To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Miraculin is a taste modifier, a glycoprotein extracted from the fruit of Synsepalum dulcificum. The berry, also known as the miracle fruit, was documented by explorer Chevalier des Marchais, who searched for many different fruits during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa.

Miraculin itself does not taste sweet. When taste buds are exposed to miraculin, the protein binds to the sweetness receptors. This causes normally sour-tasting acidic foods, such as citrus, to be perceived as sweet. The effect can last for one or two hours.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Science

The aesthetic–usability effect describes a paradox that people perceive more aesthetic designs as much more intuitive than those considered to be less aesthetically pleasing. The effect has been observed in several experiments and has significant implications regarding the acceptance, use, and performance of a design. Usability and aesthetics are the two most important factors in assessing the overall user experience for an application. Usability and aesthetics are judged by a user's reuse expectations, and then their post-use, or experienced, final judgement. A user's cognitive style can influence how they interact with and perceive an application, which in turn can influence their judgement of the application.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Greece

The Tunnel of Eupalinos or Eupalinian aqueduct (Greek: Ευπαλίνιον όρυγμα, romanized: Efpalinion orygma) is a tunnel of 1,036 m (3,399 ft) length running through Mount Kastro in Samos, Greece, built in the 6th century BC to serve as an aqueduct. The tunnel is the second known tunnel in history which was excavated from both ends (Ancient Greek: ἀμφίστομον, romanized: amphistomon, "having two openings"), and the first with a geometry-based approach in doing so. Today it is a popular tourist attraction.

I have edited thousands of articles so that they do not contain the phrase "comprised of". Edit summaries for those edits usually refer to this page.

This page explains the purpose of these edits and the project in general.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 United States/FBI 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography

D. B. Cooper is a media epithet used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in United States airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on the afternoon of November 24, 1971. He extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,278,000 in 2020) and parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular lore as D. B. Cooper.

The FBI maintained an active investigation for 45 years after the hijacking. Despite a case file that grew to over 60 volumes over that period, no definitive conclusions were reached regarding Cooper's true identity or fate. The crime remains the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history.

Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility have been proposed over the years by investigators, reporters, and amateur enthusiasts. $5,880 of the ransom was found along the banks of the Columbia River in 1980, which triggered renewed interest but ultimately only deepened the mystery. The great majority of the ransom remains unrecovered.

The FBI officially suspended active investigation of the case in July 2016, but the agency continues to request that any physical evidence that might emerge related to the parachutes or the ransom money be submitted for analysis.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

TON 618 (short for Tonantzintla 618) is a hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line, radio-loud quasar and Lyman-alpha blob located near the border of the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices, with the projected comoving distance of approximately 18.2 billion light-years from Earth. It possesses one of the most massive black holes ever found, at 40 billion M_☉.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages developed during the 1950s and 1960s; others included COMIT and TRAC.

SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type (i.e. a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language) and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. SNOBOL4 patterns are a type of object and admit various manipulations, much like later object-oriented languages such as JavaScript whose patterns are known as regular expressions. In addition SNOBOL4 strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and either interpreted or compiled and executed (as in the eval function of other languages).

SNOBOL4 was quite widely taught in larger U.S. universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a text manipulation language in the humanities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, its use faded as newer languages such as AWK and Perl made string manipulation by means of regular expressions fashionable. SNOBOL4 patterns subsume BNF grammars, which are equivalent to context-free grammars and more powerful than regular expressions. The "regular expressions" in current versions of AWK and Perl are in fact extensions of regular expressions in the traditional sense, but regular expressions, unlike SNOBOL4 patterns, are not recursive, which gives a distinct computational advantage to SNOBOL4 patterns. (Recursive expressions did appear in Perl 5.10, though, released in December 2007.)

The later SL5 (1977) and Icon (1978) languages were designed by Griswold to combine the backtracking of SNOBOL4 pattern matching with more standard ALGOL-like structuring.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Sociology

The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Physics 🔗 Health and fitness

Banana equivalent dose (BED) is an informal measurement of ionizing radiation exposure, intended as a general educational example to compare a dose of radioactivity to the dose one is exposed to by eating one average-sized banana. Bananas contain naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, particularly potassium-40 (⁴⁰K), one of several naturally-occurring isotopes of potassium. One BED is often correlated to 10⁻⁷ sievert (0.1 μSv); however, in practice, this dose is not cumulative, as the principal radioactive component is excreted to maintain metabolic equilibrium. The BED is only meant to inform the public about the existence of very low levels of natural radioactivity within a natural food and is not a formally adopted dose measurement.

🔗 United States 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 United States/Utah 🔗 English Language 🔗 Latter Day Saint movement

The Deseret alphabet ( (listen); Deseret: 𐐔𐐯𐑅𐐨𐑉𐐯𐐻 or 𐐔𐐯𐑆𐐲𐑉𐐯𐐻) is a phonemic English-language spelling reform developed between 1847 and 1854 by the board of regents of the University of Deseret under the leadership of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). George D. Watt is reported to have been the most actively involved in the development of the script,^: 159 as well as being its first serious user.^: 12

The Deseret alphabet was an outgrowth of the idealism and utopianism of Young and the early LDS Church. Young and the Mormon pioneers believed "all aspects of life" were in need of reform for the imminent millenniumand the Deseret alphabet was just one of many ways they sought to bring about a complete "transformation in society",^: 142 in anticipation of the Second Coming of Jesus. Young wrote of the reform that "it would represent every sound used in the construction of any known language; and, in fact, a step and partial return to a pure language which has been promised unto us in the latter days," the Adamic language spoken before the Tower of Babel.

In public statements, Young claimed the alphabet would replace the traditional Latin alphabet with an alternative, more phonetically accurate alphabet for the English language. This would offer immigrants an opportunity to learn to read and write English, he said, the orthography of which is often less phonetically consistent than those of many other languages.^: 65–66 Similar neographies have been attempted, the most well-known of which for English is the Shavian alphabet.

Young also prescribed the learning of Deseret to the school system, stating "It will be the means of introducing uniformity in our orthography, and the years that are now required to learn to read and spell can be devoted to other studies."

During the alphabet's heyday between 1854 and 1869, scriptural passages in newspapers, selected church records, a $5 gold coin, and occasional street signs and correspondence used the new letters. In 1868-9, after much difficulty creating suitable fonts, four books were printed: two school primers, the full Book of Mormon, and a portion of it titled the Book of Nephi.

Despite heavy and costly promotion by the early LDS Church, the alphabet never enjoyed prolonged widespread use and has been regarded by historians as a failure. However, in recent years, aided by digital typography, the Deseret Alphabet has been revived as a cultural heirloom.