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🔗 United States 🔗 Plants 🔗 United States/Utah

Pando (Latin for "I spread out"), also known as the trembling giant, is a clonal colony of an individual male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) determined to be a single living organism by identical genetic markers and assumed to have one massive underground root system. The plant is located in the Fremont River Ranger District of the Fishlake National Forest at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau in south-central Utah, United States, around 1 mile (1.6 km) southwest of Fish Lake. Pando occupies 43 hectares (106 acres) and is estimated to weigh collectively 6,000,000 kilograms (6,600 short tons), making it the heaviest known organism. The root system of Pando, at an estimated 80,000 years old, is among the oldest known living organisms.

Pando is currently thought to be dying. Though the exact reasons are not known, it is thought to be a combination of factors including drought, grazing, human development, and fire suppression. The Western Aspen Alliance, a research group at Utah State University’s S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources, has been studying the tree in an effort to save it, and the United States Forest Service is currently experimenting with several 5-acre (2 ha) sections of it in an effort to find a means to save it. Grazing animals have threatened Pando's ability to produce young offsprings to replace trees that are dying. Human development in the area is another threat, these two threats have caused pando trees to shrink in size and decrease over the past 50 years.

A study published in October 2018 concludes that Pando has not been growing for the past 30–40 years. Human interference was named as the primary cause, with the study specifically citing people allowing cattle and deer populations to thrive, their grazing resulting in fewer saplings and dying individual trees.

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 Video games 🔗 Women 🔗 Biography/sports and games 🔗 California/Southern California 🔗 California/Los Angeles area 🔗 LGBTQ+ studies 🔗 Video games/esports 🔗 LGBTQ+ studies/LGBTQ+ Person

Rebecca Ann Heineman (October 30, 1963 – November 17, 2025) was an American video game designer and programmer. Heineman was a founder or co-founder of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She was the chief executive officer of Olde Sküül from 2013 until her death in 2025.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Death 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

"Daughter from California" syndrome is a phrase used in the medical profession to describe a situation in which a long-lost relative arrives at the hospital at which a dying elderly relative is being treated, and insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the patient's life, or otherwise challenges the care the patient is being given. In his 2015 book The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care, American doctor Angelo Volandes ascribes this to "guilt and denial," "not necessarily what is best for the patient."

The "daughter from California" is often described as angry, articulate and informed.

Medical professionals say that because the "daughter from California" has been absent from the life and care of the elderly patient, they are frequently surprised by the scale of the patient's deterioration, and may have unrealistic expectations about what is medically feasible. They may feel guilty about having been absent, and may therefore feel motivated to reassert their role as an involved caregiver.

The phrase was first documented by a collective of gerontologists in a 1991 case report published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, titled "Decision Making in the Incompetent Elderly: 'The Daughter from California Syndrome'". In the paper, Molloy and colleagues presented strategies intended to help medical staff deal with the difficult family members of mentally incompetent patients.

In California, the "daughter from California" is known as the "daughter from New York".

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Engineering

The San Jose electric light tower, also known as Owen's Electric Tower after its creator and chief booster, was constructed in 1881 at an intersection in downtown San Jose, California, as a "high light" or moonlight tower to light the city using arc lights. A pioneer use of electricity for municipal lighting, it was later strung with incandescent bulbs and was destroyed in a storm in December 1915. A half-size replica stands at History Park at Kelley Park.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 China 🔗 Islam 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities

The Xinjiang re-education camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the government of the People's Republic of China, are internment camps that have been operated by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government for the purpose of indoctrinating Uyghurs since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror" announced in 2014. The camps were established under General Secretary Xi Jinping's administration and led by party secretary, Chen Quanguo. These camps are reportedly operated outside the legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them. Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in these camps as well as other ethnic minority groups, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism and promoting sinicization.

As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In May 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense claimed that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers in a strong condemnation of the "concentration camps". In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps". There have also been multiple reports from media, politicians and researchers comparing the camps to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

In 2019, the United Nations ambassadors from 22 nations, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom signed a letter condemning China's mass detention of the Uyghurs and other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the camps. Conversely, a joint statement was signed by 37 states commending China's counter-terrorism program in Xinjiang, including Algeria, the DR Congo, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, the Philippines and Sudan.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Science 🔗 Academic Journals

The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely. The crisis has long-standing roots; the phrase was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. The replication crisis represents an important body of research in the field of metascience.

Because the reproducibility of experimental results is an essential part of the scientific method, the inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results, to determine both the reliability of the results, and, if found to be unreliable, the reasons for the failure of replication.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Philately 🔗 Donald Trump 🔗 United States/U.S. presidential elections

The 2020 United States Postal Service crisis is a series of events that have caused backlogs and delays in the delivery of mail by the United States Postal Service (USPS). The crisis stems primarily from changes implemented by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy shortly after taking office in June 2020. The delays have had substantial legal, political, economic, and health repercussions.

There is controversy and speculation about whether the delays are unintended consequences of restructuring operations, or if they were intentionally created for political and/or financial gain. DeJoy has supported and donated to President Donald Trump, who has publicly linked his opposition to emergency funding for the Postal Service to his desire to restrict voting by mail in the 2020 elections.

On August 18, 2020, under heavy political and legal pressure, DeJoy announced that he would be "suspending" the policy changes until after the November 2020 election. He testified to the Senate on August 21, and to the House of Representatives on August 24, concerning the changes and their effects.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

The Russian Cross is the name of a demographic trend that occurred in Russia and many other countries of the former Warsaw Pact. In Russia, starting in 1988, birth rates among native Russians (as well as most other ethnic groups of the European part of the former Soviet Union) were declining, while from 1991 the death rates started climbing.

In 1992, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births, and continued to do so to a greater or lesser degree until 2013. When this trend is plotted on a line graph starting from the mid-1980s, the lines cross at 1992, hence the name.

🔗 Mathematics

This is a list of mathematical symbols used in all branches of mathematics to express a formula or to represent a constant.

A mathematical concept is independent of the symbol chosen to represent it. For many of the symbols below, the symbol is usually synonymous with the corresponding concept (ultimately an arbitrary choice made as a result of the cumulative history of mathematics), but in some situations, a different convention may be used. For example, depending on context, the triple bar "≡" may represent congruence or a definition. However, in mathematical logic, numerical equality is sometimes represented by "≡" instead of "=", with the latter representing equality of well-formed formulas. In short, convention dictates the meaning.

Each symbol is shown both in HTML, whose display depends on the browser's access to an appropriate font installed on the particular device, and typeset as an image using TeX.

🔗 Secret Societies

The backbone cabal was an informal organization of large-site news server administrators of the worldwide distributed newsgroup-based discussion system Usenet. It existed from about 1983 at least into the 2000s.

The cabal was created in an effort to facilitate reliable propagation of new Usenet posts. While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only operated during night time to save on the cost of long distance communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a day. The administrators of these servers gained sufficient influence in the otherwise anarchic Usenet community to be able to push through controversial changes, for instance the Great Renaming of Usenet newsgroups during 1987.