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🔗 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.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Evolutionary biology

The sexy son hypothesis in evolutionary biology and sexual selection, proposed by Patrick J. Weatherhead and Raleigh J. Robertson of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1979, states that a female's ideal mate choice among potential mates is one whose genes will produce males with the best chance of reproductive success. This implies that other benefits the father can offer the mother or offspring are less relevant than they may appear, including his capacity as a parental caregiver, territory and any nuptial gifts. Fisher's principle means that the sex ratio (except in certain eusocial insects) is always near 1:1 between males and females, yet what matters most are her "sexy sons'" future breeding successes, more likely if they have a promiscuous father, in creating large numbers of offspring carrying copies of her genes. This sexual selection hypothesis has been researched in species such as the European pied flycatcher.

🔗 Korea 🔗 Physics 🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Electrical engineering 🔗 Materials

LK-99 is a proposed ambient pressure and room-temperature superconductor with a gray‒black appearance.^: 8 LK-99 has a hexagonal structure slightly modified from lead‒apatite and is claimed to function as a superconductor below 400 K (127 °C; 260 °F).^: 1 The material was investigated by a team of Sukbae Lee et al. from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).^: 1 As of 26 July 2023 the discovery of LK-99 has not been peer reviewed or independently replicated.

The chemical composition of LK-99 is approximately Pb₉Cu(PO₄)₆O such that—compared to pure lead-apatite (Pb₁₀(PO₄)₆O)^: 5—approximately one quarter of Pb(2) ions are replaced by Cu(II) ions.^: 9 This partial replacement of Pb²⁺ ions (measuring 133 picometre) with Cu²⁺ ions (measuring 87 picometre) is said to cause a 0.48% reduction in volume, creating internal stress inside the material.^: 8

The internal stress is claimed to cause a heterojunction quantum well between the Pb(1) and oxygen within the phosphate ([PO₄]³⁻) generating a superconducting quantum well (SQW).^: 10 Lee et al claim to show LK-99 exhibits a response to a magnetic field (Meissner effect) when chemical vapor deposition is used to apply LK-99 to a non-magnetic copper sample.^: 4 Pure lead-apatite is an insulator, but Lee et al claim copper-doped lead-apatite forming LK-99 is a superconductor, or at higher temperatures, a metal.^: 5

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Nevada 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 Aviation/airport

Area 51 is the common name of a highly classified United States Air Force (USAF) facility within the Nevada Test and Training Range. A remote detachment administered by Edwards Air Force Base, the facility is officially called Homey Airport (ICAO: KXTA, FAA LID: XTA) or Groom Lake (after the salt flat next to its airfield). Details of its operations are not made public, but the USAF says that it is an open training range, and it is commonly thought to support the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. The USAF and CIA acquired the site in 1955, primarily for flight testing the Lockheed U-2 aircraft.

The intense secrecy surrounding the base has made it the frequent subject of conspiracy theories and a central component of unidentified flying object (UFO) folklore. It has never been declared a secret base, but all research and occurrences in Area 51 are Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). The CIA publicly acknowledged the base's existence on 25 June 2013, following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in 2005 and declassified documents detailing its history and purpose.

Area 51 is located in the southern portion of Nevada, 83 miles (134 km) north-northwest of Las Vegas. The surrounding area is a popular tourist destination, including the small town of Rachel on the "Extraterrestrial Highway".