Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Bridges and Tunnels

The Magdeburg Water Bridge (German: Kanalbrücke Magdeburg) is a large navigable aqueduct in central Germany, located near Magdeburg. The largest canal underbridge in Europe, it spans the river Elbe and directly connects the Mittellandkanal to the west and Elbe-Havel Canal to the east of the river, allowing large commercial ships to pass between the Rhineland and Berlin without having to descend into and then climb out of the Elbe itself.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Domain tasting is the practice of temporarily registering a domain under the five-day Add Grace Period at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second-level domain. During this period, a registration must be fully refunded by the domain name registry if cancelled. This was designed to address accidental registrations, but domain tasters use the Add Grace Period for illegal purposes.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Companies 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Business 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Military history/Military historiography

Jane's Information Group, now styled Janes, is a global open-source intelligence company specialising in military, national security, aerospace and transport topics, whose name derives from British author Fred T. Jane.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Geology 🔗 Glaciers 🔗 Solar System

The 774–775 carbon-14 spike is an observed increase of 1.2% in the concentration of carbon-14 isotope in tree rings dated to 774 or 775, which is about 20 times as high as the normal background rate of variation. It was discovered during a study of Japanese cedar trees, with the year of occurrence determined through dendrochronology. A surge in beryllium isotope ¹⁰
Be, detected in Antarctic ice cores, has also been associated with the 774–775 event. It is known as the Miyake event or the Charlemagne event and it produced the largest and most rapid rise in carbon-14 ever recorded.

The event appears to have been global, with the same carbon-14 signal found in tree rings from Germany, Russia, the United States, Finland and New Zealand.

The signal exhibits a sharp increase of around 1.2% followed by a slow decline (see Figure 1), which is typical for an instant production of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, indicating that the event was short in duration. The globally averaged production of carbon-14 for this event is calculated as Q = 1.3×10⁸ ± 0.2×10⁸ atoms/cm².

🔗 Computing

Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and is called "the first artificial intelligence program". It would eventually prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and find new and more elegant proofs for some.

🔗 New York City 🔗 Engineering

The Citicorp Center engineering crisis was the discovery, in 1978, of a significant structural flaw in Citicorp Center, then a recently completed skyscraper in New York City, and the subsequent effort to quietly make repairs over the next few months. The building, now known as Citigroup Center, occupied an entire block and was to be the headquarters of Citibank. Its structure, designed by William LeMessurier, had several unusual design features, including a raised base supported by four offset stilts, and diagonal bracing which absorbed wind loads from upper stories.

In the original design, potential wind loads for the building were calculated incorrectly. The flaw was discovered by Diane Hartley, an undergraduate student at Princeton University who was writing a thesis on the building, and was communicated to the firm responsible for the structural design. LeMessurier was subsequently lauded for acknowledging his error and orchestrating a successful repair effort. Estimates at the time suggested that the building could be toppled by a 70-mile-per-hour (110 km/h) wind, with possibly many people killed as a result. The crisis was kept secret until 1995 and Hartley had no knowledge of the significance of her work until after that time.

🔗 France 🔗 Death

The Great Plague of Marseille was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in western Europe. Arriving in Marseille, France in 1720, the disease killed a total of 100,000 people: 50,000 in the city during the next two years and another 50,000 to the north in surrounding provinces and towns.

While economic activity took only a few years to recover, as trade expanded to the West Indies and Latin America, it was not until 1765 that the population returned to its pre-1720 level.

🔗 Neuroscience

Saccadic masking, also known as (visual) saccadic suppression, is the phenomenon in visual perception where the brain selectively blocks visual processing during eye movements in such a way that neither the motion of the eye (and subsequent motion blur of the image) nor the gap in visual perception is noticeable to the viewer.

The phenomenon was first described by Erdmann and Dodge in 1898, when it was noticed during unrelated experiments that an observer could never see the motion of their own eyes. This can easily be duplicated by looking into a mirror, and looking from one eye to another. The eyes can never be observed in motion, yet an external observer clearly sees the motion of the eyes.

The phenomenon is often used to help explain a temporal illusion by the name of chronostasis, which momentarily occurs following a rapid eye-movement.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Disability 🔗 South Africa 🔗 Primates

Jack (died 1890) was a chacma baboon, who attained some fame for acting as an assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa.

🔗 Caves

Snottite, also snoticle, is a microbial mat of single-celled extremophilic bacteria which hang from the walls and ceilings of caves and are similar to small stalactites, but have the consistency of nasal mucus. In the Frasassi Caves in Italy, over 70% of cells in Snottite have been identified as Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans, with smaller populations including an archaeon in the uncultivated 'G-plasma' clade of Thermoplasmatales (>15%) and a bacterium in the Acidimicrobiaceae family (>5%).

The bacteria derive their energy from chemosynthesis of volcanic sulfur compounds including H₂S and warm-water solution dripping down from above, producing sulfuric acid. Because of this, their waste products are highly acidic (approaching pH=0), with similar properties to battery acid. Researchers at the University of Texas have suggested that this sulfuric acid may be a more significant cause of cave formation than the usual explanation offered of the carbonic acid formed from carbon dioxide dissolved in water.

Snottites were brought to attention by researchers Diana Northup and Penny Boston studying them (and other organisms) in a toxic sulfur cave called Cueva de Villa Luz (Cave of the Lighted House), in Tabasco, Mexico. Snottites were first discovered in this cave by Jim Pisarowicz in 1986, who also coined the term.

The BBC series Wonders of the Solar System saw Professor Brian Cox examining snottites and positing that if there is life on Mars, it may be similarly primitive and hidden beneath the surface of the Red Planet.