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🔗 Medicine 🔗 COVID-19 🔗 Medicine/Pulmonology 🔗 Medicine/Cardiology

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), also known as extracorporeal life support (ECLS), is an extracorporeal technique of providing prolonged cardiac and respiratory support to persons whose heart and lungs are unable to provide an adequate amount of gas exchange or perfusion to sustain life. The technology for ECMO is largely derived from cardiopulmonary bypass, which provides shorter-term support with arrested native circulation. The device used is a membrane oxygenator, also known as an artificial lung.

ECMO works by temporarily drawing blood from the body to allow artificial oxygenation of the red blood cells and removal of carbon dioxide. Generally, it is used either post-cardiopulmonary bypass or in late-stage treatment of a person with profound heart and/or lung failure, although it is now seeing use as a treatment for cardiac arrest in certain centers, allowing treatment of the underlying cause of arrest while circulation and oxygenation are supported. ECMO is also used to support patients with the acute viral pneumonia associated with COVID-19 in cases where artificial ventilation alone is not sufficient to sustain blood oxygenation levels.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 History 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Spaceflight/Timeline of spaceflight working group 🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Rocketry 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

Spaceflight as a practical endeavor began during World War II with the development of operational liquid-fueled rockets. Beginning life as a weapon, the V-2 was pressed into peaceful service after the war at the United States' White Sands Missile Range as well as the Soviet Union's Kapustin Yar. This led to a flourishing of missile designs setting the stage for the exploration of space. The small American WAC Corporal rocket was evolved into the Aerobee, a much more powerful sounding rocket. Exploration of space began in earnest in 1947 with the flight of the first Aerobee, 46 of which had flown by the end of 1950. These and other rockets, both Soviet and American, returned the first direct data on air density, temperature, charged particles and magnetic fields in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

By 1948, the United States Navy had evolved the V-2 design into the Viking capable of more than 100 miles (160 km) in altitude. The first Viking to accomplish this feat, number four, did so 10 May 1950. The Soviet Union developed a virtual copy of the V-2 called the R-1, which first flew in 1948. Its longer-ranged successor, the R-2, entered military service in 1950. This event marked the entry of both superpowers into the post-V-2 rocketry era.

🔗 Electronic music 🔗 Music/Music genres

Lowercase is an extreme form of ambientminimalism where very quiet, usually unheard sounds are amplified to extreme levels. Minimal artist Steve Roden popularized the movement with an album entitled Forms of Paper, in which he made recordings of himself handling paper in various ways. These recordings were commissioned by the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Rocks and minerals 🔗 Chemicals/Chemicals worklist

Borax, also known as sodium borate, sodium tetraborate, or disodium tetraborate, is an important boron compound, a mineral, and a salt of boric acid. Powdered borax is white, consisting of soft colorless crystals that dissolve in water. A number of closely related minerals or chemical compounds that differ in their crystal water content are referred to as borax, and the word is usually used to refer to the octahydrate. Commercially sold borax is partially dehydrated.

Borax is a component of many detergents, cosmetics, and enamel glazes. It is used to make buffer solutions in biochemistry, as a fire retardant, as an anti-fungal compound, in the manufacture of fiberglass, as a flux in metallurgy, neutron-capture shields for radioactive sources, a texturing agent in cooking, as a cross-linking agent in Slime, as an alkali in photographic developers, as a precursor for other boron compounds, and along with its inverse, boric acid, is useful as an insecticide.

In artisanal gold mining, borax is sometimes used as part of a process (as a flux) meant to eliminate the need for toxic mercury in the gold extraction process, although it cannot directly replace mercury. Borax was reportedly used by gold miners in parts of the Philippines in the 1900s.

Borax was first discovered in dry lake beds in Tibet and was imported via the Silk Road to the Arabian Peninsula in the 8th century AD. Borax first came into common use in the late 19th century when Francis Marion Smith's Pacific Coast Borax Company began to market and popularize a large variety of applications under the 20 Mule Team Borax trademark, named for the method by which borax was originally hauled out of the California and Nevada deserts.

🔗 Biography 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Ships

The rescue of Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman occurred between 29 August and 1 September 1973 after their Vickers Oceanics small submersible Pisces III was trapped on the seabed at a depth of 1,575 ft (480 m), 150 mi (240 km) off Ireland in the Celtic Sea. The 76-hour multinational rescue effort resulted in the deepest sub rescue in history.

🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Car

Kei car (or keijidōsha, kanji: 軽自動車, "light automobile", pronounced [keːdʑidoːɕa]), known variously outside Japan as Japanese city car, ultramini, or Japanese microcar, is the Japanese vehicle category for the smallest highway-legal passenger cars. Similar Japanese categories exist for microvans, and kei trucks. These vehicles are most often the Japanese equivalent of the EU A-segment (city cars).

The kei-car category was created by the Japanese government in 1949, and the regulations have been revised several times since. These regulations specify a maximum vehicle size, engine capacity, and power output, so that owners may enjoy both tax and insurance benefits. In most rural areas they are also exempted from the requirement to certify that adequate parking is available for the vehicle.

Kei cars have become very successful in Japan, consisting of over one-third of domestic new-car sales in fiscal 2016, despite dropping from a record 40% market share in 2013, after the government increased the kei-car tax by 50% in 2014. In 2018, seven of the 10 top-selling models were kei cars, including the top four, all boxy passenger vans: Honda N-Box, Suzuki Spacia, Nissan Dayz, and Daihatsu Tanto. Isuzu is the only manufacturer that has never offered a kei-sized vehicle for either private ownership or commercial trucks and microvans.

In export markets, though, the genre is generally too specialized and too small for most models to be profitable. Notable exceptions exist, though, for instance the Suzuki Alto and Jimny models, which were exported consistently from around 1980. Kei cars are not only popular with the elderly, but they are also popular with youths because of their affordability.

Nearly all kei cars have been designed and manufactured in Japan, but a version of the French-made Smart was briefly imported and officially classified as a kei car, and since then, the British Caterham 7 160 has also received such classification.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 United States/Massachusetts 🔗 Mammals 🔗 Zoo

Hoover (c. 1971 – July 25, 1985) was a harbor seal who was able to imitate basic human speech.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Business

The Panic of 1907 – also known as the 1907 Bankers' Panic or Knickerbocker Crisis – was a financial crisis that took place in the United States over a three-week period starting in mid-October, when the New York Stock Exchange fell almost 50% from its peak the previous year. Panic occurred, as this was during a time of economic recession, and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies. The 1907 panic eventually spread throughout the nation when many state and local banks and businesses entered bankruptcy. Primary causes of the run included a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks and a loss of confidence among depositors, exacerbated by unregulated side bets at bucket shops.

The panic was triggered by the failed attempt in October 1907 to corner the market on stock of the United Copper Company. When this bid failed, banks that had lent money to the cornering scheme suffered runs that later spread to affiliated banks and trusts, leading a week later to the downfall of the Knickerbocker Trust Company—New York City's third-largest trust. The collapse of the Knickerbocker spread fear throughout the city's trusts as regional banks withdrew reserves from New York City banks. Panic extended across the nation as vast numbers of people withdrew deposits from their regional banks. It is the 9th largest decline in U.S. stock market history.

The panic might have deepened if not for the intervention of financier J. P. Morgan, who pledged large sums of his own money, and convinced other New York bankers to do the same, to shore up the banking system. This highlighted the impotence of the nation's Independent Treasury system, which managed the nation's money supply yet was unable to inject liquidity back into the market. By November, the financial contagion had largely ended, only to be replaced by a further crisis. This was due to the heavy borrowing of a large brokerage firm that used the stock of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TC&I) as collateral. Collapse of TC&I's stock price was averted by an emergency takeover by Morgan's U.S. Steel Corporation—a move approved by anti-monopolist president Theodore Roosevelt. The following year, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, a leading Republican, established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/Cryptocurrency

Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks, and more recently has become known for its use in bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) as part of the mining algorithm. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".

🔗 California 🔗 Technology 🔗 Politics 🔗 Objectivism 🔗 Politics/Libertarianism

"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism". In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.

The original essay was published in Mute magazine in 1995 and later appeared on the nettime Internet mailing list for debate. A final version was published in Science as Culture in 1996. The critique has since been revised in several different versions and languages.

Andrew Leonard of Salon called Barbrook & Cameron's work "one of the most penetrating critiques of neo-conservative digital hypesterism yet published."