Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Plants 🔗 Africa/Niger

The Ténéré Tree (French: L'Arbre du Ténéré) was a solitary acacia, of either Acacia raddiana or Acacia tortilis, that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth—the only one for over 400 kilometres (250 mi). It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert in northeast Niger, so well known that it and the Arbre Perdu (Lost Tree) to the north are the only trees to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. The Tree of Ténéré was located near a 40-metre (130 ft) deep well. It was knocked down in 1973, by a truck driver.

🔗 France 🔗 France/Paris 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Travel and Tourism

Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, pari shōkōgun) is a condition exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, as a result of extreme shock at discovering that Paris is different from their expectations. The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting. Similar syndromes include Jerusalem syndrome and Stendhal syndrome. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock. It is particularly noted among Japanese travellers. It is not listed as a recognised condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

🔗 Computing

Telescript is an Agent-oriented programming language written by General Magic as part of the overall Magic Cap system. Telescript programs used a modified C-like syntax known as High Telescript and were compiled to a stack-based language called Low Telescript for execution. Low Telescript ran within virtual machine interpreters, or "Telescript engines", on host computers.

The basic model of Telescript is similar to Java, and differs primarily in where the applications would run. Java was modelled to make it possible to download Java applications onto any platform and run them locally. Telescript essentially reversed this, allowing end-user equipment with limited capabilities to upload Telescript programs to servers to allow them to take advantage of the server's capabilities. Telescript could even migrate a running program; the language included features to marshal a program's code and serialized state, transfer it to another Telescript engine (on a device or a server) to continue execution, and finally return to the originating client or server device to deliver its output.

General Magic had originally developed as a team within Apple Inc., and were spun off in 1990. When they began to generate some press buzz in 1992, Apple decided to enter the same market with their Newton tablet computer. General Magic were unable to find a niche within the market, and Telescript services were soon deprecated in favor of new products unrelated to mobile computing.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 London 🔗 England 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Citizendium Porting 🔗 Glass 🔗 Kent 🔗 Scouting/Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting 🔗 Scouting

The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass structure originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition took place from 1 May until 15 October 1851, and more than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in its 990,000 square feet (92,000 m²) exhibition space to display examples of technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m). It was three times the size of St Paul's Cathedral.

The introduction of the sheet glass method into Britain by Chance Brothers in 1832 made possible the production of large sheets of cheap but strong glass, and its use in the Crystal Palace created a structure with the greatest area of glass ever seen in a building. It astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights.

It has been suggested that the name of the building resulted from a piece penned by the playwright Douglas Jerrold, who in July 1850 wrote in the satirical magazine Punch about the forthcoming Great Exhibition, referring to a "palace of very crystal".

After the exhibition, the Palace was relocated to an area of South London known as Penge Common. It was rebuilt at the top of Penge Peak next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent suburb of large villas. It stood there from June 1854 until its destruction by fire in November 1936. The nearby residential area was renamed Crystal Palace after the landmark. This included the Crystal Palace Park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, which had previously been a football stadium that hosted the FA Cup Final between 1895 and 1914. Crystal Palace F.C. were founded at the site in 1905 and played at the Cup Final venue in their early years. The park still contains Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's Crystal Palace Dinosaurs which date back to 1854.

🔗 Computing

FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 (Business Language version 0), was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper from 1955 to 1959, and helped shape the development of COBOL.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Networking

Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome (SAS) is a network protocol flaw in the original versions of TFTP. It was named after Goethe's poem "Der Zauberlehrling" (popularized by the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of the animated film Fantasia), because the details of its operation closely resemble the disaster that befalls the sorcerer's apprentice: the problem resulted in an ever-growing replication of every packet in the transfer.

The problem occurred because of a known failure mode of the internetwork which, through a mistake on the part of the TFTP protocol designers, was not taken into account when the protocol was designed; the failure mode interacted with several details of the mechanisms of TFTP to produce SAS.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Genetics 🔗 Computational Biology 🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Human Genetic History

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA), also called the last universal ancestor (LUA), or concestor, is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descent, the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. (A related concept is that of progenote.) LUCA is not thought to be the first life on Earth but only one of many early organisms, all the others becoming extinct.

While there is no specific fossil evidence of LUCA, it can be studied by comparing the genomes of all modern organisms, its descendants. By this means, a 2016 study identified a set of 355 genes most likely to have been present in LUCA. (However, some of those genes could have developed later, then spread universally by horizontal gene transfer between archaea and bacteria.) The genes describe a complex life form with many co-adapted features, including transcription and translation mechanisms to convert information from DNA to RNA to proteins. The study concluded that the LUCA probably lived in the high-temperature water of deep sea vents near ocean-floor magma flows.

Studies from 2000 to 2018 have suggested an increasingly ancient time for LUCA. In 2000, estimations suggested LUCA existed 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago in the Paleoarchean era, a few hundred million years after the earliest fossil evidence of life, for which there are several candidates ranging in age from 3.48 to 4.28 billion years ago. A 2018 study from the University of Bristol, applying a molecular clock model, places the LUCA shortly after 4.5 billion years ago, within the Hadean.

Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859: "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed." Later biologists have separated the problem of the origin of life from that of the LUCA.

🔗 Korea 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Korea/one or more inactive working groups

A kimchi refrigerator is a refrigerator designed specifically to meet the storage requirements of kimchi and facilitate different fermentation processes. The kimchi refrigerator aims to be colder, with more consistent temperature, more humidity, and less moving air than a conventional refrigerator, providing the ideal environment for fermentation of kimchi. Some models may include features such as a UV Sterilizer.

In a consumer survey aimed at South Korean homemakers conducted by a top-ranking Korean media agency in 2004, the kimchi refrigerator was ranked first for most wanted household appliance.

🔗 Philately 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Infrastructure 🔗 Japan/Law and government

The Japanese addressing system is used to identify a specific location in Japan. When written in Japanese characters, addresses start with the largest geographical entity and proceed to the most specific one. When written in Latin characters, addresses follow the convention used by most Western addresses and start with the smallest geographic entity (typically a house number) and proceed to the largest. The Japanese system is complex and idiosyncratic, the product of the natural growth of urban areas, as opposed to the systems used in cities that are laid out as grids and divided into quadrants or districts.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia

.su was assigned as the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Soviet Union (USSR) on 19 September 1990. Even though the Soviet Union itself was dissolved a mere 15 months later, the .su top-level domain remains in use today. It is administered by the Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN, or RosNIIROS in Russian transcription).