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🔗 United States 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/American currency 🔗 U.S. Congress

The United States Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. It also prohibited the Treasury and financial institutions from redeeming dollar bills for gold, established the Exchange Stabilization Fund under control of the Treasury to control the dollar’s value without the assistance (or approval) of the Federal Reserve, and authorized the president to establish the gold value of the dollar by proclamation.

Immediately following passage of the Act, the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. This price change incentivized gold miners globally to expand production and foreigners to export their gold to the United States, while simultaneously devaluing the U.S. dollar by increasing inflation. The increase in gold reserves due to the price change resulted in a large accumulation of gold in the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, much of which was stored in the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and other locations. The increase in gold reserves increased the money supply, lowering real interest rates which in turn increased investment in durable goods.

A year earlier, in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins. These prohibitions were relaxed starting in 1964 – gold certificates were again allowed for private investors on April 24, 1964, although the obligation to pay the certificate holder on demand in gold specie would not be honored. By 1975 Americans could again freely own and trade gold.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Genetics 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia 🔗 Russia/economy of Russia

The Russian domesticated red fox is a form of the wild red fox (Vulpes vulpes) which has been domesticated to an extent, under laboratory conditions. They are the result of an experiment which was designed to demonstrate the power of selective breeding to transform species, as described by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. The experiment was purposely designed to replicate the process that had produced dogs from wolves, by recording the changes in foxes, when in each generation only the most tame foxes were allowed to breed. In short order, the descendant foxes became tamer and more dog-like in their behavior.

The program was started in 1959 in the Soviet Union by zoologist Dmitry Belyayev and it has been in continuous operation since. Today, the experiment is under the supervision of Lyudmila Trut, in Russia, at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

Hy (alternately, Hylang) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp designed to interact with the language Python by translating expressions into Python's abstract syntax tree (AST). Hy was introduced at Python Conference (PyCon) 2013 by Paul Tagliamonte.

Similar to Kawa's and Clojure's mapping of s-expressions onto the Java virtual machine (JVM), Hy is meant to operate as a transparent Lisp front end to Python's abstract syntax. Lisp allows operating on code as data (metaprogramming). Thus, Hy can be used to write domain-specific languages. Hy also allows Python libraries, including the standard library, to be imported and accessed alongside Hy code with a compiling step converting the data structure of both into Python's AST.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Physics 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

The tennis racket theorem or intermediate axis theorem is a result in classical mechanics describing the movement of a rigid body with three distinct principal moments of inertia. It is also dubbed the Dzhanibekov effect, after Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov who noticed one of the theorem's logical consequences while in space in 1985 although the effect was already known for at least 150 years before that.

The theorem describes the following effect: rotation of an object around its first and third principal axes is stable, while rotation around its second principal axis (or intermediate axis) is not.

This can be demonstrated with the following experiment: hold a tennis racket at its handle, with its face being horizontal, and try to throw it in the air so that it will perform a full rotation around the horizontal axis perpendicular to the handle, and try to catch the handle. In almost all cases, during that rotation the face will also have completed a half rotation, so that the other face is now up. By contrast, it is easy to throw the racket so that it will rotate around the handle axis (the third principal axis) without accompanying half-rotation around another axis; it is also possible to make it rotate around the vertical axis perpendicular to the handle (the first principal axis) without any accompanying half-rotation.

The experiment can be performed with any object that has three different moments of inertia, for instance with a book, remote control or smartphone. The effect occurs whenever the axis of rotation differs only slightly from the object's second principal axis; air resistance or gravity are not necessary.

🔗 Toys

A pop-pop boat is a toy with a very simple steam engine without moving parts, typically powered by a candle or vegetable oil burner. The name comes from the noise made by some versions of the boats. Other names are putt-putt boat, crazy boat, flash-steamer, hot-air-boat, pulsating water engine boat. Around the world they may be called Can-Can-boot, Knatterboot, toc-toc, Puf-Puf boat, Poof Poof craft, Phut-Phut, or Pouet-Pouet.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Project-independent assessment

In medicine, the hygiene hypothesis states that early childhood exposure to particular microorganisms (such as the gut flora and helminth parasites) protects against allergies by properly tuning the immune system. In particular, a lack of such exposure is thought to lead to poor immune tolerance. The time period for exposure begins before birth and ends at school age.

While early versions of the hypothesis referred to microorganism exposure in general, later versions apply to a specific set of microbes that have co-evolved with humans. The updates have been given various names, including the microbiome depletion hypothesis, the microflora hypothesis, and the "old friends" hypothesis. There is a significant amount of evidence supporting the idea that lack of exposure to these microbes is linked to allergies or other conditions, although it is still rejected by many scientists.

The term "hygiene hypothesis" has been described as a misnomer because people incorrectly interpret it as referring to their own cleanliness. Having worse personal hygiene, such as not washing hands before eating, only increases the risk of infection without affecting the risk of allergies or immune disorders. Hygiene is essential for protecting vulnerable populations such as the elderly from infections, preventing the spread of antibiotic resistance, and combating emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola. The hygiene hypothesis does not suggest that having more infections during childhood would be an overall benefit.

🔗 Chess 🔗 Japan

Taikyoku shōgi (Japanese: 大局将棋) lit. "ultimate chess" is the largest known variant of shogi (Japanese chess). The game was created around the mid-16th century (presumably by priests) and is based on earlier large board shogi games. Before the rediscovery of taikyoku shogi in 1997, tai shogi was believed to be the largest playable chess variant ever. It has not been shown that taikyoku shogi was ever widely played. There are only two sets of restored taikyoku shogi pieces and one of them is held at Osaka University of Commerce. One game may be played over several long sessions and require each player to make over a thousand moves.

Because the game was found only recently after centuries of obscurity, it is difficult to say exactly what all the rules were. Several documents describing the game have been found; however, there are differences between them. Many of the pieces appear in other shogi variants but their moves may be different. The board, and likewise the pieces, were made much smaller, making archeological finds difficult to decipher. Research into this game continues for historical and cultural reasons, but also to satisfy the curious and those who wish to play what could be the most challenging chess-like game ever made. More research must be done however. This article focuses on one likely set of rules that can make the game playable in modern times but is by no means canon. These rules may change as more discoveries are made and secrets of the game unlocked.

Further, because of the terse and often incomplete wording of the historical sources for the large shogi variants, except for chu shogi and to a lesser extent dai shogi (which were at some points of time the most prestigious forms of shogi being played), the historical rules of taikyoku shogi are not clear. Different sources often differ significantly in the moves attributed to the pieces, and the degree of contradiction (summarised below with the listing of most known alternative moves) is such that it is likely impossible to reconstruct the "true historical rules" with any degree of certainty, if there ever was such a thing. It is not clear if the game was ever played much historically, as there is no record of any sets having been made.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 China

PAS-22, previously known as AsiaSat 3 and then HGS-1, was a geosynchronous communications satellite, which was salvaged from an unusable geosynchronous transfer orbit by means of the Moon's gravity.

🔗 Literature

A chrestomathy ( kreh-STOM-ə-thee; from the Ancient Greek χρηστομάθεια khrēstomátheia 'desire of learning', from χρηστός khrēstós 'useful' + μανθάνω manthánō 'learn') is a collection of selected literary passages (usually from a single author); a selection of literary passages from a foreign language assembled for studying the language; or a text in various languages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject.

In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or literary style. It is different from an anthology because of its didactic purpose.