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In the long term, most economists consider productivity increases as a benefit to the economy overall, and necessary to improve the standard of living for consumers in general. By the time Taylor was doing his work, improvements in agricultural productivity had freed up a large portion of the workforce for the manufacturing sector, allowing those workers in turn to buy new types of consumer goods instead of working as subsistence farmers. In later years, increased manufacturing efficiency would free up large sections of the workforce for the service sector. If captured as profits or wages, the money generated by more-productive companies would be spent on new goods and services; if free market competition forces prices down close to the cost of production, consumers effectively capture the benefits and have more money to spend on new goods and services. Either way, new companies and industries spring up to profit from increased demand, and due to freed-up labor are able to hire workers. But the long-term benefits are no guarantee that individual displaced workers will be able to get new jobs that paid them as well or better as their old jobs, as this may require access to education or job training, or moving to different part of the country where new industries are growing. Inability to obtain new employment due to mismatches like these is known as structural unemployment, and economists debate to what extent this is happening in the long term, if at all, as well as the impact on income inequality for those who do find jobs.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=389401
| 108,070 |
728,203 |
NTL played a central role in the evolution of experiential learning and the application of behavioral science to improving organizations. Process consultation, team building, conflict management, and workplace group democracy and autonomy have become recurrent themes in the prolific body of literature and practice known as organizational development (OD). As with 'action science', OD is a response to calls for planned change and 'rational social management' involving a normative human relations movement and approach to worklife in capital-dominated economies. Its principal goal is to enhance an organization's performance and the worklife experience, with the assistance of a consultant, a change agent or catalyst that helps the sponsoring organization define and solve its own problems, introduce new forms of leadership and change organizational culture and learning. Diagnostic and capacity-building activities are informed, to varying degrees, by psychology, the behavioural sciences, organizational studies, or theories of leadership and social innovation. Appreciative Inquiry (AI), for instance, is an offshoot of PAR based on positive psychology. Rigorous data gathering or fact-finding methods may be used to support the inquiry process and group thinking and planning. On the whole, however, science tends to be a means, not an end. Workplace and organizational learning interventions are first and foremost problem-based, action-oriented and client-centred.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2819542
| 727,819 |
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Prevention programs should promote more hygienic food preparation by encouraging safer cooking techniques and more sanitary handling of potentially contaminated seafood. The elimination of the first intermediate host, the snail, is not tenable due to the nature of the organisms habits. A key component to prevention is research, more specifically the research of everyday behaviors. This recent study was conducted as a part of a broader effort to determine the status of "Paragonimus" species infection in Laos. An epidemiological survey was conducted on villagers and schoolchildren in Namback District between 2003 and 2005. Among 308 villagers and 633 primary and secondary schoolchildren, 156 villagers and 92 children had a positive reaction on a "Paragonimus" skin test. Consequently, several types of crabs were collected from markets and streams in a paragonimiasis endemic area for the inspection of metacercariae and were identified as the second intermediate host of the "Paragonimus" species. In this case study, we see how high prevalence of paragonimiasis is explained by dietary habits of the population. Amongst schoolchildren, many students reported numerous experiences of eating roast crabs in the field. Adult villagers reported frequent consumption of seasoned crabs (Tan Cheoy Koung) and papaya salad (Tammack Koung) with crushed raw crab. In addition to this characteristic feature of the villagers' food culture, the denizens of this area drink fresh crab juice as a traditional cure for measles, and this was also thought to constitute a route for infection.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2196281
| 562,699 |
2,625 |
The loss of staunch F-22 advocates in the upper DoD echelons resulted in the erosion of its political support. In July 2008, General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated to the SASC his reasons for supporting the termination of F-22 production, including shifting resources to the multi-service F-35 and preserving the F/A-18 production line for the EA-18G Growler's electronic warfare capabilities. Although Russian and Chinese fighter developments fueled concern for the USAF, Gates dismissed this and in 2010, he set the F-22 requirement to 187 aircraft by lowering the number of major regional conflict preparations from two to one, despite an effort by Moseley's successor General Norton Schwartz to raise the number to 243. After President Obama threatened to veto further production at Gates' urging, the Senate voted in July 2009 in favor of ending production and the House agreed to abide by the 187 cap. Gates highlighted the F-35's role in the decision, and in 2011, he explained that Chinese fighter developments had been accounted for when the F-22 numbers were set, and that the U.S. would have a considerable advantage in stealth aircraft in 2025 even with F-35 delays. In December 2011, the 195th and final F-22 was completed out of 8 test EMD and 187 operational aircraft produced; the jet was delivered on 2 May 2012. The curtailed procurement would force the USAF to operate the F-15C/D into the 2020s in order to retain adequate numbers of air superiority fighters.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66299
| 2,625 |
662,639 |
Neurologically, the idea of synaptic plasticity, which is an important neurochemical explanation of memory, can help to understand the Einstellung effect. Specifically, Hebbian theory (which in many regards is the neuroscience equivalent of original associationist theories) is one explanation of synaptic plasticity (Hebb, 1949). It states that when two associated neurons frequently fire together – while infrequently firing apart from one another – the strength of their association tends to become stronger (making future stimulation of one neuron even more likely to stimulate the other). Since the frontal lobe is most often attributed with the roles of planning and problem solving, if there is a neurological pathway which is fundamental to the understanding of Einstellung effect, the majority of it most likely falls within the frontal lobe. Essentially, a Hebbian explanation of Einstellung could be as follows: stimuli are presented in such a way that the subject recognizes themself as being in a situation which they have been in before. That is, the subject sees, hears, smells, etc., an environment which is akin to an environment which they have been in before. The subject then must process the stimuli which are presented in such a way that they exhibit a behavior which is appropriate for the situation (be it run, throw, eat, etc.). Because neural growth is, at least in part, due to the associations between two events/ideas, it follows that the more a given stimulus is followed by a specific response, the more likely that in the future that stimulus will invoke the same response. Regarding the Luchins’ experiment, the stimulus presented was a water-jar problem (or to be more technical, the stimulus was a piece of paper which had words and numbers on it which, when interpreted correctly, portray a water-jar problem) and the invoked response was B − A − 2C. While it is a bit of a stretch to assume that there is a direct connection between a "water-jar problem" and "B" − "A" − 2"C" within the brain, it is not unreasonable to assume that the specific neural connections which are active during a water-jar problem-state and those that are active when one thinks “take the second term, subtract the first term, then subtract two of the third term” tend to increase in the amount of overlap as more and more instances where B − A − 2C works are presented.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14540905
| 662,294 |
1,871,252 |
In the wild, "M. campanulae" seal off their cells within the nest with natural resins found in plants and trees. In 2013, however, researchers reported that the bees had used synthetics, including caulk, to seal the cells. Compositional analysis of these materials revealed calcium, titanium, and iron. They resembled polyurethane-based sealants typically used in building construction. It is not uncommon for insects to live inside found objects made of plastic. However, these findings are the first known of insects actually "building" nests with plastic. With help from citizen scientists in Toronto, over 200 nest boxes were placed throughout the city. Scanning electron microscopy, x-ray microanalysis, and infrared microscopy were employed in identification of polymeric specimens. Researchers suggest the bees' behavior may be an example of adaptive behavior. Since some of the bees were free of parasites, these novel and possibly more robust methods of nest building may offer additional protection. Incorporation of plastic into the walls and sealants of the cell nests appeared to provide some protection against brood parasite invasion. However, use of these more readily available synthetic materials, in an urban setting, may be incidental. In fact, exposure of brood to polyurethane and polyethylene based plastics could be detrimental, as the Canadian team noted, since diffusion of moisture could be inhibited. Some of the brood specimens were heavily affected by mold growth. Additionally, synthetic materials in the nest might hinder the bees ability to move and breath. Toxin exposures and other effects of urbanization are well documented contributors towards pollinator decline in general.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42898392
| 1,870,175 |
108,225 |
Each of the three services has its own intelligence collection assets. RAN doctrine stresses the importance of collecting a wide range of information, and combining it to inform decisions. It also notes that the "Collins"-class submarines are particularly effective sources of "acoustic, electromagnetic and environmental information". The Army's intelligence and surveillance units include the 1st Intelligence Battalion, 7th Signal Regiment (Electronic Warfare), 20th Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment, three Regional Force Surveillance Units and the Special Air Service Regiment. The RAAF monitors the airspace of Australia and neighbouring countries using the Vigilare system, which combines input from the service's Jindalee Operational Radar Network, other ADF air defence radars (including airborne and naval systems) and civilian air traffic control radars. The RAAF's other intelligence assets include No. 87 Squadron and the AP-3C Orion aircraft operated by No. 92 Wing. A C band radar and a telescope located at Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt provide a space situational awareness capability, which includes tracking space assets and debris. Australia also provides personnel to the US Joint Space Operations Center in Colorado Springs which tracks and identifies any man-made object in orbit.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67538
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The first lighter-than-air crossings of the Atlantic were made by airship in July 1919 by His Majesty's Airship R34 and crew when they flew from East Lothian, Scotland to Long Island, New York and then back to Pulham, England. By 1929, airship technology had advanced to the point that the first round-the-world flight was completed by the "Graf Zeppelin" in September and in October, the same aircraft inaugurated the first commercial transatlantic service. However, the age of the rigid airship ended following the destruction by fire of the zeppelin LZ 129 "Hindenburg" just before landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey on 6 May 1937, killing 35 of the 97 people aboard. Previous spectacular airship accidents, from the "Wingfoot Express" disaster (1919) to the loss of the R101 (1930), the "Akron" (1933) and the "Macon" (1935) had already cast doubt on airship safety, but with the disasters of the U.S. Navy's rigids showing the importance of solely using helium as the lifting medium; following the destruction of the Hindenburg, the remaining airship making international flights, the "Graf Zeppelin" was retired (June 1937). Its replacement, the rigid airship "Graf Zeppelin II", made a number of flights, primarily over Germany, from 1938 to 1939, but was grounded when Germany began World War II. Both remaining German zeppelins were scrapped in 1940 to supply metal for the German Luftwaffe; the last American rigid airship, the "Los Angeles", which had not flown since 1932, was dismantled in late 1939.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=177680
| 250,495 |
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In recent years, evolutionary biologists, geneticists and palaeoanthropologists have been reassessing the issues, many citing genetic and other evidence that early human kinship may have been matrilineal after all. One crucial piece of indirect evidence has been genetic data suggesting that over thousands of years, women among sub-Saharan African hunter-gatherers have chosen to reside postmaritally not with their husbands' family but with their own mother and other natal kin. Another line of argument is that when sisters and their mothers help each other with childcare, the descent line tends to be matrilineal rather than patrilineal. Biological anthropologists are now widely agreed that cooperative childcare was a development crucial in making possible the evolution of the unusually large human brain and characteristically human psychology. Although others refute the claims of supporters of the universality of matrilocality or patrilocality, pointing out that hunter-gatherer societies have a flexible philopatry or practice multilocality, which in turn leads to a more egalitarian society, since both men and women have the right to choose with whom to live. It is worth noting that according to some data, pastoralists and farmers strongly gravitate towards patrilocality, so patrilocality is a common phenomenon among non-Pygmies. But among some hunter-gatherers, patrilocality is less common than among farmers. So for example, among the pygmies of aka, which includes biaka and benzene, a young couple usually settles in her husband's camp after the birth of their first child. However, the husband can stay in the wife's community, where one of his brothers or sisters can join him. This can happen in societies where the bride's service is practiced. Or in any other societies. According to the data above, some scientists also say that kinship and residence in hunter-gatherer societies are complex and multifaceted. For example, when re-checking past data (which were not very reliable), the researchers note that about 40% of the groups were bilocal, 22.9% were matrilocal and 25% were patrilocal. A number of scientists also advocate multilocality, refuting the concepts of exceptional matrilocality (matrilineality) or patrilocality (patrilineality).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=84024
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Brown and his team also had been observing the dwarf planet for approximately six months before its announced discovery by José Luis Ortiz Moreno and colleagues from the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Spain. Brown originally indicated his support for Ortiz's team's being given credit for the discovery of Haumea. However, further investigation showed that a website containing archives of where the telescopes of Brown's team had been pointed while tracking Haumea had been accessed eight times in the three days preceding Ortiz's announcement, by computers with IP addresses that were traced back to the website of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC, Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia), where Ortiz works, and to e-mail messages sent by Ortiz and his student. These website accesses came a week after Brown had published an abstract for an upcoming conference talk at which he had planned to announce the discovery of Haumea; the abstract referred to Haumea by a code that was the same code used in the online telescope logs; and the Andalusia computers had accessed the logs containing that code directly, as would be the case after an internet search, without going through the home page or other pages of the archives. When asked about this online activity, Ortiz responded with an email to Brown that suggested Brown was at fault for "hiding objects", and said that "the only reason why we are now exchanging e-mail is because you did not report your object." Brown says that this statement by Ortiz contradicts the accepted scientific practice of analyzing one's research until one is satisfied that it is accurate, then submitting it to peer review prior to any public announcement. However, the Minor Planet Center only needs precise enough orbit determination on the object in order to provide discovery credit, which Ortiz provided (see Timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their moons to verify typical time scale of observation and publication of discoveries).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=528312
| 595,074 |
1,915,884 |
Most of the new oil fields are located in deep water and are generally referred to as deepwater systems. Development of these fields sets strict requirements for verification of the various systems’ functions and their compliance with current requirements and specifications. This is because of the high costs and time involved in changing a pre-existing system due to the specialized vessels with advanced onboard equipment. A full-scale test (System Integration Test – SIT) does not provide satisfactory verification of deepwater systems because the test, for practical reasons, cannot be performed under conditions identical to those under which the system will later operate. The oil industry has therefore adopted modern data technology as a tool for virtual testing of deepwater systems that enables detection of costly faults at an early phase of the project. By using modern simulation tools, models of deepwater systems can be set up and used to verify the system's functions, and dynamic properties, against various requirements specifications. This includes the model-based development of innovative high-tech plants and system solutions for the exploitation and production of energy resources in an environmentally friendly way as well as the analysis and evaluation of the dynamic behavior of components and systems used for the production and distribution of oil and gas. Another part is the real-time virtual test of systems for subsea production, subsea drilling, supply above sea level, seismography, subsea construction equipment, and subsea process measurement and control equipment.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10350431
| 1,914,785 |
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VLDLR is expressed on migrating neurons to help guide them to their proper location in the brain. This process is part of the reelin pathway, which is responsible for the inside-out formation of the six-layered neocortex. Despite the discovery of this pathway, many of the specifics and molecular mechanisms of this process are still being debated. The presence of two reelin receptors, VLDLR and ApoER2, has made it difficult to distinguish each protein’s specific function. VLDLR is primarily responsible for the correct layering of pyramidal cells into layer 1 of the cerebral cortex. In particular, the absence of VLDLR may lead to ectopic accumulation of pyramidal cells in this region. VLDLR does not affect the migration of early born cells into an organized layer, but since its absence results in the invasion of these neuroblasts into the marginal zone, it is theorized that VLDLR may encode a “stop signal.” This is supported by the fact that VLDLR is primarily expressed in the cortical plate adjacent to reelin-expressing cells, Cajal–Retzius cells, and in the intermediate zone. However, definitive evidence has not yet been found. In general, reelin binds VLDLR and undergoes endocytosis via clathrin-coated vesicles. Meanwhile, an intracellular protein, Dab1, has a PI/PTB domain that interacts with the NPxY sequence found in the cytoplasmic tail of VLDLR. As a result, Dab1 is tyrosine phosphorylated and reelin is degraded. Finally, phosphorylated Dab1 activates an intracellular signaling cascade that directs neuroblasts to their proper location through the alteration of the cytoskeleton. Many of the specifics of this pathway are still being investigated. It is not yet known if Dab1 is phosphorylated as a result of the endocytosis of reelin, or if there is another mechanism at play. In addition to the organization of the neocortex, VLDLR also plays a role in neuronal migration of the hippocampus and the Purkinje cells of the cerebellum. Yet, much information on this process is still unknown.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5402846
| 1,601,338 |
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South Korea started considering the F-35 in 2009, among several other competitors, for its F-X Phase III fighter program. South Korean officials had indicated that the F-35 would only be available for delivery after 2018, but Steve O'Bryan, Lockheed's vice president for F-35 business development, said at that time that Lockheed could deliver the F-35 to South Korea by 2016. Some Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF) officers have outlined possible missions for the stealth fighter, such as surprise raids deep into nuclear armed North Korea. Lockheed has refused to allow ROKAF pilots access to the aircraft to test it prior to the selection, however simulations available to South Korea are more extensive than the processes used by other customers, such as Israel and Japan. In August 2013, the F-35 was essentially eliminated from the competition when the American foreign military sales process prevented Lockheed Martin from offering a price that did not exceed South Korea's budget for the program, leaving just the Boeing F-15SE Silent Eagle within the nation's budget. Lockheed Martin responded that it would work with the American government to continue to offer the F-35 to South Korea. The defense ministry rejected the award and said a new competition would be held to "secure military capability in line with recent aviation technology developments." In November 2013, the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff Council recommended purchasing 40 F-35A as North Korea seemed to have difficulty dealing with radar-evading aircraft. On 27 January 2014, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration said that a contract for the 40 aircraft would be reviewed and, once approved, signed in September. With deliveries planned to begin in 2018, South Korea would benefit from the scale of F-35 production at the time. With full-scale production having begun, the Unit Recurring Flyaway (URF) cost of one F-35A is expected to be $80–$85 million, which includes the aircraft, avionics and mission systems, the engine, logistics support, and a flight simulator. Through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreement and past budget issues, the cost projection may be likely to rise. South Korea's formal selection of the F-35 purchase was finalized on 24 September 2014. South Korea is the third FMS country to procure the F-35A after Israel and Japan.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28702755
| 297,891 |
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"N. pilipes" prefers moist habitats with no direct sunlight. It can be found in Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. In Australia, most "N. pilipes" are found in rainforest habitats in northern and eastern Australia, where climate is humid and vegetation offers shade against direct sunlight. In general, "N. pilipes" are distributed along coastal lines, where precipitation is ample. However, reports show that "N. pilipes" can be found in dry sclerophyll and low shrublands, hundred miles away from the coast. "N. pilipes" can survive in many climate types, including temperate coastal, Mediterranean, subtropical and tropical savannah climates. They construct webs in bushes and trees, near surface water, and against buildings and other terrain structures. To reduce heat from the sun, like other spiders, "Nephila" spp. has a thermoregulatory behavior. Experiments show that when the temperature reaches 32 °C, "Nephila" spp. will adjust the angle between its body and the incoming sunlight, orienting its abdomen towards the sun but keeping the cephalothorax parallel to the web. When temperature further rises, it will align the full body along the sunlight direction, further reducing the area that is receiving heat from the sun. At temperature above 40 °C, "Nephila" spp. will abandon the web. Unlike other relatives, the distribution of "N. pilipes" doesn't depend on seasons. Adult females are active throughout four seasons and continuously lay eggs. Adult males are present in the population for longer times than females.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6242957
| 729,792 |
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On February 24, 2022, in a televised address preceding the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia "is today one of the most powerful nuclear powers in the world... No one should have any doubts that a direct attack on our country will lead to defeat and dire consequences for any potential aggressor." Later in the same speech, Putin stated: "Now a few important, very important words for those who may be tempted to intervene in ongoing events. Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so to create threats for our country, for our people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences that you have never experienced in your history." On February 27, 2022, Putin publicly put his nuclear forces on alert, stating that NATO powers had made "aggressive statements". On April 14, "The New York Times" reported comments by CIA director William Burns, who said "potential desperation" could lead President Putin to order the use of tactical nuclear weapons. On September 21, 2022, days before declaring the annexation of additional parts of Ukraine, Putin claimed in a national television address that high NATO officials had made statements about the possibility of "using nuclear weapons of mass destruction against Russia", and stated "if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people... It's not a bluff." NBC News characterized Putin's statements as a "thinly veiled" threat that Putin was willing to risk nuclear conflict if necessary to win the war with Ukraine. Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, stated that "if you start detonating nuclear weapons in the [battlefield] you potentially get radioactive fallout that you can't control — it could rain over your own troops as well, so it might not be an advantage to do that in the field."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36880
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In 1959, a gold-leaf mural by Albers, "Two Structural Constellations" was engraved in the lobby of the Corning Glass Building in Manhattan. For the entrance of the Time & Life Building lobby, he created "Two Portals" (1961), a 42-feet by 14-feet mural of alternating glass bands in white and brown that recede into two bronze centers to create an illusion of depth. In the 1960s, Walter Gropius, who was designing the Pan Am Building with Emery Roth & Sons and Pietro Belluschi, commissioned Albers to make a mural. The artist reworked "City", a sandblasted glass construction that he had designed in 1929 at the Bauhaus, and renamed it "Manhattan". The giant abstract mural of black, white, and red strips arranged in interwoven columns stood 28-feet high and 55-feet wide and was installed in the lobby of the building; it was removed during a lobby redesign around 2000. Before he died in 1976, Albers left exact specifications of the work so that it could easily be replicated; in 2019, it was replicated and reinstalled in its original place in the Pan Am building, now renamed MetLife. In 1967, his painted mural "Growth" (1965) as well as "Loggia Wall" (1965), a brick relief, were installed on the campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Other architectural works include "Gemini" (1972), a stainless steel relief for the Grand Avenue National Bank lobby in Kansas City, Missouri, and "Reclining Figure" (1972), a mosaic mural for the Celanese Building in Manhattan destroyed in 1980. At the invitation of a former student, the Australian architect Harry Seidler, Albers designed the mural "Wrestling" (1976) for the Mutual Life Centre in Sydney.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=335390
| 932,911 |
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The first meeting of Task Group 13 was held during March 2017, aiming at a new standard on light fidelity (LiFi), i.e. mobile communications by using the light. The aim is to address industrial applications, i.e. ultra-reliable, low-latency connectivity with negligible jitter for next-generation IoT. Compared to 802.15.7, the group decided to rewrite the standard entirely, based on existing and new contributions, to meet those targets. The group first worked on a low-power pulsed modulation PHY (PM-PHY) using On-Off-Keying (OOK) with frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and also a high-bandwidth PHY (HB-PHY) based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) adopted from ITU-T G.9991. The group also decided to implement mobility by considering access points in the infrastructure and mobile users in the service area as inputs and outputs of a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) link. 802.15.13 supports D-MIMO natively with a minimalistic design, suitable for specialty applications. It is implementable on low-cost FPGAs and off-the-shelf computing hardware. The Working Group letter ballot and the IEEE SA Ballot were started in November 2019 and November 2020, respectively. Publication is expected mid of 2022.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=14735
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The discoverer of the Galápagos Islands, Fray Tomás de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, wrote in 1535 of "such big tortoises that each could carry a man on top of himself." Naturalist Charles Darwin remarked after his trip three centuries later in 1835, "These animals grow to an immense size ... several so large that it required six or eight men to lift them from the ground". The largest recorded individuals have reached weights of over and lengths of . Size overlap is extensive with the Aldabra giant tortoise, however taken as a subspecies, the Galápagos tortoise seems to average slightly larger, with weights in excess of being slightly more commonplace. Weights in the larger bodied subspecies range from in mature males and from in adult females. However, the size is variable across the islands and subspecies; those from Pinzón Island are relatively small with a maximum known weight of and carapace length of approximately compared to range in tortoises from Santa Cruz Island. The tortoises' gigantism was probably a trait useful on continents that was fortuitously helpful for successful colonisation of these remote oceanic islands rather than an example of evolved insular gigantism. Large tortoises would have a greater chance of surviving the journey over water from the mainland as they can hold their heads a greater height above the water level and have a smaller surface area/volume ratio, which reduces osmotic water loss. Their significant water and fat reserves would allow the tortoises to survive long ocean crossings without food or fresh water, and to endure the drought-prone climate of the islands. A larger size allowed them to better tolerate extremes of temperature due to gigantothermy. Fossil giant tortoises from mainland South America have been described that support this hypothesis of gigantism that pre-existed the colonization of islands.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7934681
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Marine organisms are more sensitive to changes in (carbon dioxide) levels than terrestrial organisms for a variety of reasons. is 28 times more soluble in water than is oxygen. Marine animals normally function with lower concentrations of in their bodies than land animals, as the removal of in air-breathing animals is impeded by the need for the gas to pass through the respiratory system's membranes (lungs' alveolus, tracheae, and the like), even when diffuses more easily than oxygen. In marine organisms, relatively modest but sustained increases in concentrations hamper the synthesis of proteins, reduce fertilization rates, and produce deformities in calcareous hard parts. An analysis of marine fossils from the Permian's final Changhsingian stage found that marine organisms with a low tolerance for hypercapnia (high concentration of carbon dioxide) had high extinction rates, and the most tolerant organisms had very slight losses. The most vulnerable marine organisms were those that produced calcareous hard parts (from calcium carbonate) and had low metabolic rates and weak respiratory systems, notably calcareous sponges, rugose and tabulate corals, calcite-depositing brachiopods, bryozoans, and echinoderms; about 81% of such genera became extinct. Close relatives without calcareous hard parts suffered only minor losses, such as sea anemones, from which modern corals evolved. Animals with high metabolic rates, well-developed respiratory systems, and non-calcareous hard parts had negligible losses except for conodonts, in which 33% of genera died out. This pattern is also consistent with what is known about the effects of hypoxia, a shortage but not total absence of oxygen. However, hypoxia cannot have been the only killing mechanism for marine organisms. Nearly all of the continental shelf waters would have had to become severely hypoxic to account for the magnitude of the extinction, but such a catastrophe would make it difficult to explain the very selective pattern of the extinction. Mathematical models of the Late Permian and Early Triassic atmospheres show a significant but protracted decline in atmospheric oxygen levels, with no acceleration near the P–Tr boundary. Minimum atmospheric oxygen levels in the Early Triassic are never less than present-day levels and so the decline in oxygen levels does not match the temporal pattern of the extinction.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24749
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The HDD's spindle system relies on air density inside the disk enclosure to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk rotates. HDDs require a certain range of air densities to operate properly. The connection to the external environment and density occurs through a small hole in the enclosure (about 0.5 mm in breadth), usually with a filter on the inside (the "breather filter"). If the air density is too low, then there is not enough lift for the flying head, so the head gets too close to the disk, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss. Specially manufactured sealed and pressurized disks are needed for reliable high-altitude operation, above about . Modern disks include temperature sensors and adjust their operation to the operating environment. Breather holes can be seen on all disk drives – they usually have a sticker next to them, warning the user not to cover the holes. The air inside the operating drive is constantly moving too, being swept in motion by friction with the spinning platters. This air passes through an internal recirculation (or "recirc") filter to remove any leftover contaminants from manufacture, any particles or chemicals that may have somehow entered the enclosure, and any particles or outgassing generated internally in normal operation. Very high humidity present for extended periods of time can corrode the heads and platters. An exception to this are hermetically sealed, helium filled HDDs that largely eliminate environmental issues that can arise due to humidity or atmospheric pressure changes. Such HDDs were introduced by HGST in their first successful high volume implementation in 2013.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=13777
| 33,993 |
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An endotherm is an animal that regulates its own body temperature, typically by keeping it at a constant level. To regulate body temperature, an organism may need to prevent heat gains in arid environments. Evaporation of water, either across respiratory surfaces or across the skin in those animals possessing sweat glands, helps in cooling body temperature to within the organism's tolerance range. Animals with a body covered by fur have limited ability to sweat, relying heavily on panting to increase evaporation of water across the moist surfaces of the lungs and the tongue and mouth. Mammals like cats, dogs and pigs, rely on panting or other means for thermal regulation and have sweat glands only in foot pads and snout. The sweat produced on pads of paws and on palms and soles mostly serves to increase friction and enhance grip. Birds also counteract overheating by gular fluttering, or rapid vibrations of the gular (throat) skin. Down feathers trap warm air acting as excellent insulators just as hair in mammals acts as a good insulator. Mammalian skin is much thicker than that of birds and often has a continuous layer of insulating fat beneath the dermis. In marine mammals, such as whales, or animals that live in very cold regions, such as the polar bears, this is called blubber. Dense coats found in desert endotherms also aid in preventing heat gain such as in the case of the camels.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=378661
| 295,531 |
1,742,051 |
In their final regular season game of the 2013 season, the Eagles fell in a closely fought battle with former Big East rival Syracuse. The Eagles took a 7–0 lead in the 1st on a 24-yard touchdown run by Heisman candidate Andre Williams, but let up 21 straight points in the 2nd quarter before answering with a touchdown in the final minute before going to the locker room. The Eagles got the ball to start the 2nd half but Williams left early in the opening drive with an injury to his right shoulder and did not return to the game. True Freshman Myles Willis took over Williams' place and helped BC fight back and take a 28–24 lead in the 4th. Syracuse managed to kick a field goal to pull within a point but threw an interception on their next drive. The Eagles could only manage a field goal to push their lead back to four and gave Syracuse the ball with 2:08 with no timeouts. The Orange drove 75 yards down the field in 2:01 and scored a touchdown with 0:06 left on the clock to seal the game, winning their 6th of the season and becoming the 11th bowl-eligible team in the ACC. Williams' injury and the loss effectively ended his chances at winning the Heisman trophy, but he was nonetheless named one of six finalists and finished 4th in the voting. For his performance, Williams was awarded the 2013 Doak Walker Award and was named a unanimous All-American. The Eagles finished the regular season at 7–5 and 4–4 in ACC play, a remarkable turnaround from the 2–10 performance in 2012. The Eagles will play in their 23rd bowl game on December 31, 2013, in the 2013 AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl against the Arizona Wildcats.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39228283
| 1,741,067 |
438,034 |
The main purpose of this mission was to deploy Hubble. It was designed to operate above the Earth's turbulent and obscuring atmosphere to observe celestial objects at ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The Hubble mission was a joint NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) effort going back to the late 1970s. The rest of the mission was devoted to photography and onboard experiments. To launch HST into an orbit that guaranteed longevity, "Discovery" entered an orbit of around . At one point during the mission, "Discovery" briefly reached an apogee of , the highest altitude ever reached by a Shuttle orbiter. The record height also permitted the crew to photograph Earth's large-scale geographic features not apparent from lower orbits. Motion pictures were recorded by two IMAX cameras, and the results appeared in the 1994 IMAX film "Destiny in Space". Experiments on the mission included a biomedical technology study, advanced materials research, particle contamination and ionizing radiation measurements, and a student science project studying zero gravity effects on electronic arcs. "Discovery"s reentry from its higher than usual orbit required a deorbit burn of 4 minutes and 58 seconds, the longest in Shuttle history up to that time. "Discovery" also orbited the Earth 80 times during the mission.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=183328
| 437,820 |
1,232,330 |
As a therapsid, "Diictodon" shared many features with modern-day mammals. Most noticeably, they made burrows into the earth, but most reached up to in depth, suggesting that they might have been infrequent diggers and occupied abandoned burrows. Still, many scientists believe that "Diictodon" lived like the modern gopher. Their burrows could have been used to escape the heat of the desert, which was the dominant environment on the continent of Pangaea in the Late Permian Period. Inside these burrows, nests have been found, where "Diictodon" skeletons are present. They constituted of quite a gregarious lifestyle with numerous burrows in 500 square meters of space. However, their burrows were unconnected and did not form any large colonies. Many "Diictodon" nested close to flood plains, and some specimens may have been killed as water flowed into the nests, drowning the animals. Diictidon’s primary utilization of humeral excursion rather than forearm extension aided in employing rotation thrusting when burrowing. "Diictodon" had no known rival species competing in its niche, so they may have competed primarily with others of their species for the little plant material available. Fossils of infant "Diictodon" discovered in brood chambers in some burrows suggest there was parental care in the genus, and that males seem to have been involved in raising the infants, based on the fact that some adults in said burrows had tusks.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4099930
| 1,231,668 |
85,837 |
Stravinsky arrived in New York City on 30 September 1939 and headed for Cambridge, Massachusetts to fulfill his engagements at Harvard. During his first two months in the US, Stravinsky stayed at Gerry's Landing, the home of art historian Edward W. Forbes. Vera arrived in January 1940 and the couple married on 9 March in Bedford, Massachusetts. After a period of travel, the two moved into a home in Beverly Hills, California before they settled in Hollywood from 1941. Stravinsky felt the warmer Californian climate would benefit his health. Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. For a while, he maintained a circle of contacts and émigré friends from Russia, but he eventually found that this did not sustain his intellectual and professional life. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especially during World War II, when writers, musicians, composers, and conductors settled in the area. Music critic Bernard Holland claimed Stravinsky was especially fond of British writers, who visited him in Beverly Hills, "like W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Dylan Thomas. They shared the composer's taste for hard spirits – especially Aldous Huxley, with whom Stravinsky spoke in French." Stravinsky and Huxley had a tradition of Saturday lunches for west coast avant-garde and luminaries.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38172
| 85,803 |
1,434,665 |
"Bacillus licheniformis" strain SB3086 has been identified as a biological control agent of mango anthracnose infection, and also shows some antagonistic effects toward powdery mildew infections when applied in combination with copper oxychloride. One current issue with the use of "B. licheniformis" as a control agent is that no reliable means has been developed for maintaining the bacterial population over the long term. The other major issue with the use of this species as a biopesticide is that it has been potentially identified as causing illnesses such as food poisoning in humans, as well as several other diseases in animals. It is currently approved in the United States by the Environmental Protection Agency for use in controlling fungal diseases on ornamental plants and turf, but cannot be applied to any crop intended for consumption by animals or humans. "Ampelomyces quisqualis" is another biological control agent, this being a fungus that is capable of parasitizing "O. mangiferae". It was registered with the EPA as a biopesticide in 1994, used for powdery mildew control on various fruit, vegetable and ornamental crops. It has been deemed safe for use on crops intended for human and animal consumption, with no adverse side effects anticipated. It is marketed with the trade name “AQ10”, and is available in powder format. Several varieties of "A. quisqualis" that are resistant to commonly used fungicides are also available, so that regular fungicide applications may also be used in combination with the biopesticide. Pycnidia are produced within the mycelia and conidiophores of the powdery mildew, leading to reduced growth or colony death. The limitation of this parasite as a biocontrol agent is that it requires that some of the pathogen be present to act as a host for its growth. In plant species and cultivars with little or no powdery mildew resistance, the small amount of pathogen growth may cause an unacceptable amount of damage before "A. quisqualis" can control the fungus.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11512337
| 1,433,859 |
1,212,345 |
Other wartime physics research, particularly in rocketry and radar technology, was less significant in popular culture but much more significant for the outcome of the war. German rocketry was driven by the pursuit of "Wunderwaffen", resulting in the V-2 ballistic missile; the technology as well as the personal expertise of the German rocketry community was absorbed by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. rocket programs after the war, forming the basis of long-term military funded rocketry, ballistic missile, and later space research. Rocket science was only beginning to make impact by the final years of the war. German rockets created fear and destruction in London, but had only modest military significance, while air-to-ground rockets enhanced the power of American air strikes; jet aircraft also went into service by the end of the war. Radar work before and during the war provided even more of an advantage for the Allies. British physicists pioneered long-wave radar, developing an effective system for detecting incoming German air forces. Work on potentially more precise short-wave radar was turned over to the U.S.; several thousand academic physicists and engineers not participating the Manhattan Project did radar work, particularly at MIT and Stanford, resulting in microwave radar systems that could resolve more detail in incoming flight formations. Further refinement of microwave technology led to proximity fuzes, which greatly enhanced the ability of the U.S. Navy to defend against Japanese bombers. Microwave production, detection and manipulation also formed the technical foundation to complement the institutional foundation of the Manhattan Project in much post-war defense research.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4999816
| 1,211,693 |
32,116 |
From his work at Los Alamos von Neumann realized that computation was not just a tool to brute force the solution to a problem numerically, but that computation could also provide insight for solving problems analytically too, through heuristic hints, and that there was an enormous variety of scientific and engineering problems towards which computers would be useful, most significant of which were nonlinear problems. In June 1945 at the First Canadian Mathematical Congress he gave his first talk on general ideas of how to solve problems, particularly of fluid dynamics, numerically, which would defeat the current stalemate there was when trying to solve them by classical analysis methods. Titled "High-speed Computing Devices and Mathematical Analysis", he also described how wind tunnels, which at the time were being constructed at heavy cost, were actually analog computers, and how digital computers, which he was developing, would replace them and dawn a new era of fluid dynamics. He was given a very warm reception, with Garrett Birkhoff describing it as "an unforgettable sales pitch". Instead of publishing this talk in the proceedings of the congress, he expanded on it with Goldstine into the manuscript "On the Principles of Large Scale Computing Machines", which he would present to the US Navy and other audiences in the hopes of drumming up their support for scientific computing using digital computers. In his papers, many in conjunction with others, he developed the concepts of inverting matrices, random matrices and automated relaxation methods for solving elliptic boundary value problems.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15942
| 32,105 |
1,438,801 |
The final version of the constitution naturally was different from his original draft in various ways. Preuß' ideas were notably rejected concerning the reorganisation of the individual territories of the Reich—blocked by the new governments of the States. He also was unable to put into practice his idea of a very narrow definition of fundamental rights, limited to the classical freedoms, which he wanted to codify in just three articles of the constitution. Moreover, his attempt to change the nature of the second parliamentary chamber (made up of delegates from the individual State governments) proved impossible. However, some parts of the Weimar Constitution (on the role of parliament, government and "Reichspräsident"), considered especially problematic in hindsight, were strongly shaped by his ideas. In particular, the powerful position of the head of state, the "Reichspräsident", who was given authority to dissolve the Reichstag with no effective limitations and who had considerable emergency powers under Article 48, did not appear to Preuß as a contradiction to the idea of a democratic state. He felt this was a necessary precaution to deal with the danger of a dictatorship of the parliamentary majority and to resolve conflicts between government and parliament by the most democratic method available—through new elections. Preuß also was pessimistic about the ability of the political parties to operate successfully within the new framework: they had no experience in taking on responsibility or with the sort of compromise required for stable government. Under the Empire the governments had operated mostly independently of the parties and the Reichstag majority of the day.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2534735
| 1,437,991 |
602,272 |
In addition to this variety of data types and growing data volume, incoming data can also evolve with respect to velocity, that is, more data being generated at a faster or a variable pace. Business rules define the business process and include objectives constraints, preferences, policies, best practices, and boundaries. Mathematical models and computational models are techniques derived from mathematical sciences, computer science and related disciplines such as applied statistics, machine learning, operations research, natural language processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, image processing, speech recognition, and signal processing. The correct application of all these methods and the verification of their results implies the need for resources on a massive scale including human, computational and temporal for every Prescriptive Analytic project. In order to spare the expense of dozens of people, high performance machines and weeks of work one must consider the reduction of resources and therefore a reduction in the accuracy or reliability of the outcome. The preferable route is a reduction that produces a probabilistic result within acceptable limits.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35757264
| 601,963 |
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Another issue, more widely debated, is scale—how to address broad-based systems of power and issues of complexity, especially those of another development on a global scale. How can PAR develop a macro-orientation to democratic dialogue and meet challenges of the 21st Century, by joining movements to support justice and solidarity on both local and global scales? By keeping things closely tied to local group dynamics, PAR runs the risk of substituting small-scale participation for genuine democracy and fails to develop strategies for social transformation on all levels. Given its political implications, community-based action research and its consensus ethos have been known to fall prey to powerful stakeholders and serve as Trojan horses to bring global and environmental restructuring processes directly to local settings, bypassing legitimate institutional buffers and obscuring diverging interests and the exercise of power during the process. Cooptation can lead to highly manipulated outcomes. Against this criticism, others argue that, given the right circumstances, it is possible to build institutional arrangements for joint learning and action across regional and national borders that can have impacts on citizen action, national policies and global discourses.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2819542
| 727,845 |
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The team kept the project deliberately simple and comparatively modest in scope. The platforming design drew extensively from "Prince of Persia", with the Doppelgänger enemy during the Atlantis section being an homage to the Shadow Prince from that game. The high number of animal enemies was meant to ground players in the world before the more fantastical elements appeared, in addition to being easier to animate and program than human enemies. The staff were also uncomfortable with Lara killing that many humans. The initial concept gave combat prominence, but as production began the focus shifted to platforming and puzzle-solving. A plan that made it into the final product was using enemy placement to shift the atmosphere from pure action-adventure to a horror-like tone. The team consciously set the story in real archaeological locations representing several cultures. Boyd and Gibson immersed themselves in literature and history about each culture for the first three areas, respectively inspired by the Inca Empire, Classical Greece and Ancient Egypt. The Greece levels were put in after planned levels in Angkor Wat, Cambodia were dropped. The Croft Manor training level was built by Gard over a weekend. Its design was based on pictures of Georgian manor houses taken from an unspecified reference book.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3926606
| 410,167 |
34,290 |
In 1963, Benoit Mandelbrot found recurring patterns at every scale in data on cotton prices. Beforehand he had studied information theory and concluded noise was patterned like a Cantor set: on any scale the proportion of noise-containing periods to error-free periods was a constant – thus errors were inevitable and must be planned for by incorporating redundancy. Mandelbrot described both the "Noah effect" (in which sudden discontinuous changes can occur) and the "Joseph effect" (in which persistence of a value can occur for a while, yet suddenly change afterwards). This challenged the idea that changes in price were normally distributed. In 1967, he published "How long is the coast of Britain? Statistical self-similarity and fractional dimension", showing that a coastline's length varies with the scale of the measuring instrument, resembles itself at all scales, and is infinite in length for an infinitesimally small measuring device. Arguing that a ball of twine appears as a point when viewed from far away (0-dimensional), a ball when viewed from fairly near (3-dimensional), or a curved strand (1-dimensional), he argued that the dimensions of an object are relative to the observer and may be fractional. An object whose irregularity is constant over different scales ("self-similarity") is a fractal (examples include the Menger sponge, the Sierpiński gasket, and the Koch curve or "snowflake", which is infinitely long yet encloses a finite space and has a fractal dimension of circa 1.2619). In 1982, Mandelbrot published "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", which became a classic of chaos theory.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6295
| 34,278 |
237,053 |
Spectrophotometry can be used for a number of techniques such as determining optimal wavelength absorbance of samples, determining optimal pH for absorbance of samples, determining concentrations of unknown samples, and determining the pKa of various samples. Spectrophotometry is also a helpful process for protein purification and can also be used as a method to create optical assays of a compound. Spectrophotometric data can also be used in conjunction with the Beer–Lambert Equation, formula_1, in order to determine various relationships between transmittance and concentration, and absorbance and concentration. Because a spectrophotometer measures the wavelength of a compound through its color, a dye binding substance can be added so that it can undergo a color change and be measured. It is possible to know the concentrations of a two component mixture using the absorption spectra of the standard solutions of each component. To do this, it is necessary to know the extinction coefficient of this mixture at two wave lengths and the extinction coefficients of solutions that contain the known weights of the two components. In addition to the traditional Beer-Lamberts law model, cuvette based label free spectroscopy can be used, which add an optical filter in the pathways of the light, enabling the spectrophotometer to quantify concentration, size and refractive index of samples following the hands law. Spectrophotometers have been developed and improved over decades and have been widely used among chemists. Additionally, Spectrophotometers are specialized to measure either UV or Visible light wavelength absorbance values. It is considered to be a highly accurate instrument that is also very sensitive and therefore extremely precise, especially in determining color change. This method is also convenient for use in laboratory experiments because it is an inexpensive and relatively simple process.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=480465
| 236,934 |
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A direct method of accessing and destroying tumour cells can be accomplished by photothermal cancer therapy or photodynamic therapy (PDT). This procedure is known to treat small tumours that are difficult to access and avoids the drawbacks (adverse effects) of conventional methods, including the unnecessary destruction of healthy tissues. The cells are destroyed by exposure to light, rupturing membranes causing the release of digestive enzymes. AuNPs have high absorption cross sections requiring only minimal input of irradiation energy. Human breast carcinoma cells infused with metal nanoparticles in vitro have been shown to have an "increase" in morbidity with exposure to near infrared (NIR). Short term exposure in vivo (4–6 minutes) to NIR had undergone the same effect. "Hirsch et al" observed that extreme heating in tumours would cause irreversible tissue damage including coagulation, cell shrinkage and loss of nuclear straining. Results of their in vivo nanoshell therapy of mice revealed penetration of the tumor ~5mm.The metal particles were tuned to high absorption and scattering, resulting in effective conversion of light into heat covering a large surface area.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46188763
| 1,784,510 |
27,154 |
The basis for modern genetics began with the work of Gregor Mendel, who presented his paper, ""Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden"" ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), in 1865, which outlined the principles of biological inheritance, serving as the basis for modern genetics. However, the significance of his work was not realized until the early 20th century when evolution became a unified theory as the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics. In the 1940s and early 1950s, a series of experiments by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase pointed to DNA as the component of chromosomes that held the trait-carrying units that had become known as genes. A focus on new kinds of model organisms such as viruses and bacteria, along with the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, marked the transition to the era of molecular genetics. From the 1950s onwards, biology has been vastly extended in the molecular domain. The genetic code was cracked by Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg after DNA was understood to contain codons. Finally, the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 with the goal of mapping the general human genome. This project was essentially completed in 2003, with further analysis still being published. The Human Genome Project was the first step in a globalized effort to incorporate accumulated knowledge of biology into a functional, molecular definition of the human body and the bodies of other organisms.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9127632
| 27,144 |
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The initial discovery of three distinct eukaryotic DNA-dependent RNA polymerases was made using "S. purpuratus" as a model organism. While embryonic development is still a major part of the utilization of the sea urchin, studies on urchin's position as an evolutionary marvel have become increasingly frequent. Orthologs to human diseases have led scientists to investigate potential therapeutic uses for the sequences found in "Strongylocentrotus purpuratus". For instance, in 2012, scientists at the University of St Andrews began investigating the "2A" viral region in the "S. purpuratus" genome which may be useful for Alzheimer's disease and cancer research. The study identified a sequence that can return cells to a 'stem-cell' like state, allowing for better treatment options. The species has also been a candidate in longevity studies, particularly because of its ability to regenerate damaged or aging tissue. Another study comparing 'young' vs. 'old' suggested that even in species with varying lifespans, the 'regenerative potential' was upheld in older specimens as they suffered no significant disadvantages compared to younger ones.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11250054
| 503,861 |
896,826 |
In medieval Europe, local laws on weights and measures were set by trade guilds on a city-by-city basis. For example, the "ell" or "elle" was a unit of length commonly used in Europe, but its length varied from 40.2 centimetres in one part of Germany to 70 centimetres in The Netherlands and 94.5 centimetres in Edinburgh. A survey of Switzerland in 1838 revealed that the "foot" had 37 different regional variations, the "ell" had 68, there were 83 different measures for dry grain, 70 measures for fluids and 63 different measures for "dead weights". When Isaac Newton wrote "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" in 1687, he quoted his measurements in "Parisian feet" so readers could understand the size. Examples of efforts to have local intercity or national standards for measurements include the Scottish law of 1641, and the British standard imperial system of 1824, which is still commonly used in the United Kingdom. Imperial China had at one time successfully standardised units for volume throughout its territory, but by 1936 official investigations uncovered 53 values for the "chi" varying from 200 millimetres to 1250 millimetres; 32 values of the "cheng", between 500 millilitres and 8 litres; and 36 different "tsin" ranging from 300 grams to 2,500 grams. Revolutionary France was to produce what evolved into the definitive "International System of Units", which has come to be used by most of the world today.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20353
| 896,355 |
1,420,561 |
Rodbell was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Shirley (née Abrams) and Milton Rodbell, a grocer. His family was Jewish. After graduating from the Baltimore City College high school, he entered Johns Hopkins University in 1943, with interests in biology and French existential literature. In 1944, his studies were interrupted by his military service as a U.S. Navy radio operator during World War II. He returned to Hopkins in 1946 and received his B.S. in biology in 1949. In 1950, he married Barbara Charlotte Ledermann, a former friend of Margot Frank, diarist Anne Frank's older sister. Martin and Barbara had four children. Rodbell received his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Washington in 1954. He did post-doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1954 to 1956. In 1956, Rodbell accepted a position as a research biochemist at the National Heart Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1985, Rodbell became Scientific Director of the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina where he worked until his retirement in 1994. He was also Adjunct Professor of Cell Biology at Duke University (from 1991 to 1998) and Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He died in Chapel Hill of multiple organ failure after an extended illness.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1127279
| 1,419,761 |
990,235 |
The experimental findings of the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment were quickly confirmed, and extended to other hereditary characteristics besides polysaccharide capsules. However, there was considerable reluctance to accept the conclusion that DNA was the genetic material. According to Phoebus Levene's influential "tetranucleotide hypothesis", DNA consisted of repeating units of the four nucleotide bases and had little biological specificity. DNA was therefore thought to be the structural component of chromosomes, whereas the genes were thought likely to be made of the protein component of chromosomes. This line of thinking was reinforced by the 1935 crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus by Wendell Stanley, and the parallels among viruses, genes, and enzymes; many biologists thought genes might be a sort of "super-enzyme", and viruses were shown according to Stanley to be proteins and to share the property of autocatalysis with many enzymes. Furthermore, few biologists thought that genetics could be applied to bacteria, since they lacked chromosomes and sexual reproduction. In particular, many of the geneticists known informally as the phage group, which would become influential in the new discipline of molecular biology in the 1950s, were dismissive of DNA as the genetic material (and were inclined to avoid the "messy" biochemical approaches of Avery and his colleagues). Some biologists, including fellow Rockefeller Institute Fellow Alfred Mirsky, challenged Avery's finding that the transforming principle was pure DNA, suggesting that protein contaminants were instead responsible. Although transformation occurred in some kinds of bacteria, it could not be replicated in other bacteria (nor in any higher organisms), and its significance seemed limited primarily to medicine.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19517416
| 989,718 |
2,051,104 |
NASA's first cost assessment in 1987 revealed the "Dual Keel" Station would cost $14.5 billion. This caused a political uproar in Congress, and NASA and Reagan Administration officials reached a compromise in March 1987 which allowed the agency to proceed with a cheaper $12.2-billion Phase One Station that could be completed after 10 or 11 Shuttle assembly flights. This design initially omitted the $3.4-billion 'Dual Keel' structure and half of the power generators. The new Space Station configuration was named "Freedom" by Reagan in June 1988. Originally, "Freedom" would have carried two 37.5 kW solar arrays. However, Congress quickly insisted on adding two more arrays for scientific users. The Space Station programme was plagued by conflicts during the entire 1984–1987 definition phase. In 1987, the Department of Defense (DoD) briefly demanded to have full access to the Station for military research, despite strong objections from NASA and the international partners. Besides the expected furore from the international partners, the DoD position sparked a shouting match between Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and powerful members of Congress that extended right up to the final Fiscal 1988 budget authorisation in July 1987. Reagan wanted to invite other NATO countries to participate in the US-led project, since the Soviet Union had been launching international crews to their Salyut space stations since 1971. At one point, then-anonymous disgruntled NASA employees calling themselves "Center for Strategic Space Studies" suggested that instead of building "Freedom", NASA should take the back-up Skylab from display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and launch that.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41550290
| 2,049,923 |
54,325 |
By mid-1943, the Jumo 004A engine had passed several 100-hour tests, with a time between overhauls of 50 hours being achieved. However, the Jumo 004A engine proved unsuitable for full-scale production because of its considerable weight and its high utilization of strategic material (Ni, Co, Mo), which were in short supply. Consequently, the 004B engine was designed to use a minimum amount of strategic materials. All high heat-resistant metal parts, including the combustion chamber, were changed to mild steel (SAE 1010) and were protected only against oxidation by aluminum coating. The total engine represented a design compromise to minimize the use of strategic materials and to simplify manufacture. With the lower-quality steels used in the 004B, the engine required overhaul after just 25 hours for a metallurgical test on the turbine. If it passed the test, the engine was refitted for a further 10 hours of usage, but 35 hours marked the absolute limit for the turbine wheel. While BMW's and Junkers' axial compressor turbojet engines were characterised by a sophisticated design that could offer a considerable advantage – also used in a generalized form for the contemporary American Westinghouse J30 turbojet – the lack of rare materials for the Jumo 004 design put it at a disadvantage compared to the "partly axial-flow" Power Jets W.2/700 turbojet engine which, despite its own largely centrifugal compressor-influenced design, provided (between an operating overhaul interval of 60–65 hours) an operational life span of 125 hours. Frank Whittle concludes in his final assessment over the two engines: "it was in the quality of high temperature materials that the difference between German and British engines was most marked"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20488
| 54,305 |
1,519,493 |
Antonio Giordano (Napoli, 11 Ottobre 1962) is an oncologist, pathologist, geneticist, researcher, university professor and writer. As an Italian naturalized American, he is the Director of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine in Philadelphia and a professor of Anatomy and Pathological Histology at the Department of Medical Biotechnology of the University of Siena. One of his research activities is aimed at activism in the context of the denunciation of environmental factors that cause an increase in cancer pathologies. The commitment of Prof. Giordano has its origins in numerous scientific works. He worked as post-doctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, directed by Nobel Prize winner James Dewey Watson. He discovered some key factors in the regulation of the cell cycle, of the mechanisms linked to the onset of tumors, and he linked his career as a researcher to that of a scientific popularizer, mainly engaging in making the link known between the environment polluted by toxic waste and the increased risk of the onset of cancer for the population of the Campania Region. During his career, he distinguished himself for having isolated the tumor suppressor gene, the RB2/p130, subsequently demonstrating how the same gene, introduced through a retrovirus in some animal models, is able to reduce the growth of tumors.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44199904
| 1,518,635 |
1,472,892 |
The term "functional" in functional hypothalamic amenorrhea implies that the ovulatory ovarian dysfunction is reversible with correction of the underlying cause. Therefore, it is said that FHA can be reversed by removal of the stressor. Weight restoration is the best predictor of functional recovery of the HPO axis and therefore the main driver to restoration of menstrual function. Correcting energy deficits to improve function of the HPO axis often includes lifestyle changes such as increasing caloric intake and reducing the level of physical activity with resultant weight gain for normalization of BMI. Menstruation typically resumes after correction of the underlying energy deficit. Patients diagnosed with FHA should be informed that varied menstrual patterns may occur during the recovery phase, and that irregular menses during this time do not preclude conception or require examination. As women with FHA work to correct energy balance, especially female athletes and those recovering from eating disorder, recovery from hypogonadotropic hypogonadism may occur in a series of phases; there can be stages where the luteal phase is inadequate or may display lower sex steroid and gonadotropin levels for many years. These patients may present with long menstrual phases with premenstrual spotting or early arrival of menses. A minimum weight required to restore menses has not been defined, but AN patients with BMI above 18 kg/m, those who are 95% of their expected body weight, and those who were in the 25th to 50th percentiles of their BMI have been shown in various studies to exhibit a restoration of menses within a short period of time. Leptin concentrations >1.85 ng/mL have been found to regulate the recovery of LH pulsatility. IGF-1 has been linked to nutritional recovery, as women who exhibit menstrual restoration tended to display increases in this compound; this holds true regardless of GH status.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15738568
| 1,472,061 |
707,882 |
Although units described as "legiones" existed as late as the 5th century in both the border and field armies, the legionary system was very different from that of the principate and early empire. Since the term legion continued to be used, it is unclear exactly when the structure and role of the legions changed. In the 3rd or 4th century, however, the legions' role as elite heavy infantry was substantially reduced and may have evaporated entirely. Instead, those "legions" that remained were no longer drawn exclusively (and perhaps hardly at all) from Roman citizens. Either Diocletian or Constantine reorganised the legions into smaller infantry units who, according to some sources, were more lightly armoured than their forebears. Their lighter armament may have been either because they "would not consent to wear the same weight of body armour as the legionaries of old" or, as in at least one documented instance, because they were prohibited from wearing heavy armour by their general in order to increase their mobility. 4th-century legions were at times only one sixth the size of early imperial legions, and they were armed with some combination of spears, bows, slings, darts and swords, reflecting a greater contemporary emphasis on ranged fighting. The "auxilia" and "numeri" had also largely disappeared. Constantine further increased the proportion of German troops in the regular army; their cultural impact was so great that even legionaries began wearing German dress. At the start of Diocletian's reign, the Roman army numbered about 390,000 men, but by the end of his reign he successfully increased the number to 581,000 men.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7948631
| 707,513 |
1,313,735 |
While he was chair of economics at Chicago he led research into why post-World War II Germany and Japan recovered, at almost miraculous speeds, from the widespread devastation. Contrast this with the United Kingdom which was still rationing food long after the war. His conclusion was that the speed of recovery was due to a healthy and highly educated population; education makes people productive and good health care keeps the education investment around and able to produce. One of his main contributions was later called Human Capital Theory, which he formulated with the help of Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer. Schultz coined this theory in his book titled Investment in Human Capital; however, he experienced negative feedback from other economists. He states that knowledge and skill are a form of capital, and investments in human capital leads to an increase in both economic output and workers’ earnings. Many economists refused to support his theory of considering humans as a form of capital due to slavery, which at the time was an understandable critique given the civil rights movements at this time. Schultz argues that his theory does not dismiss humanity but instead encourages individuals to invest in themselves. He advocates for humans to invest in their health, internal migration, and on-the-job training; however, he focuses on encouraging individuals to better their education in order to increase their level of productivity. He states that if people were to do these things, they would have many more opportunities available for them to better their economic situations.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1331926
| 1,313,015 |
1,095,957 |
The development of nanotechnology and molecular biology has provided the improvement of nanomaterials with specific properties which are now able to overcome the weaknesses of traditional disease diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. In recent years, more attention has been devoted to designing and the development of new methods for realizing sustained release of diverse drugs. Since each drug has a plasma level above which is toxic and below which is ineffective and in conventional drug delivery, the drug concentration in the blood rises quickly and then declines, the main aim of an ideal drug delivery system (DDS) is to maintain the drug within a desired therapeutic range after a single dose, and/or target the drug to a specific region while simultaneously lowering the systemic levels of the drug. Graphene–based materials such as graphene oxide (GO) have considerable potential for several biological applications including the development of new drug release system. GOs are an abundance of functional groups such as hydroxyl, epoxy, and carboxyl on its basal surface and edges that can be also used to immobilize or load various biomolecules for biomedical applications. On the other side, biopolymers have frequently been used as raw materials for designing drug delivery formulations owing to their excellent properties, such as non-toxicity, biocompatibility, biodegradability and environmental sensitivity, etc. Protein therapeutics possess advantages over small molecule approaches including high target specificity and low off target effects with normal biological processes. Human serum albumin (HSA) is one of the most abundant blood proteins. It serves as a transport protein for several endogenous and exogenous ligands as well as various drug molecules. HSA nanoparticles have long been the center of attention in the pharmaceutical industry due to their ability to bind to various drug molecules, high storage stability and in vivo application, non–toxicity and antigenicity, biodegradability, reproducibility, scale–up of the production process and a better control over release properties. In addition, significant amounts of drugs can be incorporated into the particle matrix because of the large number of drug binding sites on the albumin molecule. Therefore, the combination of HSA-NPs and GO-NSs could be useful for reducing the cytotoxicity of GO-NSs and the enhancement of drug loading and sustained drug release in cancer therapy.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42482555
| 1,095,397 |
1,885,884 |
The existing specimens of "Orthosuchus" were found in the Lower Jurassic Red Bed Formation in South Africa in 1963. It was hypothesized that "Orthosuchus" lived mainly on terrestrial land, but some key factors contribute to the fact that it spent time mostly in water. The first notable evidence is on the palate, which was covered by soft tissue, not bone. The choanae are on the back of the palate and a valve was used to help close the glottis. These features help "Orthosuchus" keep breathing when submerging in the aquatic system. The ears are protected by earflaps, which prevent water inflow to the otic recess when this animal is in water. Modern crocodiles also have earflaps to decrease water entry. The shape of the skull, especially the snout, is similar to an Indian gharial, "Gavialis gangeticus", who prey on small fish. It is possible that "Orthosuchus" has the same predation, by slowly moving toward schools of small fish and swallow from the side. The aquatic environment provides plenty of food for the animal, besides small fish, the animal could also feed on lake invertebrates. "Orthosuchus" has a small salt-secreting gland, which indicates that it is not a marine animal. And because the pubis articulates with the front region of the ischium, it is believed to be a basal animal that lived in swamps and lakes. The animal is probably quadrupedal because the fore limbs are approximately 91% the length of the hind limb, which also makes the walking on land easier. Unlike modern crocodiles, "Orthosuchus" does not creep on its belly; it probably walks at a high position with its femur vertical to the ground. According to Parrish, primitive crocodylomorphs did not have a crawling stance because it was more used to the terrestrial environment. However, "Orthosuchus" may not be a good swimmer, since it has amphicoelous vertebrae, whereas modern crocodiles have procoelous vertebrae, which increase the mobility of the tail.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5749495
| 1,884,802 |
745,818 |
In the 5th century BCE, Hippocrates described a disease like TSE in cattle and sheep, which he believed also occurred in man. Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus records cases of a disease with similar characteristics in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. In 1755, an outbreak of scrapie was discussed in the British House of Commons and may have been present in Britain for some time before that. Although there were unsupported claims in 1759 that the disease was contagious, in general it was thought to be due to inbreeding and countermeasures appeared to be successful. Early-20th-century experiments failed to show transmission of scrapie between animals, until extraordinary measures were taken such as the intra-ocular injection of infected nervous tissue. No direct link between scrapie and disease in man was suspected then or has been found since. TSE was first described in man by Alfons Maria Jakob in 1921. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek's discovery that Kuru was transmitted by cannibalism accompanied by the finding of scrapie-like lesions in the brains of Kuru victims strongly suggested an infectious basis to TSE. A paradigm shift to a non-nucleic infectious entity was required when the results were validated with an explanation of how a prion protein might transmit spongiform encephalopathy. Not until 1988 was the neuropathology of spongiform encephalopathy properly described in cows. The alarming amplification of BSE in the British cattle herd heightened fear of transmission to humans and reinforced the belief in the infectious nature of TSE. This was confirmed with the identification of a Kuru-like disease, called new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, in humans exposed to BSE. Although the infectious disease model of TSE has been questioned in favour of a prion transplantation model that explains why cannibalism favours transmission, the search for a viral agent was, as of 2007, being continued in some laboratories.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=235248
| 745,424 |
1,889,579 |
On the other hand, in January 2014 "The Chronicle of Higher Education" reported that the effort to make free or low cost materials available in 42 courses was making little progress. Based on a survey of community-college stores, with responses from 25 campuses, only nine said that any materials had been used in 17 of the 42 courses. Only 2,386 of the 98,130 students enrolled in these courses, in 75 of the eligible 2,722 sections, used the materials. In 16 of the 75 sections students paid nothing; in the other 59 sections the average cost was $25. These numbers reported the work of OnCampus Research, an arm of the National Association of College Stores, which in fall 2013 sent a survey to 34 campus stores in the Washington Community and Technical College system. The survey focused on the first 42, or phase one, courses. It showed, according to the director of OnCampus Research, "that the recommendation of specific free or lower-priced course materials for popular courses did not equate to significant use of these materials by faculty." However, Marty Brown, executive director of the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, took exception in a "Chronicle of Higher Education" piece he explained: "The study analyzes the use of OCL materials based on adoption information from campus bookstores. This methodology provides an incomplete picture, as bookstores are not always aware when faculty members assign free, digital resources. Therefore, the study's findings do not justify its conclusion that OCL has resulted in "insignificant" savings to students. The Student PIRGs estimates the OCL has saved students more than $5.5-million, more than triple the original investment. We believe this is very significant." SPARC referred to the same presumed misunderstanding.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42174228
| 1,888,496 |
681,333 |
With over 20,000 extant pieces, Attic black-figure vases comprise the largest and at the same time most significant vase collection, second only to Attic red-figure vases. Attic potters benefitted from the excellent, iron-rich clay found in Attica. High quality Attic black-figure vases have a uniform, glossy, pitch-black coating and the color-intensive terra cotta clay foundation has been meticulously smoothened. Women's skin is always indicated with a white opaque color, which is also frequently used for details such as individual horses, clothing or ornaments. The most outstanding Attic artists elevated vase painting to a graphic art, but a large number of average quality and mass-market products were also produced. The outstanding significance of Attic pottery comes from their almost endless repertoire of scenes covering a wide range of themes. These provide rich testimonials especially in regard to mythology, but also to daily life. On the other hand, there are virtually no images referring to contemporary events. Such references are only occasionally evident in the form of annotations, for example when kalos inscriptions are painted on a vase. Vases were produced for the domestic market on the one hand, and were important for celebrations or in connection with ritual acts. On the other hand, they were also an important export product sold throughout the Mediterranean area. For this reason most of the surviving vases come from Etruscan necropolises.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1076046
| 680,978 |
1,234,295 |
She then returned to full-time practice and acquired her first Macintosh computer. She would later take the Grand Prize in "MacWorld"'s First Macintosh Masters in Art Competition. April also contributed to the design of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, by creating a memorable poster of running legs silhouetted against a square of bright blue sky in collaboration with Jayme Odgers. An early adopter of this computer as noted in Apple's Mac @ 30 video, Greiman produced an issue of "Design Quarterly" in 1986, notable in its development of graphic design. Entitled "Does it make sense?", the edition was edited by Mildred Friedman and published by the MIT Press / Walker Art Center. "She re-imagined the magazine as a fold-out artwork to almost three-by-six feet. The poster must be carefully unfolded three times across, nine times down. It contained a life-size, MacVision-generated image of her outstretched naked body adorned with symbolic images and text— a provocative gesture, which emphatically countered the objective, rational and masculine tendencies of modernist design." Greiman has said about the poster's unusual format and title “Hopefully, someone will make some sense out of this… The sense it has for me is that it’s new and yet old,… it’s a magazine, which is a poster, which is an object, which is… crazy.” The poster was also launched as a complement to the Walker Art Center's new Everyday Art Gallery.In 1995, the US Postal Service launched a stamp designed by Greiman to commemorate the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Women's Voting Rights).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4550992
| 1,233,632 |
257,700 |
In early 1923, and in poor health, Baird moved to 21 Linton Crescent, Hastings, on the south coast of England. He later rented a workshop in the Queen's Arcade in the town. Baird built what was to become the world's first working television set using items that included an old hatbox and a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, and sealing wax and glue that he purchased. In February 1924, he demonstrated to the "Radio Times" that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images. In July of the same year, he received a 1000-volt electric shock but survived with only a burnt hand but, as a result, his landlord, Mr Tree, asked him to vacate the premises. Soon after arriving in London, looking for publicity, Baird visited the "Daily Express" newspaper to promote his invention. The news editor was terrified and he was quoted by one of his staff as saying: "For God's sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him—he may have a razor on him."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39570
| 257,566 |
556,473 |
On 23 March 1944, flight trials restarted. U.S. Army Air Forces pilots finally got to fly the aircraft on 11 May 1944, and judged the cockpit layout fair and ground handling satisfactory, but deemed the aircraft underpowered due to its poor initial rate of climb, slow acceleration, and long takeoff roll, particularly when operating with only one engine. Other flight characteristics were generally good during gentle maneuvers; stick forces were light, roll rate was adequate, and control was effective at all speeds with good longitudinal stability. However, a tendency to "dutch roll" was prevalent. The prototype also displayed several disturbing behaviors as its stall speed was approached. It began to buffet well above the actual stall speed, it felt tail-heavy in fast turns, and its nose would tuck upwards during the stall. The problems were serious enough that test pilots declined to test the XP-67's spin characteristics, fearing that a spin might be unrecoverable. This irregular and unstable stall behavior has been attributed to advanced aerodynamic principles that were not fully counteracted until the advent of electronic stability controls years later. Although the final flight test report was generally positive, the aircraft's maneuverability was deemed inferior to existing types such as the North American P-51 Mustang.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2186955
| 556,184 |
1,746,685 |
Born in San Rafael, California to John Franklin Boyd (part-owner of the Bodie, California gold mine) and Louise Cook Arner, Louise grew up in Marin County and the hills of Oakland playing and competing with her two older brothers, Seth and John. The Boyds were leading citizens of the era and their children's early years, though privileged and relatively carefree, included a well-rounded education that was punctuated every summer by an extended stay on their ranch in the Oakland Hills. It was here where Louise and her brothers rode horses, explored Mount Diablo, fished, hunted, camped, and generally led a rugged and adventurous life. When Louise was a teenager, both of her brothers died from heart disease within a few months of each other, brought on by childhood bouts of rheumatic fever. Her parents were devastated and began to lean heavily on Louise for care and comfort. It was at this time that the Boyds bequeathed to the City of San Rafael their former gatehouse and some of the family property as a memorial to their two sons which is known today as Boyd park. The Victorian-style building is presently the home of the Marin History Museum. After her brother's deaths, Louise traveled extensively with her parents making numerous trips to Europe. It was at this time that she developed a keen interest in photography. In the spring of 1919, Louise took a train to Buffalo, N.Y., purchased a touring car, and accompanied by her chauffeur, drove across the United States at a time when there was no highway system and roads were often gravel and dirt. This would be the first of many cross-country trips that Louise would take and detail in her many journals. Upon her parents death in 1919 and 1920, Louise inherited the family fortune after caring for her parents in the last few years of their lives.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3405983
| 1,745,699 |
1,202,498 |
X-rays carry no charge, but at the energies involved, Auger decay of ionized species in a specimen is more probable than radiative decay. High-energy radiation exceeding the ionization potential also generates free electrons which are negligible compared to those produced by electron beams which are charged. Charging of the sample following ionization is an extremely weak possibility when it cannot be guaranteed the ionized electrons leaving the surface or remaining in the sample are adequately balanced from other sources in time. The energy transfer to electrons as a result of ionizing radiation results in separated positive and negative charges which quickly recombine due partly to the long range of the Coulomb force. Insulating films like gate oxides and resists have been observed to charge to a positive or negative potential under electron-beam irradiation. Insulating films are eventually neutralized locally by space charge (electrons entering and exiting the surface) at the resist-vacuum interface and Fowler-Nordheim injection from the substrate. The range of the electrons in the film can be affected by the local electric field. The situation is complicated by the presence of holes (positively charged electron vacancies) which are generated along with the secondary electrons, and which may be expected to follow them around. As neutralization proceeds, any initial charge concentration effectively starts to spread out. The final chemical state of the film is reached after neutralization is completed, after all the electrons have eventually slowed down. Usually, excepting X-ray steppers, charging can be further controlled by flood gun or resist thickness or charge dissipation layer.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26418605
| 1,201,855 |
1,633,001 |
The first medical schools were established in Lower Canada in the 1820s. These included the Montreal Medical Institution, which is the faculty of medicine at McGill University today; in the mid-1870s, Sir William Osler changed the face of medical school instruction throughout the West with the introduction of the hands-on approach and U.F.T.. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Upper Canada was established in 1839 and in 1869 was permanently incorporated. In 1834, William Kelly, a surgeon with the Royal Navy, introduced the idea of preventing the spread of disease via sanitation measures following epidemics of cholera. In 1871, female physicians Emily Howard Stowe and Jennie Kidd Trout won the right for women to be admitted to medical schools and granted licences from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. In 1883, Emily Stowe led the creation of the Ontario Medical College for Women, affiliated with the University of Toronto. In 1892, Dr. William Osler wrote the landmark text "The Principles and Practice of Medicine", which dominated medical instruction in the West for the next 40 years. Around this time, a movement began that called for the improved health care for the poor, focusing mainly on sanitation and hygiene. This period saw important advances including the provision of safe drinking water to most of the population, public baths and beaches, and municipal garbage services to remove waste from the city. During this period, medical care was severely lacking for the poor and minorities such as First Nations
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10620033
| 1,632,079 |
1,559,162 |
The very high precision of (strange) particle spectra and large transverse momentum coverage reported by the ALICE Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) allows in-depth exploration of lingering challenges, which always accompany new physics, and here in particular the questions surrounding strangeness signature. Among the most discussed challenges has been the question if the abundance of particles produced is enhanced or if the comparison base line is suppressed. Suppression is expected when a otherwise absent quantum number, such as strangeness, is rarely produced. This situation was recognized by Hagedorn in his early analysis of particle production and solved by Rafelski and Danos. In that work it was shown that even if just a few new pairs of strange particles were produced the effect disappears. However, the matter was revived by Hamieh et al. who argued that is possible that small sub-volumes in QGP are of relevance. This argument can be resolved by exploring specific sensitive experimental signatures for example the ratio of double strange particles of different type, such yield of formula_13 (formula_5) compared to formula_3(formula_16). The ALICE experiment obtained this ratio for several collision systems in a wide range of hadronization volumes as described by the total produced particle multiplicy. The results show that this ratio assumes the expected value for a large range volumes (two orders of magnitude). At small particle volume or multiplicity, the curve shows the expected reduction: The formula_13 (formula_5) must be smaller compared to formula_3(formula_16) as the number of produced strange pairs decreases and thus it easier to make formula_3(formula_16) compared to formula_13 (formula_5) that requires two pairs minimum to be made. However, we also see an increase at very high volume—this is an effect at the level of one to two standard deviations. Similar results were already recognized before by Petran et al.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23984205
| 1,558,276 |
231,366 |
South Asia has the highest percentage and number of underweight children under five in the world, at approximately 78 million children. Patterns of stunting and wasting are similar, where 44% have not reached optimal height and 15% are wasted, rates much higher than any other regions. This region of the world has extremely high rates of underweight children. According to a 2006 UNICEF study, 46% of its child population under five is underweight. The same study indicates India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan combined account for half the globe's underweight child population. South Asian nations have made progress towards the MDGs, considering the rate has decreased from 53% since 1990, however, a 1.7% decrease of underweight prevalence per year will not be sufficient to meet the 2015 goal. Some nations, such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, on the other hand, have made significant improvements, all decreasing their prevalence by half in ten years. While India and Pakistan have made modest improvements, Nepal has made no significant improvement in underweight child prevalence. Other forms of undernutrition have continued to persist with high resistance to improvement, such as the prevalence of stunting and wasting, which has not changed significantly in the past 10 years. Causes of this poor nutrition include energy-insufficient diets, poor sanitation conditions, and the gender disparities in educational and social status. Girls and women face discrimination especially in nutrition status, where South Asia is the only region in the world where girls are more likely to be underweight than boys. In South Asia, 60% of children in the lowest quintile are underweight, compared to only 26% in the highest quintile, and the rate of reduction of underweight is slower amongst the poorest.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=93827
| 231,247 |
1,055,360 |
with the maximum taken over all formula_24 whose product is formula_25. If formula_2 and formula_27, measuring the same content in different context, are always identically distributed, the system is called "consistently connected" (satisfying "no-disturbance" or "no-signaling" principle). Except for certain logical issues, in this case CbD specializes to traditional treatments of contextuality in quantum physics. In particular, for consistently connected cyclic systems the noncontextuality criterion above reduces to formula_28which includes the Bell/CHSH inequality (formula_29), KCBS inequality (formula_30), and other famous inequalities. That nonlocality is a special case of contextuality follows in CbD from the fact that being jointly distributed for random variables is equivalent to being measurable functions of one and the same random variable (this generalizes Arthur Fine's analysis of Bell's theorem). CbD essentially coincides with the probabilistic part of Abramsky's sheaf-theoretic approach if the system is "strongly consistently connected", which means that the joint distributions of formula_31 and formula_32 coincide whenever formula_33 are measured in contexts formula_15. However, unlike most approaches to contextuality, CbD allows for "inconsistent connectedness," with formula_2 and formula_27 differently distributed. This makes CbD applicable to physics experiments in which no-disturbance condition is violated, as well as to human behavior where this condition is violated as a rule. In particular, Vctor Cervantes, Ehtibar Dzhafarov, and colleagues have demonstrated that random variables describing certain paradigms of simple decision making form contextual systems, whereas many other decision-making systems are noncontextual once their inconsistent connectedness is properly taken into account.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38407148
| 1,054,812 |
1,062,678 |
In October 2022, Eileen Crist, William J. Ripple, Paul R. Ehrlich, William E. Rees, and Christopher Wolf all contributed to the "Scientists' warning on population", published by "Science of the Total Environment" as "part of the ongoing series of scientists' warning publications," to address the negative impacts of population size and growth on the climate and biodiversity, which they posit "continues to be ignored, sidestepped, or denied." It calls for two actions that, if heeded, will stop population growth before the end of this century. Firstly, the authors issue a global appeal to all adults to have no more than one child as part of the transformative changes needed to mitigate both climate change and biodiversity loss. Secondly, the warning urges policy-makers to "implement population policies with two key female empowerment components," primarily improving education for young women and girls and providing high-quality family-planning services to all. It emphasizes that "the combination of institutional support to plan one's child-bearing choices and educational attainment, including enhanced opportunity for higher education for women, yields immediate fertility declines." It also posits that a sustainable human population, which according to environmental analysts is "one enjoying a modest, equitable middle-class standard of living on a planet retaining its biodiversity and with climate-related adversities minimized," is between 2 and 4 billion people.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2016744
| 1,062,124 |
779,398 |
The most spectacular accretion disks found in nature are those of active galactic nuclei and of quasars, which are thought to be massive black holes at the center of galaxies. As matter enters the accretion disc, it follows a trajectory called a tendex line, which describes an inward spiral. This is because particles rub and bounce against each other in a turbulent flow, causing frictional heating which radiates energy away, reducing the particles' angular momentum, allowing the particle to drift inwards, driving the inward spiral. The loss of angular momentum manifests as a reduction in velocity; at a slower velocity, the particle must adopt a lower orbit. As the particle falls to this lower orbit, a portion of its gravitational potential energy is converted to increased velocity and the particle gains speed. Thus, the particle has lost energy even though it is now travelling faster than before; however, it has lost angular momentum. As a particle orbits closer and closer, its velocity increases, as velocity increases frictional heating increases as more and more of the particle's potential energy (relative to the black hole) is radiated away; the accretion disk of a black hole is hot enough to emit X-rays just outside the event horizon. The large luminosity of quasars is believed to be a result of gas being accreted by supermassive black holes. Elliptical accretion disks formed at tidal disruption of stars can be typical in galactic nuclei and quasars. The accretion process can convert about 10 percent to over 40 percent of the mass of an object into energy as compared to around 0.7 percent for nuclear fusion processes. In close binary systems the more massive primary component evolves faster and has already become a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole, when the less massive companion reaches the giant state and exceeds its Roche lobe. A gas flow then develops from the companion star to the primary. Angular momentum conservation prevents a straight flow from one star to the other and an accretion disk forms instead.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=48400112
| 778,981 |
411,066 |
Classical density functional theory is a classical statistical method to investigate the properties of many-body systems consisting of interacting molecules, macromolecules, nanoparticles or microparticles. The classical non-relativistic method is correct for classical fluids with particle velocities less than the speed of light and thermal de Broglie wavelength smaller than the distance between particles. The theory is based on the calculus of variations of a thermodynamic functional, which is a function of the spatially dependent density function of particles, thus the name. The same name is used for quantum DFT, which is the theory to calculate the electronic structure of electrons based on spatially dependent electron density with quantum and relativistic effects. Classical DFT is a popular and useful method to study fluid phase transitions, ordering in complex liquids, physical characteristics of interfaces and nanomaterials. Since the 1970s it has been applied to the fields of materials science, biophysics, chemical engineering and civil engineering. Computational costs are much lower than for molecular dynamics simulations, which provide similar data and a more detailed description but are limited to small systems and short time scales. Classical DFT is valuable to interpret and test numerical results and to define trends although details of the precise motion of the particles are lost due to averaging over all possible particle trajectories. As in electronic systems, there are fundamental and numerical difficulties in using DFT to quantitatively describe the effect of intermolecular interaction on structure, correlations and thermodynamic properties.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=209874
| 410,864 |
1,924,166 |
Melanoma differentiation associated gene-7 ("mda-7"), and also known as IL-24, was discovered in the mid-1900s using subtraction hybridization. "mda-7" is classified in the interleukin IL-10 family because of similar structure and amino acid sequence to other interleukins in that class, the chromosomal location (human chromosome 1q32-33), and the shared properties it has with cytokines. Protein structural studies reveal that it is a dimer and glycosylated. It has been found that its expression is either not present or present at very low levels in tumor cells, including advanced stage melanoma and metastatic disease, compared to normal non-transformed cells. Multiple studies within the past 15 years have demonstrated that increasing "mda-7" expression in tumor cells results in growth arrest and cell death in many different cell lines. When "mda-7" is over-expressed in normal cells, no change in growth or cell viability is detected. "mda-7" is also considered a radio-sensitizing cytokine because it generates a reactive oxygen species and causes stress in endoplasmic reticulum. "mda-7" has been used in several clinical trials because of its ability to induce apoptosis, prevent tumor angiogenesis, cause immune-regulation, and increase radiation lethality. It was seen in one Phase I clinical trial that injecting "mda-7" via an adenovirus directly into a tumor resulted in safe tumor regulation and immune activation.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=34556489
| 1,923,063 |
2,001,611 |
Sacral nerve stimulation was originally used in urinary incontinence. It was first used to treat FI in 1995. The procedure involves implantation of an electrical device (an implanted pulse generator, IPG) which applies a low amplitude electric current to a sacral nerve (usually S3). This appears to modulate the nerves and muscles of the pelvic floor and rectum. A Cochrane review of the efficacy of sacral nerve stimulation concluded that more research was needed, but can be helpful in selected people with FI, and reduce symptoms in selected people with constipation. It is possible to simulate the effect of SNS without surgery. This is trial usually lasts around 2–3 weeks, where a temporary percutaneous peripheral nerve electrode is placed in the lower back, and then connected to an external stimulator. This trial may not always accurately predict a successful outcome. If there is an improvement, a permanent electrode can be implanted on the sacrum and connected to an stimulator which is in turn implanted in the lower abdominal wall or in the buttock. Implanted stimulators usually last 8 years. The patients who may benefit from SNS include those with intact anal sphincters and those with a history of unsuccessful anal repair. Complications of the surgery are rare, including pain and infection, which may require implant removal in 5% of cases. The effects of SNS may include increased resting and squeeze anal tone, and improved rectal sensitivity. There is reported reduction of involuntary loss of bowel contents and increased ability to postpone defecation. A substantial percentage of patients regain full continence. Patient quality of life has also been shown to be improved after the procedure.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38075591
| 2,000,464 |
1,075,885 |
In 1960, Hess made his single most important contribution, which is regarded as part of the major advance in geologic science of the 20th century. In a widely circulated report to the Office of Naval Research, he advanced the theory, now generally accepted, that the Earth's crust moved laterally away from long, volcanically active oceanic ridges. He only understood his ocean floor profiles across the North Pacific Ocean after Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen (1953, Lamont Group) discovered the Great Global Rift, running along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. "Seafloor spreading", as the process was later named, helped establish Alfred Wegener's earlier (but generally dismissed at the time) concept of continental drift as scientifically respectable. This triggered a revolution in the earth sciences. Hess's report was formally published in his "History of Ocean Basins" (1962), which for a time was the single most referenced work in solid-earth geophysics. Hess was also involved in many other scientific endeavours, including the Mohole project (1957–1966), an investigation onto the feasibility and techniques of deep sea drilling.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=481077
| 1,075,330 |
870,492 |
Somewhat distinct from general graphics enhancements, various products were also introduced to support the broadcasting industry and other professional imaging applications. In late 1990, Millipede Electronic Graphics announced an imaging product called APEX (Archimedes P3 Expansion) featuring "four P3 (pixel pipeline processor) chips, together with an Arm3 processor running at 27 MHz". With support for "broadcast quality graphics at 32 bits per pixel", hardware support for windows and sprites, emphasising real-time image combination and manipulation, the product was aimed at professional users and priced accordingly, with the version providing 4 MB of RAM projected to cost £2750. Nevertheless, a licensing agreement had been reached with Acorn to "enable Risc OS graphics functions to be fully emulated". Following up from this earlier product, Millipede offered an "all new Apex Imager" video card in early 1994 featuring the four custom chips, ARM3, FPA, and 16 MB of video RAM on a double-width podule costing £3975, this being virtually unchanged from the pricing of the original product from 1990. This product appears to make extensive use of FPGA devices and offers numerous video input and output facilities. Apex hardware was used by the Eidos video capture and compression solution, Thumper, which ran on a Risc PC and was able to process "MPEG 1 resolution video at full PAL frame rate in real time", being regarded in early 1995 as "the best digitiser for our needs on any platform" by Eidos' managing director. Previous Eidos capture solutions used A540 machines with 8 MB of RAM.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63145
| 870,032 |
255,191 |
The mortality of the disease in 1909, as recorded in the British Army and Navy stationed in Malta, was 2%. The most frequent cause of death was endocarditis. Recent advances in antibiotics and surgery have been successful in preventing death due to endocarditis. Prevention of human brucellosis can be achieved by eradication of the disease in animals by vaccination and other veterinary control methods such as testing herds/flocks and slaughtering animals when infection is present. Currently, no effective vaccine is available for humans. Boiling milk before consumption, or before using it to produce other dairy products, is protective against transmission via ingestion. Changing traditional food habits of eating raw meat, liver, or bone marrow is necessary, but difficult to implement. Patients who have had brucellosis should probably be excluded indefinitely from donating blood or organs. Exposure of diagnostic laboratory personnel to "Brucella" organisms remains a problem in both endemic settings and when brucellosis is unknowingly imported by a patient. After appropriate risk assessment, staff with significant exposure should be offered postexposure prophylaxis and followed up serologically for 6 months.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=425881
| 255,057 |
1,875,984 |
In 1974 one of Jackson's colleagues, a Professor of Chemistry at Howard University, died suddenly. Jackson agreed to teach his course for the rest of the term and was subsequently appointed to a joint position in chemistry and physics. Here he began working on laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) to study the rovibronic coupling in cyano radicals. He was the first person to demonstrate LIF could be used to study molecular photodissociation. He primarily studied comets using satellites ground-based telescopes, using experimental data and theoretical predictions to establish how the free radicals inside comets form. Despite having left Goddard Space Flight Center, Jackson served as team leader for the International Ultraviolet Explorer telescope, which observed Halley's Comet. He joined University of California, Davis in 1985 and was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 1998. The Jackson laboratory ("Jackson’s Photon Crusaders") developed tunable lasers which could be used to detect and characterise free radicals. These included excimer lasers, nitrogen-pumped lasers and an Alexandrite laser. By building laser systems in the laboratory, Jackson helped to establish the excited states of molecules that are present in planetary atmospheres. The experiments consisted of one laser for the photodissociation of the parent molecule, and another laser to excite the free radical into an excited state. When the excited molecule fluoresced back to the ground state, the fluorescence was captured in a photomultiplier tube. He has investigated the photochemistry of carbon monoxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. His laser systems exploit resonant four-wave mixing, which allows them to photodissociate gases observed in planetary atmospheres. He also showed that it is possible to ionise the resulting atomic fragments using a velocity imaging time-of-flight mass spectrometer.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61702490
| 1,874,907 |
1,423,653 |
One of the first technical records concerning carbon nanofibers is probably a patent dated 1889 on synthesis of filamentous carbon by Hughes and Chambers. They utilized a methane/hydrogen gaseous mixture and grew carbon filaments through gas pyrolysis and subsequent carbon deposition and filament growth. The true appreciation of these fibers, however, came much later when their structure could be analyzed by electron microscopy. The first electron microscopy observations of carbon nanofibers were performed in the early 1950s by the Soviet scientists Radushkevich and Lukyanovich, who published a paper in the Soviet Journal of Physical Chemistry showing hollow graphitic carbon fibers that are 50 nanometers in diameter. Early in the 1970s, Japanese researchers Morinobu Endo, now the director of the Institute of Carbon Science and Technology at Shinshu University, reported the discovery of carbon nanofibers, including that some were shaped as hollow tubes. He also succeeded in the manufacturing of VGCF with a diameter of 1 µm and length of above 1 mm. Later, in the early 1980s, Tibbetts in the USA and Benissad in France continued to perfect the VGCF fabrication process. In the USA, the deeper studies focusing on synthesis and properties of these materials for advanced applications were led by R. Terry K. Baker. They were motivated by the need to inhibit the growth of carbon nanofibers because of the persistent problems caused by accumulation of the material in a variety of commercial processes, especially in the particular field of petroleum processing. In 1991, Japanese researchers Sumio Iijima, while working at NEC, synthesized hollow carbon molecules and determined their crystal structure. The following year, these molecules were called "carbon nanotubes" for the first time. VGCNF is produced through essentially the same manufacturing process as VGCF, only the diameter is typically less than 200 nm. Several companies around the globe are actively involved in the commercial scale production of carbon nanofibers and new engineering applications are being developed for these materials intensively, the latest being a carbon nanofiber bearing porous composite for oil spill remediation.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3313763
| 1,422,852 |
254,121 |
On August 23, 1938, Bush was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor of NASA. Its chairman Joseph Sweetman Ames became ill, and Bush, as vice chairman, soon had to act in his place. In December 1938, NACA asked for $11 million to establish a new aeronautical research laboratory in Sunnyvale, California, to supplement the existing Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. The California location was chosen for its proximity to some of the largest aviation corporations. This decision was supported by the chief of the United States Army Air Corps, Major General Henry H. Arnold, and by the head of the navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral Arthur B. Cook, who between them were planning to spend $225 million on new aircraft in the year ahead. However, Congress was not convinced of its value, and Bush had to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 5, 1939. It was a frustrating experience for Bush, since he had never appeared before Congress before, and the senators were not swayed by his arguments. Further lobbying was required before funding for the new center, now known as the Ames Research Center, was finally approved. By this time, war had broken out in Europe, and the inferiority of American aircraft engines was apparent, in particular the Allison V-1710 which performed poorly at high altitudes and had to be removed from the P-51 Mustang in favor of the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. The NACA asked for funding to build a third center in Ohio, which became the Glenn Research Center. Following Ames's retirement in October 1939, Bush became chairman of the NACA, with George J. Mead as his deputy. Bush remained a member of the NACA until November 1948.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=32767
| 253,988 |
1,782,474 |
The tradition of higher education in Košice goes back to the year 1657, when the bishop Benedict Kishdy founded an Academy by the Memorandum of “Studium Universale” and presented it with 40 000 tallers (by way of a dot). The Academy or the University started up managed by the Jesus’ Community Jesuits. The University of Košice Golden Bull issued on 6 August 1660 by the Roman emperor Leopold I. granted the University the same privileges as to all the other universities of the Habsburg Monarchy in Vienna, Prague, Köln, Graz, Trnava, Olomouc e.g. The Bull included a provision of high significance stating the academic degrees to be recognized as they were granted at any of the oldest and most famous universities. The structure of the “Academia Cassoviensis” was similar to that of other universities managed by Jesuits, determined by the Study Rules -“Ratio Studiorum”. Rector, Vice-rector and Chancellor stood at the head of the University, Faculties were represented by Deans. Alongside the Philosophical and the Law Faculties, the Theological Faculty was the strongest. Study at the Philosophical Faculty was dedicated first of all to Philosophy, History and Languages, but the lectures included also natural sciences, e.g. Physics, Mathematics, Geography and Botany. The Košice University was well known for its excellent professors Martin Palkovič, Samuel Timon, Štefan Kaprinai, Karol Wágner, Juraj Sklenár, Michal Lipšic, distinguished for dissemination of the new Physics in the Monarchy, and others. Regular and extraordinary professors were giving lectures to the students of all the Hungary nationalities. The lectures were given in Latin. The University had its own library, church, printing station and it was also connected to other institutions, a high school, seminary and convict or to vassal villages and other estate administration, for instance.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5290832
| 1,781,470 |
1,050,842 |
Broadly, aptamers are small molecules composed of either single-stranded DNA or RNA and are typically 20-100 nucleotides in length, or ~3-60 kDa. Because of their single-stranded nature, aptamers are capable of forming many secondary structures, including pseudoknots, stem loops, and bulges, through intra-strand base pairing interactions. The combinations of secondary structures present in an aptamer confer it a particular tertiary structure which in turn dictates the specific target the aptamer will selectively bind to. Because of the selective binding ability of aptamers, they are considering a promising biomolecule for use in pharmaceuticals. Additionally, aptamers exhibit tight binding to targets, with dissociation constants often in the pM to nM range. Besides their strong binding ability, aptamers are also valued because they can be used on targets that are not capable of being bound by small peptides generated by phage display or by antibodies, and they are able to differentiate between conformational isomers and amino acid substitutions. Also, because aptamers are nucleic-acid based, they can be directly synthesized, eliminating the need for cell-based expression and extraction as is the case in antibody production. RNA aptamers in particular are capable of producing a myriad of different structures, leading to speculations that they are more discriminating in their target affinity compared to DNA aptamers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65187964
| 1,050,296 |
1,505 |
When Turing was 39 years old in 1951, he turned to mathematical biology, finally publishing his masterpiece "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" in January 1952. He was interested in morphogenesis, the development of patterns and shapes in biological organisms. He suggested that a system of chemicals reacting with each other and diffusing across space, termed a reaction–diffusion system, could account for "the main phenomena of morphogenesis". He used systems of partial differential equations to model catalytic chemical reactions. For example, if a catalyst A is required for a certain chemical reaction to take place, and if the reaction produced more of the catalyst A, then we say that the reaction is autocatalytic, and there is positive feedback that can be modelled by nonlinear differential equations. Turing discovered that patterns could be created if the chemical reaction not only produced catalyst A, but also produced an inhibitor B that slowed down the production of A. If A and B then diffused through the container at different rates, then you could have some regions where A dominated and some where B did. To calculate the extent of this, Turing would have needed a powerful computer, but these were not so freely available in 1951, so he had to use linear approximations to solve the equations by hand. These calculations gave the right qualitative results, and produced, for example, a uniform mixture that oddly enough had regularly spaced fixed red spots. The Russian biochemist Boris Belousov had performed experiments with similar results, but could not get his papers published because of the contemporary prejudice that any such thing violated the second law of thermodynamics. Belousov was not aware of Turing's paper in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1208
| 1,505 |
643,051 |
In the twentieth century an alternative method, lexicostatistics, was developed, which is mainly associated with Morris Swadesh but is based on earlier work. This uses a short word list of basic vocabulary in the various languages for comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (earlier 200) items that are assumed to be cognate (on the basis of phonetic similarity) in the languages being compared, though other lists have also been used. Distance measures are derived by examination of language pairs but such methods reduce the information. An outgrowth of lexicostatistics is glottochronology, initially developed in the 1950s, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of culturally independent words. In its simplest form a constant rate of change is assumed, though later versions allow variance but still fail to achieve reliability. Glottochronology has met with mounting scepticism, and is seldom applied today. Dating estimates can now be generated by computerised methods that have fewer restrictions, calculating rates from the data. However, no mathematical means of producing proto-language split-times on the basis of lexical retention has been proven reliable.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=931814
| 642,712 |
2,083,000 |
Li was born in Shaoyang, Hunan, Republic of China, on May 29, 1943. His father, Li Binqing (), was an educator who served as president of Shaodong County No.2 High School after the establishment of the Communist State. After high school in 1960, he was accepted to Hunan Agricultural Mechanization College. Because the school was closed, he was assigned to work as a mechanic in Lengshuijiang Iron and Steel Factory. In September 1962 he entered Peking University, majoring in the Department of Physics, where he graduated in 1968. In December 1968 he was assigned to a farm in southwest China's Guizhou province. A year and a half later, he was assigned to a crystal factory in the suburb of the capital city Guiyang. In February 1973, he was transferred to a computer factory in his home-city Shaoyang. After the resumption of National College Entrance Examination, he earned his Master of Engineering degree from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in August 1981. He earned his doctor's degree at Purdue University under the direction of Benjamin Wah. He was a researcher at the University of Illinois between August 1985 and December 1986. He returned to China in January 1987 and became a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In February 1990 he was appointed director of the State Intelligent Computer Research and Development Center by the State Scientific and Technological Commission. In 1995 he founded the Shuguang Information Industry Co., Ltd. He assumed the position of director of the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in December 1999, and remained dean until January 2011. In January 2012 he was chosen as dean of the School of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was president of China Computer Federation (CCF).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62953589
| 2,081,800 |
256,853 |
Foraging, flying, or crawling insects such as flies are attracted to a cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments, and nectar. The rim of the pitcher (peristome) is slippery when moistened by condensation or nectar, causing insects to fall into the trap. The walls of the pitfall may be covered with waxy scales, protruding aldehyde crystals, cuticular folds, downward-pointing hairs, or guard-cell-originating lunate cells, to help prevent escape. The small bodies of liquid contained within the pitcher traps are called phytotelmata. They drown the insect, whose body is gradually dissolved. This may occur by bacterial action (the bacteria being washed into the pitcher by rainfall), or by digestive enzymes secreted by the plant itself. Pitcher trap fluids largely vary in their viscoelasticity and acidity which then dictates which type of prey they can target. For example, increased viscoelasticity is associated with increased insect retention to help capture flying insects such as flies, whereas increased fluid acidity can decrease insect killing-time which can help capture crawling insects such as ants. Some pitcher plants contain mutualistic insect larvae, which feed on trapped prey, and whose excreta the plant absorbs. Whatever the mechanism of digestion, the prey items are converted into a solution of amino acids, peptides, phosphates, ammonium and urea, from which the plant obtains its mineral nutrition (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Like all carnivorous plants, they all grow in locations where the soil is too poor in minerals and/or too acidic for most plants to survive. Pitcher plants supplement available nutrients and minerals (which plants normally obtain through their roots) with the constituents of their insect prey.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=113673
| 256,719 |
1,685,113 |
Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1769 and worked as a Prussian mining official in the 1790s until 1797 when he quit and began collecting scientific knowledge and equipment. His extensive wealth aided his infatuation with the spirit of Romanticism; he amassed an extensive collection of scientific instruments and tools as well as a sizeable library. In 1799 Humboldt, under the protection of King Charles IV of Spain, left for South America and New Spain, toting all of his tools and books. The purpose of the voyage was steeped in Romanticism; Humboldt intended to investigate how the forces of nature interact with one another and find out about the unity of nature. Humboldt returned to Europe in 1804 and was acclaimed as a public hero. The details and findings of Humboldt's journey were published in his "Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equatorial Regions of the New Continent" (30 volumes). This "Personal Narrative" was taken by Charles Darwin on his famous voyage on H.M.S Beagle. Humboldt spent the rest of his life mainly in Europe, although he did embark on a short expedition to Siberia and the Russian steppes in 1829. Humboldt's last works were contained in his book, "" ("Cosmos. Sketch for a Physical Description of the Universe"). The book mainly described the development of a life-force from the cosmos, but also included the formation of stars from nebular clouds as well as the geography of planets. Alexander von Humboldt died in 1859, while working on the fifth volume of "Kosmos".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8243937
| 1,684,168 |
117,145 |
In the 1920s, new university chancellor John Gabbert Bowman declared that he had a vision for a centerpiece "tall building" for the university. The Frick Acres property in Oakland was soon purchased and plans for the campus shifted focus from the hillside to a neo-Gothic Revival plan that today comprises the Cathedral of Learning, Heinz Memorial Chapel, Stephen Foster Memorial, and Clapp Hall buildings. By 1925, Bowman had settled on a design by Charles Klauder for the "tall building": an attention-getting tower whose great height, with open spaces all around, would suggest the "character that ought to be in an educated man." The building's "parallel lines going up and up...would express courage [and] fearlessness" and it would "unify Pittsburgh into a community conscious of its character." The cathedral is "cut off" flat at the top to suggest that its lines, like education, have no ending. The building was financed by donors and by a campaign to collect dimes from local school children. Bowman was a persuasive leader and although the Great Depression intervened, the Cathedral of Learning, on which construction was begun in 1926, began hosting classes in 1931 and was formally dedicated in 1937. Today, it remains the second tallest university building in the world and contains an equally impressive interior highlighted by a 22,000 sq ft (2,000 sq m) Gothic hall Commons Room with tall arches currently surrounded by 31 Nationality Rooms. Seven more Nationality Rooms are in the making.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=239870
| 117,100 |
1,754,089 |
Unit 2 was operating at the time of the earthquake and experienced the same controlled initial shutdown as the other units. As with unit 1, the reactor scrammed following the earthquake. The two diesel generators came online and initially all cooling systems were available. Initially the high pressure coolant injection (HPCI) system was primary cooling the core and at 15:00 operators activated the residual heat removal system main pump and the containment vessel spray pump at 15:07 to cool the suppression pool; all these systems failed following both AC power and DC power loss after the tsunami as the diesel generators and other systems failed when the tsunami overran the plant. The reactor core isolation cooling (RCIC) system was manually activated by operators at 15:39 following power loss, but by midnight the status of the reactor was unclear; some monitoring equipment was still operating on temporary power. The coolant level was stable and preparations were underway to reduce pressure in the reactor containment vessel should it become necessary, though TEPCO did not state in press releases what these preparations were, and the government had been advised that this might happen. The RCIC was reported by TEPCO to have shut down around 19:00 JST on 12 March, but reported to be operating again as of 09:00 JST 13 March. The pressure reduction of the reactor containment vessel commenced before midnight on 12 March although the IAEA reported that as of 13:15 JST 14 March, that according to information supplied to them, no venting had taken place at the plant. A report in "The New York Times" suggested that plant officials initially concentrated efforts on a damaged fuel storage pool at Unit 2, diverting attention from problems arising at the other reactors, but that incident was not reported in official press releases. The IAEA reported that on 14 March at 09:30, the RCIC was still operating and that power was being provided by a mobile generator.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37832404
| 1,753,099 |
1,393,469 |
DfAM is not always separate from broader DFM, as the making of many objects can involve both additive and subtractive steps. Nonetheless, the name "DfAM" has value because it focuses attention on the way that commercializing AM in production roles is not just a matter of figuring out how to switch existing parts from subtractive to additive. Rather, it is about redesigning entire objects (assemblies, subsystems) in view of the newfound availability of advanced AM. That is, it involves redesigning them because their entire earlier design—including even how, why, and at which places they were originally divided into discrete parts—was conceived within the constraints of a world where advanced AM did not yet exist. Thus instead of just modifying an existing part design to allow it to be made additively, full-fledged DfAM involves things like reimagining the overall object such that it has fewer parts or a new set of parts with substantially different boundaries and connections. The object thus may no longer be an assembly at all, or it may be an assembly with many fewer parts. Many examples of such deep-rooted practical impact of DfAM have been emerging in the 2010s, as AM greatly broadens its commercialization. For example, in 2017, GE Aviation revealed that it had used DfAM to create a helicopter engine with 16 parts instead of 900, with great potential impact on reducing the complexity of supply chains. It is this radical rethinking aspect that has led to themes such as that "DfAM requires 'enterprise-level disruption'." In other words, the disruptive innovation that AM can allow can logically extend throughout the enterprise and its supply chain, not just change the layout on a machine shop floor.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51500017
| 1,392,698 |
834,168 |
Sir Thomson believed, as did many adherents of the then-recent theory of evolution, that the deep sea would be home to "living fossils" long extinct in shallower waters, examples of "missing links". They believed that the conditions of constant cold temperature, darkness, and lack of currents, waves, or seismic events provided such a stable environment that evolution would slow or stop entirely. Louis Agassiz believed that in the deeps "we should expect to find representatives of earlier geological periods." Thomas Huxley stated that he expected to see "zoological antiquities which in the tranquil and little changed depths of the ocean have escaped the causes of destruction at work in the shallows and represent the predominant population of a past age." Nothing of the sort came to pass, however; though a few organisms previously regarded as extinct were found and cataloged among the many new discoveries, the harvest was typical of what might be found in exploring any equivalent extent of new territory. Furthermore, in the process of preserving specimens in alcohol, chemist John Young Buchanan and Sir Thomson realized that he had inadvertently debunked Huxley's prior report of "Bathybius haeckelii", an acellular protoplasm covering the sea bottoms, which was purported to be the link between non-living matter and living cells. The net effect was a setback for the proponents of evolution.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=88284
| 833,719 |
1,244,960 |
As mentioned above, traditional telephone companies are taking different measures to expand businesses in the convergent market. On the aspect of infrastructure, companies like AT&T started upgrading from traditional copper wires to fiber to enhance the quality and speed in voice and data transmission. With a relatively simple upgrade, they can offer digital subscriber lines (DSL), which allow high-speed access to the Internet. Carriers are also acquiring cable infrastructure to complement their own copper ones and seeking cooperation with cable companies. These movements will help expand their business by adding programming and interactive television in the future. Verizon are investing more than $15 billion to upgrade network. Those investments are giving positive results: Verizon's recent financial reports show it has added 263,000 new television customers and 262,000 net new Internet customers on its new fiber network. Simultaneously, it has grown consumer revenues by about 1 per cent in legacy telecommunications markets with its video and broadband services driving growth. AT&T also launched its own bundled service, which consists of voice, video, broadband and cable service. By using specialized hardware and a web interface, users are allowed to control and select the programs and link to the Internet on TV.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31591629
| 1,244,287 |
621,859 |
Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), or pNIPAM, is a commonly used thermo-responsive material. A hydrogel of pNIPAM becomes hydrophilic and swollen in an aqueous solution of 32 °C, its low critical solution temperature. Temperatures above that start to dehydrate the hydrogel and cause it shrink, thus achieving shape transformation. Hydrogels composed of pNIPAM and some other polymer, such as 4-hydroxybutyl acrylate (4HBA,) exhibit strong reversibility, where even after 10 cycles of shape change there is no shape deformation. Shannon E. Bakarich et al. created a new type of 4D-printing ink composed of ionic covalent entanglement hydrogels that have a similar structure to standard double-network hydrogels. The first polymer network is cross-linked with metal cations, while the second is cross-linked with covalent bonds. This hydrogel is then paired with a pNIPAM network for toughening and thermal actuation. In lab testing, this gel showed a shape recovery of 41%-49% when the temperature increased , and then was restored to 20 °C. A fluid controlling smart valve printed from this material was designed to close when touching hot water and open when touching cold water. The valve successfully stayed open in cold water and reduced the flow rate of hot water by 99%. This new type of 4D-printed hydrogel is more mechanically robust than other thermally actuating hydrogels and shows potential in applications such as self-assembling structures, medical technology, soft robotics, and sensor technology.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52904006
| 621,527 |
1,358,763 |
In case of stereoselectivity in action only one of the components in the racemic mixture is truly active (eutomer). The other isomer, the distomer, should be regarded as impurity or isomeric ballast not contributing to the effects aimed at. It is well documented that the pharmacologically inactive isomer (distomer) may contribute to the toxic or adverse effects of the drugs. There is a wide spectrum of possibilities of distomer actions, many of which are confirmed experimentally. Sometimes the single enantiomer version lacks certain side-effects that the racemate exhibits. And where the two enantiomers are sufficiently different in pharmacological effects, it may be possible to get a patent on one or both isomers (for instance, as in the case of propoxyphene). The chiral twins of propoxyphene are separately sold by Eli Lilly and company. Dextropropoxyphene is an analgesic agent (Darvon) and levopropoxyphene an effective antitussive (Novrad). Interestingly the reversed trade names of the drugs, DARVON and NOVRAD, also reflect the chemical mirror-image relationship. A positive consequence of this redesigning approach is that it has given a new life to an old drug, minimizing or avoiding the undesirable side-effect profile. Whether to go in for a chiral switch is normally made on a case-by-case basis. A pragmatic solution could be in favor of a decision-tree approach, incorporating various factors such as pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic, toxicological profile of the enantiomers, enantiomer-enantiomer interaction potential, safety, efficacy, risk-benefit ratio, chiral inversion, distomer liability, physicochemical properties, cost of separation and production, quality control criteria, marketing edge, etc.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67685890
| 1,358,013 |
1,123,216 |
Palaeontologists David W. E. Hone, Naish, and Innes C. Cuthill reiterated Martill and Naish's growth hypothesis in 2012; since pterosaurs were probably precocial and able to fly shortly after hatching, the role of the crest was relevant only after maturity (when the structure was fully grown). They deemed the thermoregulation hypothesis an unlikely explanation for the blood-vessel channels on the crest, which they found consistent with nourishment for growing tissue (such as the keratin in bird beaks). Hone, Naish, and Cuthill suggested that the wing membranes and air-sac system would have been more effective at controlling heat than a crest, and wind and water could also have helped cool pterosaurs in high-temperature maritime settings. In 2013, Witton agreed that the substantially larger crests of adult thalassodromids indicated that they were more important for behavioural activities than for physiology. He found the idea that the crests were used for thermoregulation problematic, since they did not grow regularly with body size; they grew at a fast pace in near-adults, quicker than what would be predicted for the growth of a thermoregulatory structure. According to Witton, the large, highly vascular wing membranes of pterosaurs would provide the surface area needed for thermoregulation, meaning the crests were not needed for that function. He concluded that the crest's blood-vessel patterns did not differ much from those seen on bones under the beaks of birds, which are used for transporting nutrients to the bone and soft tissues rather than for thermoregulation. Witton noted that although bird beaks lose heat quickly, that is not what they were developed for; the crests of pterosaurs might also have had an effect on thermoregulation, without this being their primary function.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=5382243
| 1,122,642 |
400,728 |
Construction of "Belfast", the first ship in the Royal Navy to be named after the capital city of Northern Ireland and one of ten Town-class cruisers, began in December 1936. She was launched on St Patrick's Day 1938. Commissioned in early August 1939 shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, "Belfast" was initially part of the British naval blockade against Germany. In November 1939, "Belfast" struck a German mine and, in spite of fears that she would be scrapped, spent more than two years undergoing extensive repairs. "Belfast" returned to action in November 1942 with improved firepower, radar equipment, and armour. "Belfast" saw action escorting Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union during 1943 and in December 1943 played an important role in the Battle of North Cape, assisting in the destruction of the German warship . In June 1944, "Belfast" took part in Operation Overlord supporting the Normandy landings. In June 1945, she was redeployed to the Far East to join the British Pacific Fleet, arriving shortly before the end of the Second World War. "Belfast" saw further combat action in during the Korean War and underwent an extensive modernisation between 1956 and 1959. A number of further overseas commissions followed before she entered reserve in 1963.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=209815
| 400,529 |
1,190,213 |
Cellular models are instrumental in dissecting a complex pathological process into simpler molecular events. Parkinson's disease (PD) is multifactorial and clinically heterogeneous; the aetiology of the sporadic (and most common) form is still unclear and only a few molecular mechanisms have been clarified so far in the neurodegenerative cascade. In such a multifaceted picture, it is particularly important to identify experimental models that simplify the study of the different networks of proteins and genes involved. Cellular models that reproduce some of the features of the neurons that degenerate in PD have contributed to many advances in our comprehension of the pathogenic flow of the disease. In particular, the pivotal biochemical pathways (i.e. apoptosis and oxidative stress, mitochondrial impairment and dysfunctional mitophagy, unfolded protein stress and improper removal of misfolded proteins) have been widely explored in cell lines, challenged with toxic insults or genetically modified. The central role of a-synuclein has generated many models aiming to elucidate its contribution to the dysregulation of various cellular processes. Classical cellular models appear to be the correct choice for preliminary studies on the molecular action of new drugs or potential toxins and for understanding the role of single genetic factors. Moreover, the availability of novel cellular systems, such as cybrids or induced pluripotent stem cells, offers the chance to exploit the advantages of an in vitro investigation, although mirroring more closely the cell population being affected.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1872854
| 1,189,579 |
433,755 |
The test above does not distinguish between more complex distributions, such as quantum and classical, or between fermionic and bosonic statistics. A physically motivated scenario to be addressed is the unwanted introduction of distinguishability between photons, which destroys quantum interference (this regime is readily accessible experimentally, for example by introducing temporal delay between photons). The opportunity then exists to tune between ideally indistinguishable (quantum) and perfectly distinguishable (classical) data and measure the change in a suitably constructed metric. This scenario can be addressed by a statistical test which performs a one-on-one likelihood comparison of the output probabilities. This test requires the calculation of a small number of permanents, but does not need the calculation of the full expected probability distribution. Experimental implementation of the test has been successfully reported in integrated laser-written circuits for both the standard boson sampling (3 photons in 7-, 9- and 13-mode interferometers) and the scattershot version (3 photons in 9- and 13-mode interferometers with different input states). Another possibility is based on the bunching property of indinguishable photons. One can analyze the probability to find a "k"-fold coincidence measurement outcomes (without any multiply populated input mode), which is significantly higher for distinguishable particles than for bosons due to the bunching tendency of the latters. Finally, leaving the space of random matrices one may focus on specific multimode setups with certain features. In particular, the analysis of the effect of bosonic clouding (the tendency for bosons to favor events with all particles in the same half of the output array of a continuous-time many-particle quantum walk) has been proven to discriminate the behavior of distinguishable and indistinguishable particles in this specific platform.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=49287688
| 433,541 |
1,992,723 |
Pillai, a former president of the Society of Biotechnologists, India (SBC), is known to have worked on human papillomavirus as well as cervical cancer and is the coordinator of two programs of the Department of Biotechnology, namely "National Cervical Cancer Control Program" and "Papillomavirus Vaccine Development Program". As the head of RGCB, he coordinated with Emory Vaccine Center of Emory University on a program of drug development for Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 and the initiative was successful in developing a peptide found in the skin mucus of Hydrophylax bahuvistara, a species of a frog common in the Western Ghats. The program continues its research on drug development for viral infections such as dengue and chikungunya. He has been one of the principal investigators of a program of the Department of Biotechnology for developing a "mouthwash for oral mucositis based on various plant extracts" for which patent is pending. He holds a patent for "Novel porphyritic derivatives for photo dynamic therapy (PDT): A process for the preparation and thereof and their use as PDT agents and fluorescence probes for biological applications", a process jointly developed along with his colleagues at RGCB. Diseases like Oral dysplasia, oral leukoplakia, breast cancer, Human papillomavirus infection, oral carcinomas and swine fever and drug discoveries against these diseases are some of his other research interests. His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and the online article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 60 of them. Besides, he has edited one book, "Mechanisms of Vascular Defects in Diabetes Mellitus" and has contributed chapters to books published by others. He has also mentored several research scholars in their studies.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55973815
| 1,991,580 |
1,569,019 |
In 2005, Dr. Dante G. Guevarra became the University President. His administration lasted 6 years, from 2005–2011. Highlights of his administration include: the construction and inauguration of the executive offices and conference rooms (Mateo, Olonan, and Carague) on the 2nd floor of the South Wing of the main building. This brought PUP's past presidents back home to the university where they served for years. PUPCET iApply, a Web-based PUP College Entrance Test (PUPCET) Application System was pre-released on December to accommodate PUPCET applicants until January 2006; PUP, in partnership with the San Juan City local government, opened the PUP San Juan Campus; The PUP Technical School became the College of Technology and offered short management technology courses in ICT, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Electronics Communications Engineering. The Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, declared Polytechnic University of the Philippines as the official permanent home of the Mabini Shrine. Through Proclamation 1992, President Arroyo stressed the need for a permanent home of the Mabini Shrine for the protection and preservation of its historical and architectural value. The President said that the PUP Mabini Campus is the fourth site of the Mabini Shrine. It was transferred in PUP through the National Historical Institute Board's Resolution No. 01, s. 2008, to protect it from the flood control project of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37876206
| 1,568,132 |
964,177 |
Since the 1950s, encouraged by progress in informatics, researchers began to create digital models of the processes by which sensory input is selected by the brain, stored in the memory, connected to existing knowledge and used for elaboration. These traditional computationalists views of cognition that were typical in the 1950s–1980s are now considered implausible because there is no continuity with the cognitive skills that would have been demanded and developed by the ancestors of the human species. Some researchers argue that this algorithmic focus on mental activities ignores the fact that human beings engage with evolutionary pressures using their entire bodies. Margaret Wilson considers the embodied cognition perspective as fundamentally an evolutionary one, viewing cognition as a set of abilities that built upon, and still reflects, the structure of physical bodies and how human brains evolved to manage those bodies. The theory of evolution emphasises that thanks to their bipedal gait, early humans did not need their 'forepaws' for locomotion, facilitating them to manipulate the environment with the aid of tools. One researcher goes even further, positing that the multiple opportunities provided by human hands shape people's concepts of the mind. One example is that people often conceive cognitive processes in manual terms, such as 'grasping an idea'.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33034640
| 963,668 |
1,621,104 |
In 1850, Chicago was only a 17-year-old city of 28,000 inhabitants that was increasingly becoming the center of trade for both steamships and railroads. The political and cultural environment of the mid-nineteenth century resulted in individual states granting charters to hundreds of small colleges rather than a few centralized national institutions as was typical in European countries. These colleges were highly sectarian and were motivated by the desire to both increase the quality of ministerial training as well as to discourage its young people from attending schools controlled by rival denominations. On May 31, 1850, John Evans, Grant Goodrich, Henry W. Clark, Andrew Brown, Orrington Lunt, Jabez Botsford, Richard Haney, Richard H. Blanchard, and Zodoc Hall met in a law office above a hardware store at 69 West Lake Street in Chicago and resolved that "the interests of sanctified learning require the immediate establishment of a university in the Northwest under the patronage of the Methodist Episcopal Church." While each of the founders had diverse educational, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds, they were all devout Methodists as well as successful and established businessmen, ministers, and lawyers within Chicago. Despite their evangelism, the founders were committed to the establishment of a non-sectarian institution reflecting both the worldly educational philosophy of the Methodist movement and the political realities of the Illinois state legislature adverse to chartering church-affiliated colleges.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10414221
| 1,620,189 |
745,229 |
The group of lobe-finned fishes that were the ancestors of the tetrapod are grouped together as the Rhipidistia, and the first tetrapods evolved from these fish over the relatively short timespan 385–360 Ma. The early tetrapod groups themselves are grouped as Labyrinthodontia. They retained aquatic, fry-like tadpoles, a system still seen in modern amphibians. From the 1950s to the early 1980s it was thought that tetrapods evolved from fish that had already acquired the ability to crawl on land, possibly so they could go from a pool that was drying out to one that was deeper. However, in 1987, nearly complete fossils of "Acanthostega" from about showed that this Late Devonian transitional animal had legs and both lungs and gills, but could never have survived on land: its limbs and its wrist and ankle joints were too weak to bear its weight; its ribs were too short to prevent its lungs from being squeezed flat by its weight; its fish-like tail fin would have been damaged by dragging on the ground. The current hypothesis is that "Acanthostega", which was about long, was a wholly aquatic predator that hunted in shallow water. Its skeleton differed from that of most fish, in ways that enabled it to raise its head to breathe air while its body remained submerged, including: its jaws show modifications that would have enabled it to gulp air; the bones at the back of its skull are locked together, providing strong attachment points for muscles that raised its head; the head is not joined to the shoulder girdle and it has a distinct neck.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37824359
| 744,835 |
18,753 |
In 1999, SOCOM requested Black Hills Ammunition to develop ammunition for the Mk 12 SPR that SOCOM was designing. For the rifle to be accurate out to 700 yards, Black Hills "militarized" a cartridge that used the Sierra 77 grain OTM (Open Tip Match) projectile; it switched from a .223 Remington to 5.56 mm case, increased pressure loading, crimped and sealed the primer, and added a flash retardant to the powder. The Mk 262 MOD 0 was adopted in 2002. Issues came up in development including reliability problems in different temperatures and when the weapon got dirty, and cycling issues in cold weather due to the slightly shorter barrel of the SPR compared to the full-length M16A2 barrel. The problems were addressed with a slower burning powder with a different pressure for use in the barrel, creating the Mk 262 MOD 1 in 2003. During the product improvement stage, the new propellant was found to be more sensitive to heat in weapon chambers during rapid firings, resulting in increased pressures and failure to extract. This was addressed with another powder blend with higher heat tolerance and improved brass. Also during the stage, Black Hills wanted the bullet to be given a cannelure, which had been previously rejected for fear it would affect accuracy. It was eventually added for effective crimping to ensure that the projectile would not move back into the case and cause a malfunction during auto-load feeding. Although the temperature sensitive powder and new bullet changed specifications, the designation remained as the MOD 1.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=35022
| 18,745 |
1,891,434 |
Another primary contribution was her 1993 complete revision and update of Brigitte Jordan's famous ': A Cultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States' (Fourth Edition)--the book that generated the fields of the anthropologies of midwifery and childbirth. The book was first published in 1978 and won the Margaret Mead Award in 1980. Jordan and Davis-Floyd had completed a comparative analysis on how culture interacts with the physiology of birth in four different territories, showing how birth is everywhere socially marked and shaped. Brigitte Jordan's concept of authoritative knowledge has been heavily promoted by Davis-Floyd both in her update of Birth in Four Cultures, in her co-edited 1997 collection Childbirth and Authoritative Knowleldge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, and in her 2019 co-edited collection Birth in Eight Cultures, designed with Jordan's encouragement to replace Birth in Four Cultures for undergraduate and graduate teaching. This concept has been distributed and utilized by scholars around the world. By Jordan's definition, authoritative knowledge is the knowledge that counts in a given situation, on the basis of which people make decisions and take actions. It often subsists in a hierarchy of knowledge systems in which one holds more weight than the other. A system comes to carry more weight when it has superior purpose to explain a state of the world or greater hegemonic force because it is held by people in power. Both anthropologists have acknowledged the use and spread of high technologies as a cultural factor of authoritative knowledge. The use of technologies has contributed to a new symbiosis between humans and machines, the study of which is termed "Cyborg Anthropology." Anthropologist Donna Haraway proposed this new discipline and utilized by Joseph Dumit of MIT and Robbie Davis-Floyd in 1998. Davis-Floyd's research concerns reproduction and the technologies associated with birthing standards, in which the natural process of birth is intervened in via technologies that interfere with the hormonal flow of physiologic birth; she has shown in many publications how these standard procedures serve as rituals that convey the core values of technocratic society to birthing women and practitioners alike. She has also analyzed medical training as a rite of technocratic initiation.""
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=52996023
| 1,890,351 |
1,345,065 |
The effects of irradiation on the SVZ provided for a recognition of the amount or dose of radiation that can be given is determined mostly by the tolerance of the normal cells near the tumor. As described, the increasing dose of radiation and age led to decrease in three cell types of the SVZ, yet repair capacity of the SVZ was observed despite the lack of white matter necrosis; this occurred likely because the SVZ was able to gradually replace the neuroglia of the brain. Chemotherapeutics were also tested for their effects on the SVZ, as they are currently used for many diseases yet lead to complications within the central nervous system. To do so, methotrexate (MTX) was used alone and in combination with radiation to find that roughly 70% of the total nuclear density of the SVZ had been depleted, yet given loss of neuroblast cells (progenitor cells), it was remarkable to find that SVZ NSCs would still generate neurospheres similar to subjects that did not receive such treatment. In relation to interruption of blood supply to the brain, cerebral hypoxia/ischemia (H/I) was found to also decrease the cell count of the SVZ by 20%, with 50% of neurons in the striatum and neocortex being destroyed, but the cell types of the SVZ killed were as non-uniform as the region itself. Upon subsequent testing, it was found that a different portion of each cell was eliminated, yet the medial SVZ cell population remained mostly alive. This may provide for a certain resiliency of such cells, with the uncommitted progenitor cells acting as the proliferating population following ischemia. Mechanical brain injury also induces cell migration and proliferation, as was observed in rodents, and it may also increase cell number, negating the previously held notion that no new neuronal cells can be generated.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6852419
| 1,344,327 |
366,190 |
Paracelsus extended his interest in chemistry and biology to what is now considered toxicology. He clearly expounded the concept of dose response in his "Third Defence", where he stated that "Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison." ("Sola dosis facit venenum" "Only the dose makes the poison") This was used to defend his use of inorganic substances in medicine as outsiders frequently criticized Paracelsus's chemical agents as too toxic to be used as therapeutic agents. His belief that diseases locate in a specific organ was extended to inclusion of target organ toxicity; that is, there is a specific site in the body where a chemical will exert its greatest effect. Paracelsus also encouraged using experimental animals to study both beneficial and toxic chemical effects. Paracelsus was one of the first scientists to introduce chemistry to medicine. He advocated the use of inorganic salts, minerals, and metals for medicinal purposes. He held the belief that organs in the body operated on the basis of separating pure substances from impure ones. Humans must eat to survive and they eat both pure and impure things. It is the function of organs to separate the impure from the pure. The pure substances will be absorbed by the body while the impure will exit the body as excrement. He did not support Hippocrate's theory of the four humours. Instead of four humours, Paracelsus believed there were three: salt, sulphur, and mercury which represent stability, combustibility, and liquidity respectively. Separation of any one of these humours from the other two would result in disease. To cure a disease of a certain intensity, a substance of similar nature but the opposite intensity should be administered. These ideas constitute Paracelsus's principles of similitude and contrariety, respectively.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=152487
| 365,998 |
601,854 |
Navy officials expressed concern that the original requirements of the UCLASS program had been degraded, as the original concept called for a stealthy, carrier-based, long-range unmanned combat aerial system (UCAS) with a large payload that could be refueled in-flight, but the altered version called for a UCAS that was modestly stealthy and emphasised intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions over lightly contested airspace, with a light secondary strike mission and no air refueling requirement, promoting affordability over survivability and endurance; the revised requirements were written to fill a gap in persistent, sea-based ISR. Stealth requirements were sharply reduced to lower costs, and original payload requirements calling for weapons bays to carry as many as 24 GBU-39 SDB 250 lb bombs, totaling a 6,000 lb of weapons, were reduced for a total payload of and only of weapons. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) modified requirements during an 18 December 2012 meeting and did not consider them to be "relaxed," but rather changed to consider "within the broader unmanned aircraft portfolio and included an assessment of the platform's performance, capability, survivability, and basing," shifting to increase some performance areas and decrease others to get a mix. JROC was reported to have changed the requirements in order to produce a replacement for the current drones used for Disposition Matrix missions that would not require host nation basing or permission, changing focus from a UAV capable of striking defended targets to keep costs down and maintain unmanned counterterrorism missions as a U.S. military option. Flying missions from sea-based carriers would have fewer restrictions than operating inside foreign countries, and irregular warfare missions will continue in the future to warrant further attention.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39092723
| 601,545 |
1,876,553 |
The pattern was repeated in the summer of 1984-85 with the largest single aerial firefighting operation in Australia up to that time. Lightning strikes started fires in north eastern Victoria which were in remote, inaccessible mountain country where firefighting was difficult, hazardous and slow. One hundred and eleven fires started on the afternoon on 14 January 1985 and burnt more than 150,000 ha with a perimeter in excess of 1,000 km before they were brought under control after about two weeks. About one-third of the perimeter had to be established and held in steep mountain country where there was no conventional vehicle access. At the peak of the campaign more than 3,000 people were directly deployed on fire fronts or in close support, including 2,000 from the Department of Conservation Forests and Lands (CFL), 500 CFA volunteers, 449 Armed Services personnel, 120 sawmill employees and 50 State Electricity Commission employees. Major equipment used included 75 bulldozers, 400 tankers, 20 helicopters and 16 fixed-wing aircraft. Navy Wessex and Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopters were used to lift crews and equipment while smaller Bell Kiowa reconnaissance helicopters were also effectively deployed. NSCA helicopter bellytanks more than proved their worth. Expenditure for the year was $10.5 million.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=57882206
| 1,875,475 |
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