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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Primates 🔗 Animal rights

Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the Hominidae or great ape family: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

Advocates include primatologists Jane Goodall and Dawn Prince-Hughes, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosophers Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, and legal scholar Steven Wise.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Languages 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia

Dené–Yeniseian is a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia and the Na-Dené languages of northwestern North America.

Reception among experts has been largely, though not universally, favorable; thus, Dené–Yeniseian has been called "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative-historical linguistics," besides the Eskimo–Aleut languages spoken in far eastern Siberia and North America.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Energy

Thorium-based nuclear power generation is fueled primarily by the nuclear fission of the isotope uranium-233 produced from the fertile element thorium. According to proponents, a thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle—including much greater abundance of thorium found on Earth, superior physical and nuclear fuel properties, and reduced nuclear waste production. However, development of thorium power has significant start-up costs. Proponents also cite the low weaponization potential as an advantage of thorium due to how difficult it is to weaponize the specific uranium-233/232 and plutonium-238 isotopes produced by thorium reactors, while critics say that development of breeder reactors in general (including thorium reactors, which are breeders by nature) increases proliferation concerns. As of 2020, there are no operational thorium reactors in the world.

A nuclear reactor consumes certain specific fissile isotopes to produce energy. Currently, the most common types of nuclear reactor fuel are:

• Uranium-235, purified (i.e. "enriched") by reducing the amount of uranium-238 in natural mined uranium. Most nuclear power has been generated using low-enriched uranium (LEU), whereas high-enriched uranium (HEU) is necessary for weapons.
• Plutonium-239, transmuted from uranium-238 obtained from natural mined uranium.

Some believe thorium is key to developing a new generation of cleaner, safer nuclear power. According to a 2011 opinion piece by a group of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, considering its overall potential, thorium-based power "can mean a 1000+ year solution or a quality low-carbon bridge to truly sustainable energy sources solving a huge portion of mankind’s negative environmental impact."

After studying the feasibility of using thorium, nuclear scientists Ralph W. Moir and Edward Teller suggested that thorium nuclear research should be restarted after a three-decade shutdown and that a small prototype plant should be built.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981.

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that such messages be constructed at several levels of complexity. They suggested that the sites should include foreboding physical features which would immediately convey to future visitors that the site was both man-made and dangerous, as well as providing pictographic information attempting to convey some details of the danger, and written explanations for those able to read it.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

Shamir's Secret Sharing is an algorithm in cryptography created by Adi Shamir. It is a form of secret sharing, where a secret is divided into parts, giving each participant its own unique part.

To reconstruct the original secret, a minimum number of parts is required. In the threshold scheme this number is less than the total number of parts. Otherwise all participants are needed to reconstruct the original secret.

🔗 Mathematics

The 15-puzzle (also called Gem Puzzle, Boss Puzzle, Game of Fifteen, Mystic Square and many others) is a sliding puzzle that consists of a frame of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing. The puzzle also exists in other sizes, particularly the smaller 8-puzzle. If the size is 3×3 tiles, the puzzle is called the 8-puzzle or 9-puzzle, and if 4×4 tiles, the puzzle is called the 15-puzzle or 16-puzzle named, respectively, for the number of tiles and the number of spaces. The object of the puzzle is to place the tiles in order by making sliding moves that use the empty space.

The n-puzzle is a classical problem for modelling algorithms involving heuristics. Commonly used heuristics for this problem include counting the number of misplaced tiles and finding the sum of the taxicab distances between each block and its position in the goal configuration. Note that both are admissible, i.e. they never overestimate the number of moves left, which ensures optimality for certain search algorithms such as A*.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

In condensed matter physics, Hofstadter's butterfly describes the spectral properties of non-interacting two dimensional electrons in a magnetic field. The fractal, self-similar, nature of the spectrum was discovered in the 1976 Ph.D. work of Douglas Hofstadter and is one of the early examples of computer graphics. The name reflects the visual resemblance of the figure on the right to a swarm of butterflies flying to infinity.

The Hofstadter butterfly plays an important role in the theory of the integer quantum Hall effect, and D.J. Thouless has been awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 2016 for the discovery that the wings of the butterfly are characterized by Chern integers, the quantized Hall conductances discovered in 1980 by Klaus von Klitzing for which he has been awarded the Nobel prize in 1985. The colors in the diagram reflect the different Chern numbers.

🔗 Insects 🔗 Diptera

Toxorhynchites, also called elephant mosquito or mosquito eater, is a genus of diurnal and often relatively colorful mosquitoes, found worldwide between about 35° north and 35° south. It includes the largest known species of mosquito, at up to 18 mm (0.71 in) in length and 24 mm (0.94 in) in wingspan. It is among the many kinds of mosquito that do not consume blood. The adults subsist on carbohydrate-rich materials, such as honeydew, or saps and juices from damaged plants, refuse, fruit, and nectar.

Their larvae prey on the larvae of other mosquitoes and similar nektonic prey, making Toxorhynchites beneficial to humans. In this respect, they contrast with blood-sucking species of mosquitoes. Toxorhynchites larvae live on a protein- and fat-rich diet of aquatic animals such as mosquito larvae. They have no need to risk their lives sucking blood in adulthood, having already accumulated the necessary materials for oogenesis and vitellogenesis.

Most species occur in forests. The larvae of one jungle variety, Toxorhynchites splendens, consume larvae of other mosquito species occurring in tree crevices, particularly Aedes aegypti.

Unlike Toxorhynchites mosquitoes, detritus feeder mosquito female larvae rely on blood meals to produce eggs more plentifully than a diet of nectar would permit. And even though blood sucking is a risky strategy that entails more casualties, and they could in principle subsist on nectar and the like as their males generally do, the risk is outweighed on average by the increase in the number and size of yolk-rich eggs that such protein-rich food permit.

Environmental scientists have suggested that Toxorhynchites mosquitoes be introduced to areas outside their natural range in order to fight dengue fever. This has been practiced historically, but errors have been made. For example, when intending to introduce T. splendens to new areas, scientists actually introduced T. amboinensis. An extinct species is known from Miocene aged Mexican Amber