Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 India 🔗 Plants 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 Science Policy

Norman Ernest Borlaug (; March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Borlaug received his B.S. in forestry in 1937 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.

Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. According to Jan Douglas, executive assistant to the president of the World Food Prize Foundation, the source of this number is Gregg Easterbrook's 1997 article "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." The article states that the "form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths." He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production in Asia and Africa.

🔗 Public Art 🔗 Textile Arts 🔗 Graffiti

Yarn bombing (or yarnbombing) is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colourful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk. It is also called wool bombing, yarn storming, guerrilla knitting, kniffiti, urban knitting, or graffiti knitting.

🔗 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.

🔗 Mathematics

Ramanujan summation is a technique invented by the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan for assigning a value to divergent infinite series. Although the Ramanujan summation of a divergent series is not a sum in the traditional sense, it has properties which make it mathematically useful in the study of divergent infinite series, for which conventional summation is undefined.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 Pittsburgh

A Pittsburgh toilet, or Pittsburgh potty, is a common fixture in pre-World War II houses built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and surrounding region. It consists of an ordinary flush toilet installed in the basement, with no surrounding walls. Most of these toilets are paired with a crude basement shower apparatus and large sink, which often doubles as a laundry basin. Also, because western Pennsylvania is a steep topographical zone, many basements have their own entryway, allowing homeowners to enter from their yard or garage, cleanse themselves in their basement, and then ascend their basement stairs refreshed. Its primary function was to serve as a cleanup station for steel mill workers to clean themselves after returning from work. The toilet fixtures would also limit the harm of sewage backups in hilly Pittsburgh, providing a lower, flushable outlet than the main part of the house.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Microsoft

The Ballmer Peak is a humorous concept invented by Randall Munroe in the xkcd webcomic, joking that a programmer who is appropriately intoxicated (between 0.129-0.138% BAC) will achieve a high level of programming productivity; the peak occurs at 0.1337%, a reference to leet. The concept is loosely tied to former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, and is likely a play on Balmer series of hydrogen spectral lines named for the scientist Johann Balmer.

A San Francisco organization, Originate, has organized a "Ballmer Peak-A-Thon", an open bar event where people were given "5 hours to find the elusive Ballmer peak, and build the best worst business possible."

There is no scientific basis for the Ballmer Peak, though researchers have studied adjacent topics, such as the impact of inebriation on problem solving. One study identified worse programming performance with increasing blood alcohol content, but joked in a footnote that as "the prescribed BAC in this experiment did not reach the Ballmer Peak", they did not technically refute the concept. In addition, the Ballmer Peak has been the subject of satirical academic studies, including a 2024 paper presented at SIGBOVIK, a satirical computer science conference organized by Carnegie Mellon students, which caught broader attention in the programming community. That study, which tested blood alcohol levels of only one male subject tackling competitive computer programming questions, found no evidence of a sudden "peak" of programming ability but did generally find that speed of solving the challenges increased with some alcohol consumption before a rapid decline.

By the time of Ballmer's 2013 announcement of his retirement from Microsoft, the concept of the "Ballmer Peak" was entrenched enough that media joked that the actual Ballmer Peak was the resulting jump in stock price.

🔗 Electrical engineering

The sulfur lamp (also sulphur lamp) is a highly efficient full-spectrum electrodeless lighting system whose light is generated by sulfur plasma that has been excited by microwave radiation. They are a particular type of plasma lamp, and one of the most modern. The technology was developed in the early 1990s, but, although it appeared initially to be very promising, sulfur lighting was a commercial failure by the late 1990s. Since 2005, lamps are again being manufactured for commercial use.

🔗 Mathematics

A self-tiling tile set, or setiset, of order n is a set of n shapes or pieces, usually planar, each of which can be tiled with smaller replicas of the complete set of n shapes. That is, the n shapes can be assembled in n different ways so as to create larger copies of themselves, where the increase in scale is the same in each case. Figure 1 shows an example for n = 4 using distinctly shaped decominoes. The concept can be extended to include pieces of higher dimension. The name setisets was coined by Lee Sallows in 2012, but the problem of finding such sets for n = 4 was asked decades previously by C. Dudley Langford, and examples for polyaboloes (discovered by Martin Gardner, Wade E. Philpott and others) and polyominoes (discovered by Maurice J. Povah) were previously published by Gardner.

🔗 Technology 🔗 France

The Rue de l'Avenir (transl. Street of the future) was an electric moving walkway installed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It ran along the edge of the Exposition site, from the Esplanade of Les Invalides to the Champ de Mars, passing through nine stations along the way, where passengers could board. It was designed by architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee and engineer Max E. Schmidt, designers of The Great Wharf Moving Sidewalk installed at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, the first-ever moving walkway.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Ageing and culture

Old person smell is the characteristic odor of elderly humans. Much like many animal species, human odor undergoes distinct stages based on chemical changes initiated through the aging process. Research suggests that this enables humans to determine the suitability of potential partners based on age, in addition to other factors.

One study suggested that old person smell may be the result of 2-nonenal, an unsaturated aldehyde which is associated with human body odor alterations during aging; however, there are other hypotheses. Another study failed to detect 2-nonenal at all, but found significantly increased concentrations of benzothiazole, dimethylsulphone, and nonanal on older subjects.

In 2012 the Monell Chemical Senses Center published a press release claiming that the human ability to identify information such as age, illness, and genetic suitability from odor is responsible for the distinctive "old man smell". Sensory neuroscientist Johan Lundström stated, "Elderly people have a discernible underarm odor that younger people consider to be fairly neutral and not very unpleasant."

Old person smell is known as kareishū (加齢臭) in Japan, where much social value is placed on personal grooming, and specific upmarket odor-eliminating soaps are targeted at more elderly consumers.