Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Ancient Egypt

The Ebers Papyrus, also known as Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to circa 1550 BC. Among the oldest and most important medical papyri of ancient Egypt, it was purchased at Luxor in the winter of 1873–74 by Georg Ebers. It is currently kept at the library of the University of Leipzig, in Germany.

🔗 Electronic music 🔗 R&B and Soul Music

Woo! Yeah! is a drum break that includes James Brown's ("Woo!") and Bobby Byrd's ("Yeah!") voices which has been widely sampled in popular music, often in the form of a loop. The drum break was performed by John "Jabo" Starks. It originates from the 1972 Lyn Collins recording "Think (About It)", a song written and produced by Brown, and is just one of a few other frequently used breaks contained in the recording, often collectively known as the Think Break.

🔗 Journalism 🔗 Scientology 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography

Operation Freakout, also known as Operation PC Freakout, was a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital. The plan, undertaken in 1976 following years of church-initiated lawsuits and covert harassment, was meant to eliminate the perceived threat that Cooper posed to the church and obtain revenge for her publication in 1971 of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered documentary evidence of the plot and the preceding campaign of harassment during an investigation into the Church of Scientology in 1977, eventually leading to the church compensating Cooper in an out-of-court settlement.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Physics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 Biophysics

Thomas Gold (also known as Tommy Gold), (May 22, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in 1948 proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed academic and scientific boundaries, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics, Young's lattice is a partially ordered set and a lattice that is formed by all integer partitions. It is named after Alfred Young, who, in a series of papers On quantitative substitutional analysis, developed representation theory of the symmetric group. In Young's theory, the objects now called Young diagrams and the partial order on them played a key, even decisive, role. Young's lattice prominently figures in algebraic combinatorics, forming the simplest example of a differential poset in the sense of Stanley (1988). It is also closely connected with the crystal bases for affine Lie algebras.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Africa 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù]) is a Nguni Bantu term meaning "humanity." It is often translated as "I am because we are," or "humanity towards others," or in Xhosa, "umntu ngumntu ngabantu" but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity."

In Southern Africa, it has come to be used as a contested term for a kind of humanist philosophy, ethic, or ideology, also known as Ubuntuism propagated in the Africanisation (transition to majority rule) process of these countries during the 1980s and 1990s.

Since the transition to democracy in South Africa with the Nelson Mandela presidency in 1994, the term has become more widely known outside of Southern Africa, notably popularised to English-language readers through the ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu. Tutu was the chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and many have argued that ubuntu was a formative influence on the TRC.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Acoustics

Thermoacoustic engines (sometimes called "TA engines") are thermoacoustic devices which use high-amplitude sound waves to pump heat from one place to another (this requires work, which is provided by the loudspeaker) or use a heat difference to produce work in the form of sound waves (these waves can then be converted into electrical current the same way as a microphone does).

These devices can be designed to use either standing wave or travelling wave.

Compared to vapor refrigerators, thermoacoustic refrigerators have no coolant and few moving parts (only the loudspeaker), therefore require no dynamic sealing or lubrication.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of parallel tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material, where they can be read by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to keep the memory cycling through the material. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay-line memory systems.

Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1970s, offering performance similar to core memory, memory density similar to hard drives, and no moving parts. This led many to consider it a contender for a "universal memory" that could be used for all storage needs. The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips in the early 1970s pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale and it began to be considered mostly as a replacement for disks. The equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity through the early 1980s made it uncompetitive in price terms for mass storage.

Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.

🔗 Video games

MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze, using the built-in MIDI ports of the Atari ST for networking, introduced the concept of deathmatch combat. The game found a wider audience on the Game Boy as Faceball 2000.

The original MIDI Maze team consisted of James Yee as the business manager, Michael Park as the graphic and networking programmer, and George Miller writing the AI and drone logic.