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

🔗 Metalworking 🔗 Materials

Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air. Low-background steel is so-called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination. This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides.

The primary source of low-background steel is ships that were constructed before the Trinity test, most famously the scuttled German World War I warships in Scapa Flow.

🔗 Medicine

The Therac-25 was a computer-controlled radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) in 1982 after the Therac-6 and Therac-20 units (the earlier units had been produced in partnership with CGR of France).

It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation. Because of concurrent programming errors, it sometimes gave its patients radiation doses that were hundreds of times greater than normal, resulting in death or serious injury. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems, and they have become a standard case study in health informatics and software engineering. Additionally the overconfidence of the engineers and lack of proper due diligence to resolve reported software bugs are highlighted as an extreme case where the engineers' overconfidence in their initial work and failure to believe the end users' claims caused drastic repercussions.

🔗 Law 🔗 Literature 🔗 Sexology and sexuality

The small penis rule is an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits. It was described in a New York Times article in 1998:

"For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two," said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as "the small penis rule". One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. "Now no male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, that's me!'"

The small penis rule was referenced in a 2006 dispute between Michael Crowley and Michael Crichton. Crowley alleged that after he wrote an unflattering review of Crichton's novel State of Fear, Crichton included a character named "Mick Crowley" in the novel Next. The character is a child rapist, described as being a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and Yale graduate with a small penis.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Energy

A Johnson thermoelectric energy converter or JTEC is a type of solid-state heat engine that uses the electrochemical oxidation and reduction of hydrogen in a two-cell, thermal cycle that approximates the Ericsson cycle. It is under investigation as a viable alternative to conventional thermoelectric conversion. Lonnie Johnson invented it and claims the converter exhibits an energy conversion efficiency of as much as 60%, however, this claim is at a theoretical level based on comparison with a Carnot cycle and assumes a temperature gradient of 600 °C. It was originally proposed for funding to the Office of Naval Research but was refused. Johnson obtained later funding by framing the engine as a hydrogen fuel cell. Johnson had been collaborating with PARC on development of the engine.

🔗 Chemicals

In organic chemistry, a Platonic hydrocarbon is a hydrocarbon whose structure matches one of the five Platonic solids, with carbon atoms replacing its vertices, carbon–carbon bonds replacing its edges, and hydrogen atoms as needed.

Not all Platonic solids have molecular hydrocarbon counterparts; those that do are the tetrahedron (tetrahedrane), the cube (cubane), and the dodecahedron (dodecahedrane). The possibility and existence of each platonic hydrocarbon is affected by the number of bonds to each carbon vertex and the angle strain between the bonds at each vertex.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 India 🔗 Medicine/Psychiatry

Puppy pregnancy syndrome (PPS) is a psychosomatic illness in humans brought on by mass hysteria.

The syndrome is thought to be localized in villages in several states of India, including West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh, and has been reported by tens of thousands of individuals. It is far more prevalent in areas with little access to education.

People suffering from PPS believe that shortly after being bitten by a dog, puppies are conceived within their abdomen. This is said to be especially likely if the dog is sexually excited at the time of the attack. Victims are said to bark like dogs and have reported being able to see the puppies inside them when looking at water or hear them growling in their abdomen. It is believed that the victims will eventually die – especially men, who will give birth to their puppies through the penis.

Witch doctors offer oral cures, which they claim will dissolve the puppies, allowing them to pass through the digestive system and be excreted "without the knowledge of the patient".

Doctors in India have tried to educate the public about the dangers of believing in this condition. Most sufferers are referred to psychiatric services, but in some instances patients fail to take anti-rabies medication before symptom onset, thinking that they are pregnant with a puppy and that folk medicine will cure them. This misbelief is further compounded by witch doctors who state that their medicine will fail if sufferers seek standard treatment.

Some psychiatrists believe that PPS meets the criteria for a culture-bound disorder.

🔗 Organizations 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Catholicism

The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX; Latin: Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii X 'Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X', FSSPX) is a breakaway traditionalist Catholic priestly fraternity founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Its members are commonly referred to as Lefebvrists or Lefebvrians, terms which SSPX rejects.

Lefebvre was a leading traditionalist at the Second Vatican Council with the Coetus Internationalis Patrum and Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers until 1968. The society was originally established as an association of the Christian faithful of the Catholic Church with the express permission of the Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg, François Charrière.

The society is named after Pope Pius X, whose anti-Modernist stance it stresses, retaining the Tridentine Mass and pre-Vatican II liturgical books in Latin for the other Holy Sacraments. The current Superior General of the Society is Davide Pagliarani. It has over 700 priestly members and a total of 1,482 members. Several religious institutes, mostly based in France, are associated with the society. Globally, there are an estimated 600,000 people who attend SSPX masses. Several organisations derive from the SSPX, such as the sedevacantist Society of Saint Pius V (SSPV) and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP), which Pope John Paul II authorized as a Society of Apostolic Life (1988).

Tensions between the Society and the Holy See climaxed in 1988 with the Écône consecrations: Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the Apostolic Mandate and against a personal warning by Pope John Paul II, resulting in the Vatican declaration that the bishops who consecrated or were consecrated had incurred latæ sententiæ (automatic) excommunication. However, the SSPX denied that the bishops incurred any penalty, and argued that the consecrations were permissible under canon law due to a moral and theological crisis in the Catholic Church. The declared excommunication of the surviving bishops was removed at their request, in the hope of speedily reaching "full reconciliation and complete communion" (2009).

For most of its existence, the society's canonical situation has remained disputed. Papal recognition was extended indefinitely in 2017 to confessions heard by its priests, and local ordinaries allowed to grant delegation to its priests for officially witnessing marriages. In addition, the Holy See named SSPX bishop Bernard Fellay as judge in a canonical trial against one of the society's priests. The significance of these recognitions is that, unlike other Catholic sacraments, both confession and marriage require canonical jurisdiction for their validity. While its critics claim the society's priests were not explicitly granted the requisite jurisdiction, it contends that they possessed "supplied jurisdiction" for confessions due to an "emergency crisis".

In February 2026, the Society declared their intention to consecrate new bishops on 1 July 2026 with or without a pontifical mandate from the Vatican, declining further dialogue with the Holy Office. On 13 May 2026, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández formally reiterated that this would be a schismatic act and result in automatic excommunication. On 26 May 2026, the FSPPX announced the four candidates scheduled to be consecrated bishops: Pascal Schreiber, Michael Goldade, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, and Marc Hanappier. On 1 July, SSPX Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta proceeded with the consecration of the four bishops, with Fellay acting as co-consecrator, which is a schismatic act and thus resulted in automatic excommunication.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

A Rotman lens (sometimes referred to as a Rotman-Turner lens) is a passive electronic component used for beamforming in radio frequency applications. The principle was first published by Walter Rotman and R. F. Turner in 1963, and patented by Rotman the same year.

The component allows multiple antenna beams to be formed without the need for phase shifters. It consists of a range of input ports (also called beam ports) and output ports (also called array ports). A signal applied to one of the input ports arrives at each of the output ports with a different phase shift. If the output ports are connected to individual antennas in an antenna array, this allows shaping the beam in different directions by switching which input port the signal is sent to. So-called dummy ports can be added to the design, which are terminated to absorb fields that hit them, thus preventing reflections from the side wall of the lens.

Rotman lenses can be constructed either from hollow conductive waveguides or on a stripline or microstrip substrate. They are commonly used for beamforming in radar applications.

🔗 California 🔗 National Register of Historic Places

The Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno, California are a series of subterranean structures built by Baldassare Forestiere, an immigrant from Sicily, over a period of 40 years from 1906 to his death in 1946. The gardens are operated by members of the Forestiere family through the Forestiere Historical Center, and can be considered an unconventional example of vernacular architecture.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors

The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers, due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation, often rupturing the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure.

High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and were particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers.