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🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Comic strips 🔗 Dinosaurs

A thagomizer () is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.

The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term used within scientific circles, research, and education.

🔗 United States 🔗 Media 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Georgia (U.S. state) 🔗 United States/United States Presidents 🔗 Animals in media

The Jimmy Carter rabbit incident, sensationalized as the "killer rabbit attack" by the press, involved a swamp rabbit (Sylvilagus aquaticus) that swam toward then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat on April 20, 1979. The incident caught the imagination of the media after Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, mentioned the event to a correspondent months later.

Political opponents argued that the incident was symbolic of Carter's purported weakness. According to Powell, anti-Carter political commentators went so far as to blame it for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Business 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Electrical engineering 🔗 Taiwan 🔗 Women in Business

Lisa Su (Chinese: 蘇姿丰; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: So͘ Chu-hong; born 7 November 1969) is a Taiwanese-born American business executive and electrical engineer, who is the president, chief executive officer and chair of AMD. Early in her career, Su worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor in engineering and management positions. She is known for her work developing silicon-on-insulator semiconductor manufacturing technologies and more efficient semiconductor chips during her time as vice president of IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center.

Su was appointed president and CEO of AMD in October 2014, after joining the company in 2012 and holding roles such as senior vice president of AMD's global business units and chief operating officer. She currently serves on the boards of Cisco Systems, Global Semiconductor Alliance and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Recognized with a number of awards and accolades, she was named Executive of the Year by EE Times in 2014 and one of the World's Greatest Leaders in 2017 by Fortune. She became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal in 2021.

🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Education 🔗 Science

The Nuffield Science Teaching Project was a programme to develop a better approach to teaching science in British secondary schools, under the auspices of the Nuffield Foundation. Although not intended as a curriculum, it gave rise to alternative national examinations, and its use of discovery learning was influential in the 1960s and 1970s.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Insects 🔗 Ecology

An increasing number of scientific studies are reporting substantial declines in insect populations worldwide. Most commonly, the declines involve reductions in abundance, though in some cases entire species are going extinct. The declines are far from uniform. In some localities, there have been reports of increases in overall insect population, and some types of insects appear to be increasing in abundance across the world.

Some of the insects most affected include bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, dragonflies and damselflies. Anecdotal evidence has been offered of much greater apparent abundance of insects in the 20th century; recollections of the windscreen phenomenon are an example.

Possible causes are similar to other biodiversity loss, with studies identifying: habitat destruction, including intensive agriculture; the use of pesticides (particularly insecticides); urbanization, and industrialization; introduced species; and climate change. Not all insect orders are affected in the same way; many groups are the subject of limited research, and comparative figures from earlier decades are often not available.

In response to the reported declines, increased insect related conservation measures have been launched. In 2018 the German government initiated an "Action Programme for Insect Protection", and in 2019 a group of 27 British entomologists and ecologists wrote an open letter calling on the research establishment in the UK "to enable intensive investigation of the real threat of ecological disruption caused by insect declines without delay".

🔗 Computing

The Andrew File System (AFS) is a distributed file system which uses a set of trusted servers to present a homogeneous, location-transparent file name space to all the client workstations. It was developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Andrew Project. Originally named "Vice", "Andrew" refers to Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. Its primary use is in distributed computing.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

The Zope Object Database (ZODB) is an object-oriented database for transparently and persistently storing Python objects. It is included as part of the Zope web application server, but can also be used independently of Zope.

Features of the ZODB include: transactions, history/undo, transparently pluggable storage, built-in caching, multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), and scalability across a network (using ZEO).

🔗 Geography 🔗 Antarctica 🔗 Glaciers

A blue iceberg is visible after the ice from above the water melts, causing the smooth portion of ice from below the water to overturn. The rare blue ice is formed from the compression of pure snow, which then develops into glacial ice.

Icebergs may also appear blue due to light refraction and age. Older icebergs reveal vivid hues of green and blue, resulting from a high concentration of color, microorganisms, and compacted ice. One of the better known blue icebergs rests in the waters off Sermilik fjord near Greenland. It is described as an electric blue iceberg and is known to locals as "blue diamond".

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

A criticality accident occurred on December 30, 1958, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the United States. It is one of 60 known criticality events that have occurred outside the controlled conditions of a nuclear reactor or test, though it was the third such event that took place in 1958 after events on June 16 at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and on October 15 at the Vinča Nuclear Institute in Vinča, Yugoslavia. The accident involved plutonium compounds dissolved in liquid chemical reagents; within 35 hours, it killed chemical operator Cecil Kelley by severe radiation poisoning.