Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Plants 🔗 Africa/Niger

The Ténéré Tree (French: L'Arbre du Ténéré) was a solitary acacia, of either Acacia raddiana or Acacia tortilis, that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth—the only one for over 400 kilometres (250 mi). It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert in northeast Niger, so well known that it and the Arbre Perdu (Lost Tree) to the north are the only trees to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. The Tree of Ténéré was located near a 40-metre (130 ft) deep well. It was knocked down in 1973, by a truck driver.

🔗 Poetry

"Fragments of Olympian Gossip" is a poem that Nikola Tesla composed in the late 1920s for his friend the German poet and mystic George Sylvester Viereck. It made fun of the scientific establishment of the day.

While listening on my cosmic phone
I caught words from the Olympus blown.
A newcomer was shown around;
That much I could guess, aided by sound.

"There's Archimedes with his lever
Still busy on problems as ever.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"Below, on Earth, they work at full blast
And news are coming in thick and fast.
The latest tells of a cosmic gun.
To be pelted is very poor fun.
We are wary with so much at stake,
Those beggars are a pest—no mistake."

"Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teaching all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"I am much too ignorant, my son,
For grasping schemes so finely spun.
My followers are of stronger mind
And I am content to stay behind,
Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,
These masters of mine may do the rest.
Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.
When is your friend Tesla coming up."

"Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,
It would be useless to remonstrate."

Then silence—shuffle of soft slippered feet—
I knock and—the bedlam of the street.

Nikola Tesla, Novice

🔗 Spaceflight

MOOSE, originally an acronym for Man Out Of Space Easiest but later changed to the more professional-sounding Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment, was a proposed emergency "bail-out" system capable of bringing a single astronaut safely down from Earth orbit to the planet's surface. The design was proposed by General Electric in the early 1960s. The system was quite compact, weighing 200 lb (91 kg) and fitting inside a suitcase-sized container. It consisted of a small twin-nozzle rocket motor sufficient to deorbit the astronaut, a PET film bag 6 ft (1.8 m) long with a flexible 0.25 in (6.4 mm) ablative heat shield on the back, two pressurized canisters to fill it with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.

The astronaut would leave the vehicle in a space suit, climb inside the plastic bag, and then fill it with foam. The bag had the shape of a blunt cone, with the astronaut embedded in its base facing the apex of the cone. The rocket pack would protrude from the bag and be used to slow the astronaut's orbital speed enough so that he would reenter Earth's atmosphere, and the foam-filled bag would act as insulation during the subsequent aerobraking. Finally, once the astronaut had descended to 30,000 ft (9.1 km) where the air was sufficiently dense, the parachute would automatically deploy and slow the astronaut's fall to 17 mph (7.6 m/s). The foam heat shield would serve a final role as cushioning when the astronaut touched down and as a flotation device should they land on water. The radio beacon would guide rescuers.

General Electric performed preliminary testing on some of the components of the MOOSE system, including flying samples of heat shield material on a Mercury mission, inflating a foam-filled bag with a human subject embedded inside, and test-dropping dummies and a human subject in MOOSE foam shields short distances. U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger's historic freefall from a balloon at 103,000 ft (31,000 m) in August 1960 also helped demonstrate the feasibility of such extreme parachuting. However, the MOOSE system was nonetheless always intended as an extreme emergency measure when no other option for returning an astronaut to Earth existed; falling from orbit protected by nothing more than a spacesuit and a bag of foam was unlikely to ever become a particularly safe—or enticing—maneuver.

Neither NASA nor the U.S. Air Force expressed an interest in the MOOSE system, and so by the end of the 1960s the program had been quietly shelved.

🔗 China 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants 🔗 Taiwan

Celtuce () (Lactuca sativa var. augustana, angustata, or asparagina), also called stem lettuce, celery lettuce, asparagus lettuce, or Chinese lettuce, is a cultivar of lettuce grown primarily for its thick stem or its leaves, which are known as A-choy. It is used as a vegetable. In China, the family is informally called woju (traditional Chinese: 萵苣; simplified Chinese: 莴苣; pinyin: wōjù), which is also the name of a cultivar. It is especially popular in both China and Taiwan, where the stem is interchangeably called wosun (traditional Chinese: 萵筍; simplified Chinese: 莴笋; pinyin: wōsǔn) or qingsun(青筍; 青笋; qīngsǔn).

🔗 Constructed languages

Lincos (an abbreviation of the Latin phrase lingua cosmica) is a constructed language first described in 1960 by Dr. Hans Freudenthal in his book Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1. It is a language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form, for use in interstellar radio transmissions. Freudenthal considered that such a language should be easily understood by beings not acquainted with any Earthling syntax or language. Lincos was designed to be capable of encapsulating "the whole bulk of our knowledge."

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Physiology

The effects of stress on memory include interference with a person's capacity to encode memory and the ability to retrieve information. Stimuli, like stress, improved memory when it was related to learning the subject. During times of stress, the body reacts by secreting stress hormones into the bloodstream. Stress can cause acute and chronic changes in certain brain areas which can cause long-term damage. Over-secretion of stress hormones most frequently impairs long-term delayed recall memory, but can enhance short-term, immediate recall memory. This enhancement is particularly relative in emotional memory. In particular, the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are affected. One class of stress hormone responsible for negatively affecting long-term, delayed recall memory is the glucocorticoids (GCs), the most notable of which is cortisol. Glucocorticoids facilitate and impair the actions of stress in the brain memory process. Cortisol is a known biomarker for stress. Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus regulates the production of cortisol through negative feedback because it has many receptors that are sensitive to these stress hormones. However, an excess of cortisol can impair the ability of the hippocampus to both encode and recall memories. These stress hormones are also hindering the hippocampus from receiving enough energy by diverting glucose levels to surrounding muscles.

Stress affects many memory functions and cognitive functioning of the brain. There are different levels of stress and the high levels can be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic stress level is triggered by a cognitive challenge whereas extrinsic can be triggered by a condition not related to a cognitive task. Intrinsic stress can be acutely and chronically experienced by a person. The varying effects of stress on performance or stress hormones are often compared to or known as "inverted-u" which induce areas in learning, memory and plasticity. Chronic stress can affect the brain structure and cognition.

Studies considered the effects of both intrinsic and extrinsic stress on memory functions, using for both of them Pavlovian conditioning and spatial learning. In regard to intrinsic memory functions, the study evaluated how stress affected memory functions that was triggered by a learning challenge. In regard to extrinsic stress, the study focused on stress that was not related to cognitive task but was elicited by other situations. The results determined that intrinsic stress was facilitated by memory consolidation process and extrinsic stress was determined to be heterogeneous in regard to memory consolidation. Researchers found that high stress conditions were a good representative of the effect that extrinsic stress can cause on memory functioning. It was also proven that extrinsic stress does affect spatial learning whereas acute extrinsic stress does not.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 France 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Mathematics/Mathematicians

Marie-Sophie Germain (French: [maʁi sɔfi ʒɛʁmɛ̃]; 1 April 1776 – 27 June 1831) was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Leonhard Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss (under the pseudonym of «Monsieur LeBlanc»). One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because of prejudice against her sex, she was unable to make a career out of mathematics, but she worked independently throughout her life. Before her death, Gauss had recommended that she be awarded an honorary degree, but that never occurred. On 27 June 1831, she died from breast cancer. At the centenary of her life, a street and a girls’ school were named after her. The Academy of Sciences established the Sophie Germain Prize in her honor.

🔗 Computing

Anton is a massively parallel supercomputer designed and built by D. E. Shaw Research in New York, first running in 2008. It is a special-purpose system for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of proteins and other biological macromolecules. An Anton machine consists of a substantial number of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), interconnected by a specialized high-speed, three-dimensional torus network.

Unlike earlier special-purpose systems for MD simulations, such as MDGRAPE-3 developed by RIKEN in Japan, Anton runs its computations entirely on specialized ASICs, instead of dividing the computation between specialized ASICs and general-purpose host processors.

Each Anton ASIC contains two computational subsystems. Most of the calculation of electrostatic and van der Waals forces is performed by the high-throughput interaction subsystem (HTIS). This subsystem contains 32 deeply pipelined modules running at 800 MHz arranged much like a systolic array. The remaining calculations, including the bond forces and the fast Fourier transforms (used for long-range electrostatics), are performed by the flexible subsystem. This subsystem contains four general-purpose Tensilica cores (each with cache and scratchpad memory) and eight specialized but programmable SIMD cores called geometry cores. The flexible subsystem runs at 400 MHz.

Anton's network is a 3D torus and thus each chip has 6 inter-node links with a total in+out bandwidth of 607.2 Gbit/s. An inter-node link is composed of two equal one-way links (one traveling in each direction), with each one-way link having 50.6 Gbit/s of bandwidth. Each one-way link is composed of 11 lanes, where a lane is a differential pair of wires signaling at 4.6 Gbit/s. The per-hop latency in Anton's network is 50 ns. Each ASIC is also attached to its own DRAM bank, enabling large simulations.

The performance of a 512-node Anton machine is over 17,000 nanoseconds of simulated time per day for a protein-water system consisting of 23,558 atoms. In comparison, MD codes running on general-purpose parallel computers with hundreds or thousands of processor cores achieve simulation rates of up to a few hundred nanoseconds per day on the same chemical system. The first 512-node Anton machine became operational in October 2008. The multiple petaFLOP, distributed-computing project Folding@home has achieved similar aggregate ensemble simulation timescales, comparable to the total time of a single continuous simulation on Anton, specifically achieving the 1.5-millisecond range in January 2010.

The Anton supercomputer is named after Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who is often referred to as "the father of microscopy" because he built high-precision optical instruments and used them to visualize a wide variety of organisms and cell types for the first time.

The ANTON 2 machine with four 512 nodes and substantially increased speed and problem size has been described.

The National Institutes of Health have supported an ANTON for the biomedical research community at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Carnegie-Mellon University, and recently approved support of an ANTON 2 there.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/Japanese cinema

Ornamental Hairpin (簪, Kanzashi) is a 1941 Japanese comedy-drama film written and directed by Hiroshi Shimizu. It is based on the short story Yottsu no yubune (四つの湯槽, lit. "The four bathtubs") by Masuji Ibuse.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 Baseball 🔗 Japan/Japanese baseball 🔗 Japan/Mythology

The Curse of the Colonel (Japanese: カーネルサンダースの呪い, romanisation: Kāneru Sandāsu no Noroi) refers to a 1985 Japanese urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by the ghost of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders.

The curse was said to be placed on the team because of the Colonel's anger over treatment of one of his store-front statues, which was thrown into the Dōtonbori River by celebrating Hanshin fans before their team's victory in the 1985 Japan Championship Series. As is common with sports-related curses, the Curse of the Colonel was used to explain the team's subsequent 18-year losing streak. Some fans believed the team would never win another Japan Series until the statue had been recovered. They have appeared in the Japan Series three times since then, losing in 2003, 2005 and 2014.

Comparisons are often made between the Hanshin Tigers and the Boston Red Sox, who were said to be under the Curse of the Bambino until they won the World Series in 2004. The "Curse of the Colonel" has also been used as a bogeyman threat to those who would divulge the secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices that result in the unique taste of his chicken.