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Salt water dimmers, which are an example of liquid rheostats, were used in theatres after the introduction of electric lighting to control the brightness of the lights on stage.

🔗 Medicine

Pyrotherapy (artificial fever) is a method of treatment by raising the body temperature or sustaining an elevated body temperature using a fever. In general, the body temperature was maintained at 41 °C (105 °F). Many diseases were treated by this method in the first half of the 20th century. In general, it was done by exposing the patient to hot baths, warm air, or (electric) blankets. The technique reached its peak of sophistication in the early 20th century with malariotherapy, in which Plasmodium vivax, a causative agent of malaria, was allowed to infect already ill patients in order to produce intense fever for therapeutic ends. The sophistication of this approach lay in using effective anti-malarial drugs to control the P. vivax infection, while maintaining the fever it causes to the detriment of other, ongoing, and then-incurable infections present in the patient, such as late-stage syphilis. This type of pyrotherapy was most famously used by psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for his elaboration of the procedure in treating neurosyphilitics.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Commonwealth

Operation Legacy was a British Colonial Office (later Foreign Office) programme to destroy or hide files, to prevent them being inherited by its ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height.

MI5 or Special Branch agents vetted all secret documents in the colonial administrations to find those that those that could embarrass the British government—for instance by showing racial or religious bias. They identified 8,800 files to conceal from at least 23 countries and territories in the 1950s and 1960s, and destroyed them or sent them to the United Kingdom. Precise instructions were given for methods to be used for destruction, including burning and dumping at sea. Some of the files detailed torture methods used against opponents of the colonial administrations, such as during the Mau Mau Uprising.

As decolonisation progressed, British officials were keen to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment that had been caused by the overt burning of documents that took place in New Delhi in 1947, which had been covered by Indian news sources. On 3 May 1961, Iain Macleod, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a telegram to all British embassies to advise them on the best way to retrieve and dispose of sensitive documents. To prevent post-colonial governments from ever learning about Operation Legacy, officials were required to dispatch "destruction certificates" to London. In some cases, as the handover date approached, the immolation task proved so huge that colonial administrators warned the Foreign Office that there was a danger of "celebrating Independence Day with smoke."

Academic study of the end of the British Empire has been assisted in recent years by the declassification of the migrated archives in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. After the UK government admitted in 2011 that it had secret documents related to the Mau Mau Uprising, it began to declassify documents and by November 2013 some 20,000 files had been declassified. These documents can now be accessed at the National Archives in Kew, London.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Germany 🔗 Transport 🔗 Energy 🔗 Transport/Maritime 🔗 Ships

SkySails GmbH & Co. KG is a Hamburg-based company that sells kite rigs to propel cargo ships, large yachts and fishing vessels by wind energy. Ships are pulled by an automatically-controlled foil kite of some hundreds of square meters. For multiple reasons, they give many times the thrust per unit area of conventional mast-mounted sails.

The systems save fuel, and reduce carbon emissions and shipping costs, but have not been widely adopted.

🔗 United States 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice

The Pizza Meter refers to sudden increases of pizza orders from U.S. government offices, such as the White House and The Pentagon, before large events such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Panama Invasion, and the Grenada invasion.

On the night of August 1, 1990, the night before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, military personnel at The Pentagon came together to discuss issues in the Middle East. According to Frank Meeks, the owner of Washington, D.C.'s Domino's Pizza franchise of 45 restaurants, the CIA ordered a record-breaking 21 pizzas from Domino's that night. Between January 7 to January 16, 1991, the number of pizza deliveries to the Pentagon past 10 p.m reached 101, with another 55 pizzas delivered to the White House on January 16 between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

Meeks tied the influx of pizza orders from the Pentagon, White House, and the CIA to oncoming major announcements from the White House, publicizing his observations. Consequently, the public nicknamed the event "The Pizza Meter". Shortly after Meeks' comments were released, government offices no longer ordered from Domino's branches in Washington, opting to buy pizza at separate times or at different pizza joints.

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Aviation/aircraft engine 🔗 Ships

A toroidal propeller is a type of propeller that is ring-shaped with each blade forming a closed loop. The propellers are significantly quieter at audible frequency ranges, between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, while generating comparable thrust to traditional propellers. In practice, toroidal propellers reduce noise pollution in both aviation and maritime transport.

🔗 Telecommunications

Procedure words or prowords are words or phrases limited to radio telephone procedure used to facilitate communication by conveying information in a condensed standard verbal format. Prowords are voice versions of the much older prosigns for Morse code first developed in the 1860s for Morse telegraphy, and their meaning is identical. The NATO communications manual ACP-125 contains the most formal and perhaps earliest modern (post-WW-II) glossary of procedure words, but its definitions have been adopted by many other organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Rhode Island Department of Emergency Management, Civil Air Patrol, Military Auxiliary Radio System, and others.

Procedure words are one of several structured parts of radio voice procedures, including Brevity codes and Plain language radio checks. The vast majority of the brevity codes from the U.S. military's Multiservice tactical brevity code are inappropriate for any civilian use, owing to their focus on large weapons (missiles, etc.) and other war-related issues. However, a few are used frequently enough in media to be memorable, including ABORT, BOGEY, BANDIT, FEET WET, FEET DRY, NEGATIVE CONTACT, and NO JOY.

Noblesse oblige (; French: [nɔblɛs ɔbliʒ]) is a French expression used in English meaning that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such a status to fulfill social responsibilities. For example, a primary obligation of a nobleman could include generosity towards those around him.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that the term suggests "noble ancestry constrains to honourable behaviour; privilege entails responsibility."

The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française defines it thus:

1. Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly.
2. (Figuratively) One must act in a fashion that conforms to one's position and privileges with which one has been born, bestowed and/or has earned.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Laika (Russian: Лайка; c. 1954 – 3 November 1957) was a Soviet space dog who was one of the first animals in space and the first to orbit the Earth. A stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, she flew aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft, launched into low orbit on 3 November 1957. As the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, Laika's survival was never expected. She died of overheating hours into the flight, on the craft's fourth orbit.

Little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and animal flights were viewed by engineers as a necessary precursor to human missions. The experiment, which monitored Laika's vital signs, aimed to prove that a living organism could survive being launched into orbit and continue to function under conditions of weakened gravity and increased radiation, providing scientists with some of the first data on the biological effects of spaceflight.

Laika died within hours from overheating, possibly caused by a failure of the central R‑7 sustainer to separate from the payload. The true cause and time of her death were not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six or, as the Soviet government initially claimed, she was euthanised prior to oxygen depletion. In 2008, a small monument to Laika depicting her standing atop a rocket was unveiled near the military research facility in Moscow that prepared her flight. She also appears on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space in Moscow.