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🔗 Gastropods

Micromelo undatus, common name the miniature melo, is an uncommon species of small sea snail or bubble snail, a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusk in the family Aplustridae.

🔗 Mammals

Tuffi (born 1946, India – died 1989, Paris, France) was a female Asian elephant that became famous in West Germany during 1950 when she accidentally fell from the Wuppertal Schwebebahn into the River Wupper underneath.

On 21 July 1950, the circus director Franz Althoff (de) had Tuffi, then four years old, traveled on the suspended monorail in Wuppertal, as a publicity stunt. The elephant trumpeted wildly and ran through the carriage, broke through a window and fell 12 metres (39 ft) down into the River Wupper, suffering only minor injuries. A panic had broken out in the carriage and some passengers were injured. Althoff helped the elephant out of the water. Both the circus director and the official who had allowed the ride were fined. Tuffi was sold to Cirque Alexis Gruss (fr) in 1968; she died there in 1989.

No photograph of the incident is known; a widely circulated postcard picture is a montage. A building near the location of the incident, between the stations Alter Markt and Adlerbrücke, features a painting of Tuffi. A local milk-factory has chosen the name as a brand.

The Wuppertal tourist information keeps an assortment of Tuffi-related souvenirs, local websites show original pictures.

In 1970 Marguerita Eckel and Ernst-Andreas Ziegler published a children's picture book about the incident titled Tuffi und die Schwebebahn (“Tuffi and the suspension railway”).

🔗 Birds

Wrens are a family, Troglodytidae, of small brown passerine birds. The family includes 96 species and is divided into 19 genera. All species are restricted to the New World except for the Eurasian wren that is widely distributed in the Old World. In Anglophone regions, the Eurasian wren is commonly known simply as the "wren", as it is the originator of the name. The name wren has been applied to other, unrelated birds, particularly the New Zealand wrens (Acanthisittidae) and the Australian wrens (Maluridae).

Most wrens are visually inconspicuous though they have loud and often complex songs. Exceptions include the relatively large members of the genus Campylorhynchus, which can be quite bold in their behaviour. Wrens have short wings that are barred in most species, and they often hold their tails upright. Wrens are primarily insectivorous, eating insects, spiders and other small invertebrates, but many species also eat vegetable matter and some eat small frogs and lizards.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology

A purity spiral is a theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding"). It is argued that this feedback loop leads to members competing to demonstrate the zealotry or purity of their views.

A purity spiral is argued to occur when a community's primary focus becomes implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and where that value does not have an agreed interpretation.

🔗 LGBTQ+ studies

“Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” (in Italian: Il fascismo eterno, or Ur-Fascismo) is a renowned essay authored by the Italian philosopher, novelist, and semiotician Umberto Eco. First published in 1995, this influential essay provides an analysis of fascism, a definition of fascism, and discusses the fundamental characteristics and traits of fascism. Drawing on Eco's personal experiences growing up in Mussolini's Italy and his extensive research on fascist movements, the essay offers his insights into the nature of fascism and its manifestations.

🔗 Chemicals

Solanine is a glycoalkaloid poison found in species of the nightshade family within the genus Solanum, such as the potato (Solanum tuberosum), the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), and the eggplant (Solanum melongena). It can occur naturally in any part of the plant, including the leaves, fruit, and tubers. Solanine has pesticidal properties, and it is one of the plant's natural defenses. Solanine was first isolated in 1820 from the berries of the European black nightshade (Solanum nigrum), after which it was named. It belongs to the chemical family of saponins.

🔗 Mathematics

In recreational mathematics, an almost integer (or near-integer) is any number that is not an integer but is very close to one. Almost integers may be considered interesting when they arise in some context in which they are unexpected.

🔗 Norway 🔗 Paranormal

The Hessdalen lights are unidentified lights which have been observed in a 12-kilometre-long (7.5 mi) stretch of the Hessdalen valley in rural central Norway periodically since at least the 1930s.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to Intel's Pentium microprocessor line, and was pin compatible. During the 6x86's development, the majority of applications (office software as well as games) performed almost entirely integer operations. The designers foresaw that future applications would most likely maintain this instruction focus. So, to optimize the chip's performance for what they believed to be the most likely application of the CPU, the integer execution resources received most of the transistor budget. This would later prove to be a strategic mistake, as the popularity of the P5 Pentium caused many software developers to hand-optimize code in assembly language, to take advantage of the P5 Pentium's tightly pipelined and lower latency FPU. For example, the highly anticipated first-person shooter Quake used highly optimized assembly code designed almost entirely around the P5 Pentium's FPU. As a result, the P5 Pentium significantly outperformed other CPUs in the game.

🔗 Buses

A bus trap (car trap in the UK) is a metal grate placed over a ditch or pit in the road with tines (sides) spaced far enough apart that small (shorter axle) vehicles fall between the tines but close enough that larger-diameter-wheeled vehicles, such as buses, may pass. Cycles may cross broader sided examples.

Different versions exist for restricting access. The tines cross the path of the road, not parallel with the road direction. Small-wheeled vehicles bottom out in between the tines, preventing the vehicle from continuing over the obstacle.