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🔗 Companies 🔗 Brands 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Spain

El Corte Inglés S.A. (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈkoɾte iŋˈɡles]), headquartered in Madrid, is the biggest department store group in Europe and ranks third worldwide. El Corte Inglés is Spain's only remaining department store chain. El Corte Inglés has been a member of the International Association of department stores since 1998.

🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Cycling

The Twike (a portmanteau of the words twin and bike) is a human-electric hybrid vehicle (HEHV) designed to carry two passengers and cargo. Essentially a velomobile with an electrical hybrid engine, it can be driven in electric-only mode or electric + pedal power mode. Pedaling warms the user, making electric heating in winter unnecessary, extends the range of the vehicle but does not substantially add to the vehicle's top speed.

Constructed of lightweight materials such as aluminium (frame) and plastic (shell), the 246 kg (542 lb) (unladen, varying with battery weight) tricycle vehicle first used NiCd batteries, later Li-Mn, LiFePO₄ and LiIon. Typically ranges reach from 50 to over 500 km depending on battery size, type, status on one side and speed and altitude profile and load on the other. Energy is reclaimed while driving through regenerative braking, and load is removed from the electric system by use of the pedalling system which transfers its input directly to the drivetrain (i.e., both systems operate in parallel, not in series).

🔗 Biography 🔗 India 🔗 India/Bihar

Dashrath Manjhi (1934 – 17 August 2007), also known as Mountain Man, was a laborer in Gehlaur village, near Gaya in Bihar, India, who carved a path 110 m long (360 ft), 9.1 m (30 ft) wide and 7.7 m (25 ft) deep through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and chisel. After 22 years of work, Dashrath shortened travel between the Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya town from 55 km to 15 km.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Physics 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

A vacuum airship, also known as a vacuum balloon, is a hypothetical airship that is evacuated rather than filled with a lighter-than-air gas such as hydrogen or helium. First proposed by Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi in 1670, the vacuum balloon would be the ultimate expression of lifting power per volume displaced.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Germany 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Anarchism

B. Traven (German: [ˈbeː ˈtʁaːvn̩]; Bruno Traven in some accounts) was the pen name of a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the few certainties about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927). The film adaptation of the same name won three Academy Awards in 1948.

Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. The person most commonly identified as Traven is Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924 and who had edited an anarchist newspaper in Germany called Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner). Marut is thought to have operated under the "B. Traven" pseudonym, although no details are known about Marut's life before 1912, and many hold that "Ret Marut" was in fact also a pseudonym.

Some researchers further argue that Marut/Traven's original name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern-day Świebodzin in Poland. This theory is not universally accepted. B. Traven in Mexico is also connected with the names of Berick Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, both of whom appeared and acted in different periods of the writer's life. Both, however, denied being Traven and claimed that they were his literary agents only, representing him in contacts with his publishers.

B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Ship from 1926, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927 (filmed in 1948 by John Huston), and the so-called "Jungle Novels", also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany). The Jungle Novels are a group of six novels (including The Carreta and Government), published in the years 1930–1939 and set among Mexican Indians just before and during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. B. Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period and retained this popularity after the Second World War; they were also translated into many languages. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first, with their English editions appearing later; nevertheless, the author always claimed that the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is mostly treated by Traven scholars as a diversion or a joke, although there are those who accept it.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Medicine/Psychiatry

In medicine and medical anthropology, a culture-bound syndrome, culture-specific syndrome, or folk illness is a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture. There are no objective biochemical or structural alterations of body organs or functions, and the disease is not recognized in other cultures. The term culture-bound syndrome was included in the fourth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) which also includes a list of the most common culture-bound conditions (DSM-IV: Appendix I). Counterpart within the framework of ICD-10 (Chapter V) are the culture-specific disorders defined in Annex 2 of the Diagnostic criteria for research.

More broadly, an endemic that can be attributed to certain behavior patterns within a specific culture by suggestion may be referred to as a potential behavioral epidemic. As in the cases of drug use, or alcohol and smoking abuses, transmission can be determined by communal reinforcement and person-to-person interactions. On etiological grounds, it can be difficult to distinguish the causal contribution of culture upon disease from other environmental factors such as toxicity.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Syria

Syrian Air Flight 9218 was a cargo flight operated by Syrian Air that disappeared from flight tracking near Homs while flying out of Damascus International Airport on December 8, 2024.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Education 🔗 Classical music

The Mozart effect is the theory that listening to the music of Mozart may temporarily boost scores on one portion of an IQ test. Popular science versions of the theory make the claim that "listening to Mozart makes you smarter" or that early childhood exposure to classical music has a beneficial effect on mental development.

The original study from 1993 reported a short-term (lasting about 15 minutes) improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as spatial reasoning, such as folding paper and solving mazes. The results were highly exaggerated by the popular press and became "Mozart makes you smart", which was said to apply to children in particular (the original study included 36 college students). These claims led to a commercial fad with Mozart CDs being sold to parents, the U.S. state of Georgia even proposed a budget to provide every child with a CD of classical music.

A meta-analysis of studies that have replicated the original study shows that there is little evidence that listening to Mozart has any particular effect on spatial reasoning. The author of the original study has stressed that listening to Mozart has no effect on general intelligence.

🔗 Elements

Alternative periodic tables are tabulations of chemical elements differing in their organization from the traditional depiction of the periodic system.

Over a thousand have been devised, often for didactic reasons, as not all correlations between the chemical elements are effectively captured by the standard periodic table.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom 🔗 Poultry

The salmonella-in-eggs controversy was a political controversy in the United Kingdom caused by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, Edwina Currie's claims that "most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella" in 1988. These claims led to a 60 percent decline in egg sales over the next few weeks, and angered both politicians and those in the egg production industry. Currie's statement also resulted in the destruction of around 400 million eggs and the slaughter of around 4 million hens. The controversy dominated Currie's tenure as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and resulted in her resignation two weeks later.