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🔗 Languages 🔗 Melanesia 🔗 Melanesia/Papua New Guinea

Manam is a Kairiru–Manam language spoken mainly on the volcanic Manam Island, northeast of New Guinea.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

Min Chiu Li (Chinese: 李敏求; pinyin: Lǐ Mǐnqiú; 1919–1980) was a Chinese-American oncologist and cancer researcher. Li was the first scientist to use chemotherapy to cure widely metastatic, malignant cancer.

🔗 United States 🔗 Plants

The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a large deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. The American chestnut was one of the most important forest trees throughout its range and was considered the finest chestnut tree in the world.

The species was devastated by chestnut blight, a fungal disease that came from Chinese chestnut trees introduced into North America from East Asia. It is estimated that between 3 and 4 billion American chestnut trees were destroyed in the first half of the 20th century by chestnut blight after the blight's initial discovery in North America in 1904. Very few mature specimens of the tree exist within its historical range, although many small shoots of the former live trees remain. There are hundreds of large (2 to 5 ft diameter) American chestnuts outside its historical range, some in areas where less virulent strains of the pathogen are more common, such as the 600 to 800 large trees in Northern Michigan. The species is listed as endangered in the United States and Canada. American chestnuts are also susceptible to ink disease, particularly in the southern part of its native range. This susceptibility to ink disease may have contributed to the devastation of the species.

Several groups are attempting to create blight-resistant American chestnuts. Scientists at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry created the Darling 58 cultivar of American chestnut by inserting the oxalate oxidase gene from wheat into the genome of an American chestnut. When expressed in the cambium of the Darling 58 cultivar, oxalate oxidase detoxifies oxalic acid, resulting in a tree that still gets infected by the blight fungus but that resists girdling of the trunk and survives such infection. As of 2021, the researchers who developed this cultivar are working towards applying for government permission to make these trees available to the public. If approved, these chestnut trees would be the first genetically modified forest trees released into the wild in the United States. Cross-breeding of chestnut species represents an alternate approach to restoring the American chestnut. One approach has been cross-breeding among different partially blight-resistant American chestnuts, with the goal of developing a cultivar with high resistance. Another approach is to crossbreed American chestnuts with Chinese chestnut trees, which are moderately blight-resistant, and then to backcross with American chestnuts, with the goal of creating a cultivar with most of the genetic heritage of American but retaining the blight resistance of the Chinese chestnut.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture

Cool Japan (クールジャパン, Kūru Japan) refers to the aspects of Japanese culture that non-Japanese people perceive as "cool". The Cool Japan strategy is part of Japan's overall brand strategy, aiming to disseminate Japan's attractiveness and allure to the world. The target of Cool Japan "encompasses everything from games, manga, anime, and other forms of content, fashion, commercial products, Japanese cuisine, and traditional culture to robots, eco-friendly technologies, and other high-tech industrial products".

Cool Japan has been described as a form of soft power, with the ability to "indirectly influence behavior or interests through cultural or ideological means".

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Transhumanism 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Film/Core 🔗 Film/British cinema 🔗 Hertfordshire

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel" and other short stories by Clarke. Clarke also published a novelisation of the film, in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film's release. The film stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain, and follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists and the sentient supercomputer HAL to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith.

The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.

The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Kubrick the award for his direction of the visual effects. The film is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1991, it was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2022, 2001: A Space Odyssey placed in the top ten of Sight & Sound's decennial critics' poll, and topped their directors' poll.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Religion 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before their full integration to the host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

🔗 Spaceflight

OSCAR I (aka OSCAR 1) is the first amateur radio satellite launched by Project OSCAR into low Earth orbit. OSCAR I was launched December 12, 1961, by a Thor-DM21 Agena B launcher from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lompoc, California. The satellite, a rectangular box (30 x 25 x 12 cm) weighing 10 kg., was launched as a secondary payload (ballast) for Corona 9029, also known as Discoverer 36, the eighth and final launch of a KH-3 satellite.

The satellite had a battery-powered 140 mW transmitter operating in the 2-meter band (144.983 MHz), employed a monopole transmitting antenna 60 cm long extended from the center of the convex surface, but had no attitude control system. Like Sputnik 1, Oscar 1 carried only a simple beacon. For three weeks it transmitted its Morse Code message "HI". To this day, many organizations identify their Morse-transmitting satellites with "HI", which also indicates laughter in amateur telegraphy.

OSCAR I lasted 22 days ceasing operation on January 3, 1962, and re-entered January 31, 1962.

The uniqueness of the OSCAR-1 spacecraft was not only that it was built by amateurs, only about four years after the launch of Sputnik-1, but that it was the world's first piggyback satellite and the world's first private non-government spacecraft.

Immediately following the launch of OSCAR-1, United States vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, honored it with a congratulatory telegram to the group sponsoring this momentous event in the history of Amateur Radio. It read: “For me this project is symbolic of the type of freedom for which this country stands — freedom of enterprise and freedom of participation on the part of individuals throughout the world.”

The original backup of OSCAR-1 has been restored and is fully operational, running off AC power. As of 2011 it is on display at ARRL HQ in Newington, Connecticut and continues to broadcast "HI" in Morse Code at 145 MHz.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Mathematics

In computational complexity theory, the unique games conjecture (often referred to as UGC) is a conjecture made by Subhash Khot in 2002. The conjecture postulates that the problem of determining the approximate value of a certain type of game, known as a unique game, has NP-hard computational complexity. It has broad applications in the theory of hardness of approximation. If the unique games conjecture is true and P ≠ NP, then for many important problems it is not only impossible to get an exact solution in polynomial time (as postulated by the P versus NP problem), but also impossible to get a good polynomial-time approximation. The problems for which such an inapproximability result would hold include constraint satisfaction problems, which crop up in a wide variety of disciplines.

The conjecture is unusual in that the academic world seems about evenly divided on whether it is true or not.

🔗 United States 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Education 🔗 United States/Massachusetts 🔗 Higher Education

Math 55 is a two-semester long first-year undergraduate mathematics course at Harvard University, founded by Lynn Loomis and Shlomo Sternberg. The official titles of the course are Honors Abstract Algebra (Math 55a) and Honors Real and Complex Analysis (Math 55b). Previously, the official title was Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra.

🔗 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.