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🔗 Extinction 🔗 Birds 🔗 Scottish Islands

The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) is a species of flightless alcid that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus. It is not closely related to the birds now known as penguins, which were discovered later by Europeans and so named by sailors because of their physical resemblance to the great auk.

It bred on rocky, remote islands with easy access to the ocean and a plentiful food supply, a rarity in nature that provided only a few breeding sites for the great auks. When not breeding, they spent their time foraging in the waters of the North Atlantic, ranging as far south as northern Spain and along the coastlines of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain.

The great auk was 75 to 85 centimetres (30 to 33 inches) tall and weighed about 5 kilograms (11 pounds), making it the largest alcid to survive into the modern era, and the second-largest member of the alcid family overall (the prehistoric Miomancalla was larger). It had a black back and a white belly. The black beak was heavy and hooked, with grooves on its surface. During summer, great auk plumage showed a white patch over each eye. During winter, the great auk lost these patches, instead developing a white band stretching between the eyes. The wings were only 15 cm (6 in) long, rendering the bird flightless. Instead, the great auk was a powerful swimmer, a trait that it used in hunting. Its favourite prey were fish, including Atlantic menhaden and capelin, and crustaceans. Although agile in the water, it was clumsy on land. Great auk pairs mated for life. They nested in extremely dense and social colonies, laying one egg on bare rock. The egg was white with variable brown marbling. Both parents participated in the incubation of the egg for around 6 weeks before the young hatched. The young left the nest site after 2–3 weeks, although the parents continued to care for it.

The great auk was an important part of many Native American cultures, both as a food source and as a symbolic item. Many Maritime Archaic people were buried with great auk bones. One burial discovered included someone covered by more than 200 great auk beaks, which are presumed to be the remnants of a cloak made of great auks' skins. Early European explorers to the Americas used the great auk as a convenient food source or as fishing bait, reducing its numbers. The bird's down was in high demand in Europe, a factor that largely eliminated the European populations by the mid-16th century. Scientists soon began to realize that the great auk was disappearing and it became the beneficiary of many early environmental laws, but this proved ineffectual.

Its growing rarity increased interest from European museums and private collectors in obtaining skins and eggs of the bird. On 3 June 1844, the last two confirmed specimens were killed on Eldey, off the coast of Iceland, ending the last known breeding attempt. Later reports of roaming individuals being seen or caught are unconfirmed. A record of one great auk in 1852 is considered by some to be the last sighting of a member of the species. The great auk is mentioned in several novels, and the scientific journal of the American Ornithological Society was named The Auk (now Ornithology) in honour of the bird until 2021.

🔗 Film 🔗 France 🔗 France/Paris 🔗 Film/French cinema

100 Years is an upcoming science fiction film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Advertised in 2015 with the tagline "The Movie You Will Never See", it is due to be released on November 18, 2115. The 100 year span matches the time it takes for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac to be properly aged before its release to consumers. The film stars an international ensemble, with American actor John Malkovich, Taiwanese actress Shuya Chang, and Chilean actor Marko Zaror.

100 Years will apparently be a short film, Rodriguez having stated in a 2019 interview with French YouTuber InThePanda: "I was making several short films for them, and I finished that one first, we shot that one first, I thought that was gonna be a commercial or something. And then I showed them the movie and they said 'Yeah, that's great, that's great. That's the one we lock away.' And I said 'What? That's the one you lock away? What about the other one with the future--' 'No, that's the commercial.' [...] The one that I was most attached to was the one they locked away."

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Astronomy

J002E3 is the designation given to an object in space discovered on September 3, 2002, by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung. Initially thought to be an asteroid, it has since been tentatively identified as the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket (designated S-IVB-507), based on spectrographic evidence consistent with the titanium dioxide in the paint used on the rockets. The stage was intended to be injected into a permanent heliocentric orbit in November 1969, but is now believed instead to have gone into an unstable high Earth orbit which left Earth's proximity in 1971 and again in June 2003, with an approximately 40-year cycle between heliocentric and geocentric orbit.

In 2011, Randall Munroe in his comic xkcd coined the term "citogenesis" to describe the creation of "reliable" sources through circular reporting. This is a list of some well-documented cases where Wikipedia has been the source.

pattern parsing virtual machine (previously called 'chomski' after Noam Chomsky) and pp (the pattern parser, also a provisional name) refer to both a command line computer language and utility (interpreter for that language) which can be used to parse and transform text patterns and (formal mathematical) languages. The utility reads input files character by character (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line or a pp script, and then outputs the line. It was developed from 2006 in the C language. Pp has derived a number of ideas and syntax elements from Sed, a command line text stream editor.

🔗 Cetaceans

The 52-hertz whale is an individual whale of unidentified species which calls at the very unusual frequency of 52 Hz. This pitch is a much higher frequency than that of the other whale species with migration patterns most closely resembling this whale's – the blue whale (10–39 Hz) or fin whale (20 Hz). It has been detected regularly in many locations since the late 1980s and appears to be the only individual emitting a whale call at this frequency. It has been described as the "world's loneliest whale".

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics

Fluidics, or fluidic logic, is the use of a fluid to perform analog or digital operations similar to those performed with electronics.

The physical basis of fluidics is pneumatics and hydraulics, based on the theoretical foundation of fluid dynamics. The term fluidics is normally used when devices have no moving parts, so ordinary hydraulic components such as hydraulic cylinders and spool valves are not considered or referred to as fluidic devices.

A jet of fluid can be deflected by a weaker jet striking it at the side. This provides nonlinear amplification, similar to the transistor used in electronic digital logic. It is used mostly in environments where electronic digital logic would be unreliable, as in systems exposed to high levels of electromagnetic interference or ionizing radiation.

Nanotechnology considers fluidics as one of its instruments. In this domain, effects such as fluid-solid and fluid-fluid interface forces are often highly significant. Fluidics have also been used for military applications.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 European history 🔗 Military history/Nordic military history 🔗 Finland 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Hitler and Mannerheim recording is a recording of a private conversation between Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, and Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces. It took place on a secret visit made to Finland by Hitler to honour Mannerheim's 75th birthday on 4 June 1942, during the Continuation War, a sub-theatre of World War II. Thor Damen, a sound engineer for the Finnish broadcaster Yleisradio (YLE) who had been assigned to record the official birthday proceedings, recorded the first eleven minutes of Hitler and Mannerheim's private conversation—without Hitler's knowledge. It is the only known recording of Hitler speaking in an unofficial tone.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

TWINKLE (The Weizmann Institute Key Locating Engine) is a hypothetical integer factorization device described in 1999 by Adi Shamir and purported to be capable of factoring 512-bit integers. It is also a pun on the twinkling LEDs used in the device. Shamir estimated that the cost of TWINKLE could be as low as $5000 per unit with bulk production. TWINKLE has a successor named TWIRL which is more efficient.