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🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Paranormal

A thunderstone is a flint tool or fossil turned up by farmer's plow that was thought to have fallen from the sky. They were often thought to be thunderbolts. It was not until travelers returned from far-away places where these implements were in use among primitive cultures that the origins of these objects became known. Even then, these travelers' tales received little popular credence.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Cold War

The Battle of Palmdale was the attempted shoot-down of a runaway drone by United States Air Force interceptors in the skies over Southern California in mid-August 1956. The drone was launched from Point Mugu Naval Air Station and soon went out of control. Interceptor aircraft took off from Oxnard Air Force Base and caught up with the drone, but were ultimately unable to bring it down, in spite of expending all of their rockets. After it ran out of fuel, the unmanned aircraft crashed in a sparsely populated tract of desert.

During the incident over 1000 acres were scorched and a substantial amount of property was damaged or destroyed.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Computer Security

A Kensington Security Slot (also called a K-Slot or Kensington lock) is part of an anti-theft system designed in the early 1990s and patented by Kryptonite in 1999–2000, assigned to Schlage in 2002, and since 2005 owned and marketed by Kensington Computer Products Group, a division of ACCO Brands.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Australia 🔗 Business 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Scouting

Richard Harold Smith (born 18 March 1944) is an Australian entrepreneur, aviator and philanthropist. He holds a number of aviation world records and is the founder of Dick Smith Electronics, Australian Geographic and Dick Smith Foods. He was selected as 1986 Australian of the Year. In 2010, he founded the media production company Smith&Nasht with the intention of producing films about global issues. In 2015, he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia 🔗 Finland

The Karelian question or Karelian issue (Finnish: Karjala-kysymys, Swedish: Karelska frågan) is a dispute in Finnish politics over whether to try to regain control over eastern Finnish Karelia and other territories ceded to the Soviet Union in the Winter War and the Continuation War. Despite the name "Karelian question", the term may refer also to the return of Petsamo, ceded parts of Salla and Kuusamo, and four islands in the Gulf of Finland. Sometimes the phrase "debate on the return of the ceded territories" (luovutettujen alueiden palautuskeskustelu, Swedish: debatten om tillbakalämningen av de avträdda territorierna) is used. The Karelian question remains a matter of public debate rather than a political issue.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Sociology

Wage slavery is a term describing a situation in which a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It has been used to criticise exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labour and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops) and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution. Historically, some socialist organisations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labour.

Similarities between wage labour and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labour and slavery, while Luddites emphasised the dehumanisation brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labour in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labour union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labour press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labour leader without the phrase".

🔗 Spaceflight

Space Infrastructure Servicing (SIS) is a spacecraft being developed by Canadian aerospace firm MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates to operate as a small-scale in-space refueling depot for communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

In June 2017, SSL announced its first commercial customer, Luxembourg-based satellite owner/operator SES S.A.

🔗 Fungi 🔗 Plants

A mycorrhizal network (also known as a common mycorrhizal network or CMN) is an underground network found in forests and other plant communities, created by the hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi joining with plant roots. This network connects individual plants together. Mycorrhizal relationships are most commonly mutualistic, with both partners benefiting, but can be commensal or parasitic, and a single partnership may change between any of the three types of symbiosis at different times. Mycorrhizal networks were discovered in 1997 by Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Simard grew up in Canadian forests where her family had made a living as foresters for generations. Her field studies revealed that trees are linked to neighboring trees by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain. In one study, Simard watched as a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect.

The formation and nature of these networks is context-dependent, and can be influenced by factors such as soil fertility, resource availability, host or mycosymbiont genotype, disturbance and seasonal variation. Some plant species, such as buckhorn plantain, a common lawn and agricultural weed, benefit from mycorrhizal relationships in conditions of low soil fertility, but are harmed in higher soil fertility. Both plants and fungi associate with multiple symbiotic partners at once, and both plants and fungi are capable of preferentially allocating resources to one partner over another.

Mycorrhizal associations have profoundly impacted the evolution of plant life on Earth ever since the initial adaptation of plant life to land. In evolutionary biology, mycorrhizal symbiosis has prompted inquiries into the possibility that symbiosis, not competition, is the main driver of evolution.

Referencing an analogous function served by the World Wide Web in human communities, the many roles that mycorrhizal networks appear to play in woodland have earned them a colloquial nickname: the "Wood Wide Web". Many of the claims made about common mycorrhizal networks, including that they are ubiquitous in forests, that resources are transferred between plants through them, and that they are used to transfer warnings between trees, have been criticised as being not strongly supported by evidence.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography 🔗 Women artists

Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer whose work was not discovered and recognized until after her death. She worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago's North Shore, while she pursued her photography. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide.

During her lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of her negatives were never printed. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier's photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier's prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier's photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier's photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went viral, with thousands of people expressing interest. Maier's work subsequently attracted critical acclaim, and since then, Maier's photographs have been exhibited around the world.

Her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films, including the film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Linux

The Linux Router Project (LRP) is a now defunct networking-centric micro Linux distribution. The released versions of LRP were small enough to fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk, and made building and maintaining routers, access servers, thin servers, thin clients, network appliances, and typically embedded systems next to trivial.