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National evidence-based guidelines for stroke rehabilitation have been published for England, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; yet in none of these is the Bobath approach recommended. Conversely, in 2016 the American Stroke Association concluded that although the effectiveness of NDT/Bobath (compared with other treatment approaches) had not been established that it still “may be considered” as a treatment option for mobility. This, however, was their lowest classification of acceptable treatment. Their two highest recommendation groups (“should be performed” and “reasonable to perform”) contained a variety of treatments for which there was much better evidence. NDT/Bobath was not listed as an option for arm/hand rehabilitation. Also, in 2016, the revised RCP guidelines for stroke made no mention of Bobath/NDT, whilst many alternatives were recommended. Importantly they stated that if a treatment was not mentioned, then it was not recommended and need not be funded. They also stated that therapists using such methods must objectively review their options in light of the evidence supporting the recommended alternatives. Furthermore, patients receiving such interventions should be informed that it was outside mainstream practice. A highly significant 2021 “position paper” by the Academy of Neurologic Physical Therapy of the American Physical Therapy Association concluded that, despite its lack of an evidence base, NDT/Bobath methods were still favoured by some therapist in the USA. To overcome this problem, they described a range of strategies that will be implemented to encourage best evidence-based practices and de-implement traditional (NDT/Bobath) methods of working at both an individual and organizational level.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1326454
| 1,065,639 |
2,105,811 |
The Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound in Microgravity (ADUM) project is a U.S. government-funded study investigating strategies for applying diagnostic telemedicine to space. The Principal Investigator is Scott Dulchavsky, Chairman of Surgery at the Henry Ford Health System. This study was the first formal experiment to examine the use of ultrasound in microgravity encompassing musculoskeletal, heart, lung, abdominal, pelvic, dental, and orbital scans. Ultrasound is the only medical imaging device currently available on board the International Space Station. In addition, the lack of physician expertise on board the ISS makes diagnosis of medical conditions challenging. Ultrasound may have direct application for the evaluation and diagnosis of hundreds of medical conditions and is of interest for treating exploration crews. The telemedicine strategies investigated by this project has widespread application on Earth in emergency and rural care situations. Ultrasound images from space from a variety of body regions have been shown to be of diagnostic quality and non-expert operators were easily trained in ultrasound skills. This work has been expanded to include professional Football, Baseball, and Ice Hockey teams as well as the Winter and Summer Olympic Games in collaboration with investigators such as Marnix Van Holsbeeck. Dr. Dulchavsky has also led an innovative pilot study to expand comprehensive ultrasound education to basic science medical students at the Wayne State University School of Medicine. This trial has been shown to be a success with over 82 percent of students agreeing or strongly agreeing that their educational experience with the lightweight ultrasound technology education was positive. This technology is now being taught to medical students in their clinical clerkships.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24301015
| 2,104,598 |
895,884 |
In parallel with these developments people in the US had begun to consider the issues in environmental design. One of the first areas was the consideration of psychiatric hospitals. Psychiatrists worked with architects to take account of the experience of patients who were mentally ill. Robert Sommer wrote his book on 'Personal Space' and Edward T Hall commented as an anthropologist on how people related to each other spatially. Amos Rapoport caused considerable interest amongst architects with his book 'House Form and Culture', showing that the form of buildings was not solely functional but had all sorts of cultural influences. This contributed to the emergence in architecture of 'post-modernism' which took the symbolic qualities of architecture very seriously. These early developments in the 1960s and 1970s were often seen as part of 'architectural psychology'. It was when Harold Proshansky and William Ittelson set up the Environmental Psychology program at the City University of New York Graduate Center that the term Environmental Psychology replaces Architectural Psychology as the widely used term for the study of the ways in which people made sense of and interacted with their surroundings. This was institutionalised when Canter established The Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980 with Kenneth Craik a personality psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. President Nixon's campaign to deal with depredations of the environment gave impetus to a change of direction in the field from aspects of buildings and making sense of cities to the broader issues of climate change and the impact of people in the global environment.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1639997
| 895,413 |
565,873 |
On 25 April, concerns were initially raised in the United Kingdom regarding a cluster of children of various ages presenting with a multisystem inflammatory state who required intensive care, and who all displayed "overlapping features of toxic shock syndrome and atypical Kawasaki disease with blood parameters consistent with severe COVID-19 in children." Details of the eight cases which helped trigger this alert (not all with confirmed exposure to COVID-19) were later reported in "The Lancet", where the authors summarized the clinical picture as "a hyperinflammatory syndrome with multiorgan involvement similar to Kawasaki disease shock syndrome." Accounts of analogous cases – including some that appeared less clinically severe – were also being informally shared among clinicians around Europe. The EU's Early Warning and Response System flagged suspected cases in Austria, Germany and Portugal that had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. In Bergamo, at the heart of the COVID-19 epidemic in Lombardy, a cluster of 20 cases of Kawasaki disease appeared to be roughly equivalent to the number commonly recorded there over the course of three years. In France, the government reported on 29 April that around 15 children were in hospital in Paris with symptoms of Kawasaki disease, an observation which prompted the organization of national surveillance programme for recent cases of Kawasaki-like disease.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=63895130
| 565,583 |
1,344,366 |
The HSU is designed as a campus university, and its campus in the Wandsbek district consists of 3 parts. Studying activities take place on the premises of the former Douaumont barracks on the Holstenhofweg in Hamburg-Jenfeld. The university administration is located here, as well as all departments and faculties, lecture theatres and laboratories and central facilities; it also contains sports facilities, the canteen and the management of the Student Division. Students of Engineering are accommodated here in 10 quite modern-looking residential buildings. South of the BAB 24, on the premised of the former Hanseatic barracks in the Stoltenstraße in Horn, is the accommodation for students of humanities and social sciences, and economics, and the medical facility. A third residence, rapidly constructed, is located since 2007 on the Jenfelder Allee and will be used until 2010. In addition, from 2007 to 2010, flats will be rented on the private market, in order to absorb the overload of students, which is due to the unusually well-attended years of 2007 and 2008. In the private flats, 2 to 3 students will be accommodated together. In principle, every student receives a single room with area of , mostly with en-suite bathroom and toilet. During the time of higher than usual student numbers however, there will inevitably be some instances where 2 students share a larger room. Residents may cook in the shared kitchens, where the social life between studies and the Hamburg night life will take place. Due to structural changes in military training, several external residences had to be acquired including the former Lettow-Vorbeck Barracks, which is now used by the Federal Police (Bundespolizei). Another facility frequented by students and staff is the "casino", the officer's club of the HSU (not a gambling establishment), located opposite the campus.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11558243
| 1,343,628 |
2,107,400 |
In high-energy hadron reactions one distinguishes peripheral reactions with low multiplicity and central collisions with high multiplicity. Peripheral reactions are also characterized by the existence of a "leading particle" which retains a large proportion of the incoming energy. By taking the notion of peripheral literally Ref.2 suggested that in this kind of reaction the surface of the colliding hadrons is locally excited giving rise to a hot spot, which is de-excited by two processes: 1) emission of particles into the vacuum 2) propagation of “heat” into the body of the target (projectile) wherefrom it is eventually also emitted through particle production. Particles produced in process 1) will have higher energies than those due to process 2), because in the latter process the excitation energy is in part degraded. This gives rise to an asymmetry with respect to the leading particle, which should be detectable in an experimental event by event analysis. This effect was confirmed by Jacques Goldberg in K− p→ K− p π+ π− reactions at 14 GEV/c. This experiment represents the first observation of local equilibrium in hadronic interactions, allowing in principle a quantitative determination of heat conductivity in hadronic matter along the lines of Ref.3. This observation came as a surprise, because, although the electron proton scattering experiments had shown beyond any doubt that the nucleon had a finite size, it was a-priori not clear whether this size was sufficiently big for the hot spot effect to be observable, i. e. whether heat conductivity in hadronic matters was sufficiently small. Experiment4 suggests that this is the case.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=23139945
| 2,106,187 |
998,008 |
In the early hours of 15 June, the invasion fleet moved into position and at 04:30, TG 52.17 began the pre-landing bombardment. "Tennessee" held her fire until 05:40, when she unleashed a barrage of shells from her primary, secondary, and 40 mm batteries at a range of . All shooting ceased at 06:30 to allow the carrier aircraft to make their attacks for the next thirty minutes. TG 52.17 resumed firing at 07:00 and continued until 08:12, when the amtracs and Higgins boats began to make their way to shore. As the marines fought their way ashore, "Tennessee" remained off the southern end of the landing zone, applying enfilading fire to support their advance. A battery of Japanese field guns hidden in a cave on Tinian opened fire on "Tennessee" and scored three hits, one of which disabled one of her secondary turrets; the other two did minimal damage and started a small fire. Eight men were killed and another twenty-five were wounded. The ship remained on station supporting the marines on Saipan but that afternoon, withdrew to make temporary repairs and protect the troop transports from the expected Japanese counterattack. She engaged a group of four dive-bombers that attacked the fleet that evening but scored no hits on them.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=196975
| 997,490 |
1,509,800 |
On-line aerosol measurements methods took a little longer than off-line to be developed and perfected. It wasn't till 1973 with Davis who developed and patented of the real-time single particle mass spectrometry (RTSPMS) instrument. The setup is quite similar to today's AMS system, with the sample being introduced through a small steel capillary into the ion source region. The sample would ionize after striking a hot rhenium filament. The resulting ions were separated in a magnetic sector and detected by an electron multiplier. The method could only ionize elements with ionization potentials below the work function of the filament (~8 eV), typically alkali and alkaline earth metal. The instrument did yield unit resolution up to a mass-to-charge ratio of 115. The RTSPMS instrument had a particle transmission/detection efficiency of 0.2-0.3%. Davis used the RTSPMS instrument to study samples from calibration aerosols, ambient laboratory air, and aerosols sources. Majority of his studies where focused on inorganic salts created in lab. In Davis's analysis of ambient air, he found a significant increase in lead at the end of the day, which was concluded to be due to automobile emissions. This development was the first step towards, today's modern on-line instruments.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44305631
| 1,508,950 |
1,247,615 |
In 1959, Herschbach joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he was appointed an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and became an Associate Professor in 1961. At Berkeley, he and graduate students George Kwei and James Norris constructed a cross-beam instrument large enough for reactive scattering experiments involve alkali and various molecular partners. His interest in studying elementary chemical processes in molecular-beam reactive collisions challenged an often-accepted belief that "collisions do not occur in crossed molecular beams". The results of his studies of K + CHI were the first to provide a detailed view of an elementary collision, demonstrating a direct rebound process in which the KI product recoiled from an incoming K atom beam. Subsequent studies of K + Br resulted in the discovery that the hot-wire surface ionization detector they were using was potentially contaminated by previous use, and had to be pre-treated to obtain reliable results. Changes to the instrumentation yielded reliable results, including the observation that the K + Br reaction involved a stripping reaction, in which the KBr product scattered forward from the incident K atom beam. As the research continued, it became possible to correlate the electronic structure of reactants and products with the reaction dynamics.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=174867
| 1,246,940 |
778,669 |
A requirement of the course was that each student had to produce a thesis for graduation: Whittle decided to write his on potential aircraft design developments, notably flight at high altitudes and speeds over 500 mph (800 km/h). In "Future Developments in Aircraft Design" he showed that incremental improvements in existing propeller engines were unlikely to make such flight routine. Instead he described what is today referred to as a motorjet; a motor using a conventional piston engine to provide compressed air to a combustion chamber whose exhaust was used directly for thrust – essentially an afterburner attached to a propeller engine. The idea was not new and had been talked about for some time in the industry, but Whittle's aim was to demonstrate that at increased altitudes the lower outside air density would increase the design's efficiency. For long-range flight, using an Atlantic-crossing mailplane as his example, the engine would spend most of its time at high altitude and thus could outperform a conventional powerplant. According to Whittle, "...I came to the general conclusion that if very high speeds were to be combined with long range, it would be necessary to fly at very great height, where the low air density would greatly reduce resistance in proportion to speed."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42707
| 778,252 |
1,403,118 |
Army officials consider the GMV a needed addition to a global response force like the 82nd Airborne Division. Currently, airdropped infantry would be flown to a target area or driven there by trucks. Either way, they then need to dismount and walk the distance to their destination, sometimes for many miles while carrying heavy gear. The GMV would allow light infantry to be driven right to their destination, allowing them to be airdropped further away from potential enemy fire and use mobility to find an off-road avenue of approach an adversary isn't expecting, and not be fatigued once they need to fight. The idea was to acquire up to 300 vehicles by the end of 2016 at a unit cost of $149,000, which could decrease if a second increment was bought and stationed at installations for training; predicted dates were not certain as the entire effort remains subject to funding availability. Ability to be carried under a UH-60 Black Hawk in high/hot conditions is particularly important because battalion commanders cannot always get control of a CH-47 to carry heavier up-armored Humvees.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43598546
| 1,402,331 |
191,213 |
As of 2005 Local to regional collective management efforts were considered appropriate for services like crop pollination or resources like water. Another approach that has become increasingly popular during the 1990s is the marketing of ecosystem services protection. Payment and trading of services is an emerging worldwide small-scale solution where one can acquire credits for activities such as sponsoring the protection of carbon sequestration sources or the restoration of ecosystem service providers. In some cases, banks for handling such credits have been established and conservation companies have even gone public on stock exchanges, defining an evermore parallel link with economic endeavors and opportunities for tying into social perceptions. However, crucial for implementation are clearly defined land rights, which are often lacking in many developing countries. In particular, many forest-rich developing countries suffering deforestation experience conflict between different forest stakeholders. In addition, concerns for such global transactions include inconsistent compensation for services or resources sacrificed elsewhere and misconceived warrants for irresponsible use. As of 2001, another approach focused on protecting ecosystem service biodiversity hotspots. Recognition that the conservation of many ecosystem services aligns with more traditional conservation goals (i.e. biodiversity) has led to the suggested merging of objectives for maximizing their mutual success. This may be particularly strategic when employing networks that permit the flow of services across landscapes, and might also facilitate securing the financial means to protect services through a diversification of investors.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1855357
| 191,114 |
1,352,218 |
V-5 Pre-Flight Schools were established in five locations: at the University of Iowa in Iowa City (opened on April 15, 1942), at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (established on February 1, 1942, opened that May), at the University of Georgia campus in Athens (contract "NOd3035" signed on March 19, 1942, and opened on June 18, 1942), and two in California: at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, and at the Hotel Del Monte at Monterey Bay (a lease that would lead to a purchase of the resort and ultimately in 1951, becoming the Naval Postgraduate School). Astronaut John Glenn was in the first V-5 class at Iowa, where the aspiring carrier fighter pilots were nicknamed the "Seahawks". Personnel at Chapel Hill included future presidents George Bush and Gerald Ford, along with MLB star Ted Williams, where they were known as the "Cloudbusters". Cadets in California included Ed McMahon and Dennis Weaver. At St. Mary's, they were known as the "Air Devils". Their nickname at Georgia was the "Skycrackers". In early 1943, flight preparatory schools were established at 17 colleges and universities. In July, 1943 the V-5 and V-7 programs were merged into the new V-12 Navy College Training Program. V-5 students were reclassified as V-12A (with the A standing for Aviation). Candidates had to attend four 4-month semesters (or 10-week "quarters") of college before attending Pre-Flight or could opt to transfer to the NROTC. The V-12 program differed in that it was focused on college education and it eliminated the Naval Flight Preparatory School and War Training Services stages.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=31834573
| 1,351,472 |
773,548 |
From around 1950 to 1965, the support for these theories was evenly divided, with a slight imbalance arising from the fact that the Big Bang theory could explain both the formation and the observed abundances of hydrogen and helium, whereas the Steady State could explain how they were formed, but not why they should have the observed abundances. However, the observational evidence began to support the idea that the universe evolved from a hot dense state. Objects such as quasars and radio galaxies were observed to be much more common at large distances (therefore in the distant past) than in the nearby universe, whereas the Steady State predicted that the average properties of the universe should be unchanging with time. In addition, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 was considered the death knell of the Steady State, although this prediction was only qualitative, and failed to predict the exact temperature of the CMB. (The key big bang prediction is the black-body spectrum of the CMB, which was not measured with high accuracy until COBE in 1990). After some reformulation, the Big Bang has been regarded as the best theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. Before the late 1960s, many cosmologists thought the infinitely dense and physically paradoxical singularity at the starting time of Friedmann's cosmological model could be avoided by allowing for a universe which was contracting before entering the hot dense state, and starting to expand again. This was formalized as Richard Tolman's oscillating universe. In the sixties, Stephen Hawking and others demonstrated that this idea was unworkable, and the singularity is an essential feature of the physics described by Einstein's gravity. This led the majority of cosmologists to accept the notion that the universe as currently described by the physics of general relativity has a finite age. However, due to a lack of a theory of quantum gravity, there is no way to say whether the singularity is an actual origin point for the universe, or whether the physical processes that govern the regime cause the universe to be effectively eternal in character.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2794117
| 773,132 |
219,262 |
As research on nuclear fission progressed in early 1939, Edwin McMillan at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley decided to run an experiment bombarding uranium using the powerful 60-inch (1.52 m) cyclotron that had recently been built at the university. The purpose was to separate the various fission products produced by the bombardment by exploiting the enormous force that the fragments gain from their mutual electrical repulsion after fissioning. Although he did not discover anything of note from this, McMillan did observe two new beta decay half-lives in the uranium trioxide target itself, which meant that whatever was producing the radioactivity had not violently repelled each other like normal fission products. He quickly realized that one of the half-lives closely matched the known 23-minute decay period of uranium-239, but the other half-life of 2.3 days was unknown. McMillan took the results of his experiment to chemist and fellow Berkeley professor Emilio Segrè to attempt to isolate the source of the radioactivity. Both scientists began their work using the prevailing theory that element 93 would have similar chemistry to rhenium, but Segrè rapidly determined that McMillan's sample was not at all similar to rhenium. Instead, when he reacted it with hydrogen fluoride (HF) with a strong oxidizing agent present, it behaved much like members of the rare earths. Since these elements comprise a large percentage of fission products, Segrè and McMillan decided that the half-life must have been simply another fission product, titling the paper "An Unsuccessful Search for Transuranium Elements".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21277
| 219,153 |
357,927 |
In cancer, the genomes of affected cells are rearranged in complex or even unpredictable ways. Massive sequencing efforts are used to identify previously unknown point mutations in a variety of genes in cancer. Bioinformaticians continue to produce specialized automated systems to manage the sheer volume of sequence data produced, and they create new algorithms and software to compare the sequencing results to the growing collection of human genome sequences and germline polymorphisms. New physical detection technologies are employed, such as oligonucleotide microarrays to identify chromosomal gains and losses (called comparative genomic hybridization), and single-nucleotide polymorphism arrays to detect known "point mutations". These detection methods simultaneously measure several hundred thousand sites throughout the genome, and when used in high-throughput to measure thousands of samples, generate terabytes of data per experiment. Again the massive amounts and new types of data generate new opportunities for bioinformaticians. The data is often found to contain considerable variability, or noise, and thus Hidden Markov model and change-point analysis methods are being developed to infer real copy number changes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4214
| 357,741 |
827,529 |
Monarch butterflies are especially noted for their lengthy annual migration. In North America they make massive southward migrations starting in August until the first frost. A northward migration takes place in the spring. The monarch is the only butterfly that migrates both north and south as the birds do on a regular basis. But no single individual makes the entire round trip. Female monarchs deposit eggs for the next generation during these migrations. The length of these journeys exceeds the normal lifespan of most monarchs, which is less than two months for butterflies born in early summer. The last generation of the summer enters into a non-reproductive phase known as diapause and may live seven months or more. During diapause, butterflies fly to one of many overwintering sites. The generation that overwinters generally does not reproduce until it leaves the overwintering site sometime in February and March. It is the second, third and fourth generations that return to their northern locations in the United States and Canada in the spring. How the species manages to return to the same overwintering spots over a gap of several generations is still a subject of research; the flight patterns appear to be inherited, based on a combination of the position of the sun in the sky and a time-compensated Sun compass that depends upon a circadian clock that is based in their antennae.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=207874
| 827,085 |
117,677 |
In humans, BMR is directly proportional to a person's lean body mass. In other words, the more lean body mass a person has, the higher their BMR; but BMR is also affected by acute illnesses and increases with conditions like burns, fractures, infections, fevers, etc. In menstruating females, BMR varies to some extent with the phases of their menstrual cycle. Due to the increase in progesterone, BMR rises at the start of the luteal phase and stays at its highest until this phase ends. There are different findings in research how much of an increase usually occurs. Small sample, early studies, found various figures, such as; a 6% higher postovulatory sleep metabolism, a 7% to 15% higher 24 hour expenditure following ovulation, and an increase and a luteal phase BMR increase by up to 12%. A study by the American Society of Clinical Nutrition found that an experimental group of female volunteers had an 11.5% average increase in 24 hour energy expenditure in the two weeks following ovulation, with a range of 8% to 16%. This group was measured via simultaneously direct and indirect calorimetry and had standardized daily meals and sedentary schedule in order to prevent the increase from being manipulated by change in food intake or activity level. A 2011 study conducted by the Mandya Institute of Medical Sciences found that during a woman's follicular phase and menstrual cycle is no significant difference in BMR, however the calories burned per hour is significantly higher, up to 18%, during the luteal phase. Increased state anxiety (stress level) also temporarily increased BMR.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=562788
| 117,632 |
1,233,538 |
During the mid-1950s, planners devised the idea of extending the wall of powerful land-based radar seaward with Airborne early warning and control units. This was done by equipping two wings of Lockheed RC-121 Warning Star aircraft, the 551st Airborne Early Warning and Control Wing, based at Otis Air Force Base, Massachusetts, and the 552nd AEWCW, based at McClellan Air Force Base, California, one wing stationed on each coast. The RC-121s, EC-121s and Texas Towers, it was believed, would contribute to extending contiguous east-coast radar coverage some 300 to 500 miles seaward. In terms of the air threat of the 1950s, this meant a gain of at least 30 extra minutes warning time of an oncoming bomber attack. ADC's Operation Tail Wind on 11–12 July tested its augmentation plan that required Air Training Command interceptors participate in an air defense emergency. A total of seven ATC bases actively participated in the exercise, deploying aircraft and aircrews and supporting the ADC radar net. As the USAF prepared to deploy the Tactical Air Command E-3 Sentry in the later 1970s, active-duty units were phased out EC-121 operations by the end of 1975. All remaining EC-121s were transferred to the Air Force Reserve, which formed the 79th AEWCS at Homestead Air Force Base, Florida in early 1976. The active duty force continued to provide personnel to operate the EC-121s on a 24-hour basis, assigning Detachment 1, 20th Air Defense Squadron to Homestead AFB as associate active duty crews to fly the Reserve-owned aircraft. Besides monitoring Cuban waters, these last Warning Stars also operated from NAS Keflavik, Iceland. Final EC-121 operations ended in September 1978.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4149679
| 1,232,875 |
1,941,317 |
Bachhawat return to India in 1957 to join Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMC), Vellore and established a centre for advanced research in neurochemistry and glycobiology. Here, he did research on glycolipids, glycosaminoglycans and glycoproteins and their role in neural development and neurological disorders. After working close to two decades at CMC, he moved to his native place, Kolkata, to take up the position as the director of the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) in 1976. It was during this time, he was elected as the president of the "Federation of Asian and Oceanian Biochemists" (FAOB), the first Indian to be elected to the post and held the position from 1983 to 1985. He stayed with IICB till 1985 when he was appointed as the head of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Delhi and superannuated from service in 1990 as the Dean of the Faculty of Interdisciplinary and Applied Sciences. After retirement from academic career, he served as the president of the Society of Biological Chemists for a second time (he had served the Society as its president in 1970 for a two year-term) and remained as the president till 1994 during which time the society organized the 1994 congress of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB). He was associated with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as the chairman of its technical advisory board on biological studies and was a council member (1975–77) and vice president (1987–88) of the Indian National Science Academy.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=50565963
| 1,940,206 |
1,159,217 |
Deprivation of an individual virus from possible suppression, complementation or cooperation, may represent a liberation to initiate a new evolutionary process, or a condemnation to extinction. If liberated from suppression, the isolated genome must replicate and be able to reconstruct a mutant cloud to regain adaptive capability. This has led to the suggestion that high mutation rates evolved to allow such mutant spectrum recovery following bottlenecks. Other models attribute high mutation rates to adaptive optimization independent of bottlenecks, or to a mechanistic consequence of rapid replication. Whatever their ultimate origins, high mutation rates serve the purpose of adaptation in multiple circumstances, not only following bottlenecks. A founder virus can introduce a different phenotype for the ensuing evolution. Evolution of viruses in nature and as disease agents can be viewed as succession of mutant spectrum alterations, subjected to expansions and reductions of population size in a continuous interplay of positive and negative selection and random drift. While short-term (for example, intra-host) evolution is observable and measurable, viruses may appear to be relatively static in the long term for decades (as seen with antigenic variants of FMDV ) or longer. Intra-host evolution is generally more rapid than inter-host evolution, as documented with viruses and other biological systems. Apparent invariance may be the result of selection for long-term survival of populations that have previously frenziedly tested evolutionary outcomes in short-term processes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=6962692
| 1,158,602 |
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After completing 18 months in Ghana, in 1944 Ridley was transferred to India and then Burma, where he studied and treated malnourished former prisoners of war. His biographer David Apple reports Ridley's own words: "In Calcutta, we basically had nothing to do with no assignments – a situation which continued after transfer to Parragan, near Calcutta. Finally, I was transferred to Rangoon, Burma, where life began again. I treated over 200 released allied prisoners of war in Rangoon and Singapore who suffered from nutritional amblyopia while Japanese prisoners of war. Many of the prisoners had worked on the Burma Railway. Starved and ill treated, they had developed sudden central scotoma, relieved by good diet if available. Some developed optic atrophy, some of whom made a partial recovery within six weeks of release. However, the advanced cases, though given a vitamin-rich diet were irreversible. I subsequently wrote an article on the topic of nutritional amblyopia." His paper was published in 1945 with observations that were prescient. "It is uncertain whether disturbance in a visual pathway originates in the retina or optic nerve. Failure of the cortical capillaris to nourish the outer retinal layers at the macula may be significant." The therapy he used anticipates the use today of multivitamins in ARMD patients. A logical therapy since the problems arise from malnutrition, Ridley used multivitamin therapy, returned them to a normal diet and then noted improvement in the prisoners' condition. The Burma theatre of war permitted the first large population study of individuals with nutritional amblyopia: a total of over 500 within his region of whom about 200 he personally examined and treated.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1222880
| 1,655,998 |
1,068,822 |
In "Autonomy and Biopower in the Anti-Doping Establishment: A Rogue Agent of Governmentality," sport historian Daniel Rosenke reviews Pechstein's case, citing it as an example of the contentious nature of the biological passport. After collecting sample data on the skater for a period of nearly nine years, the ISU banned Pechstein from competition for an above threshold fluctuation in reticulocyte percentage, a blood parameter used in passport profiling. Notably, Pechstein argued her ‘%Retics’ of 3.49 fell into the normal range for women her age, and asserted that the International Skating Union’s (ISU) threshold limit of 2.4 was far too low, basing this claim on a confluence of data in medical science. Two weeks following the 3.49 reading, Pechstein was tested again at 1.37, a difference considered by the ISU to be an unequivocal sign of doping. To defend herself, Pechstein cast doubt upon the accuracy of the ‘%Retics’ measurement, citing both her hemoglobin and hematocrit levels as exculpatory evidence. In short, she questioned the reliability and accuracy of the entire procedure's longitudinal sample collection, which ultimately led to her violation of the ISU's anti-doping code. Finally, Pechstein interrogated the burden of proof to be met by the ISU in proving a doping violation. She suggested, as the CAS pointed out, that "the ISU must convince the panel (of arbitrators) to a level very close to ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that all alternative causes for the increase of %Retics can be excluded, and that additionally, the [a]thlete had an intention to use blood doping." An important consideration here is that the burden of proof should be proportional the severity of the accusation (according to the World Anti-Doping Code), and in legal terms, should fall closer to beyond a reasonable doubt than the ‘comfortable satisfaction’ of the panel. With the information presented, it seems Pechstein’s assertion was valid, and cast serious doubt on the so-called ‘clear-cut’ positive described by the ISU.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2496059
| 1,068,268 |
1,572,799 |
The history of animal genetic resources begins about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. The domestication of major crop and livestock species in the early neolithic time period changed our human evolution and lifestyles. This ability to control food production led to major demographic, technological, political and military changes. Consecutively, thousands of years of natural and human selection, genetic drift, inbreeding, and crossbreeding have contributed to the diversification of animal genetic resources and increased the variety of environments and production systems that livestock keeping takes place. Relatively few species have been domesticated; out of the world's 148 non-carnivorous species weighing more than 45 kg, only 15 have been successfully domesticated. The proportion of domesticated birds used for food and agriculture is even lower- 10 out of 10,000. The reason these numbers are so low is because it is rare to find species with all of the behavioral and physiological traits necessary for domestication. These traits include lack of aggression towards humans, a strong gregarious instinct, a "follow the leader" dominance hierarchy, a tendency not to panic when disturbed, a diet that can be easily supplied by humans (herbivores), a rapid growth rate, relatively short intervals between births, and large litter size.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=51678199
| 1,571,911 |
305,923 |
Traditionally, it was assumed that extinct reptile groups were cold-blooded like modern reptiles. New research during the past decades has led to the conclusion that some groups, such as theropod dinosaurs and pterosaurs, were very likely warm-blooded. Whether perhaps plesiosaurs were warm-blooded as well is difficult to determine. One of the indications of a high metabolism is the presence of fast-growing fibrolamellar bone. The pachyostosis with juvenile individuals makes it hard to establish whether plesiosaurs possessed such bone, though. However, it has been possible to check its occurrence with more basal members of the more inclusive group that plesiosaurs belonged to, the Sauropterygia. A study in 2010 concluded that fibrolamellar bone was originally present with sauropterygians. A subsequent publication in 2013 found that the Nothosauridae lacked this bone matrix type but that basal Pistosauria possessed it, a sign of a more elevated metabolism. It is thus more parsimonious to assume that the more derived pistosaurians, the plesiosaurs, also had a faster metabolism. A paper published in 2018 claimed that plesiosaurs had resting metabolic rates (RMR) in the range of birds based on quantitative osteohistological modelling. However, these results are problematic in view of general principles of vertebrate physiology (see Kleiber's law); evidence from isotope studies of plesiosaur tooth enamel indeed suggests endothermy at lower RMRs, with inferred body temperatures of ca. 26 °C.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1398078
| 305,759 |
277,066 |
The 2L-II is an upgrade of the 2L introduced simultaneously with the 3L engine in 1988 in the 5th generation Hilux. Although bore and stroke remain the same, multiple changes have been made in its design. The engine block was made more rigid through the use of finite element analysis and through adding reinforcement ribbing. The most significant change is the redesigned cylinder head, where the camshaft now lifts the valve directly via tappet instead of using a rocker arm. The exhaust valve is 1mm larger in diameter and the inlet manifold is made 10mm larger in diameter. The pistons with a 5mm shorter compression height and piston rings were placed closer to the combustion chamber to reduce wasted volumetric capacity while durability was improved by the adoption of fiber reinforced piston grooves from the 1st Generation 2LTE to improve piston ring seizure resistance, groove wear resistance, thermal conductivity and thermal fatigue resistance over the previous Ni-Resist cast iron insert used previously to address ring seizure issues and wear resistance in bare aluminum pistons while the oil squirters were relocated to spray underneath the hottest part of the piston to further aid cooling. The revised pistons were 100g lighter than the ones in the 1st Generation 2L and the compression ratio changed to 22.2. The valve clearance is adjusted using shims. Later L engines (3L and 5L) also use this method of valve operation.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3556328
| 276,916 |
1,936,507 |
After completing her PhD, Shanahan became a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2015 to 2017. During this time, she studied the role of force-carrying elementary particles called gluons in the structure of subatomic particles called hadrons. She also used lattice quantum chromodynamics techniques to examine the structures of atomic nuclei. In 2017, Forbes featured Shanahan in its "30 Under 30: Science" list for the impact of her work on the understanding of dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model. From 2017 to 2018, she held a joint appointment as assistant professor at the College of William & Mary and senior staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Shanahan became assistant professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in July 2018, which at that time made her the youngest assistant professor of physics there. Shanahan was also a Simons Emmy Noether Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics during the fall 2018 semester. This fellowship supports early- and mid-career women physicists. Shanahan's current research includes seeking to understand how the structures and interactions of hadrons and atomic nuclei can be calculated from the fundamental principles of the Standard Model of physics, the role of gluons in the structures of hadrons and atomic nuclei, and how supercomputers and machine learning may be used to perform low-energy quantum chromodynamics calculations. Some of the predictions she is currently developing may be testable in the future using the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility's planned electron-ion collider.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=65513520
| 1,935,399 |
1,087,166 |
An I-frame is a separately-compressed version of a single uncompressed (raw) frame. The coding of an I-frame takes advantage of spatial redundancy and of the inability of the eye to detect certain changes in the image. Unlike P-frames and B-frames, I-frames do not depend on data in the preceding or the following frames, and so their coding is very similar to how a still photograph would be coded (roughly similar to JPEG picture coding). Briefly, the raw frame is divided into 8 pixel by 8 pixel blocks. The data in each block is transformed by the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The result is an 8×8 matrix of coefficients that have real number values. The transform converts spatial variations into frequency variations, but it does not change the information in the block; if the transform is computed with perfect precision, the original block can be recreated exactly by applying the inverse cosine transform (also with perfect precision). The conversion from 8-bit integers to real-valued transform coefficients actually expands the amount of data used at this stage of the processing, but the advantage of the transformation is that the image data can then be approximated by quantizing the coefficients. Many of the transform coefficients, usually the higher frequency components, will be zero after the quantization, which is basically a rounding operation. The penalty of this step is the loss of some subtle distinctions in brightness and color. The quantization may either be coarse or fine, as selected by the encoder. If the quantization is not too coarse and one applies the inverse transform to the matrix after it is quantized, one gets an image that looks very similar to the original image but is not quite the same. Next, the quantized coefficient matrix is itself compressed. Typically, one corner of the 8×8 array of coefficients contains only zeros after quantization is applied. By starting in the opposite corner of the matrix, then zigzagging through the matrix to combine the coefficients into a string, then substituting run-length codes for consecutive zeros in that string, and then applying Huffman coding to that result, one reduces the matrix to a smaller quantity of data. It is this entropy coded data that is broadcast or that is put on DVDs. In the receiver or the player, the whole process is reversed, enabling the receiver to reconstruct, to a close approximation, the original frame.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1376890
| 1,086,607 |
581,132 |
With the rise of the ability to present complex, real-world images on a computer screen, McConkie, in the early 1990s, as part of new research at the new Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, renewed investigations of why the world looks stable and continuous despite the shifting retinal input signal that accompanied each saccade. This research began when John Grimes and Dr. George McConkie (1996) began to use actual photographs to study visual stability. This development in change blindness research was able to show the effects of change blindness in more realistic settings. Additionally, further research stated that rather large changes will not be detected when they occur during saccadic movements of the eye. In the first experiment of this kind, in 1995, Blackmore "et al." forced saccades by moving the image and making a change in the scene at the same time. Observers' ability to detect the changes fell to chance. The effect was stronger using this method than when using brief grey flashes between images, although subsequent research has mostly used grey flashes or masking stimuli. Another finding based on similar studies stated that a change was easily picked up on by participants when the eye was fixated on the point of change. Therefore, the eye must be directly fixated on the area of change for it to be noticed. This was called the saccade target theory of transsaccadic memory of visual stability. However, other research in the mid-1990s has indicated that individuals still have difficulty detecting change even when they are directly fixated on a particular scene. Rensink, O'Regan, and Clarke presented a picture, followed by a blank, masking screen, followed by the initial picture with a change. The masking screen acts like a saccadic eye movement. This was a critical contribution to change blindness research because it demonstrated that a change can remain unnoticed with the smallest disruptions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2438760
| 580,835 |
126,510 |
Due to increasing environmental pressures from lobby groups and the like, many have called into question the relevance of Formula 1 as an innovating force towards future technological advances (particularly those concerned with efficient cars). The FIA has been asked to consider how it can persuade the sport to move down a more environmentally friendly path. Therefore, in addition to the above changes outlined for the 2009 season, teams were invited to construct a KERS device, encompassing certain types of regenerative braking systems to be fitted to the cars in time for the 2009 season. The system aims to reduce the amount of kinetic energy converted to waste heat in braking, converting it instead to a useful form (such as electrical energy or energy in a flywheel) to be later fed back through the engine to create a power boost. However, unlike road car systems that automatically store and release energy, the energy is only released when the driver presses a button and is useful for up to 6.5 seconds, giving an additional and 400 kJ. It effectively mimics the 'push to pass' button from IndyCar and A1GP series. KERS was not seen in the 2010 championship – while it was not technically banned, the FOTA collectively agreed not to use it. It however made a return for the 2011 season, with all teams except HRT, Virgin and Lotus utilizing the device.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=645083
| 126,458 |
54,517 |
Initially, U.S. President Eisenhower was not surprised by Sputnik 1. He had been forewarned of the R-7's capabilities by information derived from U-2 spy plane overflight photos, as well as signals and telemetry intercepts. The Eisenhower administration's first response was low-key and almost dismissive. Eisenhower was even pleased that the USSR, not the U.S., would be the first to test the waters of the still-uncertain legal status of orbital satellite overflights. Eisenhower had suffered the Soviet protests and shoot-downs of Project Genetrix (Moby Dick) balloons and was concerned about the probability of a U-2 being shot down. To set a precedent for "freedom of space" before the launch of America's secret WS-117L spy satellites, the U.S. had launched Project Vanguard as its own "civilian" satellite entry for the International Geophysical Year. Eisenhower greatly underestimated the reaction of the American public, who were shocked by the launch of Sputnik and by the televised failure of the Vanguard Test Vehicle 3 launch attempt. The sense of anxiety was inflamed by Democratic politicians and professional cold warriors, who portrayed the United States as woefully behind. One of the many books that suddenly appeared for the lay-audience noted seven points of "impact" upon the nation: Western leadership, Western strategy and tactics, missile production, applied research, basic research, education, and democratic culture. As public and the government became interested in space and related science and technology, the phenomenon was sometimes dubbed the "Sputnik craze".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=28484
| 54,494 |
391,884 |
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website states that the system was developed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, starting in the early 1940s. However, a series of aerial photos found in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (the military section of the German Federal Archives) apparently dating from 1943–1944 bear the inscription UTMREF followed by grid letters and digits, and projected according to the transverse Mercator, a finding that would indicate that something called the UTM Reference system was developed in the 1942–43 time frame by the Wehrmacht. It was probably carried out by the Abteilung für Luftbildwesen (Department for Aerial Photography). From 1947 onward the US Army employed a very similar system, but with the now-standard 0.9996 scale factor at the central meridian as opposed to the German 1.0. For areas within the contiguous United States the Clarke Ellipsoid of 1866 was used. For the remaining areas of Earth, including Hawaii, the International Ellipsoid was used. The World Geodetic System WGS84 ellipsoid is now generally used to model the Earth in the UTM coordinate system, which means current UTM northing at a given point can differ up to 200 meters from the old. For different geographic regions, other datum systems can be used.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2514694
| 391,689 |
1,015,620 |
Delays in the F-35 program may lead to a "fighter gap" with the United States and other countries lacking sufficient fighter aircraft to meet their requirements. Israel may seek to buy second-hand F-15Es, while Australia has considered buying additional F/A-18 Super Hornets in the face of F-35 delays. In May 2011, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, Ashton Carter, said that the latest price estimate of $133 million per aircraft was not affordable. In 2011, "The Economist" warned that the F-35 was in danger of slipping into a "death spiral", where increasing per-aircraft costs would lead to cuts in number of aircraft ordered, leading to further cost increases and further cuts in orders. Later that year, four aircraft were cut from the fifth "Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP)" order because of cost overruns. In 2012, a further two aircraft were cut. Lockheed Martin acknowledged that the slowing of purchases would increase costs. David Van Buren, U.S. Air Force acquisition chief, said that Lockheed Martin needed to reduce manufacturing capacity to match the reduced market for their aircraft. However, the company said that the slowdown in American orders would free up capacity, which could be diverted to meet urgent, short-term needs of foreign partners for replacement fighters. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said that no more money was available and that future price increases would be met with cuts in the number of aircraft ordered. Later that month, the Pentagon reported that costs had risen another 4.3 percent, in part because of production delays. In 2012, the purchase of six out of 31 aircraft was conditioned on progress of development and testing. In 2013, Bogdan repeated that no more money was available, but that he hoped to avoid the death spiral. In 2014 it was reported that another eight aircraft would be cut from the following year's order.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54719700
| 1,015,097 |
151,010 |
The fourth principle is the Equal Compensation Principle, which essentially states that activities equally valued by the employer should be equally valuable (in terms of compensation, including non-financial aspects such as pleasantness of the workplace) to the employee. This relates to the problem that employees may be engaged in several activities, and if some of these are not monitored or are monitored less heavily, these will be neglected, as activities with higher marginal returns to the employee are favoured. This can be thought of as a kind of "disintermediation"—targeting certain measurable variables may cause others to suffer. For example, teachers being rewarded by test scores of their students are likely to tend more towards teaching 'for the test', and de-emphasise less relevant but perhaps equally or more important aspects of education; while AT&T's practice at one time of paying programmers by the number of lines of code written resulted in programs that were longer than necessary—i.e., program efficiency suffering (Prendergast 1999, 21). Following Holmström and Milgrom (1990) and Baker (1992), this has become known as "multi-tasking" (where a subset of relevant tasks is rewarded, non-rewarded tasks suffer relative neglect). Because of this, the more difficult it is to completely specify and measure the variables on which reward is to be conditioned, the less likely that performance-related pay will be used: "in essence, complex jobs will typically not be evaluated through explicit contracts." (Prendergast 1999, 9).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=730742
| 150,942 |
157,992 |
While some models of the MB-339 are primarily intended for training operations, other are instead principally equipped to perform light fighter and fighter-bomber roles. Combat-orientated aircraft are typically outfitted with more advanced avionics, such as improved inertial guidance systems, digital nav/attack computers, a MIL-STD-1553B databus, and hands-on throttle-and-stick (HOTAS)-compatible flight controls. Furthermore, various defensive systems, such as a radio jammer, radar warning receiver (RWR), electronic countermeasures (ECM), along with larger wingtip tanks, would typically be adopted. The MB-339K carries a pair of 30mm DEFA cannon while a total of six underwing hard points can accommodate up to 1,815 kilograms (4,000 lb) of external stores. It has been qualified to be armed with various munitions, such as the Sidewinder and R.550 Magic air-to-air missiles, the AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missile, various laser-guided bombs and rockets, as well as the Marte Mk.2 anti-ship missile. According to Forecast International, Aermacchi had at one point considered making provisions for the installation of an additional two pod-mounted 30mm cannon.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=946381
| 157,911 |
805,429 |
Fire retardants applied to wildfires are usually a mixture of water and chemicals designed to wet the area as well as chemically retard a fire's progression through vegetation. Typically it is colored so that the application area can be seen from the air. Fire retardant gel based retardants which meet NFPA Standard 1150 are also being used in service. These are dyed other colors to differentiate them from the traditional red retardant. The gels and their dyes are designed to biodegrade naturally. Phos-Chek is a brand of long-term retardant currently approved for wildland fire use. Any fire retardant approved for use against wildfires on U.S. Federal lands must be included on the United States Forest Service Qualified Products List. To be added to that list, the product must be tested by Wildland Fire Chemical Systems, a division of the National Technology and Development Program, a process that can take up to two years. Phos-Chek also has a consumer-based fire retardant spray called Wildfire Home Defense that is effective immediately after application and that remains effective until it is washed off with heavy water levels. It's designed to be applied to fuel beds around homes and outbuildings to create a firebreak in the fuels leading up to each structure. Ember Bloc is another consumer-based fire retardant gel that can be applied to the exterior of one's house and nearby structures to help protect against both embers and flames in a wildfire. It has a unique ability to cling onto the side of a house to withstand high heat and windy conditions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2833427
| 805,000 |
2,036,368 |
The data is presented to the user with a strong emphasis on the relation to curated background information and underlying evidence that led to the observation of a terminus, its modification or proteolytic cleavage. In brief the protein information, its domain structure, protein termini, terminus modifications and proteolytic processing of and by other proteins is listed. All information is accompanied by metadata like its original source, method of identification, confidence measurement or related publication. A positional cross correlation evaluation matches termini and cleavage sites with protein features (such as amino acid variants) and domains to highlight potential effects and dependencies in a unique way. Also, a network view of all proteins showing their functional dependency as protease, substrate or protease inhibitor tied in with protein interactions is provided for the easy evaluation of network wide effects. A powerful yet user friendly filtering mechanism allows the presented data to be filtered based on parameters like methodology used, in vivo relevance, confidence or data source (e.g. limited to a single laboratory or publication). This provides means to assess physiological relevant data and to deduce functional information and hypotheses relevant to the bench scientist. In a later release analysis tools for the evaluation of proteolytic pathways in experimental data have been added.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33178845
| 2,035,194 |
2,057,833 |
In early 2013 Jager relocated to South Korea at the invitation of 1984 Olympic gold medal-winning coach Kim Hyung-Tak, one of two athletes selected by the Danish Archery Federation to undergo full-time training in the country ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Jager spent six months under Kim's instruction before contesting the 2013 World Championships held in Belek, Turkey. She entered the tournament's individual event with an unimpressive record, having failed to progress beyond the last 32 competitors in an international competition since 2011. In the event's preliminary ranking stage Jager achieved a new Danish record for the 144-arrow round, scoring 1,351 points from a maximum of 1,440 to qualify for the subsequent elimination rounds as the eighth seed. Jager proceeded to deliver a surprising run of results in the knock-out rounds, eliminating both Ki Bo-bae and Yun Ok-hee, the World Archery Federation's number one and number two-ranked archers respectively, to enter the final against Xu Jing, who had achieved a silver medal in the women's team event at the 2012 Summer Olympics. After tying on five set points each over the regulation five sets, Jager outshot Xu in the subsequent tiebreaking one-arrow shoot-off, landing her single arrow closer to the centre of the target to claim the world championship title.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36566969
| 2,056,648 |
1,848,067 |
In late 1977 the Queen Mary group led by Peter Kalmus, along with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory group under Alan Astbury and the Birmingham University group led by John Dowell joined Carlo Rubbia in the international collaboration known as UA1 at CERN. The UK groups involved had joint responsibility for designing, building and operating a large hadron calorimeter and also a trigger processor as part of the UA1 collaboration. The calorimeter, which measured the energies of strongly-interacting particles emerging from collisions, consisted of 7,000 sheets of plastic scintillator with a total mass of 30 tonnes placed in slots in the return yoke of a large electromagnet. Testing of the scintillator sheets was carried out at Queen Mary using cosmic rays. The scintillator light was transferred via fluorescent wavelength-shifter bars and light guides to 2000 photomultipliers outside the magnet. The number of proton-antiproton collisions exceeded the ability to record these by a factor of at least 1000. This necessitated the design of a trigger processor, a purpose-built electronic device which had to make decisions within 2 microseconds on which 1 in 1000 collisions was likely to be worth recording on magnetic tape for subsequent analysis, and which 999 could be discarded irretrievably. Some years later when the collision rate had increased, a new trigger processor was built.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38200075
| 1,847,009 |
417,876 |
Snapshot DNA Phenotyping Service is the name of a DNA phenotyping tool developed by Parabon NanoLabs which creates composite face imaging sketches based on DNA samples. The algorithms used to make the composites are not open source, however, which has attracted criticism from members of the scientific community. Moses Schanfield, professor of forensic sciences at George Washington University, criticized the lack of any peer review, noting that there is no publicly available performance record for the product. In a 2016 article the American Civil Liberties Union recommended only using genetic phenotyping "...where the link between genes and external characteristics is based on well-proven, peer-reviewed, widely accepted science, such as is apparently now the case with hair and eye color." Skin color predictions have been reported to be somewhat reliable but not predictions of the shape of the face. North Carolina detectives felt Parabon's Snapshot DNA Phenotyping Service had been helpful in identifying Jose Alvarez, Jr. in 2015 as the killer of Troy and LaDonna French in 2012. Privacy restrictions in 2019 on the use of GEDmatch for genetic genealogy may make DNA phenotyping more common. Illumina, Inc. and Identitas AG are reported to offer similar DNA phenotyping services. The United States Department of Defense provided approximately $2,000,000 in development financing for Snapshot.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=55337803
| 417,672 |
1,146,251 |
The documentary follows Drs Hopkins, Burks and Willenbring through discussions of their respective careers and the barriers they faced as women in STEM. Among notable aspects of the documentary, Dr Hopkins describes sexual harassment during her career and the fact that she was refused the same sized office space in comparison to her male counterparts. Dr Burks discusses similar issues of discrimination, including being confused with the janitor at her place of work solely based on her appearance, as well as her added experiences of racism as a black woman in science. Dr Willenbring describes the harassment she faced as a young scientist on a trip to Antarctica with an all male cohort, including being called sexist names, having her abilities diminished due to being a woman, and being physically harassed as a woman, most prominently by the trip leader, David Marchant. Dr Willenbring did not bring these allegations to light for fear of further harassment, not being believed, and the potential detrimental effects on her career. After achieving tenure 16 years later, Dr Willenbring formally complained against Marchant's treatment of her and following an investigation, what was previously named Marchant Glacier in Antarctica became renamed Matataua Glacier instead to acknowledge Marchant's abhorrent behaviour. Marchant was fired by Boston University in 2019, where he was a faculty member in the Department of Earth & Environment in the College of Arts & Sciences. While a five-member BU faculty panel recommended that Marchant be suspended for three years without pay, the university president, Dr. Robert A. Brown made the determination to fire Marchant.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=67118650
| 1,145,647 |
648,915 |
In the early twenties Ralph H. Fowler (in collaboration with Charles Galton Darwin) developed a new method in statistical mechanics permitting a systematic calculation of the equilibrium properties of matter. He used this to provide a rigorous derivation of the ionization formula which Saha had obtained, by extending to the ionization of atoms the theorem of Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, used in physical chemistry for its application to molecular dissociation. Also, a significant improvement in the Saha equation introduced by Fowler was to include the effect of the excited states of atoms and ions. A further important step forward came in 1923, when Edward Arthur Milne and R.H. Fowler published a paper in the "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society", showing that the criterion of the maximum intensity of absorption lines (belonging to subordinate series of a neutral atom) was much more fruitful in giving information about physical parameters of stellar atmospheres than the criterion employed by Saha which consisted in the marginal appearance or disappearance of absorption lines. The latter criterion requires some knowledge of the relevant pressures in the stellar atmospheres, and Saha following the generally accepted view at the time assumed a value of the order of 1 to 0.1 atmosphere. Milne wrote:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1438662
| 648,574 |
1,228,272 |
Although the political system was formally democratic, the Army increasingly seized control in Japan. Indeed, in the 1930s, separatist Army elements in Manchuria largely shaped foreign-policy. The League of Nations criticized Japan's takeover of Manchuria in 1931, so it withdrew. It joined the Axis alliance with Germany, but there was little close cooperation between the two nations until 1943. Japan opened a full-scale war in China, in 1937, taking control of the major cities and economic centers with a long record of atrocities. Two puppet regimes were nominally in charge in China and Manchuria. Military confrontations with the Soviet Union were disappointing to Japan, and it turned its attention to the south. American economic and financial pressures, joined by Britain and the Netherlands, climaxed in the cut off of vitally needed oil supplies in 1941. Japan declared war, and in three months scored spectacular successes against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands, as well as continuing the war with China. The Japanese economy could not support the large-scale war effort, especially with the rapid buildup of the American navy. By 1944, Japan was heavily on the defensive, as its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere collapsed, its navy was sunk, and American bombing started to devastate major Japanese cities. The final blow came in August 1945 with two American atomic bombs and the Russian invasion. Japan surrendered, and was occupied by the Allies, or more particularly by the United States. Its political and economic system was rebuilt on the basis of greater democracy, no military capability, and a weakening of traditional monopolistic corporations.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=54108025
| 1,227,610 |
70,750 |
A central question in evolution is how simple protocells first arose and differed in reproductive contribution to the following generation, thus driving the evolution of life. A functional protocell has (as of 2014) not yet been achieved in a laboratory setting. Self-assembled vesicles are essential components of primitive cells. The second law of thermodynamics requires that the universe move in a direction in which entropy increases, yet life is distinguished by its great degree of organization. Therefore, a boundary is needed to separate life processes from non-living matter. Irene Chen and Jack W. Szostak suggest that elementary protocells can give rise to cellular behaviors including primitive forms of differential reproduction, competition, and energy storage. Competition for membrane molecules would favor stabilized membranes, suggesting a selective advantage for the evolution of cross-linked fatty acids and even the phospholipids of today. Such micro-encapsulation would allow for metabolism within the membrane and the exchange of small molecules, while retaining large biomolecules inside. Such a membrane is needed for a cell to create its own electrochemical gradient to store energy by pumping ions across the membrane.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19179706
| 70,723 |
619,481 |
In 1964, Bill Stead, a Nevada rancher, pilot, and unlimited hydroplane racing champion, organised the first Reno Air Races at a small dirt strip called the Sky Ranch, located between Sparks, Nevada, and Pyramid Lake. The National Championship Air Races were soon moved to the Reno Stead Airport, and have been held there every September since 1966. The five-day event attracts around 200,000 people, and includes racing around courses marked out by pylons for six classes of aircraft: Unlimited, Formula One, Sport Biplane, AT-6, Sport, and Jet. It also features civil airshow acts, military flight demonstrations, and a large static aircraft display. Other promoters have run pylon racing events across the US and Canada, including races in Las Vegas, NV in 1965, Lancaster, CA in 1965 and 1966, Mojave, California in 1970-71, and 1973–79; at Cape May, NJ in 1971, San Diego, CA in 1971, Miami, FL in 1973 and 1979, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1984; Hamilton Field, California, in 1988; at Dallas, TX in 1990, in Denver, CO in 1990 and 1992, in Kansas City in 1993, in Phoenix, Arizona in 1994 and 1995; and in Tunica, Mississippi in 2005. Numerous other venues across the United States, Canada, and Mexico have also hosted events featuring the smaller Formula One and Biplane classes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=810456
| 619,167 |
495,196 |
In 2008, Eric Snively and Adam Cox tested the performance of 2D and 3D pachycephalosaur skulls through finite element analysis, and found that they could withstand considerable impact; greater vaulting of the domes allowed for higher forces of impact. They also considered it likely that pachycephalosaur domes were covered in keratin, a strong material that can withstand much energy without being permanently damaged (like the osteoderms of crocodilians), and therefore incorporated keratin into their test formula. In 2011, Snively and Jessica M. Theodor conducted a finite element analysis by simulating head-impacts with CT scanned skulls of "S. validum" (UALVP 2), "Prenocephale prenes" and several extant head-butting artiodactyls. They found that the correlations between head-striking and skull morphologies found in the living animals also existed in the studied pachycephalosaurs. "Stegoceras" and "Prenocephale" both had skull shapes similar to the bighorn sheep with cancellous bone protecting the brain. They also shared similarities in the distribution of compact and cancellous regions with the bighorn sheep, white-bellied duiker and the giraffe. The white-bellied duiker was found to be the closest morphological analogue to "Stegoceras"; this head-butting species has a dome which is smaller but similarly rounded. "Stegoceras" was better capable of dissipating force than artiodactyls that butt heads at high forces, but the less vascularized domes of older pachycephalosaurs, and possibly diminished ability to heal from injuries, argued against such combat in older individuals. The study also tested the effects of a keratinous covering of the dome, and found it to aid in performance. Though "Stegoceras" lacked the pneumatic sinuses that are found below the point of impact in the skulls of head-striking artiodactyls, it instead had vascular struts which could have similarly acted as braces, as well as conduits to feed the development of a keratin covering.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2274197
| 494,940 |
338,408 |
The Pleistocene is a geological epoch that began about 2.6 million years ago. The Holocene, the current geological epoch, begins about 11,700 years ago when the Pleistocene ends. Establishing the date of this boundary − which is defined by sharp climatic warming − as accurately as possible has been a goal of geologists for much of the 20th century. At Two Creeks, in Wisconsin, a fossil forest was discovered (Two Creeks Buried Forest State Natural Area), and subsequent research determined that the destruction of the forest was caused by the Valders ice readvance, the last southward movement of ice before the end of the Pleistocene in that area. Before the advent of radiocarbon dating, the fossilized trees had been dated by correlating sequences of annually deposited layers of sediment at Two Creeks with sequences in Scandinavia. This led to estimates that the trees were between 24,000 and 19,000 years old, and hence this was taken to be the date of the last advance of the Wisconsin glaciation before its final retreat marked the end of the Pleistocene in North America. In 1952 Libby published radiocarbon dates for several samples from the Two Creeks site and two similar sites nearby; the dates were averaged to 11,404 BP with a standard error of 350 years. This result was uncalibrated, as the need for calibration of radiocarbon ages was not yet understood. Further results over the next decade supported an average date of 11,350 BP, with the results thought to be the most accurate averaging 11,600 BP. There was initial resistance to these results on the part of Ernst Antevs, the palaeobotanist who had worked on the Scandinavian varve series, but his objections were eventually discounted by other geologists. In the 1990s samples were tested with AMS, yielding (uncalibrated) dates ranging from 11,640 BP to 11,800 BP, both with a standard error of 160 years. Subsequently, a sample from the fossil forest was used in an interlaboratory test, with results provided by over 70 laboratories. These tests produced a median age of 11,788 ± 8 BP (2σ confidence) which when calibrated gives a date range of 13,730 to 13,550 cal BP. The Two Creeks radiocarbon dates are now regarded as a key result in developing the modern understanding of North American glaciation at the end of the Pleistocene.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26197
| 338,228 |
1,402,555 |
According to an article in the "Iowa Orthopedic Journal", Coley's toxins were opposed by the medical establishment despite his reports of good results, because his reports were not believed to be credible. Hall (1997) extensively explores the issue; one of the lenses through which Hall explores it is the decades-long, complicated relationship of James Ewing and William Coley as colleagues at the same institution. Hall explains that the aspects of Coley's work that were scientifically underpowered—the anecdotal emphasis, the lack of a standardized formula for the toxins preparations, the lack of methodologically rigorous clinical trials, and (relatedly) the problem of poor replicability—led many scientists to dismiss all use of Coley's toxins as mere hogwash. Although the truth was more complex than that dismissal recognized, it is a fact that the toxins never made it to the stage of a safe and effective medication, and today their use as alternative medicine is clearly flawed for the same reason that malariotherapy as alternative medicine is flawed, given what humanity now knows about molecular biology that was not known when these older therapies were tried: Even if certain kinds of immune challenge or immunomodulation can produce desirable immunotherapeutic effects, these crude methods of inducing such challenge or modulation are not specific enough (not targeted enough), present too many harms, and do not work consistently enough to bring benefits to most patients, being dependent on idiotypic molecular factors (which were not understood at all when the therapies were first developed and which even today are still not easy for immunotherapy designers to deal with).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4527097
| 1,401,768 |
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RTV5 is a student-run television network available as channel 5 on campus. RTV5 was created initially as Rice Broadcast Television in 1997; RBT began to broadcast the following year in 1998, and aired its first live show across campus in 1999. It experienced much growth and exposure over the years with successful programs like "Drinking with Phil”, “The Meg & Maggie Show”, which was a variety and call-in show, a weekly news show, and extensive live coverage in December 2000 of the shut down of KTRU by the administration. In spring 2001, the Rice undergraduate community voted in the general elections to support RBT as a blanket tax organization, effectively providing a yearly income of $10,000 to purchase new equipment and provide the campus with a variety of new programming. In the spring of 2005, RBT members decided the station needed a new image and a new name: Rice Television 5. One of RTV5's most popular shows was the 24-hour show, where a camera and couch placed in the RMC stayed on air for 24 hours. One such show is held in fall and another in spring, usually during a weekend allocated for visits by prospective students. RTV5 has a video on demand site at rtv5.rice.edu. The station went off the air in 2014 and changed its name to Rice Video Productions. In 2015 the group's funding was threatened, but ultimately maintained. In 2016 the small student staff requested to no longer be a blanket-tax organization. In the fall of 2017, the club did not register as a club.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=25813
| 353,107 |
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1975 – Tjentiste, Yugoslavia – (July) – Set in the mountains about 100 miles north of Dubrovnik, the small town was the scene of World War II's Battle of the Sutjeska. Dr. Max Euwe laid a wreath on the war memorial at the opening ceremony. The tournament was organised at the last minute by the Yugoslav Chess Federation after the Puerto Ricans withdrew their early offer, due to mounting financial pressure. Winner Valery Chekhov played skilfully throughout, scoring an undefeated 10-3 for a deserved victory; he had recently finished second in the Moscow senior championship. Larry Christiansen finished a half-point behind. He had a winning adjournment against the Soviet, but was less well prepared for the resumption and allowed it to fizzle out to a draw. The Englishman Jonathan Mestel managed a top three finish despite being one of the younger competitors. Ventzislav Inkiov of Bulgaria, like Mestel, scored 9–4, but due to an inferior Bucholz tie-splitting score, had to settle for fourth place. Forty-eight players took part including future grandmasters Jaime Sunye Neto and Murray Chandler. It was the first World Junior to feature a 13-round Swiss format.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=294931
| 653,859 |
847,058 |
To be able to deliver the engineering degree, an École Master 's curriculum has to be validated by the Commission des titres d'ingénieur (Commission of the Engineering Title). It is important for the external observer to note that the system in France is extremely demanding in its entrance requirements (numerus clausus, using student rank in exams as the only criterion), despite being almost free of tuition fees, and much stricter in regards to the academic level of applying students than many other systems. The system focuses solely on selecting students by their engineering fundamental disciplines (mathematics, physics) abilities rather than their financial ability to finance large tuition fees, thus enabling a wider population access to higher education. In fact, being a graduate engineer in France is considered as being near/at the top of the social/professional ladder. The engineering profession grew from the military and the nobility in the 18th century. Before the French Revolution, engineers were trained in schools for technical officers, like "École d'Arts et Métiers" (Arts et Métiers ParisTech) established in 1780. Then, other schools were created, for instance the École Polytechnique and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers which was established in 1794. Polytechnique is one of the "grandes écoles" that have traditionally prepared technocrats to lead French government and industry, and has been one of the most privileged routes into the elite divisions of the civil service known as the "grands corps de l'État".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8081063
| 846,608 |
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The mechanism and action of lipoic acid when supplied externally to an organism is controversial. Lipoic acid in a cell seems primarily to induce the oxidative stress response rather than directly scavenge free radicals. This effect is specific for RLA. Despite the strongly reducing milieu, LA has been detected intracellularly in both oxidized and reduced forms. LA is able to scavenge reactive oxygen and reactive nitrogen species in a biochemical assay due to long incubation times, but there is little evidence this occurs within a cell or that radical scavenging contributes to the primary mechanisms of action of LA. The relatively good scavenging activity of LA toward hypochlorous acid (a bactericidal produced by neutrophils that may produce inflammation and tissue damage) is due to the strained conformation of the 5-membered dithiolane ring, which is lost upon reduction to DHLA. In cells, LA is reduced to dihydrolipoic acid, which is generally regarded as the more bioactive form of LA and the form responsible for most of the antioxidant effects and for lowering the redox activities of unbound iron and copper. This theory has been challenged due to the high level of reactivity of the two free sulfhydryls, low intracellular concentrations of DHLA as well as the rapid methylation of one or both sulfhydryls, rapid side-chain oxidation to shorter metabolites and rapid efflux from the cell. Although both DHLA and LA have been found inside cells after administration, most intracellular DHLA probably exists as mixed disulfides with various cysteine residues from cytosolic and mitochondrial proteins. Recent findings suggest therapeutic and anti-aging effects are due to modulation of signal transduction and gene transcription, which improve the antioxidant status of the cell. However, this likely occurs via pro-oxidant mechanisms, not by radical scavenging or reducing effects.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=81648
| 278,093 |
699,596 |
On October 18, 2012, multiple sources reported that the negotiations between Superior Aviation Beijing and Hawker Beechcraft had failed, with a press release from Hawker Beechcraft ascribing the failure to the fact that "the proposed transaction with Superior could not be completed on terms acceptable to the company." Specific problems included national security concerns as "the company's defense operations were integrated with its civilian businesses that proved difficult to untangle", and legal complications, as "advisers in the US had trouble negotiating with Chinese representatives unfamiliar with US finance and bankruptcy law." In response to the failed negotiations, Hawker Beechcraft planned to emerge from bankruptcy protection by filing an amended Joint Plan of Reorganization (POR) with the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, and re-emerge as a stand-alone company renamed Beechcraft Corporation and focused on growing the company's most profitable products. A letter from company Chairman, Bill Boisture and Executive Vice-President Shawn Vick stated that their aim is to carry out the reorganization "in a strong operational and financial position." They wrote that this may result in ceasing jet production in favor of piston aircraft manufacturing or refurbishing older aircraft, indicating these "have high growth potential." At the end of October 2012 Vick confirmed that the company would end jet production in favor of a new single-engine turboprop based on the Beechcraft Premier fuselage.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8549092
| 699,232 |
1,192,904 |
During the 1990s, Modula-3 gained considerable currency as a teaching language, but it was never widely adopted for industrial use. Contributing to this may have been the demise of DEC, a key Modula-3 supporter (especially when it ceased to maintain it effectively before DEC was sold to Compaq in 1998). In any case, in spite of Modula-3's simplicity and power, it appears that there was little demand for a procedural compiled language with restricted implementation of object-oriented programming. For a time, a commercial compiler named CM3 maintained by one of the chief implementors prior at DEC SRC who was hired before DEC being sold to Compaq, an integrated development environment (IDE) named Reactor and an extensible Java virtual machine (licensed in binary code and source code formats and buildable with Reactor) were offered by Critical Mass, Inc., but that company ceased active operations in 2000 and gave some of the source code of its products to Software Solutions GmbH. Modula-3 is now taught in universities mostly in comparative programming language courses, and its textbooks are out of print. Essentially the only corporate supporter of Modula-3 is , which inherited the sources from Critical Mass and has since made several releases of the CM3 system in source and binary code. The Reactor IDE has been open source released after several years it had not, with the new name CM3-IDE. In March 2002, also took over the repository of another active Modula-3 distribution, PM3, until then maintained at the École Polytechnique de Montréal but which later continued by the work on HM3 improved over the years later until it was obsoleted.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=241545
| 1,192,268 |
1,052,553 |
The use of heating presented major technical problems, because as of 2013, there was no clear way to focus the required heat into the tiny area required within the constraints imposed by hard drive usage. The time required for heating, writing, and cooling is about 1 nanosecond, which suggests a laser or similar means of heating, but diffraction limits the use of light at common laser wavelengths because these ordinarily cannot focus into anything like the small region that HAMR requires for its magnetic domains. Traditional plated magnetic platters are also not suitable due to their heat conduction properties, so new drive materials must be developed. In addition, a wide range of other technical, development, and control issues must be overcome. Seagate Technology, which has been prominent in the development of HAMR drives, commented that the challenges include "attaching and aligning a semiconductor diode laser to an HDD write head and implementing near-field optics to deliver the heat", along with the scale of use which is far greater than previous near-field optic uses. Industry observer IDC stated in 2013 that "The technology is very, very difficult, and there has been a lot of skepticism if it will ever make it into commercial products", with opinions generally that HAMR is unlikely to be commercially available before 2017.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2882199
| 1,052,007 |
614,093 |
Receiving a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1959, Bhaumik went to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for a position as Postdoctoral researcher. In 1961, he joined the Quantum Electronics Division at Xerox Electro-Optical Systems in Pasadena and began his career as a laser scientist. Concurrently, he taught Quantum physics and Astronomy at the California State University at Long Beach. In 1968, he was enlisted by the Northrop Corporate Research Laboratory, where he rose to become the director of the Laser Technology Laboratory and led a team that made pioneering contributions in research on excimer laser technology. One of the papers on this research was presented at the Denver, Colorado meeting of the Optical Society of America in March 1973. At this meeting, Bhaumik presented substantial evidence to demonstrate for the first time that an excimer laser could be efficient and powerful enough for practical utilization. The application of excimer lasers in Lasik eye surgery has resulted in vision correction in many cases. Excimer Laser is also used for difficult-to-treat skin diseases including psoriasis and vitiligo. The most widespread application of excimer laser has been in photolithography, a critical technology used in the manufacturing of microelectronic devices like cell phones. His contributions to the development of new and high power lasers merited his election by his peers to be a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4877968
| 613,781 |
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In December 1952, he composed a "Konkrete Etüde", realized in Pierre Schaeffer's Paris musique concrète studio. In March 1953, he moved to the NWDR studio in Cologne and turned to electronic music with two "Electronic Studies" (1953 and 1954), and then introducing spatial placements of sound sources with his mixed "concrète" and electronic work "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1955–56). Experiences gained from the "Studies" made plain that it was an unacceptable oversimplification to regard timbres as stable entities. Reinforced by his studies with Meyer-Eppler, beginning in 1955, Stockhausen formulated new "statistical" criteria for composition, focussing attention on the aleatoric, directional tendencies of sound movement, "the change from one state to another, with or without returning motion, as opposed to a fixed state". Stockhausen later wrote, describing this period in his compositional work, "The first revolution occurred from 1952/53 as "musique concrète", "electronic tape music", and "space music", entailing composition with transformers, generators, modulators, magnetophones, etc; the integration of concrete and abstract (synthetic) sound possibilities (also all noises), and the controlled projection of sound in space". His position as "the leading German composer of his generation" was established with "Gesang der Jünglinge" and three concurrently composed pieces in different media: "Zeitmaße" for five woodwinds, "Gruppen" for three orchestras, and "Klavierstück XI". The principles underlying the latter three compositions are presented in Stockhausen's best-known theoretical article, "... wie die Zeit vergeht ..." ("... How Time Passes ..."), first published in 1957 in vol. 3 of "Die Reihe".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=17268
| 313,091 |
1,714,976 |
Until the early 1980s the majority of servo drive systems used to control motion in industrial machinery were based upon analog electronics. The accepted interface to control such devices was an analog voltage signal, where polarity represented the desired direction of motion, and magnitude represented the desired speed or torque. In the 1980s, drive systems and devices based on digital technology began to emerge. A new method needed to be devised to communicate with, and control such units, as their capabilities could not be exploited with the traditional interface method used with analog drives. The earliest interfaces were either proprietary to one vendor or designed only for a single purpose, making it difficult for users of motion control systems to freely interchange motion control and drives. The membership of the VDW (German Machine Tool Builders' Association) became concerned with the implications of this trend. In response to that, in 1987 the VDW formed a joint working group with the ZVEI (German Electrical and Electronics Industry Association) to develop an open interface specification appropriate for digital-drive systems. The resulting specification, entitled "Sercos (serial real-time communication system) interface, was released and later submitted to the IEC, which in 1995 released it as IEC 61491. After the release of the original standard, original working group member companies including ABB, AEG, AMK, Robert Bosch, Indramat, and Siemens founded the "Interest Group Sercos" to steward the standard. Over the history of Sercos, its capabilities have been enhanced to the point where today it is not only used for motion control systems, but as a universal automation bus.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=11264866
| 1,714,009 |
1,405,990 |
The ISS is a collaborative effort by multiple space agencies around the world. The countries involved in the funding of the stations includes Europe, Japan, Canada, Russia and the United States. The respective space agencies of these countries are ESA, JAXA, CSA, Roscosmos, NASA. The modularity and size of components of the research station were dictated by the use of the space shuttle as the primary launch vehicle. The components also needed to be durable and maintainable. In the earlier years the development of the ISS in the 1990s, different countries brought different philosophies and approaches to the construction, design and transportation of research stations. Russian engineers emphasized automated use and remote control in their designs. The United States, Japanese and European nations were guided by four, consistent main principles: accessibility, maintainability, modularity and reconfigurability. This affected the construction of interior hardware racks which were built to be replaceable. It also took into account the preferences of the crew members who largely indicated that the interior design of the station would be constructed with distinct floors, ceiling and walls. The ISS is set to be retired around the end of the 2020s. The only other occupied space station in low Earth orbit is the Chinese space station, Tiangong. Tiangong was launched in 2021 and follows its predecessors Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 which were first launched in 2011 and 2016 respectively. This space station was the largest spacecraft built by China, weighing 22.5 tons or 49604.01 pounds.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1857169
| 1,405,200 |
377,200 |
Not long after the conclusion of "The Reader", a former editor, Norman Lockyer, decided to create a new scientific journal titled "Nature", taking its name from a line by William Wordsworth: "To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye". First owned and published by Alexander Macmillan, "Nature" was similar to its predecessors in its attempt to "provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge." Janet Browne has proposed that "far more than any other science journal of the period, "Nature" was conceived, born, and raised to serve polemic purpose." Many of the early editions of "Nature" consisted of articles written by members of a group that called itself the X Club, a group of scientists known for having liberal, progressive, and somewhat controversial scientific beliefs relative to the time period. Initiated by Thomas Henry Huxley, the group consisted of such important scientists as Joseph Dalton Hooker, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall, along with another five scientists and mathematicians; these scientists were all avid supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution as common descent, a theory which, during the latter half of the 19th century, received a great deal of criticism among more conservative groups of scientists. Perhaps it was in part its scientific liberality that made "Nature" a longer-lasting success than its predecessors. John Maddox, editor of "Nature" from 1966 to 1973 and from 1980 to 1995, suggested at a celebratory dinner for the journal's centennial edition that perhaps it was the journalistic qualities of Nature that drew readers in; "journalism" Maddox states, "is a way of creating a sense of community among people who would otherwise be isolated from each other. This is what Lockyer's journal did from the start." In addition, Maddox mentions that the financial backing of the journal in its first years by the Macmillan family also allowed the journal to flourish and develop more freely than scientific journals before it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43427
| 377,005 |
141,706 |
From about the 1980s, new designs of smaller gasoline engines also displayed cavitation phenomena. One answer to the need for smaller and lighter engines was a smaller coolant volume and a correspondingly higher coolant flow velocity. This gave rise to rapid changes in flow velocity and therefore rapid changes of static pressure in areas of high heat transfer. Where resulting vapor bubbles collapsed against a surface, they had the effect of first disrupting protective oxide layers (of cast aluminium materials) and then repeatedly damaging the newly formed surface, preventing the action of some types of corrosion inhibitor (such as silicate based inhibitors). A final problem was the effect that increased material temperature had on the relative electrochemical reactivity of the base metal and its alloying constituents. The result was deep pits that could form and penetrate the engine head in a matter of hours when the engine was running at high load and high speed. These effects could largely be avoided by the use of organic corrosion inhibitors or (preferably) by designing the engine head in such a way as to avoid certain cavitation inducing conditions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7807
| 141,648 |
188,769 |
In 1698, at the behest of King William III, Halley was given command of the , a pink, so that he could carry out investigations in the South Atlantic into the laws governing the variation of the compass, as well as to refine the coordinates of the English colonies in the Americas. On 19 August 1698, he took command of the ship and, in November 1698, sailed on what was the first purely scientific voyage by an English naval vessel. Unfortunately problems of insubordination arose over questions of Halley's competence to command a vessel. Halley returned the ship to England to proceed against officers in July 1699. The result was a mild rebuke for his men, and dissatisfaction for Halley, who felt the court had been too lenient. Halley thereafter received a temporary commission as a captain in the Royal Navy, recommissioned the "Paramour" on 24 August 1699 and sailed again in September 1699 to make extensive observations on the conditions of terrestrial magnetism. This task he accomplished in a second Atlantic voyage which lasted until 6 September 1700, and extended from 52 degrees north to 52 degrees south. The results were published in "General Chart of the Variation of the Compass" (1701). This was the first such chart to be published and the first on which isogonic, or Halleyan, lines appeared. The use of such lines inspired later ideas such as those of isotherms by Alexander von Humboldt in his maps. In 1701, Halley made a third and final voyage on the "Paramour" to study the tides of the English Channel. In 1702, he was dispatched by Queen Anne on diplomatic missions to other European leaders.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=36858805
| 188,672 |
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When Sedgwick visited Paris at the end of 1826 he found hostility to Diluvialism: Alexander von Humboldt ridiculed it "beyond measure", and Louis-Constant Prévost "lectured against it". In the summer of 1827 Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison travelled to investigate the geology of the Scottish Highlands, where they found "so many indications of "local diluvial" operations" that Sedgwick began to change his mind about it being worldwide. When George Poulett Scrope published his investigations into the Auvergne in 1827, he did not use the term "diluvium". He was followed by Murchison and Charles Lyell whose account appeared in 1829. All three agreed that the valleys could well have been formed by rivers acting over a long time, and a deluge was not needed. Lyell, formerly a pupil of Buckland, put strong arguments against diluvialism in the first volume of his "Principles of Geology" published in 1830, though suggesting the possibility of a deluge affecting a region such as the low-lying area around the Caspian Sea. Sedgwick responded to this book in his presidential address to the Geological Society in February 1830, agreeing that diluvial deposits had formed at differing times. At the society a year later, when retiring from the presidency, Sedgwick described his former belief that "vast masses of diluvial gravel" had been scattered worldwide in "one violent and transitory period" as "a most unwarranted conclusion", and therefore thought "it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation." However, he remained convinced that a flood as described in Genesis was not excluded by geology.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=543667
| 729,956 |
2,617 |
The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 reduced the Department of Defense's (DoD) urgency for new weapon systems like the F-22 and the following years would see reductions in DoD spending; this resulted in the F-22's EMD being rescheduled and lengthened multiple times over the course of development. The division of work amongst the team largely carried through from Dem/Val to EMD, although prime contractor Lockheed acquired General Dynamics' fighter portfolio at Fort Worth, Texas in 1993 and thus had the majority of the airframe manufacturing. While Lockheed Martin Aeronautics primarily performed Dem/Val work at its Skunk Works sites in Burbank and Palmdale, California, it would shift the program office and much of the EMD work to Marietta, Georgia, where it performed final assembly; program partner Boeing provided additional airframe components as well as avionics integration and training systems in Seattle, Washington. The first F-22, an EMD aircraft with tail number 4001, was unveiled at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta on 9 April 1997 and first flew on 7 September 1997. In 2006, the F-22 development team won the Collier Trophy, American aviation's most prestigious award.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=66299
| 2,617 |
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However, considerations of how unified conscious representations are formed are not the full focus of multisensory Integration research. It is obviously important for the senses to interact in order to maximize how efficiently people interact with the environment. For perceptual experience and behavior to benefit from the simultaneous stimulation of multiple sensory modalities, integration of the information from these modalities is necessary. Some of the mechanisms mediating this phenomenon and its subsequent effects on cognitive and behavioural processes will be examined hereafter. Perception is often defined as one's conscious experience, and thereby combines inputs from all relevant senses and prior knowledge. Perception is also defined and studied in terms of feature extraction, which is several hundred milliseconds away from conscious experience. Notwithstanding the existence of Gestalt psychology schools that advocate a holistic approach to the operation of the brain, the physiological processes underlying the formation of percepts and conscious experience have been vastly understudied. Nevertheless, burgeoning neuroscience research continues to enrich our understanding of the many details of the brain, including neural structures implicated in multisensory integration such as the superior colliculus (SC) and various cortical structures such as the superior temporal gyrus (GT) and visual and auditory association areas. Although the structure and function of the SC are well known, the cortex and the relationship between its constituent parts are presently the subject of much investigation. Concurrently, the recent impetus on integration has enabled investigation into perceptual phenomena such as the ventriloquism effect, rapid localization of stimuli and the McGurk effect; culminating in a more thorough understanding of the human brain and its functions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1619306
| 462,334 |
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Reduce energy use and demand through passive solar techniques and integrated building design. This process looks at optimum orientation and maximizes the thermal efficiency of the building envelope (windows, walls, roof) while also considering the interaction of the HVAC, lighting, and control systems. Integrated design uses daylight to reduce electrical demand, and incorporates energy efficient lighting, motors, and equipment. Where feasible, renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic cells, solar hot water, and geothermal exchange are used in tandem with other low emission technologies, such as fuel cells. This results in direct energy cost savings (fuel and electricity) yield a good rate of return based on the initial investment. Other external benefits include improved air quality from reduced fuel consumption (limiting nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, and other gases that contribute to air pollution). Additionally, reducing the overall aggregate electrical load significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33814239
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53,728 |
The initial impact of outsourcing, and the relatively lower cost of international human resources in developing third world countries led to a massive migration of software development activities from corporations in North America and Europe to India and later: China, Russia, and other developing countries. This approach had some flaws, mainly the distance / time zone difference that prevented human interaction between clients and developers and the massive job transfer. This had a negative impact on many aspects of the software engineering profession. For example, some students in the developed world avoid education related to software engineering because of the fear of offshore outsourcing (importing software products or services from other countries) and of being displaced by foreign visa workers. Although statistics do not currently show a threat to software engineering itself; a related career, computer programming does appear to have been affected. Nevertheless, the ability to smartly leverage offshore and near-shore resources via the follow-the-sun workflow has improved the overall operational capability of many organizations. When North Americans are leaving work, Asians are just arriving to work. When Asians are leaving work, Europeans are arriving to work. This provides a continuous ability to have human oversight on business-critical processes 24 hours per day, without paying overtime compensation or disrupting a key human resource, sleep patterns.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=27010
| 53,708 |
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Cosmos is a popular science book written by astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan. It was published in 1980 as a companion piece to the PBS mini-series with which it was co-developed and intended to compliment. Each of the book’s 13 illustrated chapters corresponds to one of the 13 episodes of the television series. Just a few of the ideas explored in Cosmos include the history and mutual development of science and civilization, the nature of the Universe, human and robotic space exploration, the inner workings of the cell and the DNA that controls it, and the dangers and future implications of nuclear war. One of Sagan's main purposes for both the book and the television series was to explain complex scientific ideas in a way that anyone interested in learning can understand. Sagan also believed the television was one of the greatest teaching tools ever invented, so he wished to capitalize on his chance to educate the world. Spurred in part by the popularity of the TV series, "Cosmos" spent 50 weeks on the "Publishers Weekly" best-sellers list and 70 weeks on the "New York Times" Best Seller list to become the best-selling science book ever published at the time. In 1981, it received the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. The unprecedented success of Cosmos ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science-themed literature. The success of the book also served to jumpstart Sagan's literary career. The sequel to "Cosmos" is, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (1994).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3789887
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Following Bill Gates' internal "Internet Tidal Wave memo" on May 26, 1995, Microsoft began to redefine its offerings and expand its product line into computer networking and the World Wide Web. With a few exceptions of new companies, like Netscape, Microsoft was the only major and established company that acted fast enough to be a part of the World Wide Web practically from the start. Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft a market dominance. The company released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, featuring pre-emptive multitasking, a completely new user interface with a novel start button, and 32-bit compatibility; similar to NT, it provided the Win32 API. Windows 95 came bundled with the online service MSN, which was at first intended to be a competitor to the Internet, and (for OEMs) Internet Explorer, a Web browser. Internet Explorer has not bundled with the retail Windows 95 boxes, because the boxes were printed before the team finished the Web browser, and instead were included in the Windows 95 Plus! pack. Backed by a high-profile marketing campaign and what "The New York Times" called "the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product in the industry's history," Windows 95 quickly became a success. Branching out into new markets in 1996, Microsoft and General Electric's NBC unit created a new 24/7 cable news channel, MSNBC. Microsoft created Windows CE 1.0, a new OS designed for devices with low memory and other constraints, such as personal digital assistants. In October 1997, the Justice Department filed a motion in the Federal District Court, stating that Microsoft violated an agreement signed in 1994 and asked the court to stop the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=19001
| 1,290 |
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The season restarted in the calendar newcomer Estonia. The rally marked the return of the FIA World Rally Championship after a half-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and was the 600th event since the championship was founded back in . Winning the warm-up event, local favourites Tänak and Järveoja were determined to prevail their home soil for the third straight year. The reigning world champions showed impressive speed throughout the weekend, leading almost the entire rally to win their first rally for Hyundai in their home country. Teammate Neuville and Gilsoul had another weekend to forget. The Belgian crew retired on Saturday afternoon after they damaged their rear-right suspension. Things went from bad to worse after rejoining the rally on Sunday as another electrical issue in the penultimate stage meant no chance for consolation points from the Power Stage. Hyundai's third entry of Craig Breen and Paul Nagle finished second after a consistent performance to complete a Hyundai 1–2. Rovanperä became the youngest driver to lead a WRC rally at the age of nineteen when he was briefly leading the event at an early stage, but a one-minute time penalty was given after his co-driver Halttunen illegally removed the radiator blanking plate. Takamoto Katsuta and Daniel Barritt were running fifth overall until they rolled their Yaris on Sunday morning. The Japanese driver lost what would've been a career-best finish. Pierre-Louis Loubet and Vincent Landais also retired from their top-class debut as they broke their steering.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=60663941
| 633,783 |
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Although rickets and osteomalacia are now rare in Britain, osteomalacia outbreaks in some immigrant communities included women with seemingly adequate daylight outdoor exposure wearing typical Western clothing. Having darker skin and reduced exposure to sunshine did not produce rickets unless the diet deviated from a Western omnivore pattern characterized by high intakes of meat, fish, and eggs and low intakes of high-extraction cereals. In sunny countries where rickets occurs among older toddlers and children, the rickets has been attributed to low dietary calcium intakes. This is characteristic of cereal-based diets with limited access to dairy products. Rickets was formerly a major public health problem among the US population; in Denver, almost two-thirds of 500 children had mild rickets in the late 1920s. An increase in the proportion of animal protein in the 20th-century American diet coupled with increased consumption of milk fortified with relatively small quantities of vitamin D coincided with a dramatic decline in the number of rickets cases. One study of children in a hospital in Uganda, however, showed no significant difference in vitamin D levels of malnourished children compared to non-malnourished children. Because both groups were at risk due to darker skin pigmentation, both groups had vitamin D deficiency. Nutritional status did not appear to play a role in this study.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=20840716
| 238,572 |
125,442 |
Oral rabies vaccination (ORV) programs have been used in many countries in an effort to control the spread of rabies and limit the risk of human contact with the rabies virus. ORV programs were initiated in Europe in the 1980s, Canada in 1985, and in the United States in 1990. ORV is a preventive measure to eradicate rabies in wild animal vectors of disease, mainly foxes, raccoons, raccoon dogs, coyotes and jackals, but also can be used for dogs in developing countries. ORV programs typically use edible baits to deliver the vaccine to targeted animals. ORV baits consist of a small packet containing the oral vaccine which is then either coated in a fishmeal paste or encased in a fishmeal-polymer block. When an animal bites into the bait, the packets burst and the vaccine is administered. Current research suggests that if adequate amounts of the vaccine is ingested, immunity to the virus should last for upwards of one year. By immunizing wild or stray animals, ORV programs work to create a buffer zone between the rabies virus and potential contact with humans, pets, or livestock. The effectiveness of ORV campaigns in specific areas is determined through trap-and-release methods. Titer tests are performed on the blood drawn from the sample animals in order to measure rabies antibody levels in the blood. Baits are usually distributed by aircraft to more efficiently cover large, rural regions. In order to place baits more precisely and to minimize human and pet contact with baits, however, they are distributed by hand in suburban or urban regions.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=16179834
| 125,390 |
1,721,301 |
All of these constructs work together and must be understood in order to assess the impact of multiple levels of influence on the distribution of disease in populations. Embodiment describes the literal physical incorporation of the social and biological world into an individual's body. Embodiment is an active process (a verb-like noun), in that the relationship between bodies and the world around them is reciprocal, cyclical, and synergistic. Pathways to Embodiment describes the various ways that social, biological, and environmental forces may interact with an individual's body in context. Pathways must be explored on various spatio-temporal scales in order to understand the complex interplays that can occur through history, inter-generationally, across the lifecourse; as well as at global, national, societal, familial, and molecular levels. Cumulative Interplay describes how patterns of disease occur within a social, ecological, and biological context. It emphasizes how individuals in different socio-economic positions have different exposures, susceptibilities, and resistance (both biological and political) to disease, based on their unique histories and experiences over the lifecourse, based on spatio-temporal factors and the interaction with groups, power structures, discrimination, and inequality. Agency and Accountability claims that the State is a responsible agent in the patterns of disease distribution in a given society. In contrast to biomedical and lifestyle theories of disease distribution, the social system that creates discrimination and inequalities are also responsible for patterns of disease. Further, Krieger expands this construct to include the accountability we as epidemiologists have in the identification and treatment of health disparities, and the obligation we have to explicitly identify our theoretical lens, as well as to become activists, not just researchers, when we observe injustice.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38762727
| 1,720,331 |
78,269 |
In their reply to Tegmark's paper, also published in "Physical Review E", the physicists Scott Hagan, Jack Tuszyński and Hameroff claimed that Tegmark did not address the Orch-OR model, but instead a model of his own construction. This involved superpositions of quanta separated by 24 nm rather than the much smaller separations stipulated for Orch-OR. As a result, Hameroff's group claimed a decoherence time seven orders of magnitude greater than Tegmark's, but still well short of the 25 ms required if the quantum processing in the theory was to be linked to the 40 Hz gamma synchrony, as Orch-OR suggested. To bridge this gap, the group made a series of proposals. They supposed that the interiors of neurons could alternate between liquid and gel states. In the gel state, it was further hypothesized that the water electrical dipoles are oriented in the same direction, along the outer edge of the microtubule tubulin subunits. Hameroff et al. proposed that this ordered water could screen any quantum coherence within the tubulin of the microtubules from the environment of the rest of the brain. Each tubulin also has a tail extending out from the microtubules, which is negatively charged, and therefore attracts positively charged ions. It is suggested that this could provide further screening. Further to this, there was a suggestion that the microtubules could be pumped into a coherent state by biochemical energy. Finally, he suggested that the configuration of the microtubule lattice might be suitable for quantum error correction, a means of holding together quantum coherence in the face of environmental interaction.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26193
| 78,240 |
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Astronomical optical interferometry has had to overcome a number of technical issues not shared by radio telescope interferometry. The short wavelengths of light necessitate extreme precision and stability of construction. For example, spatial resolution of 1 milliarcsecond requires 0.5 µm stability in a 100 m baseline. Optical interferometric measurements require high sensitivity, low noise detectors that did not become available until the late 1990s. Astronomical "seeing", the turbulence that causes stars to twinkle, introduces rapid, random phase changes in the incoming light, requiring data collection rates to be faster than the rate of turbulence. Despite these technical difficulties, three major facilities are now in operation offering resolutions down to the fractional milliarcsecond range. shows a movie assembled from aperture synthesis images of the Beta Lyrae system, a binary star system approximately 960 light-years (290 parsecs) away in the constellation Lyra, as observed by the CHARA array with the MIRC instrument. The brighter component is the primary star, or the mass donor. The fainter component is the thick disk surrounding the secondary star, or the mass gainer. The two components are separated by 1 milli-arcsecond. Tidal distortions of the mass donor and the mass gainer are both clearly visible.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=166689
| 196,509 |
332,936 |
Born in Schenectady, New York, Otto Octavius had a turbulent upbringing. His father Torbert Octavius, a factory worker, was abusive and violent towards both Otto and his mother Mary Lavinia Octavius. The young Octavius's shyness and good work in school got him labeled as a "teacher's pet" and targeted as a subject for bullying. Torbert did not appreciate having a bullied son, and roared at him to use violence in dealing with the bullies. Mary Octavius would always defend her son from Torbert's tirades, saying he was a gifted thinker who would use his brain to solve problems, not his fists. Due to his mother's insistence and her disgust towards men who worked in common manual labor, Octavius was determined not to become like his father and threw all his efforts into his education, regularly scoring top marks. Octavius's devotion to study paid off with him being awarded a university scholarship. During Octavius's freshman year of college, he was undecided in his studies until they were briefly interrupted by his father's funeral; a construction accident having ended Torbert's life. When Mary remarked that "an early death is a manual laborer's" and she expected better from her son, this seemed to spur an obsession in Octavius about the hard sciences, and he declared his major to be physical science. His obsession, however, did not manifest immediately, and he was regarded by his school friends as a devoted student who was genuinely interested in the studies. He graduated near the top of his class, and was considered a catch to many scientific firms. Octavius was soon hired by an engineering firm.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=315873
| 332,759 |
1,871,170 |
The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) has grown in Canada in recent years. Nineteen of 27 Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation casinos, which receive 40,000,000 visitors a year, are using FRT to automatically identify 15,000 problem gamblers who have voluntarily placed themselves on a self-exclusion list. The Canadian Bankers Association has been using FRT since 2008 to investigate debit card fraud. The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia has been using FRT since 2008 to counter fraudulent attempts by individuals to obtain a driver's license. In the summer of 2010, the technology was used by the Toronto Police to identify suspects wanted for vandalism or violent acts committed during the G-20 Summit there. The Department of Foreign Affairs has begun to issue e-passports with a chip that will enable the use of facial recognition technology beginning in 2012. Social media organizations such a Facebook, with millions of Canadian users have also adopted the use of FRT in their operations. All these applications and others raise privacy concerns. On 14 December 2021, the governments of British Columbia, Alberta and Québec ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop collecting and to delete images of people obtained without their consent.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=29991137
| 1,870,093 |
873,470 |
Blakiston's fish owl is classified as an Endangered Species by the IUCN. It is endangered due to the widespread loss of riverine forest, increasing land development along rivers and dam construction. The current population in Japan has been estimated at approximately 100–150 birds (20 breeding pairs and unpaired individuals), whereas on mainland Asia the population is higher, at times variously estimated at several hundred or perhaps up to thousands of individuals. Globally and included more recent detailed analysis from Russia, it is estimated that the population consists in total consists of about 1,000–1,500 individuals, or about 500–850 pairs. In the Primorye, it is estimated that 200 to 400 individuals remain. During surveys in 2016-2019 on Kunashir Island, 28 pairs of Blakiston's fish owls were registered. In Russia, fish owls are killed by fur-trappers (see above), drown in nets set for salmon, and are shot by hunters. In Japan, death by hunting is unlikely, but fish owls have been hit by cars and killed by power lines. Additionally, cases of exposure to lead or lead poisoning, possibly from bioaccumulation but also perhaps lead bullets in carrion, have been reported in these owls in at least Japan. Given their very small global population, ongoing deaths are unlikely to be sustainable. Local conservation efforts in Japan have been undertaken including education, installation of large nest-boxes and supplemental feeding. Biologists have found the presence of Blakiston's fish owls as good indicators of the health and disturbance level of a forest and of fish populations. An additional concern was a clear lack of genetic diversity found in Russia's fish owls upon the testing of their genome, with similar concerns expressed in Japan as well as evidence of inbreeding. Evidence has been found of a gradual recovery of the Blakiston's fish owl population in Hokkaido but Japanese conservationists are vexed by the lack of suitable habitat and recommend land use changes to encourage the growth of the population.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=764546
| 873,009 |
354,170 |
Some months earlier, in the Italian autumn of 1943, two officers in the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, Captain Maximilian Becker and Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel, proposed the removal of Monte Cassino's treasures to the Vatican and Vatican-owned Castel Sant'Angelo ahead of the approaching front. The officers convinced church authorities and their own senior commanders to use the division's trucks and fuel for the undertaking. They had to find the materials necessary for crates and boxes, find carpenters among their troops, recruit local labourers (to be paid with rations of food plus twenty cigarettes a day) and then manage the "massive job of evacuation centered on the library and archive", a treasure "literally without price". The richness of the abbey's archives, library and gallery included "800 papal documents, 20,500 volumes in the Old Library, 60,000 in the New Library, 500 "incunabula", 200 manuscripts on parchment, 100,000 prints and separate collections". The first trucks, carrying paintings by Italian old masters, were ready to go less than a week from the day Becker and Schlegel independently first came to Monte Cassino. Each vehicle carried monks to Rome as escorts; in more than 100 truckloads the convoys saved the abbey's monastic community. The task was completed in the first days of November 1943. "In three weeks, in the middle of a losing war, in another country, it was quite a feat." After a mass in the basilica, Abbot formally presented signed parchment scrolls in Latin to General Paul Conrath, to "tribuno militum Julio Schlegel" and "Maximiliano Becker medecinae doctori" "for rescuing the monks and treasures of the Abbey of Monte Cassino".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33088
| 353,987 |
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The Gallic were unable to sustain their strategy, however, and Vercingetorix was to become trapped in Alesia, facing not divided sections or detachments of the Roman Army but Caesar's full force of approximately 70,000 men (50,000 legionaries plus numerous additional auxiliary cavalry and infantry). This massive concentration of Romans was able to besiege the fortress in detail and repulse Gallic relief forces, and it fell in little more than a month. Vercingetorix overall persisting logistics policy, however, demonstrates a significant level of strategic thinking. As historian A. Goldsworthy (2006) notes: "His [Vercingetorix's] strategy was considerably more sophisticated than that employed by Caesar's earlier opponents..." At Alesia this mobile approach became overly static. The Gauls gave battle at a place where they were inadequately provisioned for an extended siege, and where Caesar could bring his "entire" field force to bear on a single point without them being dissipated, and where his lines of supply were not effectively interdicted. At Gergovia by contrast, Caesar's strength was divided by the appearance of another Gallic force in his rear (the Aeudans) threatening his sources and lines of supply. Together with a strong defensive anvil, (the town) supported by an offensive hammer (the open field forces), and coupled with previous resource denial pressure over time, the Romans were forced to retreat, and the Gallic secured a victory. As one historian notes about the persisting strategy:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=30855309
| 762,754 |
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The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the evolution of biological complexity anywhere in the universe requires the coincidence of a large number of fortuitous circumstances, including, among others, a galactic habitable zone; a central star and planetary system having the requisite character (i.e. a circumstellar habitable zone); a terrestrial planet of the right mass; the advantage of one or more gas giant guardians like Jupiter and possibly a large natural satellite to shield the planet from frequent impact events; conditions needed to ensure the planet has a magnetosphere and plate tectonics; a chemistry similar to that present in the Earth's lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans; the influence of periodic "evolutionary pumps" such as massive glaciations and bolide impacts; and whatever factors may have led to the emergence of eukaryotic cells, sexual reproduction, and the Cambrian explosion of animal, plant, and fungi phyla. The evolution of human beings and of human intelligence may have required yet further specific events and circumstances, all of which are extremely unlikely to have happened were it not for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago removing dinosaurs as the dominant terrestrial vertebrates.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=827792
| 214,777 |
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Cox starts this episode in Al-Qayrawan, Tunisia to analyse the orbit of the planets around our Sun, with details on how the 23-degree tilt of the Earth creates the seasonal weather patterns. He also visits the Atlas Mountains, and relates how in clear night skies the ancients observed the rotation of the stars and the retrograde and prograde motion of Mars and the other wandering planets. In Oklahoma, US, he discusses the universal reach of the Coriolis effect and the importance of the conservation of angular momentum. Next, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he examines how the "Cassini–Huygens" space-probe's imagery provides an insight on the highly complex structure of the ice rings of Saturn, and its diverse array of moons, and how they can reveal insights into the formation and evolution of the Solar System. He also explains how Enceladus, as the most reflective object in the known universe, has been of interest due to its continental divide-like canyons and geysers (as also observed in parts of Iceland). In the Sahara Desert the formative effect of winds on sand-dune morphology is paralleled to that of the gravitational effect of Saturn's 61 known moons on the matter that composite the rings - a phenomenon called orbital resonance.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=26634059
| 1,424,571 |
133,710 |
For example, in the case of anthrax, it is likely that by 24–36 hours after an attack, some small percentage of individuals (those with the compromised immune system or who had received a large dose of the organism due to proximity to the release point) will become ill with classical symptoms and signs (including a virtually unique chest X-ray finding, often recognized by public health officials if they receive timely reports). The incubation period for humans is estimated to be about 11.8 days to 12.1 days. This suggested period is the first model that is independently consistent with data from the largest known human outbreak. These projections refine previous estimates of the distribution of early-onset cases after a release and support a recommended 60-day course of prophylactic antibiotic treatment for individuals exposed to low doses of anthrax. By making these data available to local public health officials in real time, most models of anthrax epidemics indicate that more than 80% of an exposed population can receive antibiotic treatment before becoming symptomatic, and thus avoid the moderately high mortality of the disease.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4361
| 133,657 |
1,015,041 |
All the recent advances in molecular genetics clearly permit the analysis of microbial communities at much finer and functional scales and potentially with more confidence than previous methods. The classical AM fungal identification method of spore extraction from soil and further spore morphological analysis is fraught with complicating issues due to the various strategies and forms of AM fungi, e.g., lack of sporulation in certain species, seasonality, high unculturability, possible misidentification (human error), and new evidence of multi-nucleate spores and high genetic variation within clonal AM species. Because of these various problems, in the past researchers likely misrepresented the true composition of AM fungal communities present at any one point in time or place. Additionally, by following the traditional extraction, culture and microscopic identification methods, there is no way to determine active/functioning AM fungal populations, which are likely the most important when attempting to relate plant-AM symbiotic interactions and mechanisms to ecological or ecosystem function. This is especially true in the case of root colonization analyses, which can determine percentage of roots colonized by AM fungi. The major problem with this analysis is in field soils, which contain multiple species of AM fungi in association with a target plant at the same time (see Ecology of AM). The identification of the associated fungal symbionts is impossible without the use of molecular methods. Though genetic analysis of AM fungal communities has advanced a great deal in the past decade, the methodology is not yet completely refined. Below is an overview of the methods used in molecular genetic analyses of AM fungi, along with applications to research, future directions and some of their problems.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=1372958
| 1,014,520 |
1,890,510 |
In early 1942 SIB became part of the "Fleet Radio Unit, Melbourne", (FRUMEL), an "inter-naval" (joint American-Australian-British) cryptographic unit, and moved to the "Monterey" apartment building in Queens Road. FRUMEL was commanded by USN Lieutenant Rudolph Fabian, formerly of Station CAST in the Philippines. Despite continued success (Nave had warned, a month before it happened, that the Australian base at Milne Bay, at the eastern tip of New Guinea, was to be invaded in late August 1942, so the base was reinforced, and the subsequent Battle of Milne Bay was decisively won by U.S. and Australian forces – the first time the Japanese had been defeated on land by the Allies) Nave was reportedly forced out of FRUMEL and "Monterey" by Fabian, who apparently regarded him as a "security risk", because Nave wanted to cooperate with the "inter-army" unit, the Central Bureau, based at Brisbane. According to his staff, Nave often kept keys to new codes passed on by the Americans and British to himself, which might have been acceptable as a training exercise in peacetime, but not in time of war. Treweek said: "We always looked forward to his day off. We'd get the keys to his safe and find all this material in there." Nave also had difficulties with his superior, Commander Rupert B. M. Long, the Director of Naval Intelligence, whom he considered a man of no great ability.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=24946564
| 1,889,427 |
1,703,730 |
The Technical University of Košice (TUKE) is an internationally recognized research and education institution that provides education and smart solutions for various areas of life. TUKE has been ranked in the world’s top university rankings, such as: QS World University Rankings, in which TUKE ranked for the first time and in the top 1000, URAP-University Ranking by Academic Performance, SCIMAGO, Webometrics and others. With a total area of 43 hectares and with three campuses in two regional cities, it is one of the largest universities in Slovakia. Thanks to the interconnection of its nine faculties with a diverse focus, TUKE creates a unique environment for thousands of students. More than 10 per cent of them are foreign students from 40 countries. TUKE offers a wide range of appealing study programs. It works closely with other educational institutions and industrial facilities at home and abroad (95 university partnerships with 27 countries and 281 valid agreements enabling mobility of our teachers and students within the Erasmus+ program to 31 countries). The support of young innovators is covered by the University Science Park TECHNICOM through the TUKE Startup Centre and TUKE Incubator. TUKE also offers other extra-curricular activities which are worth mentioning: more than 30 kinds of sports, choir, ensemble, student television, radio, and AIESEC, AZU, BEST and IAESTE membership.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9977754
| 1,702,774 |
1,195,653 |
Mantell returned to Lewes at age 15. With the help of a local Whig party leader, Mantell secured an apprenticeship with a local surgeon named James Moore. He served as an apprentice to Moore in Lewes for a period of five years, in which he took care of Mantell's dining, lodging and medical issues. Mantell's early apprenticeship duties included cleaning vials, as well as separating and arranging drugs. Soon, he learned how to make pills and other pharmaceutical products. He delivered Moore's medicines, kept his accounts, wrote out bills and extracted teeth from his patients. On 11 July 1807, Thomas Mantell died at the age of 57. He left his son some money for his future studies. As his time in apprenticeship began to wind down, he began to anticipate his medical education. He began to teach himself human anatomy, and he ultimately detailed his new-found knowledge in a volume entitled "The Anatomy of the Bones, and the Circulation of Blood", which contained dozens of detailed drawings of fetal and adult skeletal features. Soon, Mantell began his formal medical education in London. He received his diploma as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1811. Four days later, he received a certificate from the Lying-in Charity for Married Women at Their Own Habitations that allowed him to act in midwifery duties.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=327498
| 1,195,013 |
772,457 |
MOFs have potential as heterogeneous catalysts, although applications have not been commercialized. Their high surface area, tunable porosity, diversity in metal and functional groups make them especially attractive for use as catalysts. Zeolites are extraordinarily useful in catalysis. Zeolites are limited by the fixed tetrahedral coordination of the Si/Al connecting points and the two-coordinated oxide linkers. Fewer than 200 zeolites are known. In contrast with this limited scope, MOFs exhibit more diverse coordination geometries, polytopic linkers, and ancillary ligands (F, OH, HO among others). It is also difficult to obtain zeolites with pore sizes larger than 1 nm, which limits the catalytic applications of zeolites to relatively small organic molecules (typically no larger than xylenes). Furthermore, mild synthetic conditions typically employed for MOF synthesis allow direct incorporation of delicate functionalities into the framework structures. Such a process would not be possible with zeolites or other microporous crystalline oxide-based materials because of the harsh conditions typically used for their synthesis (e.g., calcination at high temperatures to remove organic templates). Metal-Organic Framework MIL-101 is one of the most used MOFs for catalysis incorporating different transition metals such as Cr. However, the stability of some MOF photocatalysts in aqueous medium and under strongly oxidizing conditions is very low.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9821563
| 772,043 |
1,747,374 |
Willian Henry Harvey (1811–1866), Keeper of the Herbarium and professor in botany at Trinity College, Dublin, was one of the most distinguished algologists of his time (Papenfuss, 1976 p. 26). Apart from Ireland he visited South Africa, the Atlantic seaboard of America as far south as the Florida Keys on the east coast of North America and Australia (1854–1856). Between 1853 and 1856 he visited Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand and various parts of the South Pacific (Huisman, 2000 & Papenfuss, 1976). His collection in Australia resulted in one of the most extensive collections of marine plants and it inspired others (Huisman, 2000). He published: "Nereis Australis Or Algae of the Southern Ocean" in 1847–1849 and in 1846–51 his "Phycologia Britannica" appeared. His "Nereis Boreali-Americana" was published in three parts (1852–1858) this was the first, and still is (1976) is the only marine algal flora of North America as it includes taxa from the Pacific coast (Papenfuss, 1976 p. 27). His five-volume "Phycologia Australica" was published in 1858 to 1863. These volumes remain to this day a most important reference to Australian algae (Huisman, 2000). His primary herbarium is in Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). However large collections of Harvey material are to be found in the Ulster Museum (BEL) (Morton, 1977; Morton, 1981); University of St Andrews (STA) and National Herbarium of Victoria (MEL), Melbourne, Australia (May, 1977). Many of the collectors of this period sent, and exchanged, specimens freely one to another, as a result Harvey's books show a remarkable knowledge of the distribution of algae elsewhere in the world. His "Phycologia Britannica" lists species recorded and collected from various parts of the British Isles. For example, he notes William Thompson (1805–1852), William McCalla (c.1814–1849), John Templeton (1766–1825) and D. Landsborough (1779–1854) who collected, as he did, from distinct sites in Ireland. The collections of these botanists, and many others, are represented separately by collections in the Ulster Museum (BEL).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7587938
| 1,746,388 |
1,642,375 |
Near the end of the 18th century, workers operating saltpeter vats in a cave then considered part of Greenbrier County, Virginia discovered fossil limb bones. In 1796, man named John Stuart sent these remains to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson recognized them as being from a genus unknown to science and named the creature "Megalonyx". The cave from which these fossils were taken later came to be identified with Organ Cave. Since the industrial revolution, the process of mining coal has responsible for many discoveries of fossil trackways. Some have been discovered serendipitously in West Virginia. Such discoveries frequently occur when the excavation of coal mines removes the rock underlying the trackway, leaving it exposed on the tunnel's ceiling. More recently, in 1990, Frederick A. Sundberg, and other colleagues erected the new ichnospecies "Hylopus hamesi" to hold fossil amphibian footprints from the latest Mississippian Bluefield Formation. This ichnospecies represented the oldest evidence for terrestrial vertebrates in the eastern United States. Based on the anatomy of the foot responsible for the traces, the researchers concluded that the tracks were left by anthracosaurs, possibly the species "Protergyrinus scheelei", which was also known from West Virginia's Mississippian deposits. Variations in the structure of the trackways suggested that some of them were left while the animal was swimming, and thus the tracks suggest it was capable of walking on land and swimming underwater.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37798914
| 1,641,448 |
2,062,058 |
The signature event in the history of Canadian oceanography was the founding of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Instrumental in the establishment was Dr. W. E. van Steenburgh, Director-General of Scientific Services of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, who recognized the need for scientific organization to deal with questions relating to defence, sovereignty, fisheries and the environment. As a result of his initiative the Institute and was created in 1962 and acquired the new state-of-the-art research vessel, the CCGS Hudson. In many ways the story of the Institute is the story of that ship. Launched in 1962 and commissioned in 1964 the Hudson undertook five geophysical surveys of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, contributing to the understanding of the new theory of continental drift. In the 1966 the Hudson carried out a detailed survey of the Labrador Sea and studies of the Labrador current. The following year it surveyed the Denmark Strait. In 1970 the ship undertook the "Hudson '70' voyage, an 11-month, first ever, circumnavigation of North and South America and in the latter part of the decade carried out the first surveys of the chemistry of Baffin Bay. In the eighties and nineties surveys within the framework of the international Joint Global Ocean Fluxes Study and World Ocean Circulation Experiment were completed by the Hudson. Other research projects included the 1983 Canadian Expedition to Study the Alpha Ridge (CESAR) off of Ellesmere Island.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=18401364
| 2,060,868 |
2,112,913 |
The westerlies are prevailing winds in the middle latitudes (between 35 and 65 degrees latitude), which blow in regions north or southward of the high-pressure sub-tropical regions of the world. Consequently, aerosols sampled over the North Atlantic Ocean will be influenced by air masses originating in North America, and therefore be characterized by both the natural terrestrial and anthropogenic inputs. Relevant to NAAMES are the emissions from industry and urban environments in eastern North America, which emit substantial quantities of sulfates, black carbon, and aromatic compounds. Such substances can be transported hundreds of kilometers over the sea. This contribution of continental influences may create a false positive signal in the biological fluorescence signals being measured and could affect cloud microphysical properties in the open North Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, aerosols such as black carbon mixed with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted through the impartial combustion of fossil fuels from ship engines. These unburned hydrocarbons are present in the marine boundary layer of the North Atlantic and most other remote oceanic regions. As these particles age or are chemically transformed as a function of time in the air, they may alter microphysical and chemical properties as they react with other airborne particles.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=62264747
| 2,111,698 |
2,021,752 |
The important research work of William H. Wehlau, staff, and students could not be summarized better than the obituary written by Bill's last graduating PhD student, Professor Jaymie Matthews, when he wrote, after Bill's sudden death in 1995, "Bill laid the foundation for many of the astronomical period-searching techniques we take for granted today. His 1964 paper with Kam-Ching Leung (ApJ 139, 843) on the multiple periods of Delta Delphini was the first published use of Fourier integral techniques to interpret stellar light curves. The quality and quantity of data (25 nights of three-colour photometry) and sophistication of the fit (a sum of 6 cosines) would not be out of place in the modern literature on asteroseismology of Delta Scuti variables (see his paper in these Proceedings). In the next decade, Bill again was a pioneer; this time in stellar surface imaging through inversion of spectral line-profile variations into abundance and temperature maps of Ap stars. Such techniques are now widely used to analyse high-degree NRP in rapid rotators. By the 1980s, Bill's diverse interests in pulsation and spectral peculiarity converged in the rapidly oscillating Ap stars. He played key roles in the first detection of velocity oscillations in an roAp (rotating Ap) star and in translating optical-IR photometry of roAp pulsations into the first empirical atmospheric temperature profile for a star other than the Sun."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=61505618
| 2,020,589 |
719,261 |
From 1974 through the mid-1980s the United States government worked with industry to advance the technology and enable large commercial wind turbines. The NASA wind turbines were developed under a program to create a utility-scale wind turbine industry in the U.S. With funding from the National Science Foundation and later the United States Department of Energy (DOE), a total of 13 experimental wind turbines were put into operation, in four major wind turbine designs. This research and development program pioneered many of the multi-megawatt turbine technologies in use today, including: steel tube towers, variable-speed generators, composite blade materials, partial-span pitch control, as well as aerodynamic, structural, and acoustic engineering design capabilities. The large wind turbines developed under this effort set several world records for diameter and power output. The MOD-2 wind turbine cluster of three turbines produced 7.5 megawatts of power in 1981. In 1987, the MOD-5B was the largest single wind turbine operating in the world with a rotor diameter of nearly 100 meters and a rated power of 3.2 megawatts. It demonstrated an availability of 95 percent, an unparalleled level for a new first-unit wind turbine. The MOD-5B had the first large-scale variable speed drive train and a sectioned, two-blade rotor that enabled easy transport of the blades. The 4 megawatt WTS-4 held the world record for power output for over 20 years. Although the later units were sold commercially, none of these two-bladed machines were ever put into mass production. When oil prices declined by a factor of three from 1980 through the early 1990s, many turbine manufacturers, both large and small, left the business. The commercial sales of the NASA/Boeing Mod-5B, for example, came to an end in 1987 when Boeing Engineering and Construction announced they were "planning to leave the market because low oil prices are keeping windmills for electricity generation uneconomical."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=8312093
| 718,881 |
305,237 |
Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez as president in Venezuela and the beginnings of his "Bolivarian Revolution" aimed at creating greater equality, Latin American nations have seen a tide of democratically elected socialist and centre-left governments emerge. They have been elected in increasing numbers as the poor and middle classes of many countries have become increasingly disillusioned with the neoliberal economic policies still encouraged by the United States and as a very large gap continues to exist between rich and poor, denying millions of people basic opportunities and necessities. A long and very controversial history of U.S. military and political intervention in the region dating back to the 19th century has severely tarnished the image of the United States in the eyes of many Latin Americans and shapes governments' policies to this day. A recent example of the influence of the aforementioned sentiment was the Latin American and Caribbean Congress in Solidarity with Puerto Rico's Independence, an international summit held at Panama City, Panama, in which fifteen incumbent political parties (in government) requested that the United States "relinquish its colonial rule over said island-nation and recognise Puerto Rico's independence". Chavez is joined by the democratic socialist president of Bolivia, Evo Morales (that nation's first indigenous leader), who has adopted strong reformist agendas and attracted overwhelming majority electoral victories. The democratically elected president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa is also an ally of Chavez. Correa describes himself as a humanist, Christian of the left and proponent of socialism of the 21st century.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=47246185
| 305,074 |
1,667,393 |
The beginning of the Pacific War—and the rapid advance of Japanese forces—threatened the Australian mainland for the first time. The RAAF was quite unprepared for the emergency, and initially had negligible forces available for service in the Pacific. Its four squadrons based in Malaya – Nos. 1, 8, 21 and 453 – equipped with a mixture of Hudsons, Wirraways and Buffalos, were the first to go into combat, but they suffered heavily against Japanese during the Malayan Campaign and the subsequent fighting on Singapore, highlighting the fact that the Japanese held the upper hand in the air. The devastating air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942 – launched from four aircraft carriers stationed in the Timor Sea – drove the point home. Defended by a small force of just 18 Wirraways and 14 Hudsons from two squadrons – Nos. 12 and 13 – the town was heavily damaged with the loss of 10 ships, 23 aircraft and a death toll of several hundred. The British Air Ministry transferred two RAAF fighter squadrons, No. 452 Squadron and No. 457 Squadron, along with No. 54 Squadron RAF, from Britain to Australia for the defence of Darwin. The other 15 squadrons remained in the northern hemisphere until the end of the war. Shortages of fighter and ground attack planes led to the acquisition of US-built P-40 Kittyhawks, and the rapid design and manufacture of the first Australian fighter, the CAC Boomerang. RAAF Kittyhawks, such as those operated by Nos. 75, 76 and 77 Squadrons, came to play a crucial role in the New Guinea and Solomon Islands campaigns, especially in the Battle of Milne Bay and in the Kokoda Track campaign.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=3630911
| 1,666,454 |
364,166 |
The ability of diatoms to make silica-based cell walls has been the subject of fascination for centuries. It started with a microscopic observation by an anonymous English country nobleman in 1703, who observed an object that looked like a chain of regular parallelograms and debated whether it was just crystals of salt, or a plant. The viewer decided that it was a plant because the parallelograms didn't separate upon agitation, nor did they vary in appearance when dried or subjected to warm water (in an attempt to dissolve the "salt"). Unknowingly, the viewer's confusion captured the essence of diatoms—mineral utilizing plants. It is not clear when it was determined that diatom cell walls are made of silica, but in 1939 a seminal reference characterized the material as silicic acid in a "subcolloidal" state Identification of the main chemical component of the cell wall spurred investigations into how it was made. These investigations have involved, and been propelled by, diverse approaches including, microscopy, chemistry, biochemistry, material characterisation, molecular biology, 'omics, and transgenic approaches. The results from this work have given a better understanding of cell wall formation processes, establishing fundamental knowledge which can be used to create models that contextualise current findings and clarify how the process works.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46374
| 363,976 |
1,233,822 |
Impurity ions may move from the cold side of a semiconductor wafer towards the hot side, since the higher temperature makes the transition structure required for atomic jumps more achievable. The diffusive flux may occur in either direction (either up or down the temperature gradient), dependent on the materials involved. Thermophoretic force has been used in commercial precipitators for applications similar to electrostatic precipitators. It is exploited in the manufacturing of optical fiber in vacuum deposition processes. It can be important as a transport mechanism in fouling. Thermophoresis has also been shown to have potential in facilitating drug discovery by allowing the detection of aptamer binding by comparison of the bound versus unbound motion of the target molecule. This approach has been termed microscale thermophoresis. Furthermore, thermophoresis has been demonstrated as a versatile technique for manipulating single biological macromolecules, such as genomic-length DNA, and HIV virus in micro- and nanochannels by means of light-induced local heating. Thermophoresis is one of the methods used to separate different polymer particles in field flow fractionation.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7170579
| 1,233,159 |
509,898 |
Ionization processes require energy above 10 eV, while splitting covalent bonds in molecules and generating free radicals requires only 3-4 eV. The electrical discharges initiated by the ionization events by the particles result in plasma populated by large amount of free radicals. The highly reactive free radicals can recombine back to original molecules, or initiate a chain of free-radical polymerization reactions with other molecules, yielding compounds with increasing molecular weight. These high molecular weight compounds then precipitate from gaseous phase, forming conductive or non-conductive deposits on the electrodes and insulating surfaces of the detector and distorting its response. Gases containing hydrocarbon quenchers, e.g. argon–methane, are typically sensitive to aging by polymerization; addition of oxygen tends to lower the aging rates. Trace amounts of silicone oils, present from outgassing of silicone elastomers and especially from traces of silicone lubricants, tend to decompose and form deposits of silicon crystals on the surfaces. Gaseous mixtures of argon (or xenon) with carbon dioxide and optionally also with 2-3% of oxygen are highly tolerant to high radiation fluxes. The oxygen is added as noble gas with carbon dioxide has too high transparency for high-energy photons; ozone formed from the oxygen is a strong absorber of ultraviolet photons. Carbon tetrafluoride can be used as a component of the gas for high-rate detectors; the fluorine radicals produced during the operation however limit the choice of materials for the chambers and electrodes (e.g. gold electrodes are required, as the fluorine radicals attack metals, forming fluorides). Addition of carbon tetrafluoride can however eliminate the silicon deposits. Presence of hydrocarbons with carbon tetrafluoride leads to polymerization. A mixture of argon, carbon tetrafluoride, and carbon dioxide shows low aging in high hadron flux.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=9934503
| 509,634 |
2,013,004 |
Kell's primary research interests are in systems biology, synthetic biology and computational biology. He has also been heavily involved in the development of multivariate scientific instrumentation and the attendant machine learning software (his first paper on artificial neural networks was in 1992). He has written extensively on the role of microbes as agents of supposedly 'non-communicable', chronic infectious diseases. His publications are mostly open access and are very widely cited, with an H-index at Google Scholar in excess of 120. According to Google Scholar his most cited peer-reviewed research papers are in functional genomics, metabolomics and the yeast genome. He has also been involved in research to create a robot scientist in collaboration with Ross King, Stephen Muggleton and Steve Oliver, as well as several projects in systems biology. He is heavily involved in the study of membrane transporters, and their necessary involvement in the transmembrane uptake of pharmaceutical drugs. He tends to choose scientific problems in which the prevailing orthodoxy is clearly incorrect. To this end, he has recently returned to the study of bioenergetics, summarising the detailed evidence against the prevailing wisdom of chemiosmotic coupling in oxidative and photosynthetic phosphorylation, replacing it with a protet-based model.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=21091411
| 2,011,847 |
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