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🔗 Australia 🔗 Animals 🔗 Australia/Australian biota 🔗 Cephalopods 🔗 Project-independent assessment

Octopolis and Octlantis are two separate non-human underwater settlements built by the gloomy octopuses. The first settlement, named Octopolis by biologists, was found in 2009. The individual structures in Octopolis consist of burrows around a piece of scrap metal. In 2016, a second settlement was found, named Octlantis, which instead of burrows, has dens and is built with seashells.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Germany/GDR

On 16 September 1979, eight people from two families escaped from East Germany by crossing the border into West Germany at night in a homemade hot air balloon. The unique feat was the result of over a year and a half of preparations involving three different balloons, various modifications, and a first, unsuccessful attempt. The failed attempt alerted the East German authorities to the plot, but the police were unable to identify the escapees before their second, successful flight two months later.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Firearms

A synchronization gear, or a gun synchronizer, sometimes rather less accurately called an interrupter, is attached to the armament of a single-engine tractor-configuration aircraft so it can fire through the arc of its spinning propeller without bullets striking the blades. The idea presupposes a fixed armament directed by aiming the aircraft in which it is fitted at the target, rather than aiming the gun independently.

There are many practical problems, mostly arising from the inherently imprecise nature of an automatic gun's firing, the great (and varying) velocity of the blades of a spinning propeller, and the very high speed at which any gear synchronizing the two has to operate.

Design and experimentation with gun synchronization had been underway in France and Germany in 1913–1914, following the ideas of August Euler, who seems to have been the first to suggest mounting a fixed armament firing in the direction of flight (in 1910). However, the first practical—if far from reliable—gear to enter operational service was that fitted to the Eindecker monoplane fighters, which entered squadron service with the German Air Service in mid-1915. The success of the Eindecker led to numerous gun synchronization devices, culminating in the reasonably reliable hydraulic British Constantinesco gear of 1917. By the end of the war German engineers were well on the way to perfecting a gear using an electrical rather than a mechanical or hydraulic link between the engine and the gun, with the gun being triggered by a solenoid rather than by a mechanical "trigger motor".

From 1918 to the mid-1930s the standard armament for a fighter aircraft remained two synchronized rifle-calibre machine guns, firing forward through the arc of the propeller. During the late 1930s, however, the main role of the fighter was increasingly seen as the destruction of large, all-metal bombers, for which the "traditional" light armament was inadequate.

Since it was impractical to try to fit more than one or two extra guns in the limited space available in the front of a single-engine aircraft's fuselage, this led to an increasing proportion of the armament being mounted in the wings, firing outside the arc of the propeller. There were in fact some advantages in dispensing with centrally mounted guns altogether. Nevertheless, the conclusive redundancy of synchronization gears did not finally come until the introduction of jet propulsion and the absence of a propeller for guns to be synchronized with.

🔗 Human rights

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

🔗 Video games 🔗 Anime and manga

The Tamagotchi Connection, known as Tamagotchi Plus in Japan and Tamagotchi Connexion in the UK, is a virtual pet in the Tamagotchi line of digital toys from Bandai. The Tamagotchi Connection is unique from prior models in that it uses infrared technology to connect and interact with other devices and was first released in 2004, 8 years after the first Tamagotchi toy. Using the device's infrared port, the virtual pet (referred to as a Tamagotchi) can make friends with other Tamagotchis, in addition to playing games, giving and receiving presents and having a baby.

Versions 1 to 4 of Tamagotchi Connection have 6 levels of friendship that can be viewed in the Friends List:

• Acquaintance (one smiley-face)
• Buddy (two smiley-faces)
• Friend (three smiley-faces)
• Good friend (four smiley-faces)
• Best friend (two love-hearts, two smiley-faces, during connection they may kiss)
• Partner (four love-hearts, during connection they will kiss and may have babies)

Versions 5 and 6 have different levels.

If the Tamagotchi cannot find a partner from another device to have babies with, a matchmaker will come, allowing the Tamagotchi to have a baby with a computer-controlled Tamagotchi character. This applies to versions 1 to 4 and 6 only. Version 5 introduces a Dating Show game in which the user must play to gain a CPU partner.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Poland

The method of Zygalski sheets was a cryptologic technique used by the Polish Cipher Bureau before and during World War II, and during the war also by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, to decrypt messages enciphered on German Enigma machines.

The Zygalski-sheet apparatus takes its name from Polish Cipher Bureau mathematician–cryptologist Henryk Zygalski, who invented it about October 1938.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

SCOOP (Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming) is a concurrency model designed for the Eiffel programming language, conceived by Eiffel's creator and designer, Bertrand Meyer.

SCOOP defines a way for an object oriented program to be written without the concept of threads, locks, or other typical multiprogramming methods. This allows the compiler or runtime environment to optimize the amount of concurrency as well as eliminate typical design flaws such as deadlock.

The model was first designed in the early 1990s and published in 1993 in the Communications of the ACM An updated version was described in chapter 30 of the book Object-Oriented Software Construction. A prototype implementation was developed in 1995 by Eiffel Software. An article by Compton and Walker provides an overview of SCOOP and describes another early implementation. Nienaltowski, Arslan and Meyer have published a description of the model as of 2003. Work on SCOOP proceeded at the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich. SCOOP became available as a standard part of EiffelStudio early in 2011.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Scottish Islands

Operation Vegetarian was a British military plan in 1942 to disseminate linseed cakes infected with anthrax spores onto the fields of Germany. These cakes would have been eaten by the cattle, which would then be consumed by the civilian population, causing the deaths of millions of German citizens. Furthermore, it would have wiped out the majority of Germany's cattle, creating a massive food shortage for the rest of the population that remained uninfected. Preparations were not complete until early 1944. Operation Vegetarian was only to be used in the event of a German anthrax attack on the United Kingdom.

The cakes themselves were tested on Gruinard Island, just off the coast of Scotland. Because of the widespread contamination from the anthrax spores, the land remained quarantined until 1990. The five million cakes made to be disseminated in Germany were eventually destroyed in an incinerator shortly after the end of World War II.

In his novel The Impossible Dead (2011), author Ian Rankin mentions the clandestine events surrounding the removal of contaminated soils from Guinard Island by a protest group, the Dark Harvest Commando, and the island's removal from maps by the British Government. The island also features as the principal setting for the 1985 novel El año de gracia, by Cristina Fernández Cubas, in which the protagonist spends a winter shipwrecked on the island.