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🔗 Typography 🔗 Industrial design

The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on 31 July 1961.

Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a typical typewriter of the period, the Selectric had an "element" (frequently called a "typeball", or less formally, a "golf ball") that rotated and pivoted to the correct position before striking. The element could be easily changed so as to use different fonts in the same document typed on the same typewriter, resurrecting a capability that had been pioneered by typewriters such as the Hammond and Blickensderfer in the late 19th century. The Selectric also replaced the traditional typewriter's horizontally moving carriage with a roller (platen) that turned to advance the paper but did not move horizontally, while the typeball and ribbon mechanism did.

The Selectric mechanism was notable for using internal mechanical binary coding and two mechanical digital-to-analog converters, called whiffletree linkages, to select the character to be typed.

Selectrics and their descendants eventually captured 75 percent of the United States market for electric typewriters used in business. IBM replaced the Selectric line with the IBM Wheelwriter in 1984 and transferred its typewriter business to the newly formed Lexmark in 1991. By its 25th anniversary, in 1986, a total of more than 13 million machines were made and sold.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Europe 🔗 China 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Europe/ESA 🔗 Solar System/Mars 🔗 Solar System

The Mars-500 mission was a psychosocial isolation experiment conducted between 2007 and 2011 by Russia, the European Space Agency and China, in preparation for an unspecified future crewed spaceflight to the planet Mars. The experiment's facility was located at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow, Russia.

Between 2007 and 2011, three different crews of volunteers lived and worked in a mock-up spacecraft at IBMP. The final stage of the experiment, which was intended to simulate a 520-day crewed mission, was conducted by an all-male crew consisting of three Russians (Alexey Sitev, Sukhrob Kamolov, Alexander Smoleevskij), a Frenchman (Romain Charles), an Italian (Diego Urbina) and a Chinese citizen (Yue Wang). The mock-up facility simulated an Earth-Mars shuttle spacecraft, an ascent-descent craft, and the Martian surface. The volunteers who participated in the three stages included professionals with experience in engineering, medicine, biology, and human spaceflight. The experiment yielded important data on the physiological, social and psychological effects of long-term close-quarters isolation.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/Musicians 🔗 Caribbean 🔗 Reggae 🔗 Record Production 🔗 Caribbean/Jamaica

Lee "Scratch" Perry (born Rainford Hugh Perry; 20/28 March 1936 – 29 August 2021) was a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. He worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, The Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, Beastie Boys, Ari Up, The Clash, The Orb, and many others.

🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Crime 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Politics 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Panama

This is a partial list of people named in the Panama Papers as shareholders, directors and beneficiaries of offshore companies. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the full list of companies and individuals in the Panama Papers on 10 May 2016. ICIJ published the following disclaimer with regard to the data provided: "There are legitimate uses for offshore companies, foundations and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Power Players interactive application have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly."

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Spectroscopy 🔗 Blades

Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger, also known as Tutankhamun's iron dagger and King Tut's dagger, is an iron-bladed dagger from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun (reigned c. 1334–1325 BC). As the blade composition and homogeneity closely correlate with meteorite composition and homogeneity, the material for the blade is determined to have originated by way of a meteoritic landing. The dagger is currently displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Business

The Panic of 1907 – also known as the 1907 Bankers' Panic or Knickerbocker Crisis – was a financial crisis that took place in the United States over a three-week period starting in mid-October, when the New York Stock Exchange fell almost 50% from its peak the previous year. Panic occurred, as this was during a time of economic recession, and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies. The 1907 panic eventually spread throughout the nation when many state and local banks and businesses entered bankruptcy. Primary causes of the run included a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks and a loss of confidence among depositors, exacerbated by unregulated side bets at bucket shops.

The panic was triggered by the failed attempt in October 1907 to corner the market on stock of the United Copper Company. When this bid failed, banks that had lent money to the cornering scheme suffered runs that later spread to affiliated banks and trusts, leading a week later to the downfall of the Knickerbocker Trust Company—New York City's third-largest trust. The collapse of the Knickerbocker spread fear throughout the city's trusts as regional banks withdrew reserves from New York City banks. Panic extended across the nation as vast numbers of people withdrew deposits from their regional banks. It is the 9th largest decline in U.S. stock market history.

The panic might have deepened if not for the intervention of financier J. P. Morgan, who pledged large sums of his own money, and convinced other New York bankers to do the same, to shore up the banking system. This highlighted the impotence of the nation's Independent Treasury system, which managed the nation's money supply yet was unable to inject liquidity back into the market. By November, the financial contagion had largely ended, only to be replaced by a further crisis. This was due to the heavy borrowing of a large brokerage firm that used the stock of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TC&I) as collateral. Collapse of TC&I's stock price was averted by an emergency takeover by Morgan's U.S. Steel Corporation—a move approved by anti-monopolist president Theodore Roosevelt. The following year, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, a leading Republican, established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

🔗 Books

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, The Waning of the Middle Ages, or Autumntide of the Middle Ages (published in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and translated into English in 1924, German in 1924, and French in 1932), is the best-known work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.

In the book, Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism.

His main conclusion is that the combination of required modernization of statehood governance, stuck in traditionalism, in combination with the exhausting inclusion of an ever-growing corpus of Catholic rites and popular beliefs in daily life, led to the implosion of late medieval society. This provided light to the rise of (religious) individualism, humanism and scientific progress: the renaissance.

The book was nominated for the 1939 Nobel Prize for Literature, but lost to the Finnish writer Frans Eemil Sillanpää.

Huizinga's work later came under some criticism, especially for relying too heavily on evidence from the rather exceptional case of the Burgundian court. Other criticisms include the writing of the book being "old-fashioned" and "too literary".

A new English translation of the book was published in 1996 because of perceived deficiencies in the original translation. The new translation, by Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, was based on the second edition of the Dutch publication in 1921 and compared with the German translation published in 1924.

To mark the centenary of Herfsttij, a new translation by Diane Webb appeared in 2020, published by Leiden University Press: Autumntide of the Middle Ages. According to Benjamin Kaplan, this translation "captures Huizinga's original voice better than either of the two previous English editions". This new English edition also includes for the first time 300 full-colour illustrations of all the works of art Huizinga mentions in his text.

In the 1970s, Radio Netherlands produced an audio series about the book, entitled "Autumn of the Middle Ages: A Six-part History in Words and Music from the Low Countries".

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Cats 🔗 Microbiology 🔗 Veterinary medicine

Toxoplasma gondii () is a parasitic protozoan (specifically an apicomplexan) that causes toxoplasmosis. Found worldwide, T. gondii is capable of infecting virtually all warm-blooded animals,^: 1 but felids are the only known definitive hosts in which the parasite may undergo sexual reproduction.

In rodents, T. gondii alters behavior in ways that increase the rodents' chances of being preyed upon by felids. Support for this "manipulation hypothesis" stems from studies showing that T. gondii-infected rats have a decreased aversion to cat urine while infection in mice lowers general anxiety, increases explorative behaviors and increases a loss of aversion to predators in general. Because cats are one of the only hosts within which T. gondii can sexually reproduce, such behavioral manipulations are thought to be evolutionary adaptations that increase the parasite's reproductive success since rodents that do not avoid cat habitations will more likely become cat prey. The primary mechanisms of T. gondii–induced behavioral changes in rodents occur through epigenetic remodeling in neurons that govern the relevant behaviors (e.g. hypomethylation of arginine vasopressin-related genes in the medial amygdala, which greatly decrease predator aversion).

In humans, particularly infants and those with weakened immunity, T. gondii infection is generally asymptomatic but may lead to a serious case of toxoplasmosis. T. gondii can initially cause mild, flu-like symptoms in the first few weeks following exposure, but otherwise, healthy human adults are asymptomatic. This asymptomatic state of infection is referred to as a latent infection, and it has been associated with numerous subtle behavioral, psychiatric, and personality alterations in humans. Behavioral changes observed between infected and non-infected humans include a decreased aversion to cat urine (but with divergent trajectories by gender) and an increased risk of schizophrenia. Preliminary evidence has suggested that T. gondii infection may induce some of the same alterations in the human brain as those observed in rodents. Many of these associations have been strongly debated and newer studies have found them to be weak, concluding:

On the whole, there was little evidence that T. gondii was related to increased risk of psychiatric disorder, poor impulse control, personality aberrations, or neurocognitive impairment.

T. gondii is one of the most common parasites in developed countries; serological studies estimate that up to 50% of the global population has been exposed to, and may be chronically infected with, T. gondii; although infection rates differ significantly from country to country. Estimates have shown the highest IgG seroprevalence to be in Ethiopia, at 64.2%, as of 2018.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

The Invincible (Polish: Niezwyciężony) is a hard science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem, published in 1964.

The Invincible originally appeared as the title story in Lem's collection Niezwyciężony i inne opowiadania ("The Invincible and Other Stories"). A translation into German was published in 1967; an English translation by Wendayne Ackerman, based on the German one, was published in 1973. A direct translation into English from Polish, by Bill Johnston, was published in 2006.

It was one of the first novels to explore the ideas of microrobots/smartdust/etc., artificial swarm intelligence and "necroevolution", a term suggested by Lem for evolution of non-living matter.

🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Cooperatives 🔗 Israel

A kibbutz (Hebrew: קִבּוּץ‎ / קיבוץ‎, lit. "gathering, clustering"; plural: kibbutzim קִבּוּצִים‎ / קיבוצים‎) is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1909, was Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economic branches, including industrial plants and high-tech enterprises. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism. In recent decades, some kibbutzim have been privatized and changes have been made in the communal lifestyle. A member of a kibbutz is called a kibbutznik (Hebrew: קִבּוּצְנִיק‎ / קיבוצניק‎; plural kibbutznikim or kibbutzniks).

In 2010, there were 270 kibbutzim in Israel. Their factories and farms account for 9% of Israel's industrial output, worth US$8 billion, and 40% of its agricultural output, worth over $1.7 billion. Some kibbutzim had also developed substantial high-tech and military industries. For example, in 2010, Kibbutz Sasa, containing some 200 members, generated $850 million in annual revenue from its military-plastics industry.

Currently the kibbutzim are organised in the secular Kibbutz Movement with some 230 kibbutzim, the Religious Kibbutz Movement with 16 kibbutzim and the much smaller religious Poalei Agudat Yisrael with two kibbutzim, all part of the wider communal settlement movement.