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🔗 Brands 🔗 Automobiles

The Tweel (a portmanteau of tire and wheel) is an airless tire design developed by the French tire company Michelin. Its significant advantage over pneumatic tires is that the Tweel does not use a bladder full of compressed air, and therefore cannot burst, leak pressure, or become flat. Instead, the Tweel's hub is connected to the rim via flexible polyurethane spokes which fulfil the shock-absorbing role provided by the compressed air in a traditional tire.

🔗 Military history 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Animal rights 🔗 Animals 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The British pet massacre was an event in 1939 in the United Kingdom where over 750,000 pets were killed in preparation for food shortages during World War II. It was referred to at the time as the September Holocaust, and later sources describe it as a "holocaust of pets". In London alone, during the first week of the Second World War around 400,000 companion animals, about 26% of all cats and dogs were killed.

No bombs were to fall on the UK mainland until April 1940.

Similar events happened in mainland Europe, for example, the killing of millions of farm animals in Denmark due to the lack of imported fodder for them.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Measurement

The obsolete units of measurement of German-speaking countries consist of a variety of units, with varying local standard definitions. Some of these units are still used in everyday speech and even in stores and on street markets as shorthand for similar amounts in the metric system. For example, some customers ask for one pound (ein Pfund) of something when they want 500 grams.

The metric system became compulsory on 1 January 1872, in Germany and on 1 January 1876, in Austria.

Some obsolete German units have names similar to units that were traditionally used in other countries, and that are still used in the United Kingdom (imperial units) and the United States (United States customary units).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

This article compares variety of different X window managers. For an introduction to the topic, see X Window System.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The iAPX 432 (Intel Advanced Performance Architecture) is a discontinued computer architecture introduced in 1981. It was Intel's first 32-bit processor design. The main processor of the architecture, the general data processor, is implemented as a set of two separate integrated circuits, due to technical limitations at the time. Although some early 8086, 80186 and 80286-based systems and manuals also used the iAPX prefix for marketing reasons, the iAPX 432 and the 8086 processor lines are completely separate designs with completely different instruction sets.

The project started in 1975 as the 8800 (after the 8008 and the 8080) and was intended to be Intel's major design for the 1980s. Unlike the 8086, which was designed the following year as a successor to the 8080, the iAPX 432 was a radical departure from Intel's previous designs meant for a different market niche, and completely unrelated to the 8080 or x86 product lines.

The iAPX 432 project is considered a commercial failure for Intel, and was discontinued in 1986.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Energy

A solar pond is a pool of saltwater which collects and stores solar thermal energy. The saltwater naturally forms a vertical salinity gradient also known as a "halocline", in which low-salinity water floats on top of high-salinity water. The layers of salt solutions increase in concentration (and therefore density) with depth. Below a certain depth, the solution has a uniformly high salt concentration.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Archaeology

YBC 7289 is a Babylonian clay tablet notable for containing an accurate sexagesimal approximation to the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a unit square. This number is given to the equivalent of six decimal digits, "the greatest known computational accuracy ... in the ancient world". The tablet is believed to be the work of a student in southern Mesopotamia from some time in the range from 1800–1600 BC, and was donated to the Yale Babylonian Collection by J. P. Morgan.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Poland

Stańczyk (c. 1480–1560) (Polish pronunciation: [ˈstaɲt͡ʂɨk]) was a Polish court jester, the most famous in Polish history. He was employed by three Polish kings: Alexander, Sigismund the Old and Sigismund Augustus.

🔗 Insects 🔗 Insects/Ant 🔗 Birds 🔗 Ecology 🔗 Insects/Hymenoptera

Kleptoparasitism (originally spelt clepto-parasitism, meaning "parasitism by theft") is a form of feeding behavior in which one animal — i.e. the kleptoparasite — deliberately takes food from another animal, often via aggressive confrontations. The strategy is evolutionarily stable when stealing is less costly than direct predation, such as when food is scarce or when physically weaker/less assertive victims are abundant and unlikely to fight back.

Many kleptoparasites are arthropods, especially bees and wasps, but including some true flies, dung beetles, bugs and spiders. Cuckoo bees are specialized kleptoparasites which lay their eggs either on the pollen masses made by other bees, or on the insect hosts of parasitoid wasps. They are an instance of Emery's rule, which states that insect social parasites tend to be closely related to their hosts. The behavior also occurs among vertebrates including birds such as skuas, who persistently chase and harass other seabirds until they disgorge their food; and hypercarnivorous mammals such as spotted hyenas and lions, who routinely rob killed prey from each other and other mesopredators such as cheetahs. Other species might also opportunistically indulge in kleptoparasitism, especially when driven by the desperation of hunger and when scavenging isn't an option.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

The Kyl–Bingaman Amendment (Public Law 104-201, Section 1064) is a United States law. It was put into force by the Military Defense National Defense Authorization Act for 1997.

The Kyl–Bingaman Amendment (KBA) prohibits US authorities from granting a license for collecting or disseminating high resolution satellite imagery of Israel at a higher resolution than is available from other commercial sources, that is, from companies outside of the United States. An exception exists if this is done by a US federal agency, or if it is done in order to abolish the secrecy of such recordings.

U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel. The largest and most important global sources of commercial satellite imagery, such as Maxar Technologies, Capella, and Umbra, and the largest and widely-used online resources, such as Google and Bing, are American and this makes KBA a powerful instrument of U.S. government suppression of information. For example, as a result of KBA, images on internet platforms such as Google Earth have been deliberately blurred.