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The Alan Turing Year, 2012, marked the celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing during the centenary of his birth on 23 June 1912. Turing had an important influence on computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability and made important contributions to code-breaking during the Second World War. The Alan Turing Centenary Advisory committee (TCAC) was originally set up by Professor Barry Cooper

The international impact of Turing's work is reflected in the list of countries in which Alan Turing Year was celebrated, including: Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, U.K. and the U.S.A. 41+ countries were involved.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 Cryptozoology

The following is a list of unidentified, or formerly unidentified, sounds. All of the sound files in this article have been sped up by at least a factor of 16 to increase intelligibility by condensing them and raising the frequency from infrasound to a more audible and reproducible range.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Biophysics

Magnetosomes are membranous structures present in magnetotactic bacteria (MTB). They contain iron-rich magnetic particles that are enclosed within a lipid bilayer membrane. Each magnetosome can often contain 15 to 20 magnetite crystals that form a chain which acts like a compass needle to orient magnetotactic bacteria in geomagnetic fields, thereby simplifying their search for their preferred microaerophilic environments. Recent research has shown that magnetosomes are invaginations of the inner membrane and not freestanding vesicles. Magnetite-bearing magnetosomes have also been found in eukaryotic magnetotactic algae, with each cell containing several thousand crystals.

Overall, magnetosome crystals have high chemical purity, narrow size ranges, species-specific crystal morphologies and exhibit specific arrangements within the cell. These features indicate that the formation of magnetosomes is under precise biological control and is mediated biomineralization.

Magnetotactic bacteria usually mineralize either iron oxide magnetosomes, which contain crystals of magnetite (Fe₃O₄), or iron sulfide magnetosomes, which contain crystals of greigite (Fe₃S₄). Several other iron sulfide minerals have also been identified in iron sulfide magnetosomes—including mackinawite (tetragonal FeS) and a cubic FeS—which are thought to be precursors of Fe₃S₄. One type of magnetotactic bacterium present at the oxic-anoxic transition zone (OATZ) of the southern basin of the Pettaquamscutt River Estuary, Narragansett, Rhode Island, United States is known to produce both iron oxide and iron sulfide magnetosomes.

🔗 United States 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Boston 🔗 United States/American television 🔗 Cartoon Network

On the morning of January 31, 2007, the Boston Police Department and the Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards depicting the Mooninites, characters from the Adult Swim animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), leading to a massive panic. Placed throughout Boston, Massachusetts, and the surrounding cities of Cambridge and Somerville by Peter "Zebbler" Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, these devices were part of a nationwide guerrilla marketing advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

The massive panic led to controversy and criticism from U.S. media sources, including The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, CNN, and The Boston Herald. Some ridiculed the city's response to the devices—including the arrests of the two men hired to place the placards around the area—as disproportionate and indicative of a generation gap between city officials and the younger residents of Boston, at whom the ads were targeted. Several sources noted that the hundreds of officers in the Boston police department or city emergency planning office on scene were unable to identify the figure depicted for several hours until a young staffer at Mayor Thomas Menino's office saw the media coverage and recognized the figures.

After the devices were removed, the Boston Police Department stated in its defense that the ad devices shared some similarities with improvised explosive devices, with them also discovering an identifiable power source, a circuit board with exposed wiring, and electrical tape. Investigators were not mollified by the discovery that the devices were not explosive in nature, stating they still intended to determine "if this event was a hoax or something else entirely". Although city prosecutors eventually concluded there was no ill intent involved in the placing of the ads, the city continues to refer to the event as a "bomb hoax" (implying intent) rather than a "bomb scare".

Reflecting years later, various academics and media sources have characterized the phenomenon as a form of social panic. Gregory Bergman wrote in his 2008 book BizzWords that the devices were basically a self-made form of the children's toy Lite-Brite. Bruce Schneier wrote in his 2009 book Schneier on Security that Boston officials were "ridiculed" for their overreaction to the incident. In his 2009 book Secret Agents, historian and communication professor Jeremy Packer discussed a cultural phenomenon called the "panic discourse" and described the incident as a "spectacular instance of this panic". In a 2012 article, The Boston Phoenix called the incident the "Great Mooninite Panic of 2007". A 2013 publication by WGBH wrote that the majority of Boston youth thought that the arrests of two men who placed devices were not justified.

🔗 Public Art 🔗 Textile Arts 🔗 Graffiti

Yarn bombing (or yarnbombing) is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colourful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk. It is also called wool bombing, yarn storming, guerrilla knitting, kniffiti, urban knitting, or graffiti knitting.

🔗 Mathematics

The art gallery problem or museum problem is a well-studied visibility problem in computational geometry. It originates from a real-world problem of guarding an art gallery with the minimum number of guards who together can observe the whole gallery. In the geometric version of the problem, the layout of the art gallery is represented by a simple polygon and each guard is represented by a point in the polygon. A set ${\displaystyle S}$ of points is said to guard a polygon if, for every point ${\displaystyle p}$ in the polygon, there is some ${\displaystyle q\in S}$ such that the line segment between ${\displaystyle p}$ and ${\displaystyle q}$ does not leave the polygon.

🔗 Architecture

The Frankfurt kitchen was a milestone in domestic architecture, considered the forerunner of modern fitted kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low cost. It was designed in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for architect Ernst May's social housing project New Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany. Some 10,000 units were built in the late 1920s in Frankfurt.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

Wolf 359 is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Leo, near the ecliptic. At a distance of approximately 7.9 light years from Earth, it has an apparent magnitude of 13.54 and can only be seen with a large telescope. Wolf 359 is one of the nearest stars to the Sun; only the Alpha Centauri system (including Proxima Centauri), Barnard's Star and the brown dwarfs Luhman 16 and WISE 0855−0714 are known to be closer. Its proximity to Earth has led to its mention in several works of fiction.

Wolf 359 is one of the faintest and lowest-mass stars known. At the light-emitting layer called the photosphere, it has a temperature of about 2,800 K, which is low enough for chemical compounds to form and survive. The absorption lines of compounds such as water and titanium(II) oxide have been observed in the spectrum. The surface has a magnetic field that is stronger than the average magnetic field on the Sun. As a result of magnetic activity caused by convection, Wolf 359 is a flare star that can undergo sudden increases in luminosity for several minutes. These flares emit strong bursts of X-ray and gamma ray radiation that have been observed by space telescopes. Wolf 359 is a relatively young star with an age of less than a billion years. Two planetary companions are suspected but as yet no debris disks have been unmasked.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 History 🔗 Islam 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 International relations/United Nations

The history of slavery in the Muslim world began with institutions inherited from pre-Islamic Arabia; and the practice of keeping slaves subsequently developed in radically different ways, depending on social-political factors such as the Arab slave trade. Any non-Muslim could be enslaved. Throughout Islamic history, slaves served in various social and economic roles, from powerful emirs to harshly treated manual laborers. Early on in Muslim history slaves provided plantation labor similar to that in the early-modern Americas, but this practice was abandoned after harsh treatment led to destructive slave revolts, the most notable being the Zanj Rebellion of 869–883. Slaves were widely employed in irrigation, mining, and animal husbandry, but most commonly as soldiers, guards, domestic workers, concubines and sex slaves. Many rulers relied on military slaves (often in huge standing armies) and on slaves in administration - to such a degree that the slaves could sometimes seize power. Among black slaves, there were roughly two females to every one male. Two rough estimates by scholars of the numbers of just one group - black slaves held over twelve centuries in the Muslim world - are 11.5 million and 14 million, while other estimates indicate a number between 12 and 15 million African slaves prior to the 20th century.

Islam encouraged the manumission of Muslim slaves as a way of expiating sins. Many early converts to Islam, such as Bilal, were former slaves. In theory, slavery in Islamic law does not have a racial or color basis, although this has not always been the case in practice. In 1990 the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam declared that "no one has the right to enslave" another human being. Many slaves were imported from outside the Muslim world.

The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. The Ottoman slave trade exploited the human resources of eastern and central Europe and the Caucasus; the Barbary Coast slave traders raided the Mediterranean coasts of Europe and as far afield as the British Isles and Iceland. In the early 20th century (post-World War I), authorities gradually outlawed and suppressed slavery in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1924 when the new Turkish Constitution disbanded the Imperial Harem and made the last concubines and eunuchs free citizens of the newly proclaimed republic. Slavery in Iran was abolished in 1929. Mauritania became the last state to abolish slavery - in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007. Oman abolished slavery in 1970, and Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain. However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented at present in the predominantly Islamic countries of the Sahel, and is also practiced by ISIS and Boko Haram. It is also practiced in countries like Libya and Mauritania - despite being outlawed.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Geology

The Eltanin impact is thought to be an asteroid impact in the eastern part of the South Pacific Ocean during the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary around 2.51 ± 0.07  million years ago. The location was at the edge of the Bellingshausen Sea 1,500 km (950 mi) southwest of Chile. The asteroid was estimated to be about one to four km (0.6 to 2.5 mi) in diameter and the impact would have left a crater approximately 35 km (22 mi) across.