Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Zimbabwe 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 Folklore

On September 16, 1994, there was a UFO sighting outside Ruwa, Zimbabwe. 62 students at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve claimed that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school. One or more creatures dressed all in black then approached the children and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme.

The Fortean writer Jerome Clark has called the incident the “most remarkable close encounter of the third kind of the 1990s”. Skeptics have described the incident as one of mass hysteria. Not all the children at the school that day claimed that they saw something. Several of those that did maintain that their account of the incident is true.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biology 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Transhumanism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Alternative medicine 🔗 Longevity

Life extension is the idea of extending the human lifespan, either modestly – through improvements in medicine – or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally settled limit of 125 years. The ability to achieve such dramatic changes, however, does not currently exist.

Some researchers in this area, and "life extensionists", "immortalists" or "longevists" (those who wish to achieve longer lives themselves), believe that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and organ replacement (such as with artificial organs or xenotransplantations) will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans (agerasia) through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition. The ethical ramifications, if life extension becomes a possibility, are debated by bioethicists.

The sale of purported anti-aging products such as supplements and hormone replacement is a lucrative global industry. For example, the industry that promotes the use of hormones as a treatment for consumers to slow or reverse the aging process in the US market generated about $50 billion of revenue a year in 2009. The use of such products has not been proven to be effective or safe.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

Shamir's Secret Sharing is an algorithm in cryptography created by Adi Shamir. It is a form of secret sharing, where a secret is divided into parts, giving each participant its own unique part.

To reconstruct the original secret, a minimum number of parts is required. In the threshold scheme this number is less than the total number of parts. Otherwise all participants are needed to reconstruct the original secret.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Science

Xenobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), are synthetic organisms that are automatically designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues.

Xenobots are less than a 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) wide and composed of just two things: skin cells and heart muscle cells, both of which are derived from stem cells harvested from early (blastula stage) frog embryos. The skin cells provide rigid support and the heart cells act as small motors, contracting and expanding in volume to propel the xenobot forward. The shape of a xenobot's body, and its distribution of skin and heart cells, are automatically designed in simulation to perform a specific task, using a process of trial and error (an evolutionary algorithm). Xenobots have been designed to walk, swim, push pellets, carry payloads, and work together in a swarm to aggregate debris scattered along the surface of their dish into neat piles. They can survive for weeks without food and heal themselves after lacerations.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Databases 🔗 Databases/Computer science

Apache Accumulo is a highly scalable sorted, distributed key-value store based on Google's Bigtable. It is a system built on top of Apache Hadoop, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Thrift. Written in Java, Accumulo has cell-level access labels and server-side programming mechanisms. According to DB-Engines ranking, Accumulo is the third most popular NoSQL wide column store behind Apache Cassandra and HBase and the 67th most popular database engine of any type (complete) as of 2018.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Brands

The following three lists of generic and genericized trademarks are:

• marks which were originally legally protected trademarks, but have been genericized and have lost their legal status due to becoming generic terms,
• marks which have been abandoned and are now generic terms
• marks which are still legally protected as trademarks, at least in some jurisdictions

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history

On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early-warning radar of the Soviet Union reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from bases in the United States. These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system. He decided to wait for corroborating evidence—of which none arrived—rather than immediately relaying the warning up the chain-of-command. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack against the United States and its NATO allies, which would likely have resulted in an escalation to a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later determined that the system had indeed malfunctioned.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Photography 🔗 Computer graphics

Design rule for Camera File system (DCF) is a JEITA specification (number CP-3461) which defines a file system for digital cameras, including the directory structure, file naming method, character set, file format, and metadata format. It is currently the de facto industry standard for digital still cameras. The file format of DCF conforms to the Exif specification, but the DCF specification also allows use of any other file formats.

The latest version of the standard is 2.0 (2010 edition).

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics

A jiggle syphon (or siphon) is the combination of a syphon pipe and a simple priming pump that uses mechanical shaking action to pump enough liquid up the pipe to reach the highest point, and thus start the syphoning action.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Books

Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 is a 1998 novel, presented as a biography, by the Scottish writer William Boyd. Nat Tate was an imaginary person, invented by Boyd and created as "an abstract expressionist who destroyed '99%' of his work and leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found." At the time of the novel's launch, Boyd went some way to encourage the belief that Tate had really existed.