/1918 210 mm howitzer.
The Ghenea gun sight
The first artillery panoramic field lenses, later adopted by all the armies of the world, were invented by the Romanian General Toma Ghenea. Ghenea patented his "sighting attachment for ordnance" on 13 December 1902. Beginning with 1902, the panoramic sight began to gain ground very rapidly. But by 1907, Ghenea's was still "one of the most perfect yet devised". It had compensating gear for drift-caused lateral deviations and level of wheels. Ghenea's gun sight enabled sighting adjustments to be made rapidly, even for extreme alterations. The vertical angle which the sight made with the axis of the gun could be read on a quadrant scale. The Ghenea sight was peculiar because the pedestal itself was mounted on a transverse horizontal pivot to which the drum on which the elevation was set was attached. The pedestal itself was always perpendicular with the line of sight. The longitudinal level was just over the eyepiece of the panorama sight. In the Romanian Army, Ghenea's sight was fitted to the 75 mm Krupp L/30 field gun, being used for both direct and indirect laying. The Ghenea sight allowed the gun layer to adjust the range during the return of the piece in battery, by lightly turning the elevation screw which was just in front of him, without having to take his eye off the level. The bubble of the level was brought to its central position as soon as the forward movement of the gun was finished. With an ordinary sight, changing the range elevation while the gun was in motion was impossible.
Vehicle assembly
Between 1907 and 1908, Romania assembled and launched four river monitors at the Galați shipyard. The monitors were built in sections by STT in Austria-Hungary, then transported to Galați and assembled there. The four vessels were named Ion C. Brătianu, Lascăr Catargiu, Mihail Kogălniceanu and Alexandru Lahovary. Each vessel displaced 680 tons, had a top speed of 13 knots and a crew of 110. Armament consisted of three 120 mm (4.7 inches) L/35 naval guns, two 120 mm (4.7 inches) L/10 naval howitzers, four 47 mm guns and two 6.5 mm machine-guns. Armor thickness amounted to 75 mm (almost 3 inches) on the sides, deck and turrets and 50 mm (almost two inches) on the conning tower. All but Alexandru Lahovary were launched in 1907, the latter being launched in 1908. The first monitor to be launched at Galați was Lascăr Catargiu. The four monitors first saw action during the Battle of Turtucaia. On 2 September 1916, after the German formation known as Abteilung Kaufmann penetrated into the western edge of the defences of Turtucaia, the artillery fire of the Romanian monitors brought the Germans to a halt. The Abteilung attempted again on the following day, 3 September. It divided into three columns and attempted to seize high ground which dominated the Romanian defences. All three columns were brought to a halt by defensive fire, however, and then forced to withdraw, leaving behind around 300 dead and wounded. The third and final attack of Abteilung Kaufmann, on 4 September, was successful, the valuable high ground being captured. Subsequently, the monitors proceeded to evacuate Turtucaia. Alexandru Lahovary evacuated General Teodorescu and his staff, while the other three monitors - organised as the 2nd Monitor Division - safely evacuated the 9th Romanian Infantry Division. During the following year, the monitors joined the army artillery in holding the line against the Germans in Moldavia throughout the summer and autumn of 1917. In early 1918, the monitors were primarily engaged in sweeping mines from channels, rivers and ports.
During the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Romania was the only country in the region to have developed its own aircraft. Bulgaria, Serbia and even the Ottoman Empire lacked native aircraft at the time, but Romania had two machines designed by Aurel Vlaicu – A Vlaicu I and A Vlaicu II – in service with its army. Vlaicu's design had a chain-driven propeller at either end of the wing, the rudder at the front of the aircraft, a triangular tail and a 50 hp Gnome et Rhône engine. At an Austro-Hungarian aircraft contest in the summer of 1912, Vlaicu's "strange-looking monoplane", a "refreshing oddity", took the first prizes for landing in the smallest circle and for accurate "bomb dropping". Vlaicu's aircraft was nicknamed "La Folle Mouche" ("The Crazy Fly"). Although the model was subsequently purchased by the Romanian Army, Vlaicu was killed in a crash during September 1913, which also destroyed his second aircraft. Before Romania's entry into World War I, a Romanian factory started manufacturing Farman aircraft under licence. Six Farmans were ordered and served in the Romanian Air Corps. On the eve of its entry into the war in 1916, the Romanian Air Corps had 24 aircraft and another 20 from the flight schools. During the war, a number of 242-292 aircraft and 545 engines were assembled at RGA. During late 1917, limited assembly of Nieuport 17 fighters also took place at the Romanian port town of Sulina. The aircraft assembled there arrived in crates at Chilia. On 7 October, two assembled fighters were already in service at Sulina, and by the end of the year, four more operational and two non-operational aircraft were added. It is not known for certain if the Sulina air unit was involved in any combat.
Armored car production
WW1
In 1915, an armored car was designed at the CFR workshops in Bucharest. It used the chassis of a truck that was being repaired at the workshops. The armored car could mount a single machine gun.
During the war, when the workshops were located at Iași, another armored car was built. This armored car was larger and it was equipped with a machine gun, as well as with a Burileanu anti-aircraft gun. No photos exist of this armored car.
Automobil blindat M1919
During the Hungarian-Romanian War of 1919, the Romanian Army used an armored car of native design and construction. The car used the chassis of a commercial truck, possibly from one of the Renault trucks received in 1916. Presumably, the design and construction of this machine took place at the end of 1918 and were finished in 1919.
There is no description of its construction. Presumably, a wooden (or steel) frame was installed on a 4x2 truck chassis, on which sheets of steel armor were attached with rivets and bolts. The thickness of the armor could have been from 6 to 8 mm. A hexagonal turret in which a machine gun could be mounted was installed on the roof of the hull. It is known for sure that this armored car participated in the entry of the Romanian troops into Budapest in August 1919.
Foreign-produced military equipment of Romanian design
Henri Coandă
The Romanian-born inventor Henri Coandă designed several models of aircraft for the British Bristol Aeroplane Company. In January 1912, he was formally appointed Bristol's leading technician. His first design was the Bristol-Coandă monoplane. This aircraft was tested for the first time at Larkhill in March 1912. It was manufactured in both tandem and two-seater modes. Powered by an 80 hp Gnome et Rhône engine, the aircraft had a four-wheeled undercarriage and incorporated wing-warping for lateral control. This Romanian design gained Bristol the third prize during a flying competition. Italy ordered up to 14, while Romania itself ordered 10. In October 1914, Coandă left Bristol and returned to Romania. Despite a subsequent ban on monoplanes, Coandă's design was still much talked about, being rated as one of the leading machines of the day. Still, it was the influence of Coandă's father - General Constantin Coandă - that was decisive in the adoption of the model by Romania. The Bristol T.B.8 biplane was developed from the Coandă monoplane. A total of 53 were produced, including conversions from Coandă monoplanes. Coandă invented a new bomb-dropping device for these biplanes, containing twelve bombs which could be released by a hand lever in the observer's seat. The Coandă biplanes, made using the same fuselage as the Coandă monoplanes, were much better than the latter, but still had a glaring flaw: they were tail-heavy. Coandă obstinately refused to address this issue, being adamant that his calculations were correct. The planes were, in fact, "a bit tail heavy". The "Bristol-Coandă Bomb Rack One", as it was called, was put to use solely on the Bristol-Coandă T.B.8 biplane. Throughout the summer of 1913, the structurally suspect Coandă monoplane was modified and converted to this tractor-biplane configuration, known thereafter as T.B.8. The design proved moderately successful, a manufacturing licence for it being subsequently acquired by the French firm Bréguet. The T.B.8 was used as a bomber only once, on 25 November 1914, when one made a bombing attack on German artillery batteries at Middelkerke, Belgium. Romania itself acquired 7 Bristol-Coandă monoplanes and 10 Bristol-Coandă T.B.8 biplanes. Given that, on the eve of its entry into the war in 1916, the Romanian Air Force had 44 aircraft, this means that a significant part of Romania's air power was Romanian-designed: the 17 aforementioned Coandă aircraft plus the remaining airplanes designed and built by Aurel Vlaicu.
George Constantinescu
The Romanian engineer George Constantinescu, working with Vickers in the United Kingdom during the war, invented what would become the main synchronizing device for the Royal Air Force. Constantinescu's men constructed the synchronizing gear within 9 days. It was such a simple but so completely effective device, that hundreds of thousands were made with no modifications needed. Although initially designed to fire only one machine gun, the Constantinescu gear was soon adapted to operate two, mounted parallel to each other. The Romanian design made the Vickers machine gun a superb aircraft weapon, given that it was a reliable synchronizing gear. A brilliant achievement of the Romanian engineer. The Constantinescu gear began being used starting with early 1917, when production aircraft started being delivered armed with a forward-firing Vickers gun synchronized with the Constantinescu gear. Among the aircraft fitted with the Constantinescu synchronized forward-firing equipment was the Sopwith Pup. In August 1917, American representatives sent to Europe by the War Department acquired two Vickers aircraft machine guns equipped with the Constantinescu synchronizing gears.
See also
Arms industry in Romania
List of Romanian military equipment of World War II
Romanian armored fighting vehicle production during World War II
References
Military equipment of Romania
Science and technology during World War I
Equipment | Romanian military equipment of World War I | [
"Technology"
] | 2,871 | [
"Science and technology during World War I",
"Science and technology by war"
] |
62,028,998 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syme%20Medal | The Syme Medal is a research prize that is awarded annually by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in honour of James Syme (1799-1870) who was elected as its President in 1849. The medal is typically awarded for research undertaken as part of a doctoral thesis with particular consideration given to work that is likely to influence clinical practice.
See also
List of medicine awards
References
Medicine awards | Syme Medal | [
"Technology"
] | 79 | [
"Science and technology awards",
"Medicine awards"
] |
62,029,996 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prymnesin-B1 | Prymnesin-B1 is a chemical with the molecular formula . It is a member of the prymnesins, a class of ladder-frame polyether phycotoxins made by the alga Prymnesium parvum. It is known to be toxic to fish. It is a so called "B-type" prymnesin, which differ in the number of backbone cycles when compared to A-type prymnesins like prymnesin-2.
Structures
Prymnesins-B1 is formed of a large polyether polycyclic core with several conjugate double and triple bonds, chlorine and nitrogen heteroatoms and a single sugar moiety consisting of α-D-galactopyranose.
Biosynthesis
The backbone of B-type prymnesins like prymnesin-B1 is reportedly made by giant polyketide synthase enzymes dubbed the "PKZILLAs".
See also
Prymnesin-1
Prymnesin-2
References
Phycotoxins
Polyether toxins
Primary alcohols
Secondary alcohols
Conjugated enynes
Organochlorides
Halohydrins
Halogen-containing natural products
Amines
Conjugated diynes
Glycosides
Heterocyclic compounds with 5 rings
Oxygen heterocycles | Prymnesin-B1 | [
"Chemistry"
] | 281 | [
"Carbohydrates",
"Glycosides",
"Toxins by chemical classification",
"Polyether toxins",
"Functional groups",
"Biomolecules",
"Glycobiology",
"Amines",
"Bases (chemistry)"
] |
62,031,590 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairphone%203 | The Fairphone 3 and 3+ are touchscreen-based smartphones made by Fairphone. The phone has a modular, repairable design and is "constructed out of responsibly-sourced, conflict-free, and recycled materials where possible". It went on sale on 3 September 2019. It comes with Android 9 "Pie" installed.
The phone has a FullHD+ screen (2160 × 1080 pixels) with Gorilla Glass, 12 MP rear camera, 3,000 mAh battery, 64 GB storage with microSD, Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, 4 GB RAM, 8 MP front camera (16 MP on Fairphone 3+), NFC and dual SIM. At launch the Fairphone 3 retailed at £408.
The Fairphone 3+, launched in August 2020, has upgraded front and rear cameras and speaker modules. The camera modules are compatible with the FP3. However, the improved audio primarily comes from the new core module in the FP3+ and is not upgradable as this is IMEI related.
The Fairphone 3+ shipped with Android 10 and an increase in the amount of recycled plastic it contains, now 40%.
Ethical manufacturing and sustainable materials
Fairphone 3 "has been manufactured in a factory that pays the local living wage". "The tin and tungsten used in its construction is conflict free, the gold is Fairtrade, and the copper and plastics are recycled."
Modular design
The phone's modular design is constructed out of seven modules, making it easier to repair than most smartphones. The rear of the phone can be removed without using tools. Having removed the rear, the battery can be lifted out and replaced. Using a regular Phillips #00 screwdriver, the display is easily removed, and the modules are held in using only press fit sockets. The motherboard, containing the system on a chip, RAM and storage, can also be easily removed. Still, the motherboard's individual components can not be easily replaced.
Reception
Sophie Charara, writing in Wired, said that the phone's technical specification is "almost identical to the Moto G7, our current recommendation for the best budget phone." She considered it "important" that "the premium for choosing an ethical phone had dropped to below £200" "for the first time".
iFixit gave it a 10 out of 10 repairability score; 10 is easiest to repair.
Fairphone 3+
The Fairphone 3+ was launched in August 2020. It has upgraded front and rear cameras, improved audio, an increase in the amount of recycled plastic it contains (40% rather than 9%) and Android 10. The rear camera has a larger sensor, intelligent scene detection, and a higher dynamic range. The front camera has a bigger sensor and a higher dynamic range. The new cameras and speaker are alternatively available as modules that can be swapped in the original Fairphone 3.
The audio improvements cannot be achieved purely by a speaker module upgrade. The speaker module is only for the rear/side speaker, and output is only improved if the new core module for the FP3+ is used.
See also
Phonebloks
Right to repair
References
External links
Fairphone 3 Teardown by iFixit
Fair trade brands
Android (operating system) devices
Ubuntu Touch devices
Modular smartphones
Open-source mobile phones
Mobile phones with user-replaceable battery
Mobile phones introduced in 2019
Fairphone smartphones | Fairphone 3 | [
"Engineering"
] | 707 | [
"Modular design",
"Modular smartphones"
] |
62,032,322 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary%20therapy | Evolutionary therapy is a subfield of evolutionary medicine that utilizes concepts from evolutionary biology in management of diseases caused by evolving entities such as cancer and microbial infections. These evolving disease agents adapt to selective pressure introduced by treatment, allowing them to develop resistance to therapy, making it ineffective.
Evolutionary therapy relies on the notion that Darwinian evolution is the main reason behind lethality of late stage cancer and multi-drug resistant bacterial infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Thus, evolutionary therapy suggests that treatment of such highly dynamic evolving diseases should be changing over time to account for changes in disease populations. Adaptive treatment strategies typically cycle between different drugs or drug doses to take advantage of predictable patterns of disease evolution. This is in contrast to standardized treatment approach which is applied to all patients and equally based on their cancer type and grade. There are still numerous obstacles to the use of evolutionary therapy in clinical practice. These obstacles include high contingency of trajectory, speed of evolution, and inability to track the population state of disease over time.
Context
Resistance to chemotherapy and molecularly targeted therapies is a major problem facing current cancer research. All malignant cancers are fundamentally governed by Darwinian dynamics of the somatic evolution in cancer. Malignant cancers are dynamically evolving clades of cells living in distinct microhabitats that almost certainly ensure the emergence of therapy-resistant populations. Cytotoxic cancer therapies also impose intense evolutionary selection pressures on the surviving cells and thus increase the evolutionary rate. Importantly, the principles of Darwinian dynamics also embody fundamental principles that can illuminate strategies for the successful management of cancer. Eradicating the large, diverse and adaptive populations found in most cancers presents a formidable challenge. One centimetre cubed of cancer contains about 10^9 transformed cells and weighs about 1 gram, which means there are more cancer cells in 10 grams of tumour than there are people on Earth. Unequal cell division and differences in genetic lineages and microenvironmental selection pressures mean that the cells within a tumour are diverse both in genetic make-up and observable characteristics.
Mechanisms
Collateral sensitivity
Resistance to one drug can lead to unwanted cross-resistance to some other drugs and "collateral" sensitivity to yet other drugs Alternative methods include incorporating analytically tractable stochastic control algorithms to direct the evolution to specific states of resistance that encode sensitivity to other drugs, or machine learning based approaches like reinforcement learning.
Treatment strategies
Adaptive therapy
The standard approach to treating cancer is giving patients the maximum tolerated amount of chemotherapy with the goal of doing the maximum possible damage to the tumor without killing the patient. This method is relatively effective, but it also causes major toxicities. Adaptive therapy is an evolutionary therapy that aims to maintain or reduce tumor volume by employing minimum effective drug doses or timed drug holidays. The timing and duration of these holidays, which relies on the ability to modulate resistant vs. sensitive populations of cancer cells through competition, is a subject which has been studied using optimal control in theoretical studies based on Evolutionary game theory based models. The ability to modulate these populations secondary relies on the assumption that there is a both frequency-dependent selection, and an associated fitness cost to that resistance.
Proof of principle for adaptive therapy has also been established in a recent phase 2 clinical trial as well as in vivo.
Double bind
In the evolutionary double bind, one drug causes increased susceptibility of the evolving cancer to another drug. Some have found that effectiveness might be based on interactions of populations through commensalism. Others imply that population control may be possible if resistance to therapy requires a substantial and costly phenotypic adaptation that reduces the organism's fitness.
Extinction therapy
Extinction therapy is inspired by mass extinction events from the Anthropocene era. This treatment strategy is also sometimes referred to as first strike-second strike, where the first strike reduces the size and heterogeneity of a population so that the second strike that follows can kill the surviving, often fragmented population below a threshold by stochastic perturbations.
Current state
Although there is extensive modeling work on evolutionary therapy, there are only a few completed and ongoing clinical trials that use evolutionary therapy. First one conducted in Moffitt Cancer Center on patients with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer showed outcomes that "show significant improvement over published studies and a contemporaneous population." This study met with some criticism.
References
Evolutionary biology
Medical treatments | Evolutionary therapy | [
"Biology"
] | 902 | [
"Evolutionary biology"
] |
62,033,048 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C29H52 | {{DISPLAYTITLE:C29H52}}
The molecular formula C29H52 (molar mass: 400.72 g/mol) may refer to:
Fusidane (29-nor protostane)
Poriferastane (24S-ethylcholestane)
Stigmastane (24R-ethylcholestane)
Molecular formulas | C29H52 | [
"Physics",
"Chemistry"
] | 81 | [
"Molecules",
"Set index articles on molecular formulas",
"Isomerism",
"Molecular formulas",
"Matter"
] |
62,033,221 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center%20for%20Telematics | The Center for Telematics (commonly known as ZFT by its acronym in German) is a German research institute located in the City of Würzburg in northern Bavaria; although its main research topic is on robotics and telematics, it is also among the leading institutes in Bavaria designing and building small satellites (cubesats) focusing in formation flying. In 2018, a German-Israeli research team led by the Center for Telematics received a research prize from the European Research Council to build ten micro-satellites for exploring the clouds and improve global climate models. The Center for Telematics has also collaborated closely with the University of Würzburg on the development of the OBC (On-Board Computer), as well as the attitude determination sensor suite and control system of the UWE-3 and UWE-4 CubeSat, the latter launched on 27 December 2018 as a secondary payload on a Soyuz-2.
Research area
ZFT does research on Telematics, the interdisciplinary integration of telecommunications, automation and information technology (commonly known as IT), which deals with techniques to provide services in remote locations. On this basis, applications can be realized in areas as diverse as industrial remote maintenance, remote control of robots, medicine, aerospace, transport, teleoperations of pico-satellites and remote education; telematics applications in the near future will change the way people do their job and even will change the driving experience.
Given the importance of analyzing different processes that enable on-site technicians and expert personnel concentrated in service centers to work together even if they are located on different continents. The Center for Telematics informs about opportunities for the use of telematics technologies, supporting the development of products, services, and applications for industry and academia. Then, the center works analyzing potential solutions for the support of processes in the industrial remote maintenance not only in the automotive industry but also in space applications. Due to this, in 2018 ZFT was selected as the winner on the German Telematics Award in the category "Networked Production" for its software Adaptive Management and Security System in the field of advanced automation technology
Telematics in space applications: Space Factory
The center for telematics also works in conjunction with the German Aerospace Center ( abbreviated DLR) on small satellites projects such as Space Factory 4.0, consisting on developing a robotic assembly of highly modular satellites on an in-orbit platform based on Industrie 4.0 processes. TU Darmstadt, TU Munich and the ZFT are involved in Space Factory 4.0. The objectives of Space Factory 4.0 are to study processes for the rapid production of small satellites on an in-orbit platform, and to analyze and explore the necessary support and ground infrastructure, taking into account Industry 4.0 and Space Guidance (ECSS) standards.
Infrastructure on site
For applied research and performance testing, in cooperation with the academia, there is an infrastructure consisting of a 3-meter satellite tracking antenna, the robot hall, the connected field testing ground, a high precision positioning measurement environment, industrial robotic arms, numerous mobile robots, highly accurate powerful motion simulators and a control console for remote control and remote maintenance tasks. So the center is also the ground station of the experimental satellites of the University of Würzburg.
References
Robotics in Germany
European Research Council grantees
University of Würzburg
Telematics
Würzburg
2005 establishments in Germany | Center for Telematics | [
"Technology"
] | 682 | [
"Telematics",
"Wireless locating"
] |
62,034,089 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartonplast | Cartonplast is a trademark that was first given by Covema spa (Italy) in the early seventies to a specific model of extrusion line manufactured and sold world wide by the aforesaid.
In subsequent years such name was used as well to identify the product made by a Cartonplast extrusion line that is to say plastic corrugated sheet as well known as plastic hollow profile sheet or plastic twin wall sheet. The main raw material used to manufacture Cartonplast sheets are PP (polypropylene) and PET (Polyethylene terephthalate).
The Cartonplast extrusion is carried out by using a unique front spinneret plate applied to a flat T-die equipped with restrictor bar (this technology was invented and patented by Marco Terragni during the seventies) to enable using thermoplastic polymers with different MFI (range 0.9 to 3).
History
Marco Terragni started to work on this technology in 1970 with an engineering team of Riap spa and he patented it in 1974. In the year 1991 there was big development of this technology when Y.C. Wang of Formosa Plastics Corp, of Taiwan, was meeting Terragni and discussing with him the foundation of the biggest Cartonplast factory worldwide to be installed in Lolita, Texas. In 1992 Wang and Terragni signed deal for the supply of 15 Cartonplast extrusion lines for the Lolita Plant (Inteplast Group) that still today is manufacturing Cartonplast sheets under the registered trade name of Intepro or Coroplast.
Cartonplast extrusion lines are still today manufactured by company Agripak S.r.l of Milan, Italy.
Cartonplast feature
Cartonplast sheets is lightweight (hollow structure), non-toxic, waterproof, shockproof, long-lasting material that resists corrosion. Compared with cardboard, Cortoplast has the advantages of being waterproof and colorfast.
The Cartonplast composition can be altered to add anti-static properties using the masterbatch technique. This particular masterbatch produces a conductive, anti-static plastic hollow board sheet. (Conductive plate surface resistivity can be controlled between 103 ≈105; anti-static sheet surface resistivity can be controlled between 106 ≈1011.)
Applications
Cartonplast is sturdy, light, resilient, and inexpensive, making it ideal for the fabrication of reusable plastic boxes, reusable box pallets, reusable payer pads, partitions walls, facades, beam forms, advertising panels, point of sales and many others among which even small boats.
Modifying cartonplast sheets
Cartonplast sheets can be modified by adding foaming agents, colors, anti UV, antistatic additives and flame retardant.
See also
Covema
Corrugated plastic
External links
Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office: Trademark.Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office: Trademarks
Cartonplast Sheet Extrusion Lines.Hollow Profile Sheet | Plastic Processing Machinery | AGRIPAK
CartonPlast patent.Extruder and sizer apparatus for hollow plastic sections
Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office: Trademarks.Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office: Trademarks
Plastics Technology, Volume 24,Edizioni 1-6.Plastics Technology
Pira Packaging Abstracts, Volume 37.Packaging Abstracts
Kenya Gazette 19 lug 1974.Kenya Gazette
Official website of Cartonplast LLC.Cartonplast® | Karton
Cartonplast, Modern Plastic International, 1999.
Marco Terragni, Modern Plastic International, 1998.
Pira Packaging Abstracts, Volume 37.
Orquideología, Volumi 10-14.
AY Harris Indiana Industrial Directory.
Manuale dell'operatore socio-sanitario. Fondamenti di assistenza alla persona
Di Luca Cecchetto, Gianluigi Romeo.
Giornale della libreria, Volume 78,Edizioni 1-14.
Growing Wisconsin's Economy: A Job Creation Report : Forward Wisconsin Successful Business Attraction Projects, 1987-2004.
Vida apícola, Edizioni 61-67, 1993.
The World, 2008.
Markenblatt, Volume 5, Edizioni 15-17.
Playing area module comprising several elastically deformable panels maintained in a curved configuration, and corresponding panel Frederic Saunier, Romain Guerif, Herve Degauchy.
Cartonplast article.
Fabrication of High–Strength Alumina Composite Foams Through Gel–CastingElham Sheikhi, Sanaz Naghibi JOURNAL OF ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSING (JOURNAL OF MATERIALS SCIENCE) 4 (4), 46-55, 2016.
The responses of enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant systems of scion on different rootstocks under water stress deficit Maryam Keshavarzi, Akhtar Shekafandeh Advances in Horticultural Science 33 (2), 161-170, 2019.
Indirect evaporative cooling apparatus Barry R Brooks, Dan L Field US Patent 6,523,604, 2003.
Chilled packing systems for fruit flies (Diptera: Tephritidae) in the Sterile Insect Technique Emilio Hernández, Arseny Escobar, Bigail Bravo, Pablo Montoya Neotropical entomology 39 (4), 601-607, 2010.
Official Gazette of the United States Patent and ..., Volume 974, Edizioni 1-2, Di United States. Patent and Trademark Office.
References
Plastics
Plastic brands
Packaging materials
Brand name materials | Cartonplast | [
"Physics"
] | 1,168 | [
"Amorphous solids",
"Unsolved problems in physics",
"Plastics"
] |
62,034,187 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devimistat | Devimistat (INN; development code CPI-613) is an experimental anti-mitochondrial drug being developed by Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals. It is being studied for the treatment of patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
Devimistat's mechanism of action differs from other drugs, operating on the tricarboxylic acid cycle and inhibiting enzymes involved with cancer cell energy metabolism. A lipoic acid derivative different from standard cytotoxic chemotherapy, devimistat is currently being studied in combination with modified FOLFIRINOX to treat various solid tumors and heme malignancies.
Regulation
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated devimistat as an orphan drug for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, AML, myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), peripheral T-cell lymphoma, and Burkitt's lymphoma, and given approval to initiate clinical trials in pancreatic cancer and AML.
Clinical trials
Clinical trials of the drug are underway including a Phase III open-label clinical trial to evaluate efficacy and safety of devimistat plus modified FOLFIRINOX (mFFX) versus FOLFIRINOX (FFX) in patients with metastatic adenocarcinoma of the pancreas.
References
Experimental cancer drugs
Carboxylic acids
Thioethers | Devimistat | [
"Chemistry"
] | 300 | [
"Carboxylic acids",
"Functional groups"
] |
62,034,951 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%202-7 | Sh 2-7 is an emission nebula in the Scorpius constellation. The nebula is around the star Delta Scorpii. It lies next to a large reflection nebula, Sh 2-1.
According to the paper Interstellar magnetic cannon targeting the Galactic halo. A young bubble at the origin of the Ophiuchus and Lupus molecular complexes, the HII region Sh 2-7 may be acting as a faraday screen, altering the polarization of the GCS.
References
External links
NASA APOD Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula
Scorpius
Emission nebulae | Sh 2-7 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 122 | [
"Nebula stubs",
"Scorpius",
"Astronomy stubs",
"Constellations"
] |
62,035,010 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%202-9 | Sh 2-9, also known as Gum 65, is combination emission and reflection nebula in the Scorpius constellation, surrounding the multiple star system Sigma Scorpii. Sigma Scorpii is 1° to the northwest of Messier 4, and the nebula can be easily seen with small telescopes.
Sharpless 9 is a red emission nebula that surrounds the star Sigma Scorpii. It is thought the star Sigma Scorpii, a variable giant star, is ionizing this region. It is also recorded as reflection nebula C130.
This region is noted as both an emission and reflection nebula, although sometimes only one aspect is noted.
The magnitude 1.1 Antares is 2° to the southeast of this nebula.
One of strongest 2.3 GHz sources in the region coincides with Sharpless 9.
There is a radio source on the edge, and it has been proposed that this is because there is a collision between this nebula and the dark nebula Kh 527.
Catalogs
Examples:
Sharpless 9
Gum 65
Cederblad 140
References
External links
Image of Sharpless-2 9
Scorpius
Emission nebulae
Reflection nebulae | Sh 2-9 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 238 | [
"Nebula stubs",
"Scorpius",
"Astronomy stubs",
"Constellations"
] |
62,035,025 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNX8 | The SNX8 is a sorting nexin protein involved in intracellular molecular traffic from the early endosomes to the trans-golgi network. It is suggested that it acts as an adaptor protein in events related to immune response and cholesterol regulation, for example. As a protein of the SNXs family, the SNX8 is formed of 465 aminoacids and presents a BAR domain and a PX domain which are very relevant in relation to its functions. Furthermore, SNX8 study is motivated by its medical significance in relation to diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, cancer, neurodevelopmental malformations and to its role in fighting against viral infections.
Structure
Sorting nexins (SNXs)
SNX8 belongs to the sorting nexin family of proteins, which mainly contain two functional membrane-binding that allow SNXs to have different roles in endosomal sorting and protein trafficking thanks to its membrane curvature ability. To begin with, SNX-PX is a distinct phosphoinositide (PI)-binding domain. The preferential interaction of this domain with membrane lipids makes the main function of SNX-PX the targeting of proteins to phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate (PI(3)P) to endosomes. On the other hand, the BAR (Bin/amphiphysin/Rvs) domain is a key regulator of phosphoinositide-mediated, tubular-based endosomal sorting. Accordingly, this domain also dimerizes to sense, stabilize and induce membrane curvature. The SNX-BAR proteins that contain both domains are a part of phosphoinositide-enriched, high-curvature tubular micro-domains of the endo-lysosomal network.
The mammalian genome contains 12 genes coding for SNX-BAR proteins (SNX1, SNX2, SNX4, SNX9, SNX18, SNX32 and SNX33). Other domains, such as PDZ (postsynaptic density protein-95, discs-large, zona occludens-1), SH3 (Src homology 3) and RA (Ras-associated), are involved in protein-protein interactions.
SNX8
The SNX8 protein, even though is very similar to the other sorting nexins, presents a domain structure which resembles the most to SNX1's and SNX9's; for this reason, although its terciary structure remains unknown, it theoretically resembles that of SNX9 shown in the model above. Overall, the SNX8 protein is integrated by one unique peptide chain that has 465 amino acids with a molecular mass of 52.569 Da.
PX Domain-containing N-terminus
SNX8 contains a PX domain in its N-terminus, which is located between amino acids 71 and 181. A homology domain with yeast's PX domain is localized between amino acids 75 and 178 within this same domain. As it is a phosphoinositide-binding domain, it is important to highlight amino acids 109, 135 and 148 as residues directly related to phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate since being specific binding sites, constituting a phosphoinositid binding site with a span of 40 amino acids. Furthermore, it includes a pair of phosphorylable tyrosines in positions 95 and 126 that are key in its function in the IFNγ-triggered IKKβ-mediated noncanonical signaling pathway. Overall, the PX domain main function is to target SNX8 mainly to early endosomes and other membranes rich in phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate phospholipids.
BAR Domain-containing C-terminus
SNX contains a BAR domain in its C-terminus, which is located between amino acids 256 and 440. Its ability to form coatings in membranes in order to induce their curvature is key in SNX8 participation in tubular structures formation. Furthermore, SNX8 C-terminus contains a threonine in position 452 and a serine in position 456 which can go through post-traductional changes that induces its phosphorylation, resulting in a phosphothreonine and a phosphoserine. Therefore, there are classified as phosphorylation sites.
MVP1 ortholog
SNX8 has a yeast ortholog protein, the MVP1 encoded by the also homolog gene Mvp1p, which also plays a role by mediating transport of cargo to the vacuolar and lysosomal compartments. For this reason, its investigation can lead to a better understanding of SNX8 functions in human cells.
Biological functions and its molecular mechanisms
SNX8 is thought to be an adaptor protein involved in the endosome-to-Golgi transport pathway, participating in endocytosis and endosomal sorting and signaling. It downregulates retrograde transport of intracellular proteins from the early endosome compartment to the trans-Golgi network in a retromer-mediated manner. SNX8 is therefore localized in early endosomes, as its colocalization with components of the retromer such as SNX1, SNX2, Vps26 and Vps35 has been demonstrated by some studies (and also with EEA1). Furthermore, the dynamics of endosomal structures with SNX8-enriched membrane domains are regulated by the opposite motor proteins dynein-1 containing LIC1 and kinesin-1, both of which allow SNX8-mediated cargo movement through the cytosol by exerting forces on these structures. The biological functions of SNX8 that have been studied, all of which involve its role in intracellular endosomal transport, are explained in more detail in the following sections.
Innate immune response
Cytosolic RNA virus-triggered response
SNX8 is a key component in the induction of downstream effector antiviral gene transcription in response to RNA viruses, as it is necessary for RLR-mediated activation of the IFNβ promoter that leads to host defense in a dose-dependent manner. It positively regulates the aggregation and activation of VISA, a key adaptor protein involved in the innate immune response against this type of infections; this process is critical in the recruitment of other signaling components. Although SNX8's standard localization includes the cytoplasm and other compartments such as the ER, the ER-Golgi intermediate compartment, the Golgi apparatus or endosomes, it is partially localized at mitochondria. Furthermore, RNA viral infections cause the translocation of SNX8 from the cytosol to the mitochondria. During the early stage of the infection, SNX8 association with VISA increases above constitutive levels (degradation of VISA in later stages results in a reduction of this phenomenon). Structurally, the C-terminus transmembrane domain of VISA and both N-terminus PX domain and C-terminus of SNX8 are necessary for this linkage. The formation of the SNX8-VISA complex potentiates VISA prion-like polymerization and aggregation. After VISA activation, its accumulation allows the recruitment of signaling components which play a role in RLR-mediated antiviral response activation such as the intermediates of this pathway TBK1, IRF3, IκBα or ISRE. IRF3 cooperative activation with NF-κB transcription factor through phosphorylation leads to the induction of the IFNβ promoter transcription. Examples of genes whose RNA virus-triggered expression is stimulated by SNX8 are IFNB1, ISG56 and IL6 (being IL6 and IFNB1 related to cytokine secretion).
In addition, SNX8 also plays a role in RIG-I containing CARD domain-mediated and MDA5-mediated activation of the IFNβ promoter, since VISA works as an intermediate for both signaling pathways. The mechanism for SNX8 recruitment to VISA remains unclear, although two options have been suggested: translocation of viral RNA-bound RIG-I or MDA5 to VISA may result in a conformational switch that would increase its affinity for SNX8 or the RNA virus may induce post-translational modifications of one of these proteins allowing the translocation of SNX8 to mitochondria for its interaction with VISA.
Cytosolic DNA virus-triggered response
SNX8 is a key component in the induction of downstream effector antiviral gene transcription in response to DNA viruses, as it is necessary for MITA-mediated activation of the IFNβ promoter in a dose-dependent manner. It regulates the activation of MITA, a central adaptor protein in the innate immune response to DNA viral infections that activates and onsets the antiviral response, by allowing its association with the class III phosphatylinositol 3 kinase VPS34-containing translocon machinery to form the MITA-Vps34 translocation complex; this linkage is crucial for MITA transport from the ER to perinuclear microsomal punctuate structures, which are induced by infection of viruses such as HSV-1, via Golgi mediated intracellular traffic. This MITA transport pathway is vital for the immune response to start. SNX8 is suggested to play a role in MITA's activation through this transport pathway, modulating its phosphorylation at serine in position 366 and recruiting the transcription factor IRF3 whose activation is important in the activation of the IFNβ promoter transcription. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that MITA, SNX8 and VPS34 colocalize in the cytoplasm, and that SNX8 localization in ER, ER-Golgi intermediate compartment, Golgi and endosomes is similar to that of MITA. Examples of genes whose DNA virus-triggered expression is stimulated by SNX8 are IFNB1, ISG56, CXCL10 and IL6 (being IFNB1 and IL6 related to cytokine secretion).
IFNγ-triggered IKKβ-mediated noncanonical signaling pathway
SNX8 is a component of an IKKβ-mediated noncanonical signaling pathway triggered by the interferon gamma, which takes places parallelly to the more known IFNγ-induced JAK-STAT1 mediated pathway. Overall, it participates in a series of chemical reactions and molecular interactions that lead to the selective promotion of a particular subset of downstream effector gene transcription that encode IFNγ-induced GTPases of the GBP family, which participate in host defense against intracellular pathogens, and secretion proteins of the chemokine family such as CXCL9, CXCL10, and CXCL11 which present direct antimicrobial activity. In addition, SNX8 enhances the IFNγ-induced activation of the IRF1 promoter in a dose-dependent manner. Specifically, the steps of this pathway that are regulated by SNX8 are the following. The reception of IFNγ activates Janus kinase 1, resulting in the stimulation of its association with Sxn8 above standard constitutive levels. The link between these two protein within the JAK1-SNX8 complex allows JAK1 to catalyse SNX8's tyrosines phosphorylation in positions 95 and 126. This phosphorylation activates the JAK1-SNX, and the SNX8 acts as an adaptor or scaffolding protein by permitting the recruitment of the inhibitor of nuclear factor-kappa-B kinase subunit beta (IKKβ) to JAK1 in the JAK1-SNX8-IKKβ complex. This linkage is essential for IKKβ activation through autophosphorylation at serine in position 177 (as SNX8 lacks enzymatic activity) and further dimerization and oligomerization.
Cholesterol regulation
SNX8 protein regulates cholesterol levels as an activator of the SREBPs (Sterol Regulatory Element Binding Proteins), which is a family of transcription factors that control the expression of enzymes needed for the synthesis and uptake of fatty acids, endogenous cholesterol, triacylglycerides and phospholipids; this results in an overall regulation of intracellular lipid homeostasis. Although its precise mechanism of action remains unknown, data suggests that SNX8 produces changes in cholesterol distribution through regulation of the SREBP transcriptional activity by modulating intracellular traffic events rather than by interacting with proteins of the SREBP pathway like INSIG or SREBP cleavage-activating protein (SCAP). For example, it is unclear if SNX8 has a direct participation in the transport of SREBP pathway components or if it regulates endosomal and lysosomal compartmentalization through the production of cholesterol cargoes. This last possibility is supported by the fact that the ability of altering membrane curvature is shared by some proteins of the SNXs family.
It has been observed that variation in cholesterol levels alter SNX8 transcription: it remains unaltered in conditions of moderate high concentrations of cholesterol, and it experiments a decrease in conditions of restricted levels of cholesterol due to the action of the fungus-derived cholesterol-lowering statin mevinolin and the drug U18666a which promotes cytosolic cholesterol clustering within the endosomal and lysosomal compartments by acting as an intracellular cholesterol transport inhibitor. On the other hand, SNX8 overexpression induces intracellular clustering of cholesterol under conditions of high cellular cholesterol levels and aggravates abnormal distribution of cholesterol. In relation to the SREBP pathway, SNX8 is not able to successfully reduce the inhibitory impact of cholesterol on SREBP-mediated transcription, but it has an important effect that counteracts the block of this pathway triggered by the insulin-induced gene INSIG.
Intracellular non-amyloidogenic APP traffic
The amyloid precursor protein (APP) is consecutively transported from the ER after its synthesis to the plasma membrane via the trans-Golgi network; during this traffic, the neuroprotective soluble fragment sAPPα is produced as a product of APP cleavage by α-secretases. Lately, APP that reaches the membrane without being severed can be internalized into endosomes in order to be proteolytically processed through two parallel pathways: an amyloidogenic pathway via acidified late endosomes and a non-amyloidogenic or anti-myloidogenic retrograde pathway via Golgi apparatus. The amyloidogenic pathway leads to APP processing by γ-secretases and β-secretases such as BACE1, resulting in production of the neurotoxic amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide that accumulates in extracellular locations forming senile plaques.
SNX8 promotes non-amyloidogenic transport from the Golgi apparatus to other cellular locations, leading to an increase of APP levels, a stimulated distribution throughout the outer face of cell membrane, an enhanced sAPPα secretion and a reduced Aβ production (specifically, production of Aβ40 and Aβ42) . In addition, SNX8 improves APP stability, which is responsible for a longer lifespan, without having any effect in its mRNA transcription. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that SNX8 mainly colocalizes with Rab5 at early endosomes and partially with Rab4 at recycling endosomes, with Rab7 at late endosomes and with Giantin at Golgi apparatus.
Construction of tubular profiles
Although the endosomal compartment is composed of vesicular and tubular structures, it has been demonstrated that sorting involving recycling pathways is mainly tubule-mediated. Therefore, tubular structures building is essential for the activity of SNXs containing BAR domains (such as SNX1, SNX4 or SNX8) as phosphoinositide-mediated endosomal sorting proteins. This BAR domain allows them to assembly in a dose-dependent manner a helical coat with the capacity to detect, promote and stabilize the curvature of endosomal vesicular membranes into tubular profiles during the so-called incidence detection process, specially in phosphoinosited-enriched regions where they are localized thanks to the affinity of the PX domain for these membrane phospholipids. In particular, SNX8 colocalizes with Rab5 at early endosomes membranes and at the tubular endosomal network (TEN) around the endosomal vacuole, which is an important compartment for successful sorting of cargoes.
It is also worth mentioning the existing coupling of tubular structures formation and the maduration processes from early endosomes to late endosomes, which is mainly characterized by a retrograde movement from the cell periphery to a juxtanuclear position, an acidification of early endosomes lumen and a switch from Rab5 GTPase to Rab7 GTPase. The construction of these tubules, which is important for SNX-mediated endosomal sorting, experiments an important acceleration during this transition process; therefore, it is suggested that SNX8 may be involved in the transport of endogenous acid environment-requiring cargo. In addition, as SNX8 interacts with elements of the retromer, it is important to highlight the role of both subcomplexes of the retromer in the coordinated relationship between endosomal maturation and the generation of tubular profiles from vesicular structures.
Medical and clinical significance
Alzheimer's disease
Insoluble accumulations of β-amyloid peptide in brain regions related to memory and cognition are a defining characteristic of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). SNX8 has a neuroprotective role related to AD: it enhances the non-amyloidogenic APP pathway and, hence, reduces the Aβ plaques and deposit accumulations and suppresses cognitive impairment caused by AD. Some studies found that SNX8 levels were drastically lower in patients with AD. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that SNX8 overexpression mediated by adeno-associated virus (AVV) reduced Aβ levels and reversed cognitive impairment in AD mice. It is also important mentioning that a pair of polymorphisms (rs2286206 and rs10249052) within the human SNX8 gene locus have also been associated with late-onset AD.
Neurodevelopmental disorders
Several case studies studying deletions in the 7p22.3 genomic region, where the SNX8 gene is located, found that it contributes to neurodevelopmental problems with considerable impairments in the motor, cognitive and socio-emotional areas, with malformations in the heart and craniofacial structures, with developmental, intellectual and language delay, with mild intellectual disability and with cognitive impairment associated with autism in some cases. This idea is supported by the fact that the overlapping deleted regions of the different patients of these studies contained SNX8, which suggests that it is one of the accountable genes.
Antiviral activity
SNX8 plays an antiviral role against Listeria monocytogenes through the IFNγ-triggered IKKβ-mediated noncanonical signaling pathway; murine cells expressing SNX8 under this infection showed a higher expression and secretion of IFNβ and IL6 cytokines in blood and lower presence of bacteria in liver and spleens, which resulted in a reduction of Listeria monocytogenes lethality, in comparison to SNX8-negative induced murine cells.
In addition, SNX8 plays an antiviral role against DNA viruses such as HSV-1 through the MITA-mediated activation of the IFNβ promoter; murine cells expressing SNX8 under this infection showed a higher expression and secretion of IFNβ and IL6 cytokines in blood and a decreased presence of cerebral viral titers, which resulted in a reduction of HSV-1 lethality, in comparison to SNX8-negative induced murine cells.
Finally, SNX8 also plays an antiviral role against RNA viruses such as SeV (Sendai virus) through VISA-mediated activation of the IFNβ promoter; murine cells expressing SNX8 under this infection showed a higher expression and secretion of IFNβ and IL6 cytokines in blood and a reduced presence of viral accumulations, which resulted in a reduction of SeV lethality, in comparison to SNX8-negative induced murine cells.
Cardiac malformations
It is suggested that SNX8 participates in the development of the embryonic cardiac tissue since the gene is expressed with cells within the area of heart. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that SNX8 activity has been associated to sortin nexin L, a protein of the same family encoded by the SNX21 gene, which plays a role in the development of the embryonic liver. Deletions of chromosome 7p22 that induce happloinsufficiency of SNX8 among other genes (FTSJ2, NUDTI and MAD1L1) seem to cause craniosynostosis, dysmorphic features and cardiac malformations encompassing tetralogy of Fallot, one of the most common cyanotic congenital heart defects. Nevertheless, evidence demonstrates the existence of patients with SNX8 deletion whose cardiac tissue development does not experience any alteration. Finally, although cardiac malformation requires SNX8 haploinsufficiency, its deletion is not enough to cause this malformations on its own.
Relationship between cardiac malformations and cholesterol regulation
SNX8 role in cholesterol levels regulation is markedly relevant since disruption of intracellular cholesterol metabolism and trafficking is the main cause of multiple human disorders. For example, some studies suggest that SNX8 deletions might produce cardiac malformations since its function in normal cholesterol levels regulations would be completely impaired.
Neuropathic pain
SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in the SNX8 gene are related to neuropathy due to its role in endosomal content sorting. Neuropathic pain is a chronic debilitating pain condition caused by a nervous system lesion or dysfunction, which usually emerges after head and neck cancer treatment. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that other SNXs activity has also been identified with other pain conditions.
Cancer
Some mutations of SNX8 have been related to certain types of cancer, specially to stomach and endometrial cancer. The bar plot on the right shows the proportion of tumor samples from 15 cancer types that have any kind of altering mutations in the given protein. Moreover, some studies seem to draw an important relationship between different type of cancers and SNX8 expression; although most of the patients with colorectal, stomach or testis cancer showed high levels of SNX8, almost any patient with prostate, endometrial or carcinoid cancer presented low or any concentrations of SNX8. The rationale behind this differential phenotype of SNX8 synthesis remains unclear.
References
Proteins | SNX8 | [
"Chemistry"
] | 4,861 | [
"Biomolecules by chemical classification",
"Proteins",
"Molecular biology"
] |
62,035,429 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%202-10 | Sh 2-10, also called RCW 130, is an emission nebula in the Scorpius constellation.
References
Scorpius
Emission nebulae
Sharpless objects | Sh 2-10 | [
"Astronomy"
] | 36 | [
"Nebula stubs",
"Scorpius",
"Astronomy stubs",
"Constellations"
] |
62,035,474 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo%20Uribe | Bernardo Uribe Jongbloed (born 1975) is a Colombian mathematician. Uribe's research deals with algebraic geometry and topology with string theory applications.
Biography
Uribe graduated from secondary school in Bogotá and then studied from 1994 to 1998 at the Universidad de Los Andes. In 2002 he received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with thesis Twisted K-Theory and Orbifold Cohomology of the Symmetric Product under the supervision of Alejandro Ádem and Yongbin Ruan. He was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 2003/04 he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. He taught as a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and as a full professor from 2012 to 2014 at Bogotá's Universidad de los Andes. Since 2014 has been a professor at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla. In 2008/09 he was a visiting scholar in Mexico City. In 2010 he worked with Wolfgang Lück at the University of Münster.
Honors and awards
In 2012 he received a Humboldt Research Award, with which he was at the University of Bonn.
Uribe received the Mathematics Prize of the Third World Academy of Sciences in 2012. In 2018 he was an invited speaker with talk The evenness conjecture in equivariant unitary bordism at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. From July 2017 to June 2019 he was President of the Colombian Mathematical Society.
Selected publications
with Ernesto Lupercio: Gerbes over orbifolds and twisted K-theory, Communications in Mathematical Physics, vol. 245, 2004, pp. 449–489
with Ernesto Lupercio: Loop groupoids, gerbes, and twisted sectors on orbifolds, 2001, Arxiv
Orbifold cohomology of the symmetric product, 2001, Arxiv
with Lupercio: An introduction to Gerbes on Orbifolds, Annales Mathématiques Blaise Pascal, Arxiv 2004
References
1975 births
Living people
21st-century Colombian mathematicians
University of Los Andes (Colombia) alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
Topologists | Bernardo Uribe | [
"Mathematics"
] | 430 | [
"Topologists",
"Topology"
] |
62,035,892 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew%20Choptuik | Matthew William Choptuik (born 1961) is a Canadian theoretical physicist specializing in numerical relativity.
Choptuik graduated from University of British Columbia with a master's degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. advised by William Unruh in 1986. He became an associate professor in 1995 at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1999 he became a member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and in the same year he became a professor at University of British Columbia.
In 1993, he discovered critical phenomena in gravitational collapse via numerical studies. He showed—under non-generic initial conditions —the possibility of the occurrence of naked singularity in general relativity with scalar matter. This had previously been the subject of a bet between Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill. Hawking lost the bet after Choptuik's publication, but renewed it under non-generic initial conditions.
Choptuik was the 2001 awardee of the Rutherford Memorial Medal. In 2003 he received the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. In 2003 he became a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2002, he became an honorary doctor of Brandon University.
References
External links
Homepage
1961 births
Living people
Canadian expatriate academics in the United States
Fellows of the American Physical Society
20th-century Canadian physicists
Theoretical physicists
21st-century Canadian physicists
University of British Columbia Faculty of Science alumni
University of Texas at Austin faculty
University of California, Santa Barbara faculty
Academic staff of the University of British Columbia | Matthew Choptuik | [
"Physics"
] | 313 | [
"Theoretical physics",
"Theoretical physicists"
] |
57,736,318 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-sensing%20capacitor | A force-sensing capacitor is a material whose capacitance changes when a force, pressure or mechanical stress is applied. They are also known as "force-sensitive capacitors". They can provide improved sensitivity and repeatability compared to force-sensitive resistors but traditionally required more complicated electronics.
Operation principle
Typical force-sensitive capacitors are examples of parallel plate capacitors. For small deflections, there is a linear relationship between applied force and change in capacitance, which can be shown as follows:
The capacitance, , equals , where is permeability, is the area of the sensor and is the distance between parallel plates. If the material is linearly elastic (so follows Hooks Law), then the displacement, due to an applied force , is , where is the spring constant. Combining these equations gives the capacitance after an applied force as:
, where is the separation between parallel plates when no force is applied.
This can be rearranged to:
Assuming that , which is true for small deformations where , we can simplify this to:
C
It follows that:
C
C where , which is constant for a given sensor.
We can express the change in capacitance as:
Production
SingleTact makes force-sensitive capacitors using moulded silicon between two layers of polyimide to construct a 0.35mm thick sensor, with force ranges from 1N to 450N. The 8mm SingleTact has a nominal capacitance of 75pF, which increases by 2.2pF when the rated force is applied. It can be mounted on many surfaces for direct force measurement.
Uses
Force-sensing capacitors can be used to create low-profile force-sensitive buttons. They have been used in medical imaging to map pressures in the esophagus and to image breast and prostate cancer.
References
Capacitors
Sensors | Force-sensing capacitor | [
"Physics",
"Technology",
"Engineering"
] | 393 | [
"Physical quantities",
"Measuring instruments",
"Capacitors",
"Capacitance",
"Sensors"
] |
57,736,814 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C25H26O3 | {{DISPLAYTITLE:C25H26O3}}
The molecular formula C25H26O3 (molar mass: 374.48 g/mol, exact mass: 374.1882 u) may refer to:
Adarotene
Estrone benzoate, or estrone 3-benzoate | C25H26O3 | [
"Chemistry"
] | 69 | [
"Isomerism",
"Set index articles on molecular formulas"
] |
57,736,951 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzie%20Sheehy | Suzanne Lyn Sheehy (born 1984) is an Australian accelerator physicist who runs research groups at the universities of Oxford and Melbourne, where she is developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine.
Early life and education
Sheehy was born in Mildura in 1984. She moved to Melbourne as a child, and was inspired to study physics at a young age by her teachers at Parkdale Primary and Mentone Girls' Grammar School. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne in 2006. In 2010 she earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where she worked in the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science. Her DPhil was part of the PAMELA project, focussed on designing non-scaling fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators for charged particle therapy supervised by Kenneth Peach.
Research and career
In 2010 Sheehy was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 fellowship in high intensity hadron accelerators. She was part of the collaboration that achieved the first compact electron accelerator EMMA in 2011. She was appointed to a joint position in Intense Hadron Accelerators with the University of Oxford and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in 2015, and is now a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.
Public engagement
Sheehy is a science communicator and public speaker. Working with Emmanuel Tsesmelis, during her DPhil Sheehy designed a particle physics outreach show Accelerate! for 11- to 18-year-old children in the United Kingdom which later also ran in Germany. She was responsible for training presenters and delivering shows and workshops. The training was delivered as part the CERN teacher educational program. As part of the program, they made a YouTube video explaining How to Make a Cloud Chamber. It has received over 100,000 views. Sheehy worked with the Royal Institution to create videos about particle accelerators. She gave the 2012 National Space Academy keynote talk. She appeared on Discovery Channel's Impossible Engineering. She was a speaker at 2018 TEDx Sydney.
In 2022 she published her first book of popular science: The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments that Changed Our World (Bloomsbury).
Awards and honours
2017 awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF).
2016 Institute of Physics HEPP Group Science in Society Award
2010 University of Oxford Vice Chancellors Civic Award
2010 British Science Association Lord Kelvin Award
References
1984 births
Particle physicists
Australian women physicists
Australian physicists
University of Melbourne alumni
Alumni of the University of Oxford
Australian science communicators
Scientists from Melbourne
People educated at Mentone Girls' Grammar School
Living people
Date of birth missing (living people) | Suzie Sheehy | [
"Physics"
] | 535 | [
"Particle physicists",
"Particle physics"
] |
57,738,208 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian%20Scientific%20Expedition | Belgian Scientific Expedition was a scientific survey of the Great Barrier Reef, conducted in 1967–1968.
The Belgian Scientific Expedition to the Great Barrier Reef was a seven month expedition beginning in 1967, sponsored by the University of Liege, Belgium, the Belgium Ministry of Education and the National Foundation for Scientific Research. It indirectly honoured the Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 1928–1929, which was led by Maurice Yonge and a large group of researchers from Europe. This earlier expedition had studied the northern Great Barrier Reef primarily around Low Isles Reef.
The 1967 expedition, led by Professor Albert Distèche took place between Lady Musgrave Island and Lizard Island off the coast of Queensland on the Great Barrier Reef. Seventy-five ship's crew, many researchers and guests were involved in the expedition. Its primary objective was to make scientific marine biology films. Ron Taylor, who would become famous for his films and diving work with sharks was one of the cinematographers hired to undertake the underwater filming using a 35mm motion picture camera.
The former British warship, the De Moor was utilised for the study by the Belgian Navy. Captain Wally Muller was contracted to guide the De Moor through the Swain Reefs and remain with the expedition, on his charter vessel, the Careelah.
Coral reef scientists participated in the study as time permitted. The ship would return to shore every 10 days. Among these scientists were David Barnes from the Townsville area and Robert Endean from the University of Queensland. Sir Maurice Yonge would also visit during this expedition, in recognition of his earlier work in 1928.
Later studies of the Reef would be conducted and published as part of Project Stellaroid, which surveyed coral reefs in the North Pacific Ocean and their damage by the Crown of Thorns starfish.
References
Marine biology
Great Barrier Reef | Belgian Scientific Expedition | [
"Biology"
] | 357 | [
"Marine biology"
] |
57,738,246 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janez%20Lawson | Janez Yvonne Lawson Bordeaux (February 22, 1930 – November 24, 1990) was an American chemical engineer who became one of NASA's computers. She was the first African-American hired into a technical position at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She programmed the IBM 701.
Early life and education
Lawson was born on February 22, 1930, in Santa Monica, California. Her parents were Hilliard Lawson and Bernice Lawson. She attended Belmont High School and graduated in 1948. Lawson completed a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1952. She was a straight-A student and President of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Career
Despite her qualifications, Lawson could not get work as a chemical engineer because of her race and gender. She saw an advertisement for a job as a computer in Pasadena. There was discussion about whether or not she should get the job, but Macie Roberts stood up for her. Lawson got the job, and in 1953 was one of the first Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees to be sent to a training course at IBM. Lawson was the first African-American hired into a technical position at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was promoted to mathematician in 1954. She became skilled at programming during the course, using a keypunch and learning speedcoding. Lawson lived in Los Angeles and would commute for over an hour to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory every day. Lawson joined the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation in the late 1950s.
References
1930 births
1990 deaths
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American scientists
20th-century American engineers
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American women mathematicians
African-American engineers
African-American women engineers
20th-century American women engineers
American chemical engineers
American computer programmers
Delta Sigma Theta members
Human computers
Jet Propulsion Laboratory faculty
Mathematicians from California
NASA people
Engineers from Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
20th-century American chemists | Janez Lawson | [
"Technology"
] | 384 | [
"Human computers",
"History of computing"
] |
57,738,472 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael%20Fuhrer | Michael S. Fuhrer is a US/Australian physicist recognised internationally as a pioneer in atomically-thin (two-dimensional) materials, including graphene and novel topological materials, with expertise in fabrication and characterisation of their electronic and optical properties.
He is founding Director of ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET), an Australian research centre developing ultra-low energy electronics based on technologies including topological materials, exciton superfluids, non-equilibrium physics, atomically-thin materials and nanodevice fabrication.
Fuhrer is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow.
Education
Fuhrer was educated at the University of Texas at Austin gaining a bachelor's degree in Physics 1990, and at the University of California, Berkeley, gaining a PhD in Physics in 1998, under the supervision of Alex Zettl.
Career and research
After postdoctoral research at Berkeley in collaboration with Profs. Paul McEuen, Alex Zettl, Marvin Cohen, and Steven Louie, Fuhrer joined the University of Maryland, College Park as an Assistant Professor in 2000, from 2009-2012 was Professor of Physics, and from 2009-2013 he directed the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials at Maryland. He joined the School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University, Melbourne Australia as a Professor in 2013. He was the founding Director of the Monash Centre for Atomically-Thin Materials (founded 2015).
Achievements
Fuhrer has pioneered the study of the electronic properties of 2D materials, making the first quantitative measurements of the resistivity of graphene due to charged impurities, defects, and phonons, demonstrating the intrinsic conductivity of graphene at room temperature is higher than any other material. He demonstrated the first atomically thin MoS2 transistors, and made the first measurements of the minimum conductivity and electron-phonon scattering in topological insulator Bi2Se3. In 2017 he demonstrated that the topological material trisodium bismuthide (Na3Bi) can be manufactured to be as 'electronically smooth' as the highest-quality graphene-based alternative, while maintaining graphene's high electron mobility.
Fuhrer has published over 200 papers cited over 34,000 times, for an h-index of 75. Fifteen of Fuhrer's papers have been cited more than 500 times.
Honours and awards
Fuhrer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2023.
Core expertise
Fuhrer's expertise includes:
The physical electronic properties of atomically thin materials, such as graphene, and their applications
Development of low energy electronics to boost sustainability outcomes
Research into ‘topological’ phases of matter, such as topological insulators and topological semimetals, and their application in future electronics
Topological insulator thin films
Atomically thin semiconductors, such as monolayer molybdenum disulphide and tungsten disulphide
scanning probe techniques (scanning tunneling microscopy, atomic force microscopy)
References
External links
Living people
Australian physicists
Quantum physicists
Australian nanotechnologists
Academic staff of Monash University
Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Sciences alumni
Year of birth missing (living people)
Fellows of the American Physical Society | Michael Fuhrer | [
"Physics"
] | 685 | [
"Quantum physicists",
"Quantum mechanics"
] |
57,739,447 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pei%20Hsien%20Tang | Tang Peixian or Pei Hsien Tang (; October 1930 – 11 April 2013) was a Chinese hematologist.
Tang was born in Shanghai, and attended the Peking Union Medical College. He worked for the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Over the course of his career, Tang assumed leadership roles in the Chinese Society of Pathophyisiology and the Chinese Pathophysiology Society of Experimental Hematology. Tang was the founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Hematology, established in 1993, and served until his death. He also served on the Sixth National People's Congress.
References
1930 births
2013 deaths
Scientists from Shanghai
People's Republic of China politicians from Shanghai
Chinese hematologists
Delegates to the 6th National People's Congress
Academic journal editors
Peking Union Medical College alumni
Stem cell researchers
Writers from Shanghai
Physicians from Shanghai | Pei Hsien Tang | [
"Biology"
] | 177 | [
"Stem cell researchers",
"Stem cell research"
] |
57,739,568 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrone%20methyl%20ether | Estrone methyl ether, or estrone 3-methyl ether, is a synthetic estrogen and estrogen ether – specifically, the C3 methyl ether of estrone – which was never marketed. It has been used to synthesize mestranol (ethinylestradiol 3-methyl ether).
See also
List of estrogen esters § Ethers of steroidal estrogens
References
Abandoned drugs
Estranes
Estrogen ethers
Ketones
Synthetic estrogens | Estrone methyl ether | [
"Chemistry"
] | 100 | [
"Ketones",
"Functional groups",
"Drug safety",
"Abandoned drugs"
] |
57,739,907 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18-Methylsegesterone%20acetate | 18-Methylsegesterone acetate (18-methyl-SGA; also known as 18-methylnestorone) is a progestin medication of the 19-norprogesterone group which was never marketed. It was first described in a patent in 1997 and then in a literature paper in 2003. 18-Methyl-SGA is the C18 methyl or C13β ethyl derivative of segesterone acetate (SGA; 16-methylene-17α-acetoxy-19-norprogesterone), and shows 3 to 10 times the progestogenic potency of SGA in bioassays. This is analogous to the case of the 19-nortestosterone progestin norethisterone and its 18-methyl derivative levonorgestrel, the latter showing substantially increased potency relative to the former similarly. As SGA is already one of the most potent progestins to have been developed, with 100-fold the potency of progesterone and 10-fold the potency of levonorgestrel in bioassays, 18-methyl-SGA is an extremely potent progestogen, among if not the most potent known.
SGA is a highly selective progestogen. Like SGA, 18-methyl-SGA shows negligible affinity for the androgen receptor. While 18-methyl-SGA has not been assessed at the other steroid hormone receptors, it is expected to be highly selective for the progesterone receptor similarly to SGA. 18-Methyl-SGA shows over 16 times the affinity of progesterone for the progesterone receptor expressed in rat uterus. In terms of oral bioavailability, it is known that SGA is not active orally, while the oral activity of 18-methyl-SGA is unknown. The addition of an 18-methyl group to SGA is unlikely to affect its rate of delivery from sustained release systems. As such, 18-methyl-SGA should be ideally suited for use via routes of administration like subcutaneous implants and transdermal patches.
See also
List of progestogen esters § Esters of 19-norprogesterone derivatives
References
Abandoned drugs
Acetate esters
Alkene derivatives
Diketones
Norpregnanes
Progestogen esters
Progestogens
Vinylidene compounds | 18-Methylsegesterone acetate | [
"Chemistry"
] | 499 | [
"Drug safety",
"Abandoned drugs"
] |
57,740,433 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapristone | Metapristone (developmental code name RU-42633; also known as desmethylmifepristone) is the major metabolite of mifepristone (RU-486, RU-38486) and a selective progesterone receptor modulator (SPRM) which itself was never marketed. It is formed from mifepristone in the liver by the enzyme CYP3A4 via monodemethylation, and circulates at concentrations higher than those of mifepristone. The metabolite retains partial but considerable affinity for the progesterone receptor (PR) and the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) ( = 21% and 61% of that of mifepristone for the human forms of these receptors, respectively). On the basis of actions that are apparently independent of its hormonal activity, metapristone is being researched as a potential cancer metastatic chemopreventive agent.
References
Abortifacients
Alkyne derivatives
Anilines
Antiglucocorticoids
Antiprogestogens
Estranes
Experimental cancer drugs
Human drug metabolites
Selective progesterone receptor modulators | Metapristone | [
"Chemistry"
] | 254 | [
"Chemicals in medicine",
"Human drug metabolites"
] |
57,740,853 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-based%20diffusion%20analysis | Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) is a statistical tool to detect and quantify social transmission of information or a behaviour in social networks (SNA, etc.). NBDA assumes that social transmission of a behavior follows the social network of associations or interactions among individuals, since individuals who spend a lot of time together, or who interact more have more opportunity to learn from each other. Therefore, NBDA infers social transmission if the spread of a novel behavior follows the social network of a population. NBDA thus allows the study of social learning to be linked to animal behavior research that uses social network analysis. NBDA was introduced by Franz & Nunn and further developed by Hoppitt, Boogert, & Laland.
Implementation
NBDA requires prior knowledge about the underlying social network of a population. In an observational study, the order (or timing) at which individuals in the population acquire a behaviour or information is recorded. NBDA then tests whether the spread of information or behaviour is explained by the previously determined network or not. Because more closely associated individuals are more likely to interact with each other, information is assumed to travel along social ties. If there is a good match between the diffusion of information and the underlying network social transmission is assumed. Otherwise, it is assumed that information was asocially acquired (e.g. trial and error, mistakes, etc.).
Application
NBDA does not only serve as a tool for the detection of social learning, but also allows the estimation of the strength of the social transmission effect. In addition, several individual-level variables can be included in the analysis, which have potential influence on an individual's learning rate (e.g. gender, rank or age), and can also be used to model the effect of, and statistically control for potential ecological and genetic influences. NBDA has been successfully used in a number of studies to identify and quantify the effects of social transmission on the spread of behaviors in both wild and captive animal populations such as starlings, chimpanzees or humpback whales.
Examples
Lobtail-feeding in humpback whales
Foraging strategies in tits
Moss-sponging in chimpanzees
References
External links
Ethology
Research methods
Networking algorithms
Social network analysis | Network-based diffusion analysis | [
"Biology"
] | 472 | [
"Behavioural sciences",
"Ethology",
"Behavior"
] |
57,741,290 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leogorgon | Leogorgon ("Leo's gorgon") is an extinct genus of dubious therapsid from the Late Permian Sokolki Faunal Assemblage of Russia. It was originally classified as a rubidgeine gorgonopsian, and would have been the first member of that clade from outside of Africa if that identification had been valid. However, it may instead be a combination of the tooth of a gorgonopsian and the braincase of a dicynodont, and may be a wastebin taxon.
History
Leogorgon klimovensis was named in 2003 by the paleontologist Mikhail Ivakhnenko. The genus name honors the paleontologist Leonid Tatarinov. The holotype, PIN 4549/13, is a partial braincase from the Klimovo-1 locality in Vologda Oblast, Russia, and pertains to the Sokolki Faunal Assemblage. Ivakhnenko also referred an incisor tooth from the same locality to the new species. He interpreted the fossils as representing a large rubidgeine gorgonopsian, the first found outside of Africa, and noted that it was especially similar to Dinogorgon.
In 2008, however, Ivakhnenko noted that, due to its poorly known anatomy, Leogorgon could be a relative of the Russian Phthinosuchidae rather than the sole Russian representative of Rubidgeinae. In 2016, a rubidgeine identity was formally rejected by paleontologist Christian Kammerer, as the features which Ivakhnenko stated supported its assignment to Rubidgeinae are actually present in other gorgonopsians, and in fact the braincase has no uniquely gorgonopsian features at all and may be from a dicynodont. The referred incisor is from a gorgonopsian, but cannot be distinguished from incisors of the contemporaneous Inostrancevia. Recent evidence suggests that African gorgonopsians form an endemic group.
References
Prehistoric therapsid genera
Lopingian synapsids of Europe
Permian Russia
Fossils of Russia
Nomina dubia
Fossil taxa described in 2003 | Leogorgon | [
"Biology"
] | 457 | [
"Biological hypotheses",
"Nomina dubia",
"Controversial taxa"
] |
57,742,157 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophenylsilatrane | 1-(4-Chlorophenyl)silatrane is an extremely toxic organosilicon compound which was developed by M&T Chemicals as a single-dose rodenticide. It was never registered as rodenticide, except for experimental use. 1-(4-Chlorophenyl)silatrane was one of the chemicals studied in the Project Coast.
Toxicity
1-(4-Chlorophenyl)silatrane is a GABA receptor antagonist and it destroys nervous functions in the central nervous system of vertebrates, primarily in the brain and possibly in the brain stem. It's a rapid acting convulsant, causing convulsions within 1 minute in mice and rats. Death occurred within 5 minutes. It is therefore likely to induce poison shyness. In field trials, it was less effective than zinc phosphide against wild rats.
See also
Phenylsilatrane
References
Convulsants
Organosilicon compounds
Nitrogen heterocycles
Oxygen heterocycles
Neurotoxins
Rodenticides
Chemical weapons
GABAA receptor negative allosteric modulators
Poisons
4-Chlorophenyl compounds
Atranes
Silicon heterocycles | Chlorophenylsilatrane | [
"Chemistry",
"Biology",
"Environmental_science"
] | 254 | [
"Chemical accident",
"Toxicology",
"Chemical weapons",
"Rodenticides",
"Neurotoxins",
"Poisons",
"Biochemistry",
"Neurochemistry",
"Biocides"
] |
57,742,480 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk%20Evaluation%20and%20Mitigation%20Strategies | Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) is a program of the US Food and Drug Administration for the monitoring of medications with a high potential for serious adverse effects. REMS applies only to specific prescription drugs, but can apply to brand name or generic drugs. The REMS program was formalized in 2007.
The FDA determines as part of the drug approvals process that a REMS is necessary, and the drug company develops and maintains the individual program. REMS applies only to specific prescription drugs, but can apply to brand name or generic drugs. REMS for generic drugs may be created in collaboration with the manufacture of the brand name drug. The FDA may remove the REMS requirement if it is found to not improve patient safety.
The REMS program developed out of previous systems dating back to the 1980s for monitoring the use of a small number of high-risk drugs such as the Accutane, which causes serious birth defects, Clozaril, which can cause agranulocytosis, and Thalidomide, which is used to treat leprosy but causes serious birth defects. The 2007 Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act created section 505-1 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act which allowed for the creation of the REMS program for applying individual monitoring restrictions to medications.
Some of the provisions required by the REMS program are training and certification of physicians allowed to prescribe the drug, requiring that the drug be administered in a hospital setting, requiring pharmacies to verify the status of patients receiving REMS drugs, requiring lab testing of patients to ensure that health status is satisfactory, or requiring that patients be entered into a registry.
Usage
As of 2018, there are 74 medications subject to REMS monitoring.
62% of these include "elements to assure safe use". These typically require clinicians or health care institutions to become certified prior to prescribing. 12% include only a "communication plan" REMS element which is informational in nature. These communication plans are typically composed of letters, websites, and fact sheets describing the specific safety risks identified in the REMS. 26% include only the "medication guide" REMS element.
Communication aspect
In 2020, clinical settings enrolled in the REMS program asked the FDA to make their reviews of REMS compliance public so that they can more easily view the records and adjust to feedback. Between 2014 and 2017, the FDA stated they did not have enough data to determine whether the REMS program was sufficiently preventing opioid abuse. The Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General recommended that parties in the REMS program provide the FDA more data. The FDA was habitually late in evaluating that data, reportedly leaving those parties with inadequate time to react to the review before their next assessment. In November 2020, the FDA planned to create a “Summary of the REMS Assessment” document that would publicize their assessments of clinical settings and manufacturers in the REMS program. The FDA made a public request for comment on the idea of publishing the Summary of the REMS Assessment. Without the publication of the Summary, parties in the REMS program must request it using the Freedom of Information Act.
References
Drug safety
Food and Drug Administration
2007 establishments in the United States | Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies | [
"Chemistry"
] | 653 | [
"Drug safety"
] |
57,743,398 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathocuproine | Bathocuproine is an organic compound with the formula . It is related to [Phenanthroline|1,10-phenanthroline]] by the placement of two methyl groups and two phenyl groups in the 2,9 and 4,7 positions, respectively. Like 1,10-phenanthroline, bathocuproine is a bidentate chelating ligand. The two methyl groups flank the nitrogen centers, such that bathocuproine is a bulky ligand. It forms a monomeric 1:1 complex with nickel(II) chloride, whereas the less bulky parent phenanthroline forms a 2:1 complex.
This compound was first prepared by Case and Brennan in the early 1950s is a pale yellow solid that is soluble in polar organic solvents.
References
Chelating agents
Phenanthrolines | Bathocuproine | [
"Chemistry"
] | 183 | [
"Chelating agents",
"Process chemicals"
] |
57,744,417 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN%202018cow | SN 2018cow (ATLAS name: ATLAS18qqn; also known as Supernova 2018cow, AT 2018cow (AT = Astronomical Transient), and "The Cow") was a very powerful astronomical explosion, 10–100 times brighter than a normal supernova, spatially coincident with galaxy , approximately distant in the Hercules constellation. It was discovered on 16 June 2018 by the ATLAS-HKO telescope, and had generated significant interest among astronomers throughout the world. Later, on 10 July 2018, and after AT 2018cow had significantly faded, astronomers, based on follow-up studies with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), formally described AT 2018cow as SN 2018cow, a type Ib supernova, showing an "unprecedented spectrum for a supernova of this class"; although others, mostly at first but also more recently, have referred to it as a type Ic-BL supernova. An explanation to help better understand the unique features of AT 2018cow has been presented. AT2018cow is one of the few reported Fast Blue Optical Transients (FBOTs) observed in the Universe. In May 2020, however, a much more powerful FBOT than AT 2018cow (namely, CRTS-CSS161010 J045834-081803, or CSS161010 for short) was reportedly observed.
On 2 November 2018, two independent teams of astronomers both concluded that the AT 2018cow event was "either a newly formed black hole in the process of accreting matter, or the frenetic rotation of a neutron star."
In January 2019, astronomers proposed that the explosion may have been a white dwarf being pulled apart by a black hole; or a supernova leaving behind a black hole or a neutron star, the creation of a compact body being observed for the first time. On 13 December 2021, astronomers reported that AT 2018cow, an extreme FBOT, "could be a neutron star or black hole with a mass less than 850 solar masses" based on high-time-resolution X-ray observation studies.
History
AT 2018cow was discovered on 16 June 2018 at 10:35:02 UTC by the ATLAS-HKO telescope, a twin system, at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii. It was a powerful astronomical explosion (discovery magnitude 14.739; redshift 0.014145, 0.0136), 10 – 100 times brighter than a normal supernova, spatially coincident with galaxy , approximately distant in the Hercules constellation.
By 22 June 2018, this transient astronomical event had generated significant interest among astronomers throughout the world. At least 24 major telescopes were observing the event, the largest number, as of 27 June 2018, of concurrent observations (over 35 posted on 27 June 2018) of any astronomical event ever reported on The Astronomer's Telegram. The event had been tentatively identified as a supernova and given the designation Supernova 2018cow and classification SN Ic-BL.
The first X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) observations of AT 2018cow were obtained on 19 June 2018 with the Swift telescope. These observations revealed that the object was a bright X-ray/UV transient, with an X-ray luminosity of ~ and a UV brightness of about 11.7 (Vega mag) in the range 1600-3600 Å. On 25 June 2018, astronomers, using the Liverpool Telescope and the telescope at Palomar Observatory, noted on The Astronomer's Telegram: "AT2018cow has faded every night since our first observations . ... observations suggest that although a link to Ic-BL SNe and GRBs remains credible given the smooth spectra and luminous radio and X-ray counterpart, AT2018cow is distinct in other ways and its true identity remains unclear. Observations are continuing." On 29 June 2018, astronomers, using telescopes at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory, reported further support for the fading of AT 2018cow. However, using the Swift/XRT telescope on 30 June 2018, an increase in the X-ray luminosity of the transient was reported. That would be the beginning of an unusual X-ray variable behavior.
On 2 July 2018, astronomers, using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), reported that there were no significant >100 MeV gamma-ray emissions between 19–26 June 2018. Further, on 3 July 2018, astronomers reported, using the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) detector aboard the AstroSat space observatory, no hard X-ray transients were detected between 13–16 June 2018 (event detection time) and, using the UVIT fitted with a F172M filter, observed an AB magnitude of an estimated 17.6 at the AT 2018cow location on 3 July 2018. Moreover, astronomers on 3 July 2018 reported, using the MAXI GSC detector aboard the ISS, that no significant X-ray emissions were detected between 11–21 June 2018. On 4 July 2018, astronomers, using NuSTAR, reported a lessening of hard X-ray emissions from AT 2018cow. On 12 July 2018, astronomers, using INTEGRAL, reported no detections of the source from 30 June – 8 July 2018; however, GRB-like bursts may have been observed earlier in the vicinity, on 12 and 15 June 2018, although association of these bursts with AT 2018cow may be "disfavored".
Radio emissions, at 5 GHz with a flux density of ~ 170 microJy, were detected from the location of AT 2018cow on 3–4 July 2018 by e-MERLIN; radio emissions at the AT 2018cow location were detected by ATCA at 5.5 GHz with ~0.4 mJy flux density and at 9 GHz with ~1.0 mJy on 3 July 2018, and at 34 GHz with ~10 mJy on 5 July 2018. VLBI observations at 22 GHz, with the NRAO, using the VLBA and Effelsberg radio telescopes, found a total flux density of ~5 mJy around 8 July 2018 at a reportedly more accurate (but consistent within uncertainties) astrometric location of AT2018cow (RA=16h 16m 00.2242s, DEC=22d 16' 04.890") than that of e-MERLIN.
On 10 July 2018, astronomers, based on follow-up studies with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), formally described AT 2018cow as SN 2018cow and as a type Ib supernova, showing an "unprecedented spectrum for a supernova of this class". On 19 July 2018, astronomers, using the Kanata telescope at the
Higashi-Hiroshima Observatory, observed further declines in the optical and near-infrared luminosity of the AT 2018cow position in early July 2018, and noted that the large decline rates of the light curves were "quite large" compared to Type Ic (Ic-BL) and Type Ib/c supernovae.
On 6 August 2018, ultraviolet observations of the AT 2018cow location, using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), detected brightness (Vega mag) of about 19 on all four bands (F218W, F225W, F275W, F336W) studied. On 12 August 2018, astronomers at the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) detected a low frequency radio emission (1390 MHz band; 438+/-82 uJy) at the AT 2018cow position.
On 15 August 2018, astronomers using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) array of Cherenkov telescopes (CTA) reported no significant gamma-ray source at the AT 2018cow location on 3–5 July 2018, which, as a consequence, resulted in the preliminary determination of upper limits on the integrated flux of the Very-High-Energy (VHE) gamma emission from AT 2018cow as follows: above the energy threshold 220 GeV (±2sd) an upper limit of 5e-12 ph cm^-2 s^-1; above 1 TeV (±2sd) an upper limit of 5e-13 ph cm^-2 s^-1.
Properties
According to astronomers at the time of its discovery, the explosion, with a surface temperature of over and traveling , may have been a cataclysmic variable star (CV), gamma-ray burst (GRB), gravitational wave (GW), supernova (SN), or something else. However, the CV scenario was rapidly disfavored given the initial featureless optical spectrum and the large initial X-ray luminosity of the transient. According to astronomer Kate Maguire of Queen's University Belfast: "It really just appeared out of nowhere. There are other objects that have been discovered that are as fast, but the fastness and the brightness, that's quite unusual."
The classification of type Ic-BL indicates a spectrum with very unusually broad lines, but with no hydrogen lines and weak or missing helium lines. Such a spectrum is produced by the explosion of a very large star which has lost its outer layers of hydrogen and helium. However, according to astronomer Shubham Srivastav, associated with the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT): "Although spectroscopic features indicate a tentative similarity with broad line Ic supernovae, its true nature remains a puzzle." Also, according to Maguire: "We're not sure yet what it is, but the normal powering mechanism for a supernova is radioactive decay of nickel, and this event is too bright and too fast for that." The AT 2018cow explosion could have been accompanied by a gravitational wave (GW) emission, but the GW emission could not be detected since the LIGO detectors in the states of Washington and Louisiana were down at the time of the event due to service upgradings.
An explanation to help better understand the unique features of AT 2018cow, particularly as a white dwarf tidal disruption event, has been presented.
As of 29 September 2018, AT 2018cow has been explained in various ways, including as a type Ic supernova, a gamma-ray burst, an interaction between a white dwarf and black hole, and as a magnetar. Preliminary studies to better understand the exact physical nature of AT 2018cow, using the European VLBI Network (EVN), have been presented.
On 2 November 2018, two independent teams of astronomers both concluded that the AT 2018cow event was "either a newly formed black hole in the process of accreting matter, or the frenetic rotation of a neutron star."
In January 2019, Anna Ho of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who conducted observations with the Submillimeter Array on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, noted that an unusually protracted period of continuing activity after the event was noticed, enabled more extensive study than typically afforded during such events, allowing observation of it while it was brightening. Subsequently, astronomers proposed that AT 2018cow may have been a white dwarf being pulled apart by a black hole; or, a supernova leaving behind a black hole or a neutron star, the creation of a compact body being observed for the first time.
See also
References
External links
SN 2018cow webpage on the Transient Name Server
AT2018cow webpage at Vanbuitenen.nl
AT2018cow webpage by the Astronomy Section Rochester Academy of Science
CGCG 137-068 webpage at the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
AT2018cow images from 21 June 2018 by Cedric Raguenaud
AT2018cow – Originated from supernova in strongly magnetized environment/ALMA at NAOJ
Supernovae
Discoveries by ATLAS
Hercules (constellation)
June 2018
2018 in science
2018 in outer space | SN 2018cow | [
"Chemistry",
"Astronomy"
] | 2,465 | [
"Supernovae",
"Astronomical events",
"Constellations",
"Hercules (constellation)",
"Explosions"
] |
57,744,538 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone%20virus | Keystone virus (Keystone orthobunyavirus) is a mosquito-borne virus which can infect mammals. It was first discovered in animals in the Florida area, where it is spread in part by local species of Aedes mosquitoes. In 1964, a case of human infection, producing minor symptoms of a rash and fever, was circumstantially diagnosed. Conclusive laboratory demonstration of the virus in humans was first obtained and reported in 2018.
The virus
The Keystone virus was first discovered in mosquitoes in the Keystone area of Tampa, Florida in 1964, based on antigenic evidence from specimens caught in 1963. The virus has been subsequently observed along the eastern and southern coastline of the United States, from Boston through Texas. In small mammals it can produce symptoms of encephalitis. Infection in humans is believed to be widespread, based on a 1972 report detecting Keystone virus antibodies in 19–21 percent of the people tested in the Tampa Bay region.
The first laboratory isolation of the virus from a human case occurred in Florida in 2016, and was reported in 2018. Identification took almost two years after the case actually occurred, when blood samples taken from the subject in 2016 were analyzed retrospectively by researchers studying the incidence of Zika virus in the Florida population.
The Aedes atlanticus mosquito is a demonstrated vector. The virus transmits transstadially through the different stages of the insect's life: A female mosquito may lay eggs carrying the virus, which hatch into infected larvae, eventually maturing into adults that can infect mammals while injecting their anti-coagulant saliva during a bite.
References
Orthobunyaviruses
Infraspecific virus taxa | Keystone virus | [
"Biology"
] | 344 | [
"Virus stubs",
"Viruses"
] |
57,746,699 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneathia%20sanguinegens | Sneathia sanguinegens is a Gram-positive and anaerobic bacterium from the genus of Sneathia which has been isolated from humans.
References
External links
Type strain of Sneathia sanguinegens at BacDive - the Bacterial Diversity Metadatabase
Fusobacteriota
Bacteria described in 1995 | Sneathia sanguinegens | [
"Biology"
] | 69 | [
"Bacteria stubs",
"Bacteria"
] |
57,746,884 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing%20in%20the%20Republic%20of%20Korea%20Armed%20Forces | Hazing in the Republic of Korea Armed Forces refers to the widespread hazing and bullying carried out among military personnel, often to conscripts and junior members in South Korea. Hazing has been enforced and encouraged mainly under the pretext of establishing military discipline and hierarchy. Hazing has resulted in a large number of fragging, shooting spree and suicide cases; such cases of suicide are referred to as non-combat casualties by the military.
Such hazing has ranged from physical violence to malicious harassment, sexual violence, verbal abuse, to other forms of abuse, with some even resulting in death. Other forms of hazing have also included being beaten with a heated object and being forced to eat bugs. Such hazing in the South Korean military has led to numerous major incidents, including a series of suicides and gun shootings.
History
The Republic of Korea Armed Forces originates from the Korean Liberation Army, formed in response to Japanese occupation and attempts at colonization during World War II. The Ministry of National Defense (South Korea) specifies the roots of its armed forces as the Korean Liberation Army, which organized to liberate Korea from Japanese colonial rule during WWII. However, in the process of establishing the Korean Army under the command of the U.S. military government after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, military generals from Manchukuo Imperial Army and Japanese Army were at the center of the Korean Army. As such, the Japanese military culture was forced onto Korean military culture; normalizing beating, other forms of physical abuse, a strict ranking culture and hierarchy system, and an emphasis on mental perseverance by enduring harsh behavior. The same culture and values have remained as remnants of the Japanese occupation of Korea.
In addition, the system of conscription in South Korea which requires male citizens between the ages of 18 and 28 to perform compulsory military service, a lack of transparency from the South Korean military, and a larger culture of hierarchal abuse continue to perpetuate hazing in the South Korean military.
Critics have also noted that LGBT South Korean soldiers are particularly targeted and vulnerable to hazing and extreme abuse during conscription.
Current situation
About 60 percent of the deaths in the South Korean military are suicides each year. According to the research, it has been confirmed that severe beatings, physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual violence have significant effects on the suicidal impulse of the respondent.
The following data is an annual comparison of total deaths and suicides in the military from 1994 to 2019.
While the true cause of such high suicide rates among South Korean military soldiers have been debated, research has shown that hazing, anger, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation were positively linked and that hazing is a significant predictor of high levels of anger and depressive symptoms. Others have also argued that rather than the isolation of conscription into the military, a culture of hierarchy in the military and senior soldiers abusing their power are the cause of high suicide rates among South Korean military soldiers.
Government actions
South Korea's Defense Ministry issued a decree in 2011 to root out hazing in the South Korean military. To ensure anonymous reporting, the agency also provides a service called Defense Help Call to receive reports of all possible crimes and violence that could lead to a suicide. The South Korean government also established a military human rights center to further ensure the human rights of South Korean military soldiers.
Recently, the South Korean government is preparing a policy to lower conscription standards for mental and physical conditions that would previously be considered exempt, as it fears that the nation's low birthrate will lead to fewer conscripts; South Korea had the lowest fertility rate in the world in 2020 and 2021. However, experts warn such actions will eventually lead to even wider problems by recruiting personnel who would not be able to adapt to the closed military.
Hazing in popular culture
Since 80% of Korean men are conscripted soldiers and as hazing is common in South Korean culture, there have been many references and discussions in South Korean popular culture. Depictions of hazing and a larger culture of abuse and authority in the South Korean military have been presented through films, TV shows, animations, webtoons, and reality TV.
Notable incidents resulting from hazing
June 2005 - The 28th Infantry Division (Gyeonggi-do Yeoncheon). A 22-year-old South Korean private who had been hazed by his superiors killed eight soldiers early Sunday morning at a guard post at the demilitarized zone.
July 2011 – Second Marine Division shooting spree.
July 2013 – Suicide of Private Kim.
April 2014 - The 28th Infantry Division (Gyeonggi-do Yeoncheon). Private Yoon Seung-joo, 23, died in April after being beaten and denied food and sleep.
June 2014 – Gangwon-do Goseong shooting spree.
September 2015 – Suicide at GP.
22 July 2017 – Infantry Private Goh committed suicide by jumping.
See also
Hazing in the military
Conscription in South Korea
Republic of Korea Armed Forces
Dedovshchina
Ganghwa Island shooting
Human rights in South Korea
References
Harassment and bullying
Human rights abuses in South Korea
Military of South Korea
Military scandals
Hazing
Violence against men in Asia | Hazing in the Republic of Korea Armed Forces | [
"Biology"
] | 1,048 | [
"Harassment and bullying",
"Behavior",
"Aggression"
] |
64,341,482 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American%20Artist%20%28artist%29 | American Artist (born 1989) is a contemporary artist working in new media, video, installation and writing. They legally changed their name to American Artist in 2013, in order to re-contextualize the definition of the term "American artist"—at once taking on the name of an anonymous term while becoming the embodiment of its meaning. Their work, in Artist's words, focuses on themes surrounding "blackness, being, and resistance in the context of networked virtual life."
Career
In a 2022 return to Los Angeles, Artist presented newly commissioned work “Shaper of God” in a solo show at the Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theatre (REDCAT) to great acclaim.
In 2020, Artist had a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum entitled “My Blue Window,” which included a multi-media installation and app download that enabled viewers to download information on surveillance and predictive policing.
Artist's 2019 solo exhibition "I’m Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die)" at Koenig & Clinton, New York, transformed the gallery space into a seminar room for six police cadets as a way to simultaneously explore the Blue Lives Matter movement and how this is at odds with black and brown lives.
Their work has a history of addressing police brutality and activism, such as their 2016 piece "Sandy Speaks," in which Artist created a chatbot that imagined Sandra Bland had a means to speak from behind bars, thereby fulfilling her wish posthumously to educate black youth on ways to interact with law enforcement.
Artist's work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Koenig & Clinton, New York; HOUSING, New York; and The 8th Floor, New York. They have participated in group exhibitions including Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,
MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2020); Parallels and Peripheries, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2019); ICONICITY, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Stony Brook University, NY (2019); A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN, Performance Space New York, NY (2018) (a project in collaboration with artists Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry and Nora Khan); Geographies of Imagination, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (2018); I Was Raised on the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2018); Screenscapes, Postmasters, New York, NY (2018); Lack of Location is My Location, Koenig & Clinton, Brooklyn, NY (2017); and Off Pink, The Kitchen, New York, NY (2015).
Artist was named one of the "30 Young Artists to Watch in 2019" by Cultured Mag
Education
Artist received a B.F.A. in Graphic Design from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 2011. Then an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2015. In 2017, they participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
References
1989 births
American new media artists
Living people
21st-century American artists
Multimedia artists
People from Altadena, California
Artists from California | American Artist (artist) | [
"Technology"
] | 662 | [
"Multimedia",
"Multimedia artists"
] |
64,342,661 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Hentai | E-Hentai is an image-hosting and file-sharing website focused on hentai (Japanese cartoon pornography). The site hosts user-generated image galleries primarily of pornographic content originating or derived from anime, manga, and video games, such as fanart, scanlations of manga and dōjinshi, and cosplay photographs. Its sister site Exhentai (colloquially known as Sad Panda) was spun off from E-Hentai in 2010 to host artwork that depicts material that is illegal in certain jurisdictions, such as lolicon, shotacon, and bestiality.
History
E-Hentai launched as a Yahoo! Group on July 1, 1999. The group moved to a .net domain in 2001 before moving to its current .org domain in 2005 after ownership of its .net domain lapsed and was purchased by another party. On March 27, 2010, E-Hentai announced that in response to pressure from advertisers, it would no longer host artwork depicting underage characters (lolicon and shotacon) and bestiality. Existing galleries containing this content were deleted from the site, amounting to the removal of approximately 30,000 of the website's 150,000 galleries; this content was later spun off onto Exhentai, a sister site to E-Hentai. Access to Exhentai requires an existing E-Hentai account; for individuals without an account, Exhentai appears as a blank page with an illustration of a crying panda, and has consequently has earned the nickname "Sad Panda" among users of the site. In June 2019, both sites were removed from Google, per the company's policy of de-listing websites that violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
On July 26, 2019, E-Hentai and Exhentai announced that both sites would shut down in response to "recent legislative changes in the Netherlands", where the servers of the sites were hosted at the time. Vice speculated that the shutdown was in reaction to the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market adopted by the European Union in June 2019, which makes digital platforms legally liable for material posted by users that violates copyright, as well as a July 2019 proposal by Dutch Minister of Justice Ferdinand Grapperhaus to impose harsher punishments on websites that do not rapidly remove child pornography. 24 hours' notice was given for the shutdown of Exhentai, leading users on the image board 4chan to attempt to archive the entire site before it closed on July 27. On August 2, 2019, Exhentai relaunched after its servers relocated to Moldova.
Operations
Works posted to E-Hentai and Exhentai are typically pirated and are uploaded without the consent or knowledge of the original creators. The site is owned and operated by an anonymous moderator who uses the handle Tenboro and is funded through a combination of advertising revenue and donations; in 2009, E-Hentai estimated its annual hosting costs at USD$46,000, with donations covering "less than half" of operating costs. In 2019, Tenboro stated that a persistent tendon injury limited their ability to perform timely maintenance on the website and that they were considering options for its future, such as naming a successor moderator or preserving the website as a permanent archive.
Impact
Collectively, E-Hentai and Exhentai are one of the largest databases of hentai manga and contain over 1,000,000 image galleries. The site hosts both original Japanese hentai manga and scanlations in multiple languages, including Chinese, English, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai. At its peak popularity, the commercial web traffic company Alexa ranked E-Hentai as the 264th-most popular website on the internet. Outlets have noted that E-Hentai functions as a de facto archive for artwork that is rare or non-existent on other physical and digital platforms; the site hosts content such as Comiket-exclusive works (dōjin) and out-of-print art books that are both pornographic and non-pornographic in nature, with Vice calling the website the "Alexandria Library of hentai". The Daily Dot described E-Hentai as "a relic of 'the old internet, citing it as an example of niche portals for digital content that predate contemporary social media.
See also
Fakku
Legal aspects of file sharing
References
External links
Exhentai Website
File sharing communities
Hentai
Image-sharing websites
Internet properties established in 1999 | E-Hentai | [
"Technology"
] | 908 | [
"File sharing communities",
"Computing websites"
] |
64,342,777 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean%20Langenheim | Jean H. Langenheim (née Harmon; September 5, 1925 – March 28, 2021) was an American plant ecologist and ethnobotanist, highly respected as an eminent scholar and a pioneer for women in the field. She has done field research in arctic, tropical, and alpine environments across five continents, with interdisciplinary research that spans across the fields of chemistry, geology, and botany. Her early research helped determine the plant origins of amber and led to her career-long work investigating the chemical ecology of resin-producing trees, including the role of plant resins for plant defense and the evolution of several resin-producing trees in the tropics. She wrote what is regarded as the authoritative reference on the topic: Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany, published in 2003.
Langenheim earned a PhD in botany with a minor in geology in 1953 from the University of Minnesota. She was the first female faculty member in the natural sciences and first woman to be promoted to full professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the first woman to serve as president for the Association for Tropical Biology, second woman to serve as president of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and Society for Economic Botany, founded and served as the first president for the International Society of Chemical Ecology, and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the California Academy of Sciences. During her time as ESA president, she initiated a project to document women's experiences and contributions to the field of ecology and conducted a follow-up project in 1996. Her research was summarized in two publications, and resulted in a large historical collection and a continued effort by ESA to document women's contributions to the field.
Early life and education
Langenheim was born in Homer, Louisiana in 1925 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She graduated from Tulsa Central High School in 1943.
Langenheim received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Tulsa (UT) in 1946. She was the first woman student body president at UT. She earned her Master of Science in 1949 and PhD in 1953, both in botany with a minor in geology from the University of Minnesota. Her PhD advisor was leading plant ecologist W.S. Cooper, who went against university policy to sponsor her as a doctoral student; at the time, women could pursue up to a Master's degree. Her dissertation was entitled, "Vegetation and environmental patterns in the Crested Butte Area, Gunnison County, Colorado " and was subsequently published in Ecological Monographs.
Career and legacy
Langenheim has conducted interdisciplinary research across five continents in the fields of plant ecology, paleobotany, and ethnobotany. She has conducted field work in the western United States, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Australia, New Zealand, Angola, Kenya, Ghana, and the Amazon rainforest. Her work has spanned the fields of botany, geology, and chemistry and included research on tropical plants, redwoods, and Pacific coast plants. She is known internationally for her research and is considered a trailblazer in plant sciences and ecology, and a pioneer for women in the field. She began her career at a time when opportunities for women in sciences were limited. In the introduction to her memoir, The Odyssey of a Woman Field Scientist, she recounts:"I lived through the period of being the token woman in numerous situations; I was not an activist fighting on the front lines, so to speak, but tried to demonstrate the capability of women through my own hard work and accomplishments." She was the first female faculty member in the natural sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) when she joined the faculty in 1966, and the first woman at the university to be promoted to full professor when she became Chair of the biology department in 1973. She was an advisor or co-advisor for 41 graduate students during her time on the faculty. She taught undergraduate and graduate classes at UCSC from 1966-1994, retired from the university officially in 1994, but continued to advise graduate students as emerita faculty until 2009 and remain active in research, the university community, and scientific societies.
Langenheim was the first woman to serve as president for the Association for Tropical Biology (now the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation) in 1985 and second woman to serve as president for the Ecological Society of America (ESA) from 1986–87 and the Society for Economic Botany from 1993-94. She also founded and served as the first president for the International Society of Chemical Ecology from 1986-87 and served as academic vice president for the Organization for Tropical Studies from 1975-77.
Early career
After completing her PhD, Langenheim advanced her career in teaching and plant ecology research at a variety of institutions. She was an instructor in field ecology at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab (RMBL) from 1953–66 and served as a member of the RMBL board of directors (1962–65) and as vice president (1965–66). From 1955-59, she was a lecturer, instructor, and research associate at San Francisco College for Women (now Lone Mountain College) and Mills College. Langenheim credits her time at these women-only institutions as preparing her to teach and to support women in the field:"I taught one year at Mills College and several years at San Francisco College for Women. These experiences at fine liberal arts colleges, where women’s issues were at the forefront, prepared me [for] action supporting women scientists, as well as for later teaching at UCSC with a liberal arts approach to undergraduate education." She was also a research associate in the botany department at the University of California Berkeley from 1954–59 and a teaching associate in the botany department at the University of Illinois Urbana from 1959-62. From 1962 through 1966 she was a research fellow in the Harvard University Biological Labs, a scholar of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now the Bunting Institute), a research associate in the Harvard Botanical Museum, a Cabot Fellow, and an American Association of University Women Wiley Fellow. It was during her time at Harvard that she began her research on the ecology and evolution of plant resins and amber.
Langenheim joined the faculty of UCSC in 1966, one year after the campus was established. She was a founding member of the Adlai E. Stevenson College, where she lived as the faculty preceptor for several years, and helped develop the graduate programs at the university. Her botany course, co-taught with plant physiologist Kenneth Thimann, was "highly popular because of the way it related plants to human affairs" and led to publication of a textbook in 1982 entitled Botany: Plant Biology and Its Relation to Human Affairs. She also taught graduate courses in tropical and chemical ecology and the history of ecological concepts. She was a visiting professor at Harvard and the Universidade de Pará in Brazil in 1974, and served as Chair of the biology department at UCSC from 1974-1976.
Plant resins and amber
Langenheim is well known for her more than 40 years investigating plant resins and amber. Her research on plant resins spans from the chemistry, geologic history, and ecological role to their uses throughout human history. In 1961, she began conducting research at Harvard University to study fossilized plant resin, also known as amber, and the ecology and evolution of resin-producing trees in the tropics. While at Harvard, she conducted the first chemical studies of amber's plant origins through geologic time and wrote a seminal paper on the subject, published in Science in 1969, that established her as the leading expert on botanical sources of amber. It was this work that led to her career-long chemical ecology research on tropical resin-producing trees, including the mechanisms for producing resin and the role they play in insect and disease defense. She wrote what is regarded as the authoritative reference on the subject: Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany, published in 2003. The book was awarded the 2004 Mary W. Klinger Book Award from the Society for Economic Botany, which is given for an "outstanding book published in the discipline of Economic/Ethno Botany."
Philanthropy
Langenheim has a history of philanthropic giving to UCSC. In 2004, she established the Jean H. Langenheim Graduate Fellowship in Plant Ecology and Evolution with an endowment gift of $200,000, to support students studying terrestrial plant ecology and evolution. When she published her memoir in 2010, all royalties from sales of the book were donated to the fellowship endowment. She also donated copies of her memoir to the UCSC Arboretum gift shop, with proceeds from sales going to support the Arboretum.
In 2006, she established the Jean H. Langenheim Endowed Chair in Plant Ecology and Evolution with a gift of $350,000 to the university "to support and encourage research and teaching in the area of terrestrial plant ecology and evolution, including studies of human impacts on plants, such as global warming, introduction of invasive plants, and ecosystem destruction."
Documenting women's contributions to ecology
In 1986, Langenheim began a project to document the careers, experiences, and accomplishments of other women contemporaries in ecology. She started the project because she was the second woman president of ESA at the time, and wanted to highlight the accomplishments of other women in the field:"Since there have been so few women officers, and I was the only woman president, except E. Lucy Braun, I decided that I would do my Presidential Address on the history of women’s contributions to ecology. This would not only ”educate” many, but would also provide the opportunity to give tribute to the accomplishments of women, and to many who have remained essentially “invisible” (and hence unrecognized)." The project took two years, with surveys received from 55 women ecologists, and culminated in a speech to ESA members entitled "The Path and Progress of American Women Ecologists", which was subsequently published in the ESA Bulletin in December 1988. In 1996, she contacted colleagues again as an update to this project, with a focus on women's research contributions. The results of this second survey were published in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics in 1996 in an article entitled "Early History and Progress of Women Ecologists: Emphasis Upon Research Contributions". Her work to document the careers and accomplishments of women in ecology made her the ESA de facto expert on the subject, and created a rich history, commentary, and legacy of women in ecology. ESA's efforts to document women's contributions to the field continue today based on her work in their "Women in Ecology Series."
Honors and awards
1967 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
1972 Cooley Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists
1973 Elected Fellow to California Academy of Sciences
1974-76 Chair, UCSC biology department
1975-77 Academic vice president, Organization for Tropical Studies
1979 University of Tulsa Distinguished Alumna Award
1981 Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Research School of Biology, Australian National University
1985 President, Association for Tropical Biology (now the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation)
1986-87 President, Ecological Society of America
1986-87 Founder and President, International Society of Chemical Ecology
1993-94 President, Society for Economic Botany
2004 California Botanical Society dedicated its 2004 volume of the journal Madroño to her
2006 Centennial Award from the Botanical Society of America for "contributions to the advancement of the plant sciences"
2006 Fellows Medal of the California Academy of Sciences for "decades of excellence in contribution to the advancement of science and to the life of this institution"
2011 Sigma Delta Epsilon (Graduate Women in Science) national honorary membership
2012 Elected Fellow of the Ecological Society of America
Selected works
Langenheim has published over 130 scientific papers, book chapters, and several books, including:
Jean H. Langenheim. 1962. Vegetation and Environmental Patterns in the Crested Butte Area, Gunnison County, Colorado. Ecological Monographs. Vol. 32, Iss. 3, pp. 249–285.
Jean H. Langenheim. 1969. Amber: A Botanical Inquiry. Science. Vol. 163, No. 3872, pp. 1157–1169.
Langenheim, J. H., Thimann, K. V. 1982. Botany: Plant Biology and Its Relation to Human Affairs. United Kingdom: Wiley. 624 pp.
Jean H. Langenheim. 1988. Address of the Past President: Davis, California, August 1988: The Path and Progress of American Women Ecologists. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Vol. 69, No. 4, pp. 184–197.
Jean H. Langenheim. 1996. Early History and Progress of Women Ecologists: Emphasis Upon Research Contributions. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. Vol. 27, pp. 1–53.
Jean H. Langenheim. 2003. Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany. Timber Press, Oregon. 586 pp.
Memoir and biography: Jean H. Langenheim. 2010. The Odyssey of a Woman Field Scientist: A Story of Passion, Persistence, and Patience. Xlibris. 539 pp. https://books.google.com/books?id=IjNWRwAACAAJ
External links
Society for Economic Botany
Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation
International Society of Chemical Ecology
Ecological Society of America Women in Ecology Series
References
1925 births
2021 deaths
People from Homer, Louisiana
Writers from Tulsa, Oklahoma
Writers from Louisiana
American women ecologists
American women scientists
University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences alumni
University of Tulsa alumni
University of California faculty
Ethnobotanists
American women academics
Chemical ecologists
21st-century American women scientists
Graduate Women in Science members | Jean Langenheim | [
"Chemistry"
] | 2,800 | [
"Chemical ecologists",
"Chemical ecology"
] |
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